Various Blog Things

Blogging Station at the Courtyard Hotel by the Philadelphia Airport

First of all, congratulations to all of the winners of the EduBlog awards, and especially to all of those who were nominated.  While I’m at it, congratulations to all of you bloggers who been doing this for some time, who have contributed in large, small, supportive, and critical ways to the conversation that I consider to be so important to education’s efforts at this time.

I especially want to congratulate the TechLearning blog for winning the best group blog distinction.  I feel only a very small part of that effort as I marvel each week at the creativity and energy of these young folks.  I say young because I think that Terry Freedman is the only one who is anywhere near my age. 

Second, one of the only blog posts that I took time to read from my aggregator this morning came from Mark Alness, announcing to his students that their blogs are back.  A few weeks ago, in an effort to ease the stress that the Class Blogmeister server was feeling, both from the 130,000 bloggers who are using it and the nearly one million page views being served up to Citation Machine users each day (End of the semester), I’d cut out to a new database table all of the blog entries prior to May 2007.  Admittedly, I’d not considered the impact that this action would have on teachers south of the Equator.

It was only a temporary relief, and as I’ve written here already, I ended out getting an additional server.  As it turned out, re-joining the two database tables was much more complex than it was to separate them out.  I’d thought it would take some simple MySQL action, but I had to write some script to do the work, and I only got it right yesterday afternoon, here in my hotel room, in Philadelphia.

Mark writes:

To all past bloggers here at roomtwelve.com – all of your blog articles are back online! For the past few weeks, they have been unavailable, while the servers for classblogmeister were upgraded.

So, for those in Room Twelve from 2005-06, your blogs are all intact, right here, where they always have been…

I found it especially interesting that he went on to add:

May not seem like such a big deal, but I had groups of former students coming in to my class asking about their blogs – like, what happened to our blogs? Are they gone?

Although most of these kids are not actively contributing (right now), it’s clear their writing is still important to them – even what they wrote way back in third grade.

Finally, a while back I met a superintendent in California, Jeffrey Felix, who was working on his doctorate, and he’d decided to do his dissertation on classroom blogging.  We talked at length about it then, and he continued the conversation, via formal e-mail exchanges.  He also sought consultation from Will Richardson and Alan November.

I’d been thinking, for some time, that there was a lot of data and experience being generated among Class Blogmeister users, so I offered to post an announcement to the CB mailing list, asking for teachers who would be willing to help Jeff with his research.  Frankly, that’s the last I heard about his study until yesterday, when he e-mailed me a copy of his paper, which has been accepted, passed through peer review (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education), and he will be presenting it at the SITE Conference in 2008.

Among the findings that I zero’ed in on from the summary that he sent me were the four communication patterns that  teachers perceived as a result of their students’ blogging:

• increased peer interaction among students,
• increased teacher interaction with the students,
• students exhibiting more positive emotions about learning, and
• an increased sharing of ideas among students and with the teacher.

Also, he found that edubloggers (his term for teachers who blog) describe student learners who have been a part of a blogging classroom as engaged in four types of learning:

• students increasing their understanding of topics, making sense of what they learn, and developing their own understanding of the subject matter,
• students cultivating deeper thought processes; creating meaning and new ideas from the subject,
• students exploring the subject beyond the immediate requirements, and
• students connecting with previous experiences learned in or out of the classroom.

At several points, Felix noted the excitement and enthusiasm that the participating teachers expressed during the exchanges.  I would love to see more quantitative data.  It’s why I added a readability tool to CB, so that each student blog is given a Flesch Index and grade level score, just to see what teachers might make of this.  Not heard much so far.  But all things considered, when classroom teachers are seeing something that is working, and excited about it, well that’s good enough for me.