This week’s topic in ETEC 565 is blogging and the wisdom of the crowd. I reflected, read and came across a wealth of voices in the crowd, each one sharing something important about the topic of blogging in educational settings.
This particular blog post, although done in 2004, is very relevant to the foundations of educational blogging – purpose and audience. (http://weblogg-ed.com/2004/04/13/)
The focus of the conversation on this blog was on the ultimate purpose and passion that true bloggers and blogging require. Unless there is that burning need to express a thought, opinion, idea or concept, the blog and blogger are doomed to failure. Will Richardson quotes Stephen Downes with the question – “Where is the locus of blogging? is it with the students or is it with the teacher?”
For my own work thus far, I would say the locus of blogging is with the teacher creating a contrived circumstance to provide a means for students to write in a public forum for the sake of sharing their writing publicly or with an authentic audience. For many educational blogs (listed in the ‘Links to School Bloggers‘) again, it is contrived for the sake of the exercise. Once the exercise is over, the blog is dropped.
To be true to the purpose of blogging, it needs to become a passionate endeavour of sustained energy with depth and breadth to the topic of discourse. Would my personal blog fit into that category? Probably not. Maybe not yet.
Will my words echo in the blogospher with the likes of
Will Richardson, (http://weblogg-ed.com/);
Stephen Downes (http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm);
Seth Godin (http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/)
Steve Hargadon (http://www.stevehargadon.com/) or even
Chris Kennedy (http://cultureofyes.ca/)?
Probably not. But that doesn’t mean my words shouldn’t be publicly published with passion and penache! (try that one 3 times quickly :))
That can also be said for our students, particularly those who feel strongly about a topic or interest. That’s where they pick up the pen (or keyboard) and begin to write. As found in this article written by Stephen Downes “Writers will write because they can’t not write.” (Bloggers will blog because they can’t not blog.) Their voice will shout out through their words and, like the ones from the ‘Fisch Bowl‘ be celebrated for their contribution. The marks and grades, at that point, would be a secondary consideration.
Another great posting about educational blogging also comes from Will Richardson (http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml)
What we’re doing when we blog – written by Meg Hourihan is another interesting link to review. It was published through the O’Reily Web Development Center (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html).
And one final connection to a blog about the best in educational blogging sites – http://oedb.org/library/features/top-100-education-blogs
So the voice of ONE can make a difference in the crowd.
It’s linking those voices together that leads you to the ones you want to listen to and that will lead to my next post – It’s All About the Tags!
With this e-learning toolkit exploration, the first challenge was getting past the ‘I don’t want to’ and ‘Garage band or nothing’ mental state. I trusted the instructions and decided to dive in. Once the initial bump was worked out, it was very easy to create a simple voice cast. Then I tried it again with music playing in the background. I prefer with music but I can see the power of having just the voice recording done for specific learning tasks for students, particularly those with attentional difficulties. What surprised me the most was the quality of the recording and the ease with which mp3 files can be created. This would not be an onerous task for an instructor to complete, once there was an identifiable need. My next challenge is to try creating some supporting voice casts to link into course modules. Here is a sample of my Audacity challenge – Success.
