RCWP AI tech blogging community

Hi all,

A quick thought from Ottawa, Canada where I'm with family (coincidentally celebrating Canada Day; the streets are packed). These are the fireworks from on top our hotel parking lot.

Here's the thought I'm reiterating from our last day together: some of us talked about continuing our "tech team" through a blogging community, which for me is an exciting and potentially promising platform to share and dialogue about ideas that got started during the AI.

Consider this if I didn't successfully convert you during the week. :) Subscribe to each others blog (you can find them on our wiki http://rcwp08techai.wetpaint.com/ by clicking on the RSS icon (typically the little orange icon to the far right of the URL) and adding it to your new RSS reader (Bloglines or Google Reader). New posts will by like reading a local community digital newspaper. You can do the same with Flickr accounts, wikis and any other website you find valuable that has an RSS feed.

What a tremendous institute from my perspective. I'm wondering if in fact I gained more than the participants; I'm as enthused as I remember being leaving Chico last year after NWP's Tech Matters institute. Thank you all.

And you'll have one reader for sure. :)
John

A Pedagogy of Blogging

Seems appropriate that a first blog post should be about the reasons I'm choosing to blog in the first place.

Until I read sections from Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroooms, I thought of blogs more a place for personal (and narcissistic?) publication than a tool for learning. What can a blog do that a content management system like WebCT or Blackboard can't? We've been using WebCT for 2 years in our writing project (Red Clay Writing Project) to upload/download documents, create discussion boards, among other useful classroom applications. What I'm just now recognizing is how contained that information is, how inaccessible it is for others outside of our project (i.e., other writing project sites). This dawned on me when we shared our WebCT structure (reading lists, agendas, etc.) with others in our GA writing projects state network. It literally took someone showing someone at an annual meeting for that information to move beyond its original site.

Blogs, on the other hand, seem ready to open up access to that information, and technologies like RSS feeds (Real Simple Syndication) and Aggregators (i.e., Bloglines) are examples of ways teachers and students can collect (and subscribe to) specific content/webpages relevant to their interests. Yeah, I’m just now getting that.

A simple example: Red Clay is currently brainstorming for its next youth writing camp. We recently viewed Red Cedar Writing Project’s plans for their youth tech camp on one of their wikis, plans that would likely remain hidden behind firewalls and passwords in a content management structure like WebCT.

A question that still lingers for me concerns copyright issues, especially for posting published academic readings. I appreciated Brian Lamb’s article Dr. Mashup: or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix, which touches on copyright issues (notably the practice of designating Creative Commons licensing) and raises good questions about issues in education involving creativity and intellectual property.