I’ve railed before that it isn’t about blogging. It’s about communicating. Classroom blogging affords a unique opportunity to spend less time teaching writing, and more time teaching communication. That said, this article in BusinessWeek Online caught my attention this morning.
Defense contractors and aerospace companies aren’t known for their openness. After all, this is an industry built on security clearances and classified government projects. But today Boeing Co. (BA ) is embracing a kind of management glasnost that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The evidence? Boeing’s use of blogs. The Chicago aerospace giant — no stranger to recent and well-publicized ethical and political scandals — is among a small but growing group of large non-tech companies such as Walt Disney (DIS ), General Motors (GM ), and McDonald’s (MCD ) that are embracing the power of blogging. That means Boeing has learned to cede some control and expose itself to stinging criticism in exchange for a potentially more constructive dialogue with the public, customers, and employees. “Companies are nervous about creating external blogs because they fear the negative comments,” says Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ). “But negative comments do exist. A company is better off knowing about them.”
Perhaps it is, a bit, about blogging. If conversation is being harnessed by the corporate world, through blogging, then perhaps it is the “B” word is becoming a basic skill. I don’t know. It’s still about communication.
2¢ Worth!
My friend, David Jakes, has posted a very useful list of factors that he believes, contribute to the sustainability of an innovation. I’m listing them here, but please head over the the 
I heard some buzz about a movement toward customer created ads. It started with MoveOn’s Defeat Bush Ad contest, back in 2003. This one comes from 
Conversations continue about schools that block access to the blogosphere. I ran across an interesting comment last night, in my end of the day aggregator scan. It was in a blog post by Wesley Fryer (
I’ve been trying to reconcile some of the problems that I see in the way that we inflict education on children today. For instance, think about this. There are a large number of teachers in our (U.S.) classrooms today who are around my age, fifty something. In the last half of our careers we have witnessed astounding changes in the very nature of information, and these changes are only accelerating. So here’s the math.
Each year, about this time, the eclipse begins, as the shadow cast upon education discourse begins its irresistible march toward the end of the school year. Discussion boards and mailing lists slow to a crawl. E-mail all but disappears and blogging? Well we’ve only seen one summer of education blogging, so no trend has made itself apparent. We have seen some bloggers, during the summer months of 2005, disappeared completely into the darkness, never to be heard from again. Others, however, found their traction during the months of sunshine and frolic. ..And certainly, the summer conferences will spark much blogging and podcasting.
I’ve also run across a couple of blogs, people talking about Citation Machine, ..and apparently, some folks on a listserv are grumbling about my putting Google Ads on the tool. By the way, Google Ads work. I’ve calculated that if the the load on SOCM were to continue through the year, I could make just about as much money as I did my first year teaching. Of course, my first year teaching earned me less than $7000. The problem is that upgrading to a dedicated server is going to cost a lot of money, like a car payment — a really nice car, car payment. So Google Ads, stay 😉
But hey! I’m really beginning to second think this. The problem isn’t that the kids don’t know about paper mills, and hiding them doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is with students who think they might just get away with turning in a purchased paper. They should know, be told, that we know about the paper mills too, and that we know how to detect them, that we have ways of telling when a student wrote it and when someone else got payed to write it. Students don’t plagiarize because they’re smart. They plagiarize because they’re lazy. We’re not lazy. We’ll catch them. They need to hear that in their schools from their increasingly tech-savvy teachers.