TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

Top Ten Reasons as seen by Tony Karrer, spiced with a nice piece of humour
What from your own experience would you add to the list?

http://bit.ly/bTzFFY

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

I have just read Sam's blog post "To Blog Or Not To Blog"

Sam is an 11 year old kid

"who’s really tall and loves to sing, act, have fun, play sports and video games, and read the Warriors series but now more the Twilight saga. Blogging is important to me because I love to write and I like to have a place to vent my feelings about things and let others know what is happening to people in other places. I read alot so I will probably have lots of book reviews"

Wow! His post has almost reduced me to tears.

http://bit.ly/bTzFFY

Here are my thoughts -

Wow Sam! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts as you have. You see, I work with teachers. Many of them do not value the role of blogs as a learning tool. They will use books without question but blogs – Heck No!! The problem for most I dare to say is that they are not bloggers themselves. They have not experienced the power of being connected, actively involved, confident collaborators who use online tools to connect to a real audience, who write for a real purpose and gain feedback from the global network they are connected to. So how do we get them to see this? How do we shift then into the 21st C?

At the moment one school principal has prescribed that classes have to have a blog or wiki. His reasoning for this is that parents need to connect with the classrooms. Most parents work and so don’t get in during school hours. While this is an admirable reason it does not go far enough. It says nothing about the power of the blog as a tool to advance the students learning and connectedness. It says nothing about the value of a blog over a book, the later being an increasingly outdated tool in which students are pushed and pulled into, expected to write in and which no-one else sees, and which at the end of the day goes into a dark cubbyhole, alone, unopened, unread and where there is no-one to respond.

It was great to have the opportunity to vent - to respond. In doing so, at the very least I feel that someone may hear my concerns and understand what I am saying – especially as they don’t seem to have heard in the immediate world I live in and work in.

If the rate of change outside your organization

is greater than the rate of change inside your organization,

the end is in sight.

- Jack Welch

Posted via email from Lorraine's posterous