Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Blogs are changing education

eSchool News ran an article Thursday on their 2006 EduBlog awards sponsored by Discovery Education:

“Panelists: Blogs are changing education – Winners of the first-ever ‘Best of the Education Blog’ Awards discuss blogging’s impact on teaching and learning”

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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3 responses to “Blogs are changing education”

  1. Weekly Roundup (26 March 2006)

    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’!

    Wes Fryer and Christopher D. Sessums in particular h…

  2. […] After a little booth duty, Scott, Betsy and I raced across the street to a luncheon hosted by eSchool News to celebrate the four winners of their Best of Education Blogs awards.  I had the honor of hosting a little panel discussion with Wesley Fryer, Frank LaBanca, Sara Mead and Bill MacKenty.  What I really loved about the discussion was that they all came from such different perspectives.  From a EduPolitical blog to educational theory, to classroom perspectives, to just partical blogging with students, the winners really reprsented the multitude of ways that blogging can be used in education.  You can read more about the discussion at eSchool,or  Moving at the Speed of Creativity, but I think Scott summed it up pretty well when he said, "this brief 30 minute discussion may have been the best professional development experience I have had in years."  ’nuff said.  They did video tape the entire thing, hopefully they’ll get it cut and published soon. […]