That’s the title of one of four, count ‘em, four different presentations I’ll be giving at MACUL on Friday. (How I got talked into that I’ll never know!) When I originally submitted the idea, I saw it as a way to show how blogs in schools were evolving and branching out, and to have a conversation on the ways in which they would continue to mature. And while I still see that being a part of it, I’m feeling like the bigger, and in some ways, more important discussion is what we need to do to insure that blogs in schools even have a future. I don’t mean that in a defeatist sense as I obviously believe these tools need to play an important part in our teaching and practice. I mean it in the “what are the obstacles and how do we overcome them” sense. So I’d like to start the presentation early here by looking at the most widely articulated impediments to adoption of the tools and offering some very thin, discussion starting ideas about how we might respond to them. This assumes, of course, that you believe (as I do) that these tools can make significant contributions to our practice and to our (and our students’) learning, that they in fact do have the potential to fundamentally improve what we do in the classroom. And, it assumes that we all have access.

These are in no real order, though I’d be interested to hear what the top choices are.

Since I’ve been more than apt to complain when journalists do the “blogs are online journals” story, let me compliment Cynthia Kopkowski from the Palm Beach Post who put together a pretty nice article whose headline actually refers to teacher bloggers as “saavy!” Wow!

Hey…that’s two articles in a row that actually paint Weblogs as learning tools…a trend?

And I’m open to a better estimate in terms of teachers blogging. 3,000 seems low and high at the same time. My guess is more are using them in some form, but I wonder if it’s close to how many are actually blogging for themselves on a regular basis.

It’s good to have Anne back, isn’t it? Her presence on our panel yesterday was really great, and her list of things she’s learned from blogging has inspired me. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

If I wasn’t at iLaw last week, I would have sure liked to have been at Gnomedex. The big news, of course, was Microsoft’s announcement that RSS was going to be integrated into the next version of IE. (Wonder what Firefox will have by then.)

But the even bigger news was that there was a presentation on “Blogs in the Classroom” as well! Kathy Gill at the University of Washington gave it, and she gave some surprising stats about the blog knowledge of her incoming students: 89% had sipped the blog juice in one form or another, but only 7% had even heard of Flickr. Sheesh.

BTW, some great Gnomedex notes at Blogaholics.

Back to iLaw: Yochai Benkler did a presentation on “The Internet and Political Values” yesterday that was, for the most part, way over my head, but the parts that I did get were pretty enlightening. One thing that really stuck was his deconstruction of the Long Tail, where it appears that there are a few blogs that get lots of readers and many, many blogs that get just a few. In the larger view, this is true, but what’s significant is when you break it down into clusters of blogs by interest. Benkler showed that within interest groups, the distribution is pretty standard: some blogs have a lot of readers, most blogs have a fair number (in relative terms) and some have very few. His point, I think, was that as the blogosphere grows larger, there will still be great opportunity for new bloggers to become significant contributors within their interest groups. Think of it as a lot of mini blogospheres, similar to our growing K-12 edublogger sphere. There have been so many great new voices added to our mix over the past six months or so, and that only promises to continue.

The other thing he talked about which I found interesting was how quickly the blogosphere can organize to take political action. He used the Sinclair Broadcasting Group story from last year as an example. Within a week after announcing they would run a controversial program about John Kerry, bloggers brought about movement against local advertisers of Sinclair that eventually caused the company’s stock price to go down and to them pulling the program. It was a pretty powerful case study.

Unfortunately, I can’t stay the full day today. My brain is spinning once again, not quite as buzzed as after last year, but buzzed nonetheless. It’s hard to capture it in one general thought or idea, but if I had to, I’d say the message here is that the huge waves of change caused by the Read/Write Web are just growing larger, that “the law” does not fully understand the implications of these changes, yet, and that it’s going to be a very interesting (and messy) decade ahead. Sounds right for education as well.

THE Journal this month has an article I wrote about my Secret Life of Bees blog if anyone might be interested. It seems hard to believe that it’s been almost three years now since that project. Time flies…

Over at ETI, Tom is writing about the future of blogging in preparation for our NECC panel in a couple of weeks. I’m cross posting this back over there in response.

My take on the future of blogging differs from Tom’s in some respects. Specifically, I don’t agree that the practice of reading and writing in blogs will remain unchanged in 10 years. If fact, I would doubt that blogs in their current iteration will be around in 10 years. To compare blogs to e-mail is, I think, to say that, like e-mail, blogging has only one fairly restrictive use. I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, Tom points out correctly that blogs have already evolved from basic link lists with little annotation to a more complex form of exposition, which is, ironically, a change he’s been fighting against and I’ve been fighting for.

I think that evolution will continue as more and more communication goes online in more and more transparent ways. In fact, I would argue that in 10 years, especially in educational circles, exposition will be taught in what is currently blog form. I sincerely doubt that our current process of exchanging paper will still be around. I also believe that the social, collaborative aspects of blogging will also be subsumed into the writing process we teach. It will move writing as product to writing as conversation or contribution. Because of blogging, writing will take on more meaningful outcomes.

This type of blog work will become part of a much more complex and diverse learning environment which combines blog, e-portfolio, community and more. I think Elgg comes close to that vision, though I wonder what level of autonomy over these spaces students will be afforded. (That’ll take a few more decades…) And in similar ways, individual blogging will cede to more community aggregated forms. (RSS is already beginning to render individual Websites fairly meaningless.) Again, the emphasis will continue to move toward dialogue and conversation and away from monologue.

So, once again, to me this comes down to a distinction between form and function. To me, the form will not be sustainable, but the function, the blogging will become an integral part of what we do.

Konrad Glogowski has a post up titled “Grading Conversations” where he writes:

I think that student bloggers should be recognized for writing as part of a larger community of inquirers. Some of my most successful writers are those who are aware of what their friends are writing about and who participate in conversations with other bloggers in their class. This is an important part of knowledge- and community-building, especially when (as in my class) students investigate and write about related ideas. When the whole class is engaged in investigating human rights, for example, the interactions that occur among bloggers can have a strong impact on individual writers and the communal sense of knowledge-building. Students quickly become aware that they are all co-constructing knowledge and begin to spend a lot of time commenting on other blogs and other entries. When I mark their contributions, a part of their grade is given for showing that they are an integral part of the blogosphere and not just an isolated writer.

I just think that is so good, and so different from the ways in which most teachers approach assessment. I mean many of us give grades for something called “class participation,” but that is much, much different from “knowledge construction participation.” We’re saying to our students that while it’s important for them to share their ideas with the rest of us, it’s equally (if not more) important to be willing to contribute and test those ideas in the context of the class community. That they need to stop giving “answers” (which suggest the discussion is over) and start contributing insights and experiences and questions (which suggests the discussion continues.)

We need to stop thinking in terms of assessing answers and start thinking about how we assess the contributions our students make to the conversations about learning that are happening in our classrooms. It’s not going to be an easy shift, because it’s much less concrete compared to what the system now calls for. But it’s great to see that teachers are starting to move in that direction, and that they’re willing to enter the conversation for themselves.