Bridging digital divides
Preface:
Seizing the means of the feeds
May I be granted ...So far, we have looked at microblogging, specifically Twitter, as a way to develop collaborative writing between teachers and students (although only about five have you have completed the Twitter homework as of this morning...). We also looked at the ERIC search engine, one of the best sources for educational research on the Internet. Today, we're going to expand our knowledge about educational social softwares to two fundamental dynamos of educational technology: blogs and wikis.
... the serenity to accept the pages I should not edit,
... the courage to edit the pages I should,
... and the wisdom to know the difference.
— the Wiki Prayer
Blogs (more formally, "Web logs") broke into the public consciousness in 2004, creating an infinite source of information channels, each one a personal online diary, providing hyperlinks to Web sites of interest and posting personal commentaries for the world to read, ponder, and discuss. Educational blogs, or "edublogs," seek to harness the power of blogs to offer instructional resources for the classroom. They are well established tools in many different content areas.
Let's see how information flows through microblogs, to blogs, to more tradition news organs:
11:43 AM Oct 14th from web US DOE Twittered "Nation's Report Card: Mathematics 2009, on NAEP scores for grades 4 and 8; Sec. Duncan's statement on results." Later that afternoon, the edublogs caught fire, finally, a day later, the traditional, "dead tree" newspapers delivered now day old news on Page 1, right column.
But there is an inverse function to these information flows -- a Twitter cannot be verified for its accuracy, blogs are not required to enact due diligence to ensure what they post is true, but the New York Times can be held liable for printing lies. So if you're doing academic research, a New York Times article can be cited, but not a blog or Twitter. It's the price you pay for being first to post, last to tell the truth.
At best, blogs can be a thorn in the side of traditional medias and markets, digitizing the epithet that "the emperor wears no clothes." They can be excellent, convenient fact checkers (in blog form or Twitter!), pointing out bald faced lies being passed off as truths. Given their 21st century nature, they also can be a ripe field for finding ways to incorporate social software (like Twitter!) into the classroom.
At worst, they devolve into "flame wars," expressed as vile comments to a controversial blog posting. Back in the day when RFCs were ubiquitous to Internet culture, everybody who was "logged in" knew how to behave, because everybody was pounding out telnet commands on flickering green vt100 emulators -- they were all part of the same "digital native" culture. Then, in the 1990s, Prodigy and AOL started selling Usenet connections to their customers, relationships ruptured, and nasty conversations erupted. The result, "information superhighway rage," where people access the Internet not to learn, but to devolve into petty squabbles that accomplish nothing.
I said last week, this "digital divide" is not so much about a difference in access, as it is a difference in culture. So when a troll flames a newbie, netiquette breaks down, just like teachers' early experiences in the classroom, when we first understood what "unaccountable" student conversations looked liked. Flame wars, like unmanaged classrooms, are people shouting at each other, as if they were on cable TV.
Like so many of my earlier blog postings, I have to leave a topic incomplete, knowing that I haven't made my point clear to everybody (the Twitter responses make that clear...), but like life and children, at some point you have to let go, regardless of how you could make the posting better, more clear. So keep thinking about the digital divide, and how it disrupts the 21st century classroom. Let's move on to today's experiential section, looking at some examples of educational blogs, or "edublogs."
Module
Developing an virtual toolbox
When I taught high school Chemistry, the principal of the school, Bruce Billig, was fond of saying at Professional Development sessions that teachers should take what we learn about better teaching techniques, and "put it in your toolbox." I was more interested in developing my own toolbar, developing teaching aids accessible with a click of a mouse on a button. What we're looking at in today's class are the massive data flows on the Internet, and how to channel them in ways that will help us find the educational resources we need to develop better lesson plans.
Often, blogs are little more than esoteric diatribes about meaningless jargon and unending drivel. On the other side of the blog bust are posts which are little more than jigsaws of web links that supposedly have something to do with the title of the blog posting. Think about how I have been writing this blog, how I present the material in each posting, what this blog's relationship is to the class. At the very least, you should see this blog as a resource for people late or absent to a class. Instead of holding on to extra copies for students who couldn't make a particular class, I can simply say, "read the blog posting for that class. All the materials you need are online, so just click on the links, and read the 'Evaluation' section at the end of the posting for the homework assignment." Writing edublogs can help teachers lay out before the class exactly we want to accomplish, like a lesson plan, but in a format easily accessible to students.
So a blog should be written to satisfy the needs of the reader, not as a therapeutic device for PTSD patients. The infamous "list of list" pages, where a topic is mentioned in the title of a blog posting, and all that follows is a list of links to materials related to the topic is a common trope in blog writing. But it's only a static page of information, reflecting all of the online research done in making the list. As soon as the blog entry is posted, the page grows old, neither updated or revised, an electronic dusty book.
A lot of teachers' blog pages are very similar, listing outlines of content, sample exams, student rankings, but never showing what is most important in education: how learning new concepts can reshape our understandings and perceptions of the world around us. Instead of writing a list and saying, "there, I'm a technologically savvy teacher," we need to push ourselves, just like we push our students.
OK, that's enough for me, and probably too much for you. Let's see how we can take a list of online resources, and integrate them into an interactive lesson. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to gain a fuller understanding of "edublogs." Rounding up the usual suspects, most "edublog lists" will include the following nationally renown resources.
Here are some edublogs with a local NYC bent.
And here is a vaunted list of lists!
- 20 Education Blogs
- 50 Education Blogs
- 100 Education Blogs
- Another 100 Education Blogs
- 100 Higher Education Blogs
- Another Best of Education Blogs
- An EduBlogRoll
- A Wiki of Edublogs
So let's take our eyes off this blog, and use some social software to do two things:
- From the list of edublogs listed above, find one that you find interesting to read. Twitter me the name of the edublog. First Twitter, first claim! No two students can choose the same edublog.
- Read a posting from your chosen blog, and tweet a one sentence summary of that posting.
Writing Wikis
Blogs are primarily teacher-centered devices. Many experts believe that blogs are not a helpful tool for collaborative writing projects. The social softwares expressly designed for online collaborative writing projects are called wikis. "Wiki" is an Hawaiian word, meaning "fast." Wikis allow students to easily create and edit their own writings, and create links to other web pages. The most common wiki is of course, Wikipedia, which is an open-source collaboration of hundreds of writers, offering information that some argue isn't entirely reliable. Although some studies indicate Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica, remember the difference between blogs and "dead tree" sources, the same difference apply to wikis -- if you plan to cite a reference in a research paper you are writing, you are always better off citing an established publisher that predates the online revolution, like NYT or Britannica, etc.
That being said, wikis offer an easy way for students to memorialize their writings for teacher evaluation. Every student who has taken this class since 2007 has his or her work uploaded to our class wiki. Instead of having a stack of student papers sitting on a desk, collecting dust, waiting for a teacher to read them, uploading student work to a wiki makes evaluation easier. Teachers can pick away at evaluating student work whenever they have a few minutes between classes, on the weekend while waiting for the pot of chili to amalgamate, wherever there is Internet access, instead of carrying around a brick-heavy backpack, with stacks of papers.
Like blogs, wikis can offer a matrix of information about a specific topic, like lesson plans, by anyone who is willing to upload their work, to anyone who is interested in downloading their information. Over the years, my students have developed one of the best lesson plan wikis on the Internet. Soon, all of you will be contributing to our lesson plan wiki. For example, here are several lesson plan wikis:
- Curriki (slow load)
- Merlot
- Connexions
- Thinkfinity
- Scholastic
- Top 20 Education
- Kathy Schrock
- Federal Resources for Educational Excellence
- NEA Lesson Plans
- Library of Congress | Digital Collections
- Federal Resources for Educational Excellence
- WWW Virtual Library
- Infomime
- The Front Page
- Librarian Chick
Ray, J. (2006). Welcome to the Blogoshere: The Educational Use of Blogs (aka Edublogs). 330 South Campus Ave., Indianapolis, IN.: Kappa Delta Pi Record. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ 738 088)
Poling, C. (2005). Blog On: Building Communication and Collaboration Among Staff and Students. 1710 Rhode Island Ave NW, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20036: Learning and Leading with Technology. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ 697 316)
Lawler, C. (2008). Action Research as a Congruent Methodology for Understanding Wikis: The Case of Wikiversity. Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.: Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EJ 840 803)
'nuff sed.
Evaluation
Homework #2
Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their Homework #1 research (APA citations) to their group's wiki page.
Deliverable #2: Each group will find 5 lesson plan Webpages that offer a lesson plan that pertains to the group's Aim, and are not already on the lesson plan wiki. Each lesson plan reference will include a hyperlink, and a few sentences describing why this is a good lesson plan for your Aim. Please use the bulleted web sites above as a starting point to finding your lesson plan web sites.
Deliverable #3: Each group will access the linked resources on this blog posting to answer the following questions on their group's wikipage :
- What is a blog, and describe three examples of edublogs on the Internet, including URL addresses.
- What is a wiki, and describe three examples of education wikis on the Internet, including URL addresses.
.
1 comment:
Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.
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