WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com... [2]

It’s odd. Some weeks it would seem the edublogging community is hard pushed to come up with a decent post between them, and then some weeks - like this week - everyone seems to be ‘in the zone’!

[3] Wes Fryer and [4] Christopher D. Sessums in particular have been in great form this week, so I’ll begin by quoting their excellent posts (beginning with Wes):

Despite or in-spite of what teachers are or are not doing with technology in the classroom, young people are using technology to communicate with each other big-time…

The kids are using technology in powerful ways to communicate, but in many cases are putting themselves at risk. In addition to helping students stay safe, as educators and parents we need to figure out ways to leverage the TREMENDOUS intrinsic motivation students have to communicate with each other via IM, social networking sites, etc.

Post: [5] MySpace resource for educators and parents

I think high quality blog posts include hyperlinks to the other online sources referenced in the post. As Jay Rosen has observed, a high-quality blog post with a rich array of hyperlinks can be analogous to an entire course syllabus for a college course. I don’t know if my own posts meet this high standard, but I certainly do think blogging is something we should be teaching people about in schools and part of that instruction should include encouragement to link to other sources.

Post: [6] Blogs are changing education

It’s not hard to see where Wes stands on the issue of new media and education! In these two posts and others on his blog he makes a strong case for using [7] Web 2.0 (i.e. more collaborative) technologies with students. As Aristotle said, [8] man is by nature a social animal and therefore it’s not surprising that most students tend to learn best when they’re working for a purpose and collaboratively. [9] Will Richardson has mentioned often the need for a more appropriate response to students’ use of sites such as [10] MySpace than to simply block access to them. Instead of preventing students from accessing such sites, we as teachers should be familiar with them enough to find ways of using them to provide the intrinsic motivation to which Wes alludes…

This theme of educational institutions not beginning where students are at is also brought up by Christopher:

Today I sat in on a session given to middle and high school teachers by [11] Stephen G. Barkley…

The first analogy Barkley made caught my attention: schools as airplanes. Many schools strap students into their seats facing toward the front, where talking is not discouraged, but it isn’t encouraged either. To extend the metaphor further, many schools focus more on the destination rather than the experience, centering more on scope and sequence rather than the myriad of opportunities that is our everyday existence. Where an in-flight movie serves more as a distraction rather than a meaningful encounter with a text.

Barkley discussed how, in his experience, many educators run their classrooms like a franchise: the students in the room are the teacher’s responsibility, not the schools responsibility, not the team’s responsibility, not the community’s responsibility. He talked about how many schools target improving student test scores, not improving the lives of individual students. In terms of professional development, the question becomes: what do schools need to look at in terms of the way they are structured that will allow them to focus on individual students?

Many schools and educators are caught in a bind. They have to choose between focusing on the curriculum or the students, the needs of the individual versus the needs of the school district.

Barkley cited the work of [12] Margaret Wheatley where she states in effect that schools need to focus on the whole student instead of the parts. This notion is illustrated when you think of the school as an assembly line: The math teacher focuses on math, the English teacher focuses on language arts, the social studies teacher focuses on history, yet none of them focus on the child as a whole. Again, where’s the team? Many teachers and schools focus exclusively on curriculum and leave out the other teachers, the community, the parents, the library, the technology. It seems part of the reason for this is that schools are rule-bound, they work off of structures, whereas learning is more about processes, relationships, identity formation, and regular change. Learning is messy, and messy is anathema to school structure.

Post: [13] Curriculum versus Learners

That last sentence - that learning is a messy process not suited to the rigid structures imposed by schools is one that has been a recurrent theme in my thinking recently. I can see how it makes the lives of managers easier to continually report on how students have progressed by using sub-levels, but in practice this is completely at odds with how real learning takes place!

In another post, Christopher asks why edubloggers decide to blog in the first place, and what keeps them blogging:

For many of us (myself included), blogging fits nicely into what [14] Plato, and most recently NYT columnist [15] David Brooks, describes as the thymotic urge, i.e., it appeals to our desire for recognition. I realize this is only one facet to the multifaceted motivation to blog, but it is one that should be clearly acknowledged.

My dearest friend is bright, tech savvy, a good writer, and can quote [16] Hegel and [17] Homer Simpson. We have discussed why he doesn’t blog many times. He says he just doesn’t have the desire to put his thoughts out there in such a medium. We’ve talked about fear of rejection, of putting your heart and soul into your writing, only to have no one acknowledge it as being a possible factor preventing him from blogging.

[18] So what makes edubloggers tick? What makes them feel that what they have to say will be worthwhile to others? Do edubloggers desire recognition? Would you blog if no one read your posts?

For me, blogging is a social act. I heart connecting with others. I like to share my thoughts and receive feedback from others. Blogging is a way for me to test my ideas out. As a future professor, writing and publishing determines whether or not I will be retained by a college. Professors are supposed to be contributing to the larger body of knowledge that exists in their area of expertise and blogging is an easy way to do that (it’s almost as if the blogosphere were a perpetual conference). Blogging affords me the opportunity to contribute to the larger conversation and network with others of like and unlike minds.

I think what I love best about blogging is that it allows me to peer into the thought processes of others. Being a people-watcher, I have always been fascinated by what makes people do or say the things they do. My favorite bloggers reveal their minds and parts of their souls; they risk exposing themselves, their inner most thoughts and feelings, all for what purpose? My entertainment? Possible adulation from the roaring masses?

Post: [19] What makes Edubloggers tick?

An interesting post. Would I continue mrbelshaw.co.uk/teaching if I never received any feedback? Well, perhaps not as often, so I suppose this thymotic urge is a factor. Another factor (which I believe there’s a proper term for but I can’t find it) is the experience of not knowing what you really think about something until you’ve either written it down (OK, typed…) or said it out loud. Sometimes what makes sense to you in a fuzzy, unactualized way in your head needs a bit of teasing out before it becomes coherent and a defensible position to take on an issue. Blogging helps with that, I think.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that one has to undergo a process of both internal and external reflection when blogging. In a post which comes as very welcome after a self-imposed blogging break, Jeremy Price of the [20] Smelly Knowledge blog cites an article entitled [21] What Does Reflection Mean to Us? by Kristina Kenegos:

We must give children an opportunity to discover the world through their own lens. This all takes time. When we ask ourselves what we can give to the generation we have given birth to, time would be the best idea yet. Unqualified, unstructured, lifetime.

Post: [22] On The Value of Reflection

This ties in with an article I saw in the Sunday Times today with the headline ‘Multitasking children are losing the plot’ which raises a concern that the multitasking ‘abilities’ of what they call ‘Generation M’ is actually a negative phenomenon:

The trend for children to multitask by juggling an array of electronic gadgets is severely damaging their levels of concentration, scientists have warned…

…scientists have confirmed the belief of many parents that it is impossible to concentrate on more than one thing at the same time. They found that children tackling homework while sending messages via the internet can end up spending 50% longer than if they had done each task separately.

How can the fact that the children involved in the study took 50% longer be equated with anything negative, apart from the fact that they’re spending longer on their homework?! What if the messages they’re sending are about their homework, what if they’re producing higher quality work than they would do otherwise? What if they’re learning within a whole new paradigm?

Well that’s quite enough for one day’s blogging. The last thing I’d like to flag up before providing links to the things I haven’t had time to include is [23] feeds.mrbelshaw.co.uk. This is a new blog I’ve set up which automatically syndicates content from my favourite blogs in education and technology. Those who don’t want to or don’t know how to set up an RSS feed reader can therefore visit the site for the latest information. It also provides a searchable archive that I and others can use for research!

Links to content I didn’t have time to include:

• [24] The Budget in more detail
• [25] Real money behind Brown’s tricks
• [26] Podcasting rule book
• [27] Top 100 library books worldwide

Popularity: 2% [[28] ?]