(the new) bgblogging

Via Aaron Campbell comes this diagram through James Farmer on Communities of Inquiry and how blogs serve them. It’s heartening that others are asking the same kinds of questions as I find myself asking these days and coming up with thoughtful, sensible answers. I particularly appreciate Aaron’s response to Susan Marandi’s observation that the best teachers she ever had were the sages-on-the stage. He writes:

He’s putting his finger right on what ails us here in the U.S. on so many levels. He goes on to say,

Bravo, Aaron.

Aaron and Will are trying out all kinds of interesting e2e virtual-communities-of-inquiry experiments,and I’ll be interested to see what they learn about integrating such advances into their classrooms and how such far-reaching use of technology affects learning communities. They are really integrating various technologies into their work, seeing that RSS and real-time collaborative blogging, wikis, chat, audio and video all have promise together in the classroom. I’m still just playing around with blogging myself. Actually, if truth be told, Héctor and I are going to try to do some class-to-class collaboration with wikis this spring, and I am hoping to get moving on some “blogging in the wilderness” collaborations with the Social Software Users’ Group from CET, and I have students blogging in far-flung places on the earth, but I haven’t yet moved to this full-fledged integration of a range of tools. Perhaps I am listening a bit to Héctor’s fabulous recent posting–I highly recommend it: he doesn’t post often, but he always posts brilliantly–about needing to take it a bit slower this semester, to fine tune the kind of multi-blog approach I’m using in my classes, incorporating a bit of podcasting and such, but not taking any new leaps, instead learning from Aaron, James and Will as they go. And thinking aloud here.

For me the beauty of this professional blogging is that it keeps me reading the Web to keep abreast of what my virtual colleagues are doing out there and to keep reflecting on what I’m doing and why. I know I’ve said this several times before, but really,if we ask our students to blog shouldn’t we have tried it out ourselves? Would you teach a kid to drive if you didn’t drive a car yourself? I’m still astonished by the numbers of teachers thinking they can throw blogging into the class without ever trying it out for themselves, feeling what it’s like to click the send button and have your modest essay or comment move out beyond yourself and into that vast unknown of the Web.

Which brings me to Trackback vs. Comments. Héctor is one of the few bloggers out there (,Sarah too, and Patti–though she doesn’t blog) who leaves substantive comments in response to postings rather than using Trackback (though he does that, too). I admit I am a more selfish user of the Web, choosing to respond to other people’s blogs via Trackback for the mostpart because I like to hang onto my thoughts on whatever topic I’ve responded to, weaving them into the archives of this evolving one-teacher’s- reflection kind of blog, and I can’t do that on someone else’s blog. I want to see the evolution of my thinking on technology in the classroom, and most of the time I am interested in a line or so of someone else’s posting, and so I use Trackback. But I must say that sometimes I feel a little guilty. Should I just go onto Aaron’s blog and respond to his posting? Or James Farmer’s? Probably. But I also find it more efficient to do everything here, and time, well, time is pretty short when the semester looms and we’re moving to MT 3.15 and I still have to work out details of the four-colum/four-blog-within-the-Motherblog design… I’ll keep thinking about this one…

Yes, this week I am pulling up a couple of new course blogs–though new is a relative term here, since one of them, at least, uses previous course blogs rather prominently. Now that EL170 (Introduction to Creative Writing) is in its fourth course blog, I have incredible resources to mine for examples, models and provocative discussion. This group of students will stand on the shoulders of the students who passed through this classroom before them, learning from their successes and their “glorious failures.” More on the new blogs anon.

Filed under: Discoveries in the Blogging World |