10:32 AM
This entry was a response that I wrote to the WWWEDU mailing list. The question regarded what school administrators should be learning about blogging.
I think that the real value of blogging, from a management standpoint, is in RSS and the aggregator — it’s the directions in which the communication flows. I’ll be participating in an event for a school district in Illinois this summer, exploring exactly how these technologies (blogging, RSS, aggregators, Podcasting, syndicated/subscribed/sent content, etc.) might integrate into the teaching and learning environment. I’m very excited about the possibilities, but in five words, “it hasn’t been invented yet!” We are so new into this stuff, that its place in the instructional environment is fuzzy, and its administrative application has barely been thought about.
I recently ran into an Ohio tech-ed leader with whom I’ve worked, who is working toward integrating RSS and aggregation into the backbone of how they communicate throughout the district. Again, they don’t know exactly what that is going to look like, but they plan to have it up and running by the beginning of the school year.
So, hey, make it up 😉
One interesting thing I learned recently at a Blogger-con was from an employee of a major technology corp, who had given permission to and even encourages all employees to begin blogging (internally) about their work. All blogs are syndicated so that they can be subscribed to by people with an interest. One of the surprises was that rather than workers overwhelmingly subscribing to their boss’s blogs, the trend seemed to go in the other direction, aggregation going from bottom to top.
David,
I just ordered your book, Classroom Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere. I am also interested in getting my teachers to blog much in the way you described in your blog, Blogging for Admisistrators.
Can you point me in the direction where I might get more information?
Casey,
I think that we are still, pretty much, figuring this out. I suggest that you continue to learn as much as you can about RSS, and that you start experimenting with blogging software, especially as posts can be syndicated and picked up by the aggregators of other local educators.
You might also do a search in technorati schools, blogging, and administrator, or other combinations. Technorati searches the blogsphere, so you would be able to keep up with what people are saying on the subject.