DD Shift

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..

I’m hearing the song called “Sh**ty Day” by Soko.

I have just spied the “Add media” buttons as the top of the edit window… Excellente!

The song that I am hearing is “1 2 3 4” by Feist.

Two things:

1. Argh… my last post was too long. You have to scroll.
2. I selected this design because it uses a sans serif font for titles and serif fonts for the text body. I also like the left alignment. I don’t like that the background is white– it is hard on the eyes. Perhaps I will spend some time investigating whether or not that is changeable.

The song that I am hearing is “German Studies” by the Breeders. It’s an interesting song because it is done all in German, and they don’t know how to pronounce German words.

Blogging… so, here I am. Here are some very brief thoughts that I have about blogging.

1. In my school we do a lot with “cross-curricular” projects. I’m wondering how effective a blog realm would be in facilitating those types of projects. How would it compare to wikis? I have used wikis for this purpose, but blogs might be more effective for individual projects that are done across different classes. Taking it one step further… blogs might be ideal for individual work, wikis might be ideal for individual work…
2. Blogging is very public. And, if you have students who are weak in the writing area– is there something that you can do to make the blogging more accessible/attractive for them? Publishing your writing in a space where your peers can read and comment is a very scary thing. In working on wikis this year, I suspect this was a barrier for some of my students who opted to take a zero on the parts that required them to publish online. Of course, you can set up online-etiquette guidelines, but that does not change the feedback that is received in the hallways, in the lunchroom and on the playground…
3. Where can I post my podcasts here? Where can I post my videos? I think that a digital publishing space should provide opportunities for expression outside the realm of mere writing. Do I need to find a different provider for this and link? This will be a point of investigation.