More thinking about blogs rather than Blackboard

I missed it while I was out of town, but there was discussion of using blogs rather than Blackboard on the Chronicle.  The article reports on a meeting held at CUNY on how to improve online education.  The various speakers outlined a number of reasons for doing so, among them:

• openness
• increased ability to customize  courses
• cost
• reliability

Of course, people like the ease of use with Blackboard, the relatively easy learning curve.  Some reported that there isn’t time to set up a blog for a course.

In part, I think this goes back to the argument TeachPaperless made about hiring geeks: for professors who use blogs, they are not at all difficult to use with classes.  For example, look at silver in sf and Art3059.  (Note:  You’ll have to go back to earlier posts to see how David Silver used this blog with his classes.  It is not just his course blog but his “regular” blog.)

Jim Groom summed it all up nicely.  The article quotes him as saying:

“I think the model for the CMS is outdated given the new Web, and I think that’s one of the problems,” he said. “It can serve certain functions well, but it’s hard for proprietary CMS’s, whatever they are, to keep up with the how the Web is changing.”

Back home again

Well, I was gone for a week.  I thought I would have a chance to post while I was gone, but internet access was limited by having to go to a coffee shop to do it.  And then there was so much stuff I HAD to get done that I didn’t do anything extra at all.  Didn’t even really check email.

But now I’m back home.  I have a ton of stuff to get done, but I think I will get a chance today to catch up on my reading and do some writing.  I have missed it.

Geek vs teacher

Over at TeachPaperless there is another great post entitled Hire Geeks.  In it he makes some great points:

I want teachers who are curious, experimental, sophisticated, and engaged. ‘Lifelong learner’ sounds like someone taking a woodshop class at the retirement home.

What we really need is to be recruiting more geeks.

I’m talking about folks who don’t have to be ‘trained’ in using technology. I’m talking about people who live and breathe social media and don’t understand how you live without it.

I couldn’t agree more!  It isn’t enough to know how to create a  powerpoint.  We aren’t going to keep out kids involved, much less motivate them to really take ownership of their learning if we are teaching the way we have been forever.  We need to change education, and the only way to do that is to change the people who are teaching.

Now, I am almost 59 years old.  I am not a “digital native”.  You can’t accuse me of not understanding how “foreign” some of this stuff is, how easy it is to fall behind technologically.  But I am also proof that it can be done.  No matter who we are, we can embrace technology in our personal lives if we want to.

I don’t think that being a geek necessarily makes you a good teacher.  But I think that you have to be a geek today if you want to really be an effective teacher.  (I know I am overstating this.  It isn’t entirely true.  There are exceptions.  But on the whole, I stand by my statement. )  A teacher who is a geek can teach children what they need to know in a way that speaks to them and motivates them.  Whether it is through digital storytelling or blogging or wikis or whatever, a teacher who is a geek can find some way to meet the students where they are and help them to move beyond that.  A teacher who is a geek can create an environment in the classroom that draws on the interests of the students and makes learning more enjoyable.

He goes on to say:

It is painfully obvious to our kids that certain teachers have no clue when it comes to the integration of technology into their classrooms.

And more ‘training’ ain’t gonna help.

Because before you integrate technology into your classroom, you’ve got to integrate it into your life.

And you should only integrate it into your life in ways that you need and/or want to. The worst thing we can do as a society is to force people into the use of technology — particularly social technologies — via training and tech mandates.

That’s like forcing a democracy upon another country.

Not a good idea.

Rather, we should model the best practices in the use of technology and give folks the room they need to experiment with the tools so that they can develop personal relationships with them.

This is one of the reasons that I believe social media are better than Blackboard in the classroom.  No one is going to use Blackboard outside of a class setting.  You aren’t going to develop a personal relationship with it.  You cannot really ever deveop the level of familiarity with it that you can with blogging or wikis.  You can become more familiar, yes, but it is still an artificial relationship.

We need teachers for whom technology is like breating: necessary.  It cannot be something we bring out of the closet once in a while so we can tall someone we are using technology.  We have to be geeks.

Check out the post at TeachPaperless.  Be sure to read the comments, too; they are quite interesting.

It’s in the links

Over at TeachPaperless there was a post that I though was really interesting.  It took me back to my literacy posts and the discussion of wanting to be able to check things out for myself.  Anyway…

The post is called Owning Knowledge: Thoughts about the ‘Ethic of the Link.’ In discussing how sending a student to read something online is different from telling them to read a traditional text, he says:

But via links, the student enters into a Web of information navigable in an inviting way; personal interest and self-motivation is cued by curiosity and made accessible by simple access to more links. And, of course in the fluid and social world of links available via Twitter, Diigo, and the like, the student actually becomes part of the process of the creation of knowledge itself. The result is ultimately one of activating ownership.

The process of actively accessing sources of knowledge rather than expecting the passive reception culled from the distribution of knowledge is the defining feature of a successful academic mindset.

We want the student to own knowledge, not lease it until the exam is through.

That academic mindset is, obviously, something my university students need to have.  And to some degree they do, but I can help them to strengthen it.  And I believe that is part of my job in trying to help them prepare for expectations in US universities.

This idea that reading hyperlinked texts has some real value is an appealing one to me.  I believe it is true, but I have to admit I like it because it reinforces something I do anyway.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about my classes the last few days, and this came at a really good time.  I want to do more to make my classrooms look like what he describes:

Classtime itself should be a conversation, a debriefing, a discussion based on what the students found.

I think I still sometimes feel guilty that my classes don’t look the way I remember classes looking.  I don’t stand up there and lecture.  We don’t complete workbooks or worksheets.  We don’t have multiple choice tests.

What we do is talk and read and talk about what we read.  And then we write about it.  And, yes, there are times when I “teach” them things in a more traditional sense. But those times are usually few and far between.

I don’t know why I feel a need to legitimize what I do.  My students don’t complain.  But there is an element of insecurity in me.  So I worry.  And I take comfort where I can find it.  Like in the post on TeachPaperless.

So I am ready to go ahead with some of the ideas I have for fall, to use the blog and wiki more than Blackboard, to have students do their reading online, to use class time to make knowledge together.  I am excited!

Blackwater Draw

I have mentioned the Blackwater Draw Archaeological Site here before.  It is about 7 or 8 miles from my house.  We went out today because we heard they had a field school working on a site.  There hadn’t been any work done there in some time, so this was exciting news.  My husband and I went out there today to check it out.  The administrator, Geroge Crawford, and Assistand Professor David Kilby were kind enough to stop their work and talk to us about it.  If you are interested in Clovis Man or archaeology, you might be interested in the blog they have set up.  You can find it here.  And if you do, please leave them a comment.  I know they would aprpeciate it!

Blogs as course management systems

Tim over at Assorted Stuff has a post about his upcoming presentation at NECC on using blogs as course management systems.  Tim shares his experience with his district’s IT department:

Actually, truth be told, they want nothing to do with open source projects of any kind (and certainly not any CMS that isn’t named Blackboard).

Or, for that matter, with any of the growing collection of open collaborative and networking tools out there on the read/write web (Google Docs being another sore point around here).

All of them are resources over which they cannot exercise complete and total control.

This is something I have played around with and feel pretty strongly about myself.   I think that teaching in a more open environment is good for me as an educator and for my students. It isn’t a popular idea at my institution, any more than it is in Tim’s district.  That does not, however, make it a bad idea.

So if this is how I feel, why do I have my summer course set up and one of my fall courses started on Blackboard?  Because it’s easy.  I can try to justify it by saying that I was trying to learn to use Blackboard, but that wouldn’t be totally honest.  It is just easier in some ways.  And harder in others, too.

For a variety of reasons most of my fall course shells are not accessible to me right now.  So I don’t have them started, much less set up.  So I have a chance to redeem myself, to do something I really believe in.

Now let’s see if I do it.

A presentation on blogging

Yesterday I led a group of teachers in a workshop on blogging.  There were the usual technology glitches but I thought it went pretty well.  We began by talking about what they think of when they hear the term “blog.”  That in itself was pretty interesting.

They were interested in how you might use blogs with a class, and I had lots of examples to show them.  It got me all excited about doing that again. I know that my students need to write a lot more than I have them write if they want to get better at it.  And I have them write a lot, really.  Blogging is a really good way to do that.  So now the question is:  How do I begin to practice more of what I preach?

Empowerment

A quote from a post by Bruce Smith over at change.org:

When teachers are fully respected and given the power they deserve, they are in turn more capable of respecting and empowering their students.

Worth thinking about and remembering, isn’t it?

Another comment on comments

I had a comment today on a post from last April called New Literacy, in which I wrote about a news article that quoted an educator named Maria Corkern.  The comment was from Ms. Corkern herself.  It makes some important points:

First of all, let me say that some of you who have responded to the original question of why I didn’t have links to back up my opinions were correct…it is not my position when being interviewed to insert this information. None of my interviewers, from coast to coast, has asked for the information. Second, most people listening to radio are in their cars and not able to remember links to websites. I’m lucky if they remember the name of my book! Last, I would assume you are educated and resourceful enough to research the topic if you needed to.

That is all very true.  And I must say that my original concern was not so much with Ms. Corkern’s statements as with the article that seemed to think it was OK to just say something without offering any proof.  It was not meant as an attack on Ms. Corkern or her ideas.  I apologize to her if it seemed that way.  My commentary was not really about her as much as about what I think  it means to be literate.

That being said, I did appreciate the fact that in her comment Ms. Corkern included links to some of the research on the subject of vocabulary.  Unfortunately, most of the links didn’t lead me anywhere.  The pages had been moved or the site couldn’t be found or something else was wrong.  But she shared the name of Ruby Payne as a researcher in the area.

So I looked around to see what I could learn about Dr. Payne.  I read a lot of articles about her.  Dangerously Irrelevant blogged about her.  The New York Times Magazine wrote about her.  Larry Ferlazzo wrote about her.  The Journal of Educational Controversy wrote about her.  (They even had lots of references.  Good for me and my idea of literacy!) A student teacher wrote about her in a blog on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel online.  I am obviously very, very late to the discussion of Ruby Payne.  And it isn’t even a discussion I really want to get involved in.  Others have talked about her enough, I think.

So there you have it.

But back to my original argument, I still think it is a part of literacy to check out the sources, the evidence.  If a source doesn’t give me that option, I am not going to waste my time.

Dream a little dream with me.

Imagine that you are an ESL instructor and you have $10,000 to spend this week.  What would you buy?  Just give me your ideas off the top of your head.  I’ll tell you the back story later.