3.0 ["Weblogs: Let's Get Started"]

Two things I appreciated from this chapter: at the end Richardson reproduces Blogger's "Good Educator's Blogs". Not all the links are necessarily the same, as some have moved hosts, but the authors remain:

• David Warlick
• Clay Burrell
• Chris Lehmann
• George Siemens
• Jeff Utecht
• Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach
• Stephen Downes
• danah boyd
• Tom Hoffman
• Vicki Davis
• Shelly Blake-Plock
• Clarence Fisher

If/when I make time I'll link to their current blogs/Twitter handles/FB pages/WordPress/Tumblr/Instagram/websites or whatever tools they're using, but I find I read at least one of these people every week. Making one's voice heard in education and technology is easy, nowadays, and most of these folks have found multiple outlets.

Another thing I liked from the chapter was (p. 45) Richardson's suggestion to have students start with reading blogs before writing. The same principle applies as students learn to write in other media and forms -- for example, to help students become poets we encourage them to read poetry, and to help them become musicians we expect them to listen to a variety of musical styles. He says "good blogging starts with good reading", and I would extend that to incorporate evaluating for authority and other aspects of value as they learn to craft their own blogs.

Links from Web Tools deluge class -- Thank You, Keri!!

• Tweet This! Ideas for using Twitter in the classroom!
• Pinterest - use Pinterest to learn reading skills and strategies in the elementary classrom
• Using Wallwisher - ideas for the classroom
• **Socrative** - student response system - go to site and use room #: 02035007 to log in and respond to the classroom quiz
• Class Dojo - keep students inline using this easy student behavior site/app
• Online interactive timelines (Dipity, Timetoast) - Read about uses of timelines in the classroom
• Issuu - Creating your own magazine/books and publishing them! Tell me more!
  • 4th grade classroom creates "tall tales" using Story Jumper and then "publishes" them to Issuu

2.2

The Blogs as Resources section of the chapter spells out some criteria for assessing blogs for "accuracy and trustworthiness" (Richardson 2010, p. 37). He articulates in detail principles which are key to information literacy in general, whether the source is print or online, blog or other site; they are particularly specific to blogs, but I believe he does a good job of explaining them and the reasons for them, and I'm gratified that they're close to what I've been teaching. Some of the folks he features in the chapter have retired or moved on to other things.

Here are some of the key steps from the section as I've highlighted them, plus my reflections:

1. "Try to find out as much as you can about the author of the Weblog. See if there is an 'About' link that will lead to a name..." He mentions Google, and identifying background, profession, authority, and domain publisher. I've enjoyed a side trip into domain registration and learning about ICANN (the text mentions its predecessor InterNIC).  I find more and more I like to use Quora or Stack Overflow for crowd-sourced opinions on sites and tools, including WhoIs services.
2. "Next, you may want to find out what kind of a reputation the blogger has among his peers." He mentions Technorati's "Authority" rating, as well as sites linking to a blog.
3. Blogroll on the blog, especially to determine bias or agenda; other posts on the blog, and accuracy of analysis or synthesis from source links. This last is one of my favorites for evaluating whether the blogger is providing value-added or just content-farming.

Critical thinking as to authority (and to relevancy and other factors we'll explore in this text or elsewhere) is a key 21st-century skill our students need to acquire for college and career readiness as well as for effective citizenship.

Begin with the end in mind...

The truth is, I started reading this book by reading the Epilogue. I would never do that with fiction, just like I avoid film spoilers, but with this book I thought it would give me context on where we were headed -- and it did. Richardson spells out a vision for an inspiring, productive teacher who truly helps his students learn and makes progress alongside his colleagues by making wise use of available technologies. I'm glad I started my approach this way, because it gave me a context of the ideal into which to fit the details provided in each chapter as we proceed.

2.1

I've been using one of the Blogger gadgets, the Link List, to catch links as I go from reading Richardson's text, calling them "Related Sites". When I find broken links or 404s from the text links I sometimes check for an updated link and use that instead -- it's not surprising that some of the tinyurls for student work sites would no longer function. Although some of the tinyurls failed, searching for them led me to handy online lists of links from the text, like the one from one of Karen Gallagher-Edlund's (McCaskey East HS, Lancaster PA) wikis at http://edw2010.wikispaces.com/Online+class+notes.

As Richardson talked about the many uses of Weblogs in schools,

• class portal
• online filing cabinet
• e-portfolio
• collaborative space
• knowledge management and articulation
• school Web site,

I was struck by how often we now employ other Web 2.0 tools for these functions. Tools like Edmodo and Digi[cation], as well as wikis and our official FPS websites, provide for many of these uses while offering other advantages, such as enhanced privacy or more options for collaboration.

1.2

Further reacting to Will Richardson's R/W Web chapter:

Learners as Teachers bullets (3rd ed., p. 9)

• What are your passions?
• Who are your teachers? Are they all in physical space?
• How are you building your own learning networks using these tools?
• In this new environment, how are you modeling your learning for your students?

I'm not going to attempt to fully answer these questions here, but rather take them as starting points.

1) My passions include solving problems and puzzles, listening, connecting with people, and learning (about anything and everything, as far as I've found so far). I get particularly excited when I witness an "aha" moment in another learner. In terms of my scope of interests, I notice that when I don't pursue something it's typically out of a sense of prioritizing needs (like helping the person in front of me, or eating, sleeping, etc.).

2) Many of my teachers are not in physical space nearby (although they are extant, incarnate, somewhere). Others are writers or teachers who have gone before, or people I've worked with, or people I work with now.

3) See below for list of tools -- my own PLNs might be represented with something like a 3- or 4-D Venn diagram, with connecting spheres depending on platform and focal points. For example, I use a Librarians group on Facebook, as well as Twitter-following some of the same people. I also use Twitter for other topics, interests, and groups, sometimes organized into lists. Because Twitter lists are like Gmail labels, I can flag some librarians (for example) as educators, or some Tweeting administrators for ed-news. I have more inputs and feeds than I can realistically process at the moment, so I use filters (like VIPs in Mail on the Mac) to make sure key data comes to my attention.

4) Among the ways I model learning for my students is by thinking out loud as we solve problems together (like math, with someone today), by publishing to a limited extent ( @KathleenPorter, or an earlier blog Ms. Porter @ F.H.S. ), and by being honest when we're figuring something out together (like setting up several classes with Edmodo last week).

1.1

My first impression of Richardson's Read/Write Web chapter was that he cited the right sources. He started in 1989 with Tim Berners-Lee, as described in Andy Carvin's synopsis of his speech on the Semantic Web at the MIT Tech Review Emerging Technologies Conference in September 2004. The link from the third edition of the book to the source article is already broken, but I found it posted on Carvin's site at Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web. Carvin describes the talk Berners-Lee gave at MIT that month, including the following:

Berners-Lee’s early remarks focused on his development of the Web. “Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet,” including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. “All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant…. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web… and the idea was that it would minimally constraining.” And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be “the cloth on which a tapestry would be made – the jewels, the colors…”

Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, what’s come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking – and more recently, wikis and blogs. “The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write…. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows they’re [embracing] its creative side.”

Carvin continued to write up Berners-Lee's "90-minutes-worth in 30 minutes" talk, concluding with his comments about the Web and education (remember, this is Sept. 2004):

As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. “I’d like to see lots of curricula like the MIT Open Courseware initiative being picked up by K-12,” he said. “The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as “The Font of All Knowledge”) . You really need to keep education materials sown together. So I’d love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but I’d [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it.”

“Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other,” he concluded. “And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology… There’s lots of work to do out there.”

This put me in mind of Randy Paush's work at Carnegie-Mellon with Alice -- and, of course, our work in our current class together.