Reflection 1: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts chs 1-2

Will Richardson. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.

(Richard really needs to stop saying Weblog. It's annoying me. Blog blog blog.)

Blogging, though, really is something that has changed the Internet and the way people communicate. Of course, it's more than just blogger (and I think that Richardson overemphasizes this particular site, as Live Journal for example houses more than 13 million blogs) and blogging, there's YouTube and more recently Twitter, which presidential candidates are using to communicate with the public and that people are using to communicate with each other and to create new ways of spreading information. Barak Obama texts into Twitter to let his constituents know what he's thinking or doing ("At the University of Iowa envisioning affordable universal healthcare by end of first term. 10:32 AM May 29, 2007 from web"). It's a new step in sharing information, but a bit different than what Richardson notes in the book.

Is Twitter less valuable than blogging? And is there really a heirarchy of blogging, as Richardson seems to think? "Real blogging" and "not blogging"? Is a blog where someone expresses their opinion innately less valuable than one where someone expresses their opinion using linked content?

(Of course, this may just be because I'm biased. I have 2 separate blogs on LiveJournal, and it is a bit jarring to read for class and discover that Richardson doesn't think what I do qualifies as blogging.)

But however you define what a blog is, I think that they can be an incredible tool for learning. Majoring in women and gender studies in undergrad (the other major was biology), my blog and the blogs of others that I met were an incredible tool for learning, communicating, collaborating, and gathering information.

I wish that we had the ability to do the same for my students. Communicating with authors, as Richardson's students did with Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees), connecting with other students in other parts of the world, filing/organizing student work, communicating with parents - it would just be amazing. And then I inevitably hit a wall - I have students that don't even know how to use Google. They just type a long question into the address bar. Portfolios have a stranglehold on the computer lab, and JCPS has a stranglehold on the content we're able to access. Any sort of means of effective communication with the outside world is cut off - preparing my classroom for my first year of teaching, I wasn't even able to visit a newsgroup to figure out how to hook up my classroom VCR.

The district cuts our students off - and us as well - from this massive resource. How does one respond to that? What do you do?