Teach42

This was copied, pasted and edited from an email conversation I had with a colleague that I greatly respect last night.

Steve,
You have to help me with something.

I’ve poked around some with blogs and I just don’t get it. The blogs I’ve read and some that folks get all in a lather about seem like, well, an exercise in shameless self-indulgence. Are people really that interested in the drivel that so many of them contain? I feel like I’m either reading dear diary baloney or an endless stream of letters to the editor of a bad local newspaper.

Without trying to sound arrogant, I’m a *really good* elementary teacher to whom even fairly non-obvious instructional applications of technology are quickly apprehended. And I have historically been an early adopter of all sorts of things. I sort of feel embarrassed to say that when it comes
to blogs, I just don’t see what all the fuss is about. Am I just getting old and crotchety?

I figured I’d ask you because you’re a straight shooter. Can you help?

First of all, there’s nothing special about a blog. It’s a web page, nothing more nothing less. However, it’s a web page that’s unbelievably simple to update. It doesn’t require technical experience, you don’t need to know HTML, you don’t need to spend hours working with tags, tables and frames just to get a product that looks decent. And therein lies the first part of what makes blogs special; they’re easy. ANYONE can setup a blog and create content for it. The web is longer dominated by the elite, those with the hidden knowledge of HyperTextMarkupLanguage, the truly ‘geeky’.

The second piece of what makes blogs special is that they have mechanisms built in to provide feedback to the author. Comment systems provide the reader a chance to interact directly with the writer. Beyond that, since the comments are associated with the original post, other visitors see not only the original post, but other people’s responses as well. If one finds the writing of a blogger quotable, they can copy the text and blog about it themselves on their own site. By providing what’s called a trackback or pingback, the original author is then notified immediately that someone find their writing interesting enough to quote and can visit that persons site as well to read their thoughts. Just imagine if every time you spoke to someone about an article in the Chicago Tribune, the original author got a little message letting him or her know you were doing so. That’s how this works on a smaller scale.

So now we have a system that requires no technical experience for people to create content, or for people to respond to. We have the beginnings of actual dialogue. I’m sure you can see some potential for this if for no other reason than as a collaborative tool. But there’s more to blogs that make them special.

Trying to visit 20 sites on a daily basis would be a lesson in futility. There’s no way that you can do it. To visit each of those sites and scan through them for new content is virtually impossible. That’s where RSS comes into play. Nearly every blog out there creates an RSS feed, a subscribable XML file that dishes out everything that you write. Using an aggregator like Bloglines, you subscribe to the RSS feeds for the blogs you want to read. Then you visit one site, Bloglines in this case, and have all the content you want brought to you. If there’s a new post on any blogs that you subscribe to, it just shows up as a new post. You read it, it’s marked as read, and you move on. Quick and easy. I read through about 90 blogs per day. I don’t spend more than 20 minutes doing so in a session. Most of those blogs are from educators that I respect. Some of them are from teachers, others from principals, and some are even student’s weblogs. I personally find it fascinating to see what a fifth grader will write about when they choose to. And considering that it takes about 20 seconds to read the paragraph a fifth grader might write on a given day, I can afford to splurge and check them out. I also read blogs about the latest OSX tips and tricks, software development and other sorts of technology related topics. I subscribe to the National School Board Association’s blog and read up on the articles that are important to board members. I also subscribe to the Technology section of the New York Times. And all that content is brought to me. If you want to check out my feeds, head to my public bloglines feed. You’ll see I also read up on some gaming news as well as a few poker blogs Gotta have hobbies!

Ok, that’s a lot so far, and if that were it, then it would be plenty, but there’s more. Because of all these resources available to me, I wind up hearing about software and news that normally I might not see for months, if at all. If I see something that I think might be interesting, I’ll blog about it. People who subscribe to my blog are then alerted to this new piece of information. If they find it interesting, they blog about it. Anyone who reads their blog learns about it and passes it along as well. It creates a network, a community, a source of information far beyond my own personal network. Today I sought information from LMAIS about people who are blogging in independent schools. I got back virtually no information. So I blogged about it today. I also sent out a few emails to people whose blogs I read on a regular basis. I got an incredible response and was repeatedly referred to a private school in Montreal whose administrator has a great deal of experience with this. I also found out about a private school in Colorado who will begin blogging in the next few weeks. I’m going to be getting in contact with those two tomorrow. Those are sources that I would normally never have found out about through my normal network of colleagues. And most of the people who provided me with that information don’t know me from Adam.

One topic that I learned about through blogs was Podcasting. I’d never heard of it before and probably wouldn’t have heard about it for months, possibly until it made it to headline news. I’m trying it out and while I’m not 100% sold on it yet, I see tremendous potential there. I think it’s something we’ll be seeing a lot more of in the near future. It all comes about as a result of blogs and syndication.

So far, I really haven’t talked too much about content yet. Some if it is, as you say, ’shameless self-indulgence’. I’m guilty of that, I know. But blogs provide me an opportunity to flesh out ideas, to put into writing some of my internal dialogue with the express purpose of sharing it with like-minded people. Hopefully they may provide feedback of some sort. Even if they don’t provide me with feedback, perhaps my thoughts may spark ideas in their own minds. Simply put, there are other people out there who think like me. I want to read their ideas and share my ideas with them. I’m sure there are other “*really good* elementary teacher to whom even fairly non-obvious instructional applications of technology are quickly apprehended” as well Perhaps you’ve just been reading the wrong blogs. Not all blogs are journals. In fact, I dare say at this point most of them aren’t. Many news sources, such as the New York Times, have switched to blog format because of vast potential of the medium and the ability to reach a larger audience. I wouldn’t visit the New York Times site on a daily basis, but I love having just the technology section delivered to me. It’s not just delivered to me in the mornings either; it delivers the articles throughout the day, as they are published.

Let me know if you have any other questions. Even though I’ve only been blogging personally for a few weeks now and I still can’t use them at my own school, I’m feel as though I’m becoming quite an authority (in my own mind)! When I get into something, I often get really into it!

Steve

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