"It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of blogs out there - how do you handle information overload and how do you think RSS might help with that?"
I suspect that the same criteria I share with my students during information literacy sessions will guide me through the littered information landscape that the blogosphere no doubt contains. We rely on these core four principles: currency, relevance, bias and authority. RSS is a tool that I will use to put the blogs I encounter to these tests. RSS, by default, arranges new strands within feeds chronologically. Insofar as relevance is concerned, RSS seems agnostic on this count. With reagrd to bias and authority, I am certain that these are rarely evident early in my subscription to a particular feed. Circumstances and contexts will reveal whether the authors I am following are worthy of my trust and whether my worldview and theirs are truly congruent. I do not expect to agree with everything that I read. Still, I want the opinions and statements that I weigh to be coherent, reasoned, persuasive, witty, compassionate and charitable.
RSS highlights the difference for me between online and print literacy. I like to re-read print books all the time and I worry that blogs will never rise to the print standard I have set for myself. I can only imagine reading a blog once even if I follow a particular author's feed. While I may be enamored with an online author's style, I have yet to come across digital creations that are memorable the way La Chute by Albert Camus ot the The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot are memorable for me. With RSS, I feel like I am sorting through newspaper clippings in folders and grudgingly giving my attention to ephemeral things. It makes me thirst all the more for ageless wonders.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Thing 3
How might a blog support the work you do? How might you use a blog with students? How might they respond to a blog assignment? What concerns do you have about educational blogging?
I think that blogs hold some potential for supporting online book clubs. In the past, I have posted key passages and quotes to provide students with mile markers through a novel . I have always thought that this use of a blog was somewhat unimaginative, but I struggled to design an assignment that provided students with the opportunity to participate in the "un-packing" of the major themes in a novel.
One idea that I am playing with is to invite students to use podomatic to record their personal reading of key passages in a novel ( My test novel is The Catcher in The Rye because I am confident students will not pass up an opportunity to lend their voices to Holden Caufield). Students would then post comments to a blog where they explained why they chose to accent particular syllables, to stress un-italicized words, to pause where there is no obvious punctuation warranting a pause or stop. I suspect that students will have very different ideas about how Holden crafts his alibis and rationalizations and that we will all benefit from hearing each other's voices and reading each other's comments. I believe that this closer examination of the meter in Salinger's prose will lead to a more confident reading fluency.
My concern about educational blogging is that students will pass up opportunities to articulate their own voice and to construct their own meaning of the text. I am also concerned that the students will not be charitable in their reading of other students' ideas about the text. I think that prior to introducing the blog, much preparatory work must be done in the classroom to encourage disciplined inquiry and appreciative listening.
I think that blogs hold some potential for supporting online book clubs. In the past, I have posted key passages and quotes to provide students with mile markers through a novel . I have always thought that this use of a blog was somewhat unimaginative, but I struggled to design an assignment that provided students with the opportunity to participate in the "un-packing" of the major themes in a novel.
One idea that I am playing with is to invite students to use podomatic to record their personal reading of key passages in a novel ( My test novel is The Catcher in The Rye because I am confident students will not pass up an opportunity to lend their voices to Holden Caufield). Students would then post comments to a blog where they explained why they chose to accent particular syllables, to stress un-italicized words, to pause where there is no obvious punctuation warranting a pause or stop. I suspect that students will have very different ideas about how Holden crafts his alibis and rationalizations and that we will all benefit from hearing each other's voices and reading each other's comments. I believe that this closer examination of the meter in Salinger's prose will lead to a more confident reading fluency.
My concern about educational blogging is that students will pass up opportunities to articulate their own voice and to construct their own meaning of the text. I am also concerned that the students will not be charitable in their reading of other students' ideas about the text. I think that prior to introducing the blog, much preparatory work must be done in the classroom to encourage disciplined inquiry and appreciative listening.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Thing 1 and Thing 2
I am participating in 23 Things because I am conducting an experiment this summer. My goal is to increase summer reading participation and to promote authentic reading and sustained reflection on reading. I have maintained a book club blog (tnbookclub.blogspot.com) that has pretty much flopped. I tried to use the blog medium to post questions and excerpts and students did not really respond to these prompts. I am trying a new approach by employing wiziq to be present online multiple times a week and provide a context and some resources for the books that our students are reading. I am hoping to stumble upon a method for balancing freedom and structure: I think students need the freedom to discover and the boundaries to linger/loiter long enough in one place to realize that discovery is afoot . Knowing that many/some people could potentially read this blog does not make me self-conscious (though I am trying to be better about typos). The blog remains an online diary until someoe engages me in conversation. This blog is helping me document my efforts to add substance to form. I subscribe to the very trendy notion that education should nurture a culture of evidence and a culture of mastery.
Thing 1
I like the idea of bridging the gap between how students live and how they learn. Many of the technologies discusssed (wikis, blogs, e-portfolios) appeal more to people my age (just turned 40--long live X) than to the digital learners under 18 with whom I work every day. They are far more enamored with iPhone Apps, Facebook quizzes and bittorrent grand theft audio/video. I worry that the digital learning revolution has succeeded in honing the core competencies of our best students, but failed to engage our most reluctant learners. They still "play school" every time we ask them to answer Ning prompts or collaborate on projects using Google Docs. They still live in a world completely foreign to the digital learning experience that we have tried to craft for them. Assignments are still assignments whether or not you get to use your phone or computer. There is a superficiality to the digital revolution so far that disturbs me. In very rare instances have I read posts or replies that resemble considered thought, measured argument or careful investigation. Instead, my students remain narcissistic and solipsistic. It's always about them and the rest of the world is fake. I want to contribute to initiatives that remedy this unrepentant and twittering Catcher in Rye worldview.
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