Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Purdue University is making podcasts of lectures in almost 50 courses at its West Lafayette campus available online. Students can listen to the lectures on MP3 players to catch up on missed classes or review for exams. (The Chronicle, subscription…

Tim has a post about the goodness of the “Long Tail,” but as I read it I was thinking about how it highlights the issues from yesterday’s post. He says:

So letÂ’s bring this back to the world of educational technology. The most obvious point is that there are a lot of great thinkers out there blogging and working in the long tail. If you restrict your students to using a traditional textbook they will never find the gems out there in the tail where so many fresh perspectives and new ideas can be found. We donÂ’t need to wait for information to show up in dead tree form anymore.

True, but it’s more complicated than that. Here’s the problem. If we are going to help teachers see blogs as “research safe,” we’re going to have to give them some tools by which to assess those blogs. Right now, I would teach teachers and students that they should

It’s Wednesday morning in a hotel lobby on the campus of Duke University. With no working Internet in my room, I dressed, packed, and escaped to the lobby where they have very fine wireless service. I wish there had been a descent alternative for the lack of hot water in my room. […]

Cell phone — check. Laptop — check. Flatscreen TV, PlayStation, XBox, CD player, DVD player, iPod, Palm Pilot, desktop monitor for the laptop … It’s a good thing Kolby Kallweit doesn’t have to foot the electric bill at his Drury University dorm room. Go

There is something timeless about back-to-school season. Generations of students have ticked off the same items on their late-August to-do lists. Pencils? Books? An outfit for the first day back? But in recent years, the classrooms that students are retur

Technological innovation may be opening whole new educational vistas at Acton-Boxborough schools, but learning how to live with new technology in classrooms and hallways isn’t always easy. Camera-phones, text-messaging, and high-speed wireless Internet ac

If you’ve come to read this blog, unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you’ve heard about the Kutztown 13 case. If not, HERE is the original eSN article about the case. Very broadly, this is a situation where students in a high school were given laptops as…

I have a few aggregators on my laptop but I still largely read through the browser. The last couple of days I’ve been asking whether that is because old dogs can’t learn new tricks or if it represents some sort of preference. I’m not sure, but…

I think and write so much about the creation and contribution of content using blogs and wikis and the like that sometimes I think I neglect the other half of the equation, the consumption of blog and wiki and podcast content by students and teachers. And it’s becoming obvious that it’s a much needed and important dialogue that I have to start with teachers here, especially those in the English and Social Studies departments where the research loads are heaviest.

I was reminded of this by a conversation I had this morning with our school librarian who had seen a mention of Wikipedia on a technology in-service agenda we’ve been planning for next month. She wanted to know how we were going to position Wikipedia as a tool for research, and I said that although I felt it was probably as good a place as any to learn about the less controversial topics in the world, I could understand why she and others didn’t feel it should be offered up as a trusted source. But I added that it was important for teachers to understand what Wikipedia was all about, and that they and their students could use it as a tool for learning about information literacy and source validation. Which led to a more intense conversation about the use of blogs in research. I know there are teachers here who will not let students use Weblogs as sources for all the standard they-aren’t-edited reasons. And I said to the librarian and to the English chair, who had dropped in to listen to our conversation, that there are tens of thousands (if not more) blogs and bloggers creating more than valid research content and that we had to at least start some serious professional development efforts to teach them how to assess Weblogs for validity and accuracy. Which led to an even larger discussion about the state of copyright and plagiarism and… Suffice to say, it got pretty intense.

These are conversations that I know a lot of teachers and supervisors don’t really want to have. It’s a big shift. I know much of that hesitancy is based on not knowing how to find the potentially good sources, how to do the assessment, and how to successfully navigate a research process that is becoming less individualized and more and more social. To me, there’s no way we do it without first expanding our definition of “trusted sources” and without re-examining the process in that context. The disruption of self-publishing and open content and transparent negotiation of meaning and the rest require us to start making sure our teachers understand what’s happening so they can teach students effective practice. So I’ve set one of my goals for the first two months of school to create that Moodle site that I wrote about before, for teachers first and perhaps, if the comfort level is there, for parents next. I’m going to try to work on a syllabus this week…suggestions welcomed.

From the “Courses We’d Love to Teach Dept.” is the graduate course “Social Software Affordances” at Teachers College at Columbia. The very comprehensive syllabus says that:

Social software represents the promise of truly networked human communities extending across the online and offline dimensions of reality. But beyond the hype, a critical approach to social software is necessary in order to explore its impact and possibilities.

Students are asked to set up aggregators and blogs, and there will be a class wiki that will collect research and analysis that they gather during the semester. Among the questions they hope to answer are:

What is ’social’ about social software?

What are the pedagogical implications of social software for education?

What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?

Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?

In some less formal ways, these are questions we should all be asking even on the K-12 level.

Google’s plan to scan millions of library volumes has already drawn fire from a number of publishers who argue that the project is likely to run afoul of copyright law. Now another trade group, the Association of Learned and Professional…

In response to the College Board’s announcement of the 2005 SAT scores, Secretary Spellings said high schools must do more to prepare students for the future.