Blog Juice for Educational Technology

So despite writing this while sitting on the tarmac at Midway (Chicago) airport after being canceled out of flying home last night and now being delayed AGAIN, I’m in a downright giddy Read/Write Web mood. Maybe it was spending the day with a roomful of energetic, geared-up Discovery educators yesterday who despite the roadblocks and […]

George points to a couple of interesting articles that highlight the disruptions going on “out there” and encourages to read with education in mind. It’s something I constantly do, because i really believe that as traditions in those arenas begin to crumble and break down, there will be more and more pressure on the traditions […]

Just a quick update on the Digg for educators experiment. In four days we’ve had about 2,500 views, are averaging over 110 unique visitors per day, and aggregated over 50 articles. There ave been over 100 votes for stories too, which has pushed Steven’s “Adults and MySpace” article to the top of the heap. So […]

So says Joanne Jacobs in her essay “The Knowledge Tree Goes Social” which I listened to in podcast form on my drive up to Newport, RI today. (I’m speaking at EdAccess tomorrow morning.) She cites the blog search engine Sphere as the source though I couldn’t replicate the result. Regardless…

69,000.
Whoa.
Not to sound like an […]

I added this article from today’s Times about Wikipedia to the EdBloggerNews site (which if you haven’t gone there and signed up for an account and subscribed to the RSS feed and added the bookmarklet to your toolbar so you can start contributing yet you should) and this quote just jumped out at me:
Wikipedians often […]

From the “Throw it Up and See if it Sticks Deptartment” I just put together a Digg-type site over at CrispyNews specifically for those of us who are focused on the Read/Write Web and the implications for education. Here’s how I think you could use it if you bought into it.
First, go over to the […]

So here is the not so subtle change that’s happening when teachers learn about the Read/Write Web and the tools that they can bring into their classrooms. As little as six months ago, there was a sense of “yeah, but” resignation in terms of not being able to really implement these tools in effective ways […]

If you want to find an area of the country that is getting really serious about the Read/Write Web in the classroom, look no further that Western New York. If nothing else, the last two days here speaking to and with the superintendents from about 50 districts and the staff developers from the Erie BOCES […]

Jeff Jarvis posted one of those push-my-feeble-brain-to-the-limit posts last week which I think has resonance in a lot of ways. It starts with this:
In the future of media, which is now, everybody is a network. In the past, networks were defined by control of content or distribution. But now, you can’t own all distribution and […]

Tim O’Reilly’s recent commencement address at the UC Berkeley School of Information has been widely cited, and I’m not sure that all of it really resonates, but there are a couple of phrases and ideas that are especially relevant and worth noting. And since he wasn’t just talking to a group of educators, these points […]

One of the themes that’s been running through my brain a lot of late is the idea that with blogs and podcasts and screencasts and others we really have an opportunity to ask our students to become more than just receivers of knowledge. They can become transmitters of that knowledge, teachers of it in easy, meaningful ways. It’s an idea that I added into my MACUL presentations at literally the last minute, but it was one that I think really resonated with many who sat in.

If you’ve ever taught, you know that the best way to learn something is to not only do it but to teach it to others. (Many heads in the audience nodded in agreement.) In the “old days” of the traditional, non-connected classroom, we really didn’t have too many opportunities for students to teach back what they learned on a regular basis. And that’s because, obviously, it required a lot of planning to set up the communicaiton between the student teachers and a group of learners down the hall or down the street or, in some cases, around the world. And to be honest, those connections were somewhat contrived, based on the desires of the adult teachers in the classrooms. I’m not saying that some of these were not effective. But what I am saying is that they really weren’t a viable option for many teachers.

Not so today, assuming of course, you have a regular connection. Not only can we ask our students to teach back what they know to a potentially large audience, it’s not a contived audience, because the people who learn from it are motivated to do so. They will self-select it. And in doing so, there is the potential for connection and community building that can extend the learning that occurs in the classroom.

Ironically, this is especially true, I think, with the more multimedia technologies that we talk about. Podcasts, vidcasts, screencasts all give students the opportunity to take what they have learned and turn it into teachable content. That’s what I hear when I listen to Bob Sprankle’s or Tony Vincent’s kids. That’s what I sense with the Wheaton Academy vidcasts. And that’s why I am so intruiged with screencasting as a new medium for students to use to teach.

That’s an interesting shift I think. Instead of being focused on how well our students can test on the material, what if we focused on how well they can teach it?

Nothing in the latest Technorati statistics to suggest whether or not the content being created on blogs is becoming more useful or interesting or valuable, but there’s no doubt that the blog engine continues to run at a pretty high RPM. Some of the findings:

I actually had a spare 15 minutes this morning, and after reading the latest review of Ning on Tech Crunch, I decided to go back and see what was new. The result? If you’re ever passing through my town, you can now find a good place to eat.

I can’t believe how absolutely simple that was, and how much potential there is in being able create things like this so easily. Tim has this all down, of course, and I envy him. I don’t have much of a programming gene, so for me to be able to clone someone’s else’s work and make it relevant is just way too cool. Now, as always, all I need is the time.