Four Reasons Why the Blogsphere Might Make a Better Professional Collaborative Environment than Discussion Forums

I have been experimenting a good bit lately with integrating some of the emerging web tools (blogs, wikis, rss, podcasting, etc.) into my presentations and workshops, attempting to expand the scope and dimension of these events. For most of my presentations at NECC, I used a wiki page for my online handouts, enabling participants to come in after the presentation (or during if we’d had WiFi in the presentation rooms) and add their own insights on the topics. Some of the wiki pages also aggregated web links from my Del.icio.us account and related external blog articles written by participants after the session (and by colleagues before the session). This was accomplished by tying in with Technorati’s ability to generate RSS feeds based on keyword and tag searches.

With this experience, I’ve been wondering about using some of these tools to establish professional collaborative spaces for schools, districts, and school consortia. Our tendency is to look to discussion boards and mailing lists for online collaborations, and all things considered, these may remain the most effective tools for many collaborative efforts. However, let’s consider some potential benefits of making educators active participants in the read/write web.

The set up might look something like this:

1. Each cooperating teacher establishes a weblog and registers their blog with Technorati or some other wayport.
2. The school establishes a series of unique tags covering various topics relevant to in-house communication and collaboration. For instance, Sanderson High School may have a tag called shs-extra, for extra-curricular activities. The tag shs-sci would relate to science subjects, teaching, and/or supplemental opportunities.
3. All teachers would be trained in using and organizing an aggregator. Bloglines would suffice, but there may be more powerful applications that may serve better for further aggregating content. Teachers would then subscribe to those educators most connected to their work responsibilities, and also subscribe to tags and search terms that are otherwise relevant to their work.
4. The school would also establish a building (or consortia) account on a social bookmarking service (Delicious, Furl, etc.) organizing tags based on various subjects of instruction and professional topics. The account could be managed and organzied by the school’s library/media specialist. Teachers would also aggregate these web links and contribute to them on an ongoing basis, constructing a growing library of online digital content.

Now this all sounds a bit complicated, and it isn’t simple. Managing its assembly, introduction, implementation, and support would require some expertise and vision on someone’s part. However, might there be some good reasons to go to this trouble, beyond the fact that teachers should be learning to use these information tools and perhaps integrate them into their learning environments.

Here are four reasons why teachers should blog together:

1. Teacher Blog Articles come from the Person.

A teacher blog article comes from the person first, and the teacher second. Discussion boards are designed around topics. Blog environments are designed around people. This means:

1. The teacher’s writings carry with them the teacher’s identity through the template or skin they have chosen, and through their writing style.
2. When the writing is associated with the person, that person may be more likely to consider more carefully, and compose more precisely, their ideas before they enter the conversation.
3. A History teacher may be more likely to subscribe to the blog of Ms. Oren (a literature teacher), than to the literature discussion board, perhaps discovering new opportunities to collaborate and cross-pollinate ideas.
2. Blogs extend beyond their primary community of interest.

Weblog writings can be available to the extended education community, further ensuring more care and thoughtfulness in the conversations and more fully conveying to the extended community the growing complexities, challenges, and opportunities for preparing children for the 21st century.

On the other hand, making teacher collaborative blogs available to the public may also suppress valuable exchanges, so this feature should be considered carefully.

3. Blogs and other RSS content can be organized uniquely.

Blog content would be received and organized uniquely by each user, through their personal choice of aggregator. In addition, news, web searches, and social bookmark content might also be integrated and organized into the educator’s aggregator. The result should be a teacher cultivated personal professional digital library.

4. Individual blog articles with their comments and links to related blogs can serve better as a stand-alone document and line to for other interested people.

There are other potential benefits for establishing blogging/RSS environments as well as other potential challenges. I am not advocating that we replace discussion boards as a collaborative environment. Merely, I am suggesting that in some instances (or more) we might consider a carefully designed RSS connected environment as a content-building, experience and skill sharing, professional community.

I would love to hear your ideas, and if anyone might be interested in piloting such an implementation, I would love to contribute.