'Participants of this session are welcome to edit these handouts. The edit password is teacher</font> :)
A lot of people have asked about the RSS site I am using now. It is called ''Netvibes'' and the URL is [[http://netvibes.com | http://netvibes.com]].
Session Notes
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At the turn of the century, teachers in classrooms across the U.S. and many other parts of the world were becoming acquainted with newly arrived multimedia computers and broadband* access to the Internet. We were exploring new techniques for utilizing these seemingly magical tools to facilitate better teaching and learning. We also recognized the importance of these technologies in preparing our children for what will surely be a future that is heavily influenced by computers and global networks. We explored a wide variety of new web-based instructional services and learned to build webquests* for our students, to provide rich inquiry activities to help students learn to use the Net to teach themselves and to use their growing knowledge and skills to produce new knowledge and valuable information products.
At that giddy time, none of us had heard of Blogs. If we had heard the term, we probably would have envisioned a mass of something that was probably too uninterested in knowing any more about.
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Doug Johnson recently wrote an article about blogging for the media specialist (see citation below). As part of that article, he submitted a list of prominent librarian bloggers, and ed tech bloggers: | |
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School Library Media Alice in Infoland (Alice Yucht) |
Ed Tech |
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Johnson, Doug. "Blogging & the Media Specialist." Learning & Leading with Technology March 2006. | |
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Session Blogs Last 10 Blog Posts that include classroom, blogging, and warlick: | |
Yet today, blogs have become an important and moving force in politics, entertainment, art, religion, and most other aspects of modern society. Blogs were fairly limited to the technorati in early 2004 with growing indications of its potential importance emerging in many likely places. My first blog experience was with a regular publication, called Where is Raed?. Published on a surprisingly steady basis, the author described daily events and details about life in Baghdad in early 2003, as U.S. troops massed on the borders of his country. As people in the U.S. and other countries watched CNN, listened to NPR, and read their favorite daily and weekly news print sources, many of them also tuned into Where is Raed? to learn about how the imminent invasion was affecting the residents of this far away country that we had heard so much about over the last decade.
The Great Discussion
...an ongoing public exchange and cultivation of ideas that was once limited to hired and elected leaders, journalists, and pundits. Today, the discussion is increasingly influenced and contributed to by nearly all walks of people, who observe, reflect, and report – a new society of citizen journalists.
It was not lost on me that I did not know the author of Where is Raed?, nor was there an obvious way to research and prove his authority. However, when I Googled* the title of the popular blog, I immediately received approximately 3,500 web pages that mentioned it. Of the ones that I examined, a vast majority were message boards where people were discussing just this thing -- was the author geninely a citizen of Iraq living in Baghdad, or a college student in Kansas, pulling something over on us. The point is that people were considering and talking about the publication, not just what was being published. They were seeking and discussing information about the information, rather than accepting the information.
This points to another idea that will arise again, that we must no longer assume the authority of the information we use, but, instead, prove the authority. This is a major shift that is critical for our classrooms, not only in what we teach our students, but also how we teach our students.
In the end, a New York Times journalist, Peter Maass, returned to the U.S. shortly after the invasion, and began to read the “Baghdad Blogger”, having returned to his cable modem. As he read through the articles and other references to the author, he learned that Salam Pax, the author’s pseudonym, had worked with an NGO called CIVIC, studied in Vienna, and worked as a translator for several foreign journalists. Peter Maass later reported in SLATE Magazine:
Warlick, David. Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere. Raleigh: The Landmark Project, 2005.
The latest 10 blog articles written anywhere that mention classroom and 'blogging'.