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.