eSchool News ran an article Thursday on their 2006 EduBlog awards sponsored by Discovery Education:
Dennis Pierce, Managing Editor of eSchool News, did a good job with this article and the quotations. (Misquotes in articles are unfortunately common, I have found, so I really appreciate this.) As panelists last Thursday during the awards luncheon in Orlando, we had an engaging dialog facilitated by Steve Dembo, which was the focus of this article. I hope the video recorded version will be available sometime soon to share as an audio podcast. Unfortunately, my iPod recorder malfunctioned so I was not able to podcast the event.
I did resonate with the following quotation from Bill MacKenty, which Dennis included in the article:
It’s [blogging] not about…who you are, or the color of your skin–it’s about what you have to say. There’s something utterly beautiful and noble about that.
The reference to the “tongue-in-cheek essay by someone calling for schools to ban the use of pencils” was Doug Johnson’s article in the March 2006 issue of ISTE’s Learning and Leading with Technology. Doug has another version of this (relating to students and iPods) titled “Proposal for Banning Pencils” republished on his blog. Bill MacKenty has posted about this article also being available on Education World’s website.
On the subject of blog quality, the one thing I did forget to mention during our roundtable was hyperlinks. 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.
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