Posts
With profound apologies to screenwriters, Ted Elliot and Terry Rossi, (and not forgetting the original book author - William Steig) I have come to believe that, like an ogre, blogging is like an onion - it has layers. Perhaps I should use Donkey's metaphor of parfaits and layers, but, like onions, I've found some of my blog posts "smelly", while writing blog posts occasionally makes me cry. Parfaits are just far too sweet and don't reflect the struggle that are part of critical thinking and metacognition. Onions are a fabulous metaphor - for ogres and blogging.
Learning about blogging
Personal Learning
My initial experiences with blogging began in February of 2007, when I created an account in Blogger after attending my District-wide inservice day. The keynote speaker, whose name escapes me, talked about the benefits of blogging in a general way and I thought I'd give it a try. Like many beginning bloggers, I began on the surface level by journalling about my family and particularly the experience of living with a child with Down syndrome and then living in the country. At the time, I was on parental leave and we were living on a acreage with a heritage farmhouse in a very small town beside Shuswap Lake. I didn't really want to post too much, for fear of putting too much information on the web and I'm a sporadic journal writer on paper, so I carried that habit into the blogosphere. I started reading other blogs, particularly those of other parents and educators whose blogs were recommended by others, but I hadn't discovered RSS feeds, so I didn't develop habits of returning to blogs on a regular basis. I didn't post to other people's blogs, either, as it felt intrusive at the time. Most of the questions that I wanted answered as a parent of a child with special needs were answered as part of a Yahoo Group of Canadian parents, so blogs weren't an effective way for me to gain insight into parenting or visioning what life will be like for daughter as she gets older. I was also very busy writing professionally for a regional magazine and so I needed to ensure that I was spending time with my children and not developing a significant relationship with my home computer screen. When I have time to blog on a personal level again, I will approach it in a significantly different way. Linking to the blogs and writing of others, while incorporating the life experiences we've gained along the way, as well as visioning a future will be much easier and much more important than before.
Moving from Personal to Professional
When I moved from working in an elementary library to a secondary library, I peeled away a layer of surface level interaction with technology. I needed to become more capable and confident in my use of various tools and decided to create a blog to support a colleague who was working on a Social Studies project with his students. Every year, his students create propaganda posters about Napoleon Bonaparte. They research to discover who interacted with Napoleon, what the nature of the relationship was and possibly what individuals may have said about him. Based on what they discover, they create a poster either praising Napoleon or villifying him. This blog works well as a project page, although had I known about wikis I would have chosen that option. I learned a great deal about linking to other information in this project, but Will Richardson would tell me that this is a web-based project page - not a blog. (Richardson, 2006.) Although I had peeled a layer back, I still had much to learn about blogs and blogging.
The impetus for learning more about blogging came at Tech It Up in October of 2009. After listening to Doug Johnson, I knew I had a lot more to learn and based on various discussions during the course of the day, I began reading Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms when I had spare moments - infrequent as those were. Because of my need for practical information, I skimmed for information that was applicable to my needs of the moment, rather than the foundational reasons for blogging. Like most busy educators, I needed a solid reason for engaging more deeply with the topic of blogging and going deeper. When I registered for this course, I knew I would finally have a reason to peel back another layer. Despite this, one of the things I've discovered about blogging is that a topic needs to be something the blogger is passionate about or is choosing to explore in a more critical way. It is very difficult to blog at Richardson's highest levels (7 and 8) in what Davies and Merchant describe as "well-written and concise posts (are) most likely to be read to the end..."
From Professional Practice to Professional Learning Networks
As a teacher librarian, reading the blogs of excellent practitioners in my field (and related fields) and blogging about my own learning and practice has allowed me to expand my network well beyond my district and even my province. Being able to refer others to posts about 21st Century Librarianship (Valenza, 2010.) or literacy and blogging (Hamilton, 2010) for further discussion, while incorporating that learning into my own practice has changed how I view professional development. While I have been an early adopter in many things, I feel dangerously behind in my skill set because of my reading of blogs. There is a new urgency in my need to ensure that I am exemplifying best practice, not only in my school, but in my district and beyond. I recognize that by blogging, I open my professional practices to scrutiny in a way that I don't even get a chance to do in front of teacher librarians in my own district. While I may be ahead of the curve compared to some, I have much to learn from those ahead of me. I am reminded of the Desiderata (a poster I saw frequently in my teen years) which encouraged readers to remember that comparing oneself to others is fruitless because there will always be those ahead and those behind. (It's timely that a DigiDesiderata has come out recently.)Really, blogging is about the web which I named the blog after - a connection of threads creating a beautiful whole. Perhaps I'm reaching a deeper layer after all.
Introducing PLN's to Students
What has me most excited about blogging is the possibilities for use with senior students. Because of the increasing push for "21st Century Learning" in all its varied meanings, opportunities for changes in practice are beginning to emerge. Recently, a major technology company approached our district to see if we were interested in using a new product for pilot projects. This would be a very exciting development. Immediately, I was struck with the idea of using this particular piece of hardware as a blogging tool for a year long research project that would incorporate the BCTLA's new Points of Inquiry. As blogging is an ideal means of allowing learners to reflect over a long period of time about "the progress of research, emerging processes, the aggregation of links or references and observations or reflections that develop over time," (Davies & Merchant, 2010) teaching students the Inquiry Process, while giving them time to work on a project that would be part of their final mark across two (and possibly more) subject areas seemed a timely idea. By building a "community of bloggers", students are able to "learn(ing) through social participation." (Davies & Merchant, 2010) Because the students would be choosing the research topic, it could incorporate at minimum, Social Studies and English and possibly other subject areas. Using tablet or slate devices could be a benefit to this process by allowing for easy access to RSS feeds and aggregators. I am eager to develop this idea further, in the hopes that I could be part of a team piloting a project like this. Blogging can encourage students to develop their own network, and take responsibility for their own learning - the cornerstone of most discussions about learners in the 21st Century. If effect, by learning about, and working to improve my own blogging practices, I may be planting onions as well as peeling back the layers of my own and really, that's the heart of why I became a teacher - to improve myself as a human being and hopefully influence others by being the best person I could be.
Retrieved from Flickr: Creative Commons image by Al Ibrahim
Works Cited
Davies, J. & Merchant, G. (2010). Web 2.0 for schools: Learning and participation. New York: Peter
Lang.
Ehrmann, M. (n.d.) Desiderata. Retrieved from http://www.inspirational-short-stories.com/desiderata
poem.html. (2010, November 28).
Hamilton, B. ( 2010, October 27). Assessment and metacognition: Blogging research reflections.[Web log
comment]. Retrieved from http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/assessment-and-
metacognition-blogging-research-reflections/. (2010, November 25).
Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts andother powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand
Oaks: Corwin Press.
Valenza, J. (2010, October). Manifesto for 21st century school librarians. Retrieved from
http://informationfluency.wikispaces.com/You+know+you're+a+21st+century+librarian+if+.+.+..
(2010, November 25).
