summer learning

Blogging   Thing 4
The genre of blog writing in general seems to be non fiction amazement of how wonderful blogging is and what a difference it has made in life in general.  Mostly it seems as if people simply write to tell others how thoughtful and insightful they all are.  Everything is first person–or else the royal “we” is used.  The reading is less a continuous narrative and more short snippets of thought.  The writing does get to the point very quickly. Teaching Brevity Students 20 blog http://students2oh.org/2007/12/16/teaching-brevity/#comment-273 reinforces this idea and generally everyone feels that brevity is to be desired.  I suppose when you are reading lots of comments it is, but I’m not so sure that brevity in and of itself should be a goal of writing. One interesting point raised in “A Rationale for Educational Blogging” http://anne.teachesme.com/2007/01/17/rationale-for-educational-blogging/#comment-36767 was where does the responsibility lie in protecting students from harming their futures?  One mom/educator wrote back that it was the parent’s responsibility and she was teaching her children to realize the impact of what they wrote on a blog.  I am not sure that everyone is/can/will and ultimately the educator will have to deal with the issue of inappropriate blogs or blogs that reflect immature thinking–that may be archived and later come back with negative consequences.  I will search for more comment along this line of thought.

How to Prevent Another Leonardo http://wanderingink.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/how-to-prevent-another-leonardo-da-vinci/#comment-3173 had very interesting ideas about why No Child Left Behind won’t do wonders for the American Educational system.  But one individual pointed out that Leonardo probably would have done just fine and actually the interconnectedness of the global network means that no one individual achieves greatness–but that lots of quietly working groups are achieving brilliant things in very specialized subjects.  Blogging obviously is working for them and there does seem to be a blogging literacy –collective/collaborative but most importantly accessible to many.

I really liked the ideas of The Ripe Environment “The simultaneous personal and public experience of using all of the tools at the teacher’s disposal to tear down walls, collaborate with each another, and question the traditional role of technology in the classroom.” http://http://yongesonne.edublogs.org/2007/06/29/the-ripe-environment/ as this discussion really looked at how overwhelming all the new technologies are for most instructors and what we wanted to develop in the classroom and in the student was not really mastery of the technology itself. 

The extreme biology comment section really looked like the blogs my students did.  People just having conversations with each other about a topic.  Some give direct suggestions. Others opinions.  This individual had his/her opinion changed as result of the conversation. http://www.missbakersbiologyclass.com/blog/2007/10/07/imagine-turning-the-faucetand-nothing-coming-out#comment-1574  This is what I imaging happens on most blogs.