Peter Ford at Weblogs in Education, ECML, Graz

The Cogs of a Watch

Peter starts off the real explanation of what we’re here to do.

What are blogs?

None of the long-winded explanations (yet) but a four-point outline:

Weblogs are fully-functional websites that can be created and updated from any internet browser
Weblogs are websites made simple
Subversion incorporated
No guru required

But if, as a languages teacher, collaboration, interaction and project team participation are not high on your list then read no further. Blogging is all about this.

There’s no curriculum to which you are constrained, he points out. Is this not a problem for many education systems where teachers have been brought up in this culture and do have to conform?

But when we are constantly encouraged to work collaboratively over the net, how exactly are we supposed to do that? On a blog. But why should students respond to this? Because we give them explicit instructions and guidance as to how they might do that.

Stats – “much worse than in my country, not as bad in my country.”

98% of UK children watch 23 hrs of TV per week.

80 % have a home PC

70% have internet

80% games console

Teens read 15 mins per day

and watch 200 mins of TV per day

and use computers for 80 mins per day

Is this a bad thing like many adults make it out to be?

Why would teachers want to publish to the web?

Help children make sense of what’s happening in the world and help them operate in it. We missed the boat with TV, according to Peter. Why is it that kids can concentrate on TV for 3 hours every night, yet cannot concentrate on a teacher for 3 minutes? Blogging, in the hands of a responsible teacher, can bridge the gap between home and school.

It’s teachers who make the difference.

Good teaching and blogging – not that far apart.

Being explicit about expectations: the poem. If we don’t model what we want from kids – on a blog or not – we cannot expect results. The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The great teacher explains. The super teacher inspires. And so kids should try to do the same. What do kids normally do in school? They tell whatever they’ve been told to tell back in their exam.

Blogging provides a way out of that. A tutor blog sets the example. See Peter’s tutor blog http://class6f.basblogs.com, where he shows kids what he’s reading at the moment (because he wants them to read), what he think of it (because he wants them to review their reading) and which team he supports (because he thinks his team is best – let the debate begin!).

But modelling what you want a class to do is not new. It’s just good teaching. So why do it so publicly?

Live Projects

Who is going to read this? The average audience is two. But this student (Project Rain Forest) was determined to get it read by more people, her writing immediately taking on real purpose. In four years she had 21,230 readers of her blog homepage, with half a million hits over that time. In fact, most of the readers came from Google or web.ask.com. People found her site looking for knowledge. Her learning had become someone else’s knowledge. Now, does that piece of writing take on a little more importance? Does the accuracy of knowledge take on more importance?

But it gets better. Hans chips in: he’s in Costa Rica and has visited a rain forest project there. It has a website. He provides the link. This is real collaborative learning. That’s why this kind of project should be blogged publicly and not kept to the four walls of the classroom.

Real purpose, audience, responsibility, collaboration, real student experts.

Student experts

Kids are going to be better experts than us in some areas (embedding audio, making slideshows in blogs) but they will not be better teachers than us.

If we want kids to write well in a language that is not their own then they have to write a lot. There just isn’t time to do that in the classroom and blogs give an opportunity to teach writing, and above all, get writing done. How do you teach writing over the blog? The blog is less important than showing them the way, leading them to their peers’ good work, hyperlinking to other sources that might help them. Offering your own model of constructive criticism on a regular (daily) basis, that all can see, teaches a class how to constructively criticise. If you want them to do two stars and a wish, you have to show them how. It’s all about the “Cogs in the Watch”: one doesn’t turn without the other. But when they all turn together, the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.

The fates guide those who go willingly, those who do not, they drag. Seneca

An excellent piece of advice from Peter, that should stop us from banging our heads any further. Don’t worry about the colleagues around you who don’t want to “get into technology”.