I Want to Be a Tenenbaum
I am hearing the song called “I Always Wanted to Be a Tenenbaum” by Mark Mothersbaugh.
What about Blog-overload? Blog-o-whelmed? Overbloggedness?
Suppose my history teacher, English teacher, foreign language teacher, science teacher, PE/Health and Wellness teacher, homeroom teacher, art teacher, and even my math teacher have all had the same blog training on the last professional development day. They all find blogging to be an excellent idea, and they great ideas of how to integrate it into their subjects.
In the next week, each asks me to start and maintain a blog for their subjects. Now I have 8 different blogs that I have to keep track of. Due to the fact that my school is large, and the staff is naturally decentralized, different teachers use different service providers for blogging. I now have 5 blogs in one spot and 3 blogs in another. Two teachers will allow me to blog in one space, the others require that they have their own space that they can control… This is reminiscent of the “olden” days when I got email addresses from every institution to which I belonged…
How do we manage blog-barrage? Who manages the blog spaces? I think that before schools embark on this journey, they need to think about this carefully to save the sanity of the students. Will Richardson touches on this issue in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts…, but leaves it up to schools and school districts to decide how to manage it.
This is actually a bit of a dilemma… usually when things get started, you want to keep it open so that people can use what they feel most comfortable with. This lowers the barrier to entry for teachers which would, in turn, hopefully encourage more practice in that area. But, if you attempt to encourage growth in this way, you are setting yourself up for a maintenance nightmare later. This reminds me of a course that I had at Washington University on project management when we talked about assimilation of technology into an organization..
June 18th, 2008 at 21:04
How do we encourage the integration of technology without enabling the teachers that come to us for help? My experience has been to be there for support without offering to own the task. I accomplish this by scheduling 2 meetings prior to the semester start with the teacher. Since I am not in the classroom I work around their schedule. First session is the creation of the blog and a walk through of the features they will be using, etc. I also give them a configuration handout (needs to be updated since edublogs changed their interface). We go through the handout together, they are always the driver of the computer. My goal is to give them the confidence to embark on this journey themselves, with the knowledge that I am available to help at any time. Not sure if that makes sense or if it is feasible??
June 19th, 2008 at 13:48
Thank you for your post…
I think that your approach is great. I will put this into my bag of tricks… I’m also worried at a slightly different level. If I were to work with several different teachers in this way, they might go out and find their “own” blogging providers and then ask students to set up accounts in different places… Suddenly, the students have different accounts in several different places. This is tough to manage (a variety of URLs, logins and passwords). It would be great if there would be a way to standardize which services will be used by which providers in the school… But, who would do this? And, does it make sense in the early stages of technological introduction in the school to limit teachers in this way?
June 21st, 2008 at 23:56
[...] He was presenting about the same issues that I have recently identified in my blog about over-bloggedness. In the end he identifies a number of other options to OpenId and during the course of the [...]