Category: Uncategorized

I want to thank Tom Hoffman for his comments on James Farmer’s post: Blogging works best… in relation to my previous post.

You should already be structuring work so that it is relevant to a student’s life, whether or not it is in a blog or a notebook, and frankly, whether or not you are forcing the students to do it or not … If you don’t know how to do this without blogs, you also don’t know how to do it with blogs.

He is absolutely correct that student work should already be relevant.

What I was trying to convey in my post was that blogging is more than a way of communicating your ideas. It appears to me that blogging tends to create or reinforce a way of thinking and working on ideas. It is a forge in which I fix up a raw thought into a useful tool with the heat of thoughtful input from anyone who is inclined to participate.

My comments stemmed partially from a conversation I had with Matt in which Matt said that he learned through practice that blogging is contrary to his personality. He noticed that blogging worked for me because I like to present thoughts for other people to evaluate and build upon because I am comfortable with people pulling the ideas apart and building upon them without feeling that changes devalue the original thought. Matt prefers to do this in a way that allows for the various iterations of the idea to be hidden behind the final presentation. He will share raw ideas verbally so that they can be worked on in a group, but they cannot be so accuratly traced back so there is very little risk of being pinned down by an idea that turned out to have little merit. If I put a worthless idea on my blog someone can find it years later if they are so inclined. I am responsible for what I say here in a way that exceeds the responsibility for verbal communication. After talking with Matt I began to recognize a number of people I am aquainted with who I believe will never become bloggers for the same reason that Matt will probably stop blogging in the near future. I have come to accept that as perfectly natural and acceptable.

Tom talked about forcing students to do things (assignments) which implies that they will likely stop doing those things when the prodding ceases. I think blogging is like traditional writing in that students should be exposed to it as a way to think and record/organize ideas. That being said we should not expect that all students wil find value in continuing to use the tool after the prodding stops. The point of my earlier post was that we will discourage some of those who would use the tool if we do not give them ownership of the tool in the first place. That would mean that those students who might be inclined to blog will possibly underuse any blog assignment they might have and thus the blog in their classroom is counterproductive if they do not own the blog.

James is right about these two quick ways to kill off blogging in education. This is partially because of the ubiquitous but unnatural dissection of our education system into years, semesters and courses rather than dividing our education by students, topics and lives.

Blogging works best when it is a part of a persons life, meaning that it is a way that they work rather than a course requirement. It works best when it is owned by the individual student rather than being an element of a class they are taking. It works best when it is not forced. In short it cannot belong to the institution and it can rarely work as a requirement.

If we already know exactly how to kill blogging in education let us ask how we can avoid these easy deaths.

Great news from Nate There is now a place to start when looking for conversations. I like what I have seen so far I can’t wait to see how things shake out when it comes to maintaining an accurate list of relevant feeds and deciding on the thresholds for inclusion.

I like to see that Nate has done somehting with the idea of collecting threads, but I have one question about his solution – how is it more accessible to the non-bloggers? Those of us who subscribe by RSS can get updates and even make changes to the wiki but what about others who are still more comfortable with subscribing to an email list?

Nate is probably right that the overhead would be a major burden to – and yes, it might possibly even kill – my journal idea, but just because we have an option does not mean that we have addressed all the concerns. That is what needs to happen at some point if we are to find the right balance in this type of communication between groups within our group (AECT).

I found another idea over at Weblogg-Ed that looks promising. There is a link there to a conversation tracker at blogpulse by Inteliseek. Unfortunately I have not been able to get it to work. I am thinking that they only track a subset of blogs, but if the tool could be used for AECT related blogs or Education related blogs it would be a very interesting start.

On another note, I am starting to wonder if I should take a sabbatical (as a student) to work on this stuff for a while without having to worry about classes. Any ideas? 🙂

I know Nate is serious about Getting off the porch and so am I. I said before that we are not getting our message out to the right audience just because it is on the web and thus universally available. I started talking about presenting at AECT in Orlando only to learn that Nate was ahead of me there with the Overlay and the Strategic Task Force. Since then I have realized that between now and October is at least one lifetime in the blogosphere if not two.

I think that finding some way to keep these good conversations visible in some ongoing way would be useful but I continue to contend that we also need to send the invitations into the established venues of communication. A presentation in October is too long to wait. We should still do that, but before then we should publish something. Here’s a radical idea – why don’t we actually advertise? Get an ad in TechTrends or ETR&D listing the topics of some good academic conversations that we have had in our stadium and invite people to visit us.

This would be print, so the conversations would have a different type of life, but the ad could point people to a website which teaches how to join the blogosphere as a reader, provides links to the conversations in the ad along with all the blogs that have participated in any of those conversations and teaches them how to begin writing a blog when they are ready to contribute in that manner. Perhaps it should provide a link to the aect-members list of blogs so they can get a dynamic list of bloggers to look at. The point is that we have to advertise our party in a way that will get to people, but email is not easy and definitly not persistent. We need it in print!

I think I finally understood Nate’s position after reading this today. Where I have been questioning him up until now I no longer question because I recognize his perpective and his push.

Well said Nate. It is especially important for those trying to develop reputations to take the risks that will build those reputations. This does not mean that the ranked players should not participate, but it means that taking the risks on new technologies is less important for them personally. It is not so important for the current leaders to lead in the new areas but it is an excellent opportunity for newer players (like me) to explore a leadership role in a new area like this.

I was pleased to discover, thanks to Nate, that Ward Cates has become a part of the AECT blogging community.

I welcome Ward for a couple of reasons, he is a representative of that group of people within AECT who have the stature withint AECT to change the way blogging is viewed within the profession and also because I consider Ward to be a friend. I look forward to reading Ward’s thoughts (through his blog) and hope that there will be more like him who begin to recognize the tremedous potential that blogging can have within our discipline.

Speaking of which – welcome also goes out to Sharon Smaldino. May the ranks thus continue to swell.

I have lately come to an interesting discovery as to why most education centered blogs tend to become “blogging in education” centered blogs.

Not long after I started blogging I became disinterested in blogging because so much of it was inward focused on the merits of blogs in education. Once I got over that and started to focus on writing about the things that I was interested in (and finding other sources that were more focused on those things) I began to really appreciate the potential power of blogs. As I began to blog more I became acutely aware of the potential power that is lost because of the lack of participation within our professional community. Basically it comes down to the fact that the adoption rate is not high enough yet. That brings me to begin pushing for ways to get more people involved and aware of the benefits and power of blogging which means that I have started blogging more about blogging than I used to.

My only disclaimer is that I am also pushing other educational bloggers to take their message back to the traditional outlets and to refine their message to be more effective in promoting the wider adoption that will really lend power to the medium of blogging. We can use the blogs as a platform to solve the issues related to adoption, but in the end we must take the solution outside of the blogosphere or slse it remains nothing more than an unproven theory of how to get people involved.

Update – see Scott Adams’ Conversations about starting a blog for another good perspective on this subject.

Thank you Nate for sending exactly the message that more people in AECT and education need to hear. In Why Blog II you have reminded us of the essence of what we need to tell the current non-participants. unfortunately those non-participants will never see your message because they are not participating.

My latest quest is to get the blogging community to recognize the need to take our message back to the traditional outlets of information distribution and Nate has given me the perfect example to work with.

Rovy suggested a non-proposal for a non-session at AECT. I don’t want to fully reject the idea, but it seems to contradict the idea I had in first suggesting a session. If “the only publicity is through blogs” we virtually invite ourselves to keep preaching to the choir. The point of having a session was to bring the discussion to those who are not participating in the blogosphere.

After reading the post on the AECT news blog I am thinking that perhaps we should contact the Radical Thinkers of Penn State to see if we could learn from their experience or possibly even enlist their help.

Back to Nate and Rovy. . .