Archive for June, 2006
Metablognition and Technosociality
An intuition that using weblogs might be a way to publish student writing lead me to occupy Borderland so I could try blogging myself. It started out as an encampment rather than a full-force occupation. I’d never heard of “edublogs,” and I didn’t have a well-defined blogging mission. I was simply writing about this and [...]
On Literacies being multiple
This post is a response to Clarence Fisher’s Literacy as Battleground. While I’m in sympathy with Clarence’s belief that teachers should rethink pedagogy in order to account for new information communication technologies, I do not agree that we have reached an all-or-nothing “tipping point.” My original statement was not a commentary on current educational usages [...]
Blogging as Active Sociality
Will Richardson’s Changing the Mindset post used MySpace as an example of the emergent mindset that I mentioned in my previous entry. I thought Will’s example was excellent, and I left a comment,
“It seems that distinctions between public and private are being blurred, and the “real” world is hard to distinguish from online activity.”After I [...]
Making Things Public
Education bloggers understand that the deployment of new publishing tools in classrooms unhinges learning from the frame of the traditional classroom. When students change from recipients of information to active participants in knowledge exchange and construction, their roles as learners are redefined. The definition of classroom is opened for debate. Terms like social and networking [...]
Surprise, Surprise
According to a Harvard study,
U.S. President George W. Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind education policy is failing to close racial achievement gaps and will miss its goals by 2014.
This shouldn’t be news. It indicates (at least) three things.Teachers’ voices aren’t heard. Teachers know that students with special needs, and students without the skills [...]
An Internet of Classrooms
If you play with an idea long enough, you begin to recognize sides to it that weren’t obvious at first. This post is about an evolution in my thinking about classroom change, design, technology, culture and institutional resistance. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a single blog post, so I expect there will [...]
Edge U blogging
Graham’s post, Blogging Masterclass Reflections, grabbed my attention. I hear Graham’s point about “teachers being bloggers first before imposing it on their students,” because I’ve said before, and I continue to believe that teachers who want to use blogs with their students need to blog themselves.
You can say, as Graham does, “…there might something [...]
Transacting with Wikipedia
Jaron Lanier’s essay published on Edge last week seemed to be prompted by his dissatisfaction with the Wikipedia biography about him which identified him as a film director, a statement that he claimed was inaccurate. His efforts to edit the page were repeatedly overruled by the other authors, and he concluded that “people with [...]
Teaching Manifesto
Teaching is a noun. A gerund, I think. It’s not a verb even though it often behaves like one. Teaching isn’t do-able in the same way that writing, or playing music, or washing dishes is because doing it (teaching) isn’t the same as getting it done. Teaching isn’t the reciprocal of learning.
Teaching and learning [...]Beyond Repair - Letting Go
I never wanted to change the system, or buck the system, or become any kind of reformer. All I wanted was to get a K-12 Reading Specialist endorsement on my teaching certificate. I wanted to do a better job teaching and advance on the pay scale. I went to graduate school and got a dose [...]
