I created the ning as an extension of my presentation on the same topic at the Wisconsin State Reading Association in Milwaukee, February 6.  It’s a small group now, but please join us and help us learn together.

I had set up some wiki pages for the course, and it mostly went well, mostly.

We hit a snag when not everyone could access an email account to get their edublogs password. There were a few who never did get to open a blog and play with it. If this would have been me, I would have been very disappointed. I wish I had remembered that they would need access to an email account and had them all get a gmail or other web mail account (some tried to get gmail from the school but were denied).

On the more positive side, I think everyone left with a better sense of what they can do with a blog or a wiki or both. I promised to update the wiki site with resources for them.

We had three hours. We could have used three days. In the future, I would probably not try to do both blogs and wikis in one class. It’s too much!

If you’re out there, SITA class, let me know how things are going and what I can do to help.

I’ll be talking about what I love, so it should be easy & FUN!

The first question I posted had to do with Blogging itself and how Bloggers are democratic voices in an important way, or at least can be. I wanted my students to think about how Blogging is or could be something relevant to their own lives.

Of course, being in the Blogosphere myself, my perception is skewed. I do think Bloggers are important. I do think the rise of independent voices is necessary in times of corporate controlled media. But Blogs are important for another reason.

As I was reading the posts from my juniors, I was impressed with two things. One, they were more prolific in their blog posts. When they write in class in their paper response journals, I’m lucky if they push themselves to 100 words in ten minutes. It’s a grueling process, somehow, for them to write on paper.

When I pointed this out, one girl said, “I can type so much faster than I can write.” And it’s true. It’s true for almost everyone. And don’t we pretty much convert them to typing everything in 9th grade, then revert? I can see why it’s frustrating.

Secondly, most of their posts are articulate. Seriously–articulate. This from people who say they don’t know anything or pretend not to care. Students do care how they sound in public spaces. This is something I know from CyberEnglish.

But the key is that the Blog space has to be public.

In trying to compromise with CIPA and the restraints schools feel about students and the Internet, class management tools like Moodle offer Blog space within them. The trouble with this Blog space is that it’s pseudo Blog space–it’s not public. And therefore not as valuable.

The one thing I wish were true about Blogs is that they’d have layered commenting. What I mean is that it would be nice to comment on comments in a hierarchial structure, like a threaded discussion.

It is important for the world’s citizens to be able publish their thinking in Blogs, etc. , but it is even more important for those thoughts to generate debate.