Thursday, May 18, 2006

Education in blogging links

When I try to research this, I find that I probably don't use the correct search words, or that what I expected is just not there.

First, a link to HigherEd BlogCon, which was in April this year.

Several of the articles in the 2004 collection Into the Blogosphere are on teaching, and I want to point particularly to Remediation, Genre and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs.

I find several sites devoted to and discussing education and teaching at higher levels, some of the weblogs of people I think of as friends are among these:
Jill/txt
Culturecat
Jerz' Literacy Weblog
Vitia

With a slight change to my search topics, from education to teaching, I had a larger and more relevant group of hits:
A History Teacher - with several links to other teachers
hipteacher - with a lot of links, but dated 2005
Weblogg-ed
Ms Frizzle
Edblogger praxis - last post oct 2005
EdWeek.org, the Blogboard


I have not been able to find good European examples. There are attempts in Danish and Norwegian, and there is obviously an interest in and a will to use blogs, but not the same enthusiasm as it seems American teachers feel. It may also be that if I had been fluent in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Dutch and a long list of other languages, I would have found a much wider variety. The many language communities of Europe makes it harder to reach a massive audience - but that may not be neccessary for a good teaching weblog.

3 comments:

Dennis G. Jerz said...

Interesting.. the order of results for education in blogging (entered into Google without quotations marks) differs from that for blogging in education (again, without quotation marks).

Mike @ Vitia said...

Interesting. Dennis, Clancy, and I all deal with the practice of literacy instruction in higher education (though Dennis might say he's more of a journalism person than a rhetoric & composition), and so our work on blogs understands blogs as a site to examine the intersection of pedagogy and students' literate practices. As you've pointed out to me, instruction in literate practices in European higher education is performed much more via tutoring and mentoring relationships: the expository writing course required of 98% of first-year college students is a uniquely American phenomenon. However, I've heard of some fascinating stuff being done in Australia -- and of course two of the people associated with that work, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, link to you. In an interesting bit of synchronicity, they've published with James Paul Gee, whose _What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy_ is the book lots of composition & rhetoric folks were raving about two years ago. You probably know all this already -- it's just interesting to me that the world seems like such a small place. When I first encountered Michael Joyce's _afternoon_ in 1987, I thought it was a text game, like the Infocom games Dennis is so enthusiastic about. Then, many years later, I saw Mark Bernstein's occasional references to the "Scandinavian hypertext bloggers," and of course your work is the first thing I think of when I hear people talk about scholarship on video games and hypertext. Interesting intersections.

Torill said...

Just to make that even more an aspect of synchonicity: I am publishing an article this year (I hope, seems like there has been a delay) in a handbook which Michele and Colin edits! Stephanie Nilson asks if blogs are incestous - perhaps doing research on certain topics leads to this kind of incestous interlinking?