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Blog If You Love Learning and Jerome S. Bruner

Mark Wagner from Educational Technology and Life offers a workshop titled Blog If You Love Learning: An Introduction to Weblogs in Education. Edublogs is offered as the hosting service for this workshop. Wagner links to websites both of educational blogs and subject specific blogs.

• Read, reflect, write, and respond.
• Develop a voice.
• Use a blog as a backup brain.
• 25 Basic Styles of Blogging, a slide show is presented on Slideshare.

In a 2006 blog Wagner explores Jerome S. Bruner, the Culture of Education, and Educational Technology by annotating quotes in an interesting style. Here are two samples:

Native endowment may be as much affected by the accessibility of symbolic systems as by the distribution of genes. (p. 11)

Consider how much more important this becomes in the age of the digital divide! Already there is such a clear gap between those who can read and write academic language, and those who are functionally illiterate... a similar gap has formed between those who can use educational technologies such as an office suite, the internet, and email... and now another gap is forming between those who can use blogs, wikis, and RSS and those who cannot.

Works and works-in-progess create shared and negotiable ways of thinking in a group... [and] externalization produces a record of our efforts, one that is "outside us" rather than vaguely "in memory." (p. 23)

It is amazing how well this quote captures so much of what is exciting about the read/write web in education! Will Richardson in particular writes often about the benefits of writing as thinking, and I have linked before to suggestions that blogs can be our back up brain.

Blog Basics

Using a Blog in the Classroom requires classroom management, collaboration, discussions, and administrative and parental support. School districts have guidelines and (AUP) Acceptable Use Policies. Parental permission may be required. Use one or two student initials to identify documents posted. Read everything before it is posted. Never post anything you have not read and viewed. Look for any alternative interpretation that may open the door to conflict. Any posting that may open that door should be approved by your supervisor and in some cases, even by the principal. Blog Basics

What would John Dewey Say about Blogs?

Use a Blog. Use a Blog. Use a Blog.

Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests (of all children) - the interest in conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in artistic expression - we may say they are the natural resources, the invested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child.

John Dewey "The School and Society" published in 1915; delivered in a lecture in 1899.

• Intelligence and practice, thought and action cannot be separated.
• The final end of intelligence and practice is to fit into society.
• Individuals need a community to live and grow.
• Intelligence and practice means solving real community problems.
• The curriculum of the school should never become isolated from the practical evolution of the society.
• Dewey conceived each practical activity should engage the full intelligence of students to uncover deeper meanings.
• Each activity is ripe with limitless questions about materials, techniques, and purposes all moving the student toward deeper meanings.
  
• Dewey distinguished between work and occupation. An occupation fully engages intelligent thought with manual, utilitarian activity.
  
• Engagement in community gives each person a place as a value-giver and a thoughtful advocate of problems and solutions.

A Blog is a community project.
A Blog incorporates conversation, inquiry, construction, and artistic expression.
A Blog focuses on a real problem.
A Blog encourages students to explore deeper meanings using materials, techniques, and purposes.

From
John Dewey
Mr. Hill
Philosophy 170 Course Notes "The School and Society" Tad Beckman