The Future of Education is in the Blogs
901am’s David Krug’s article, “Educators Flock to Blogging”, maybe a peek into the future of blogging.
One Principal believes blogging is the future of education. And I tend to agree. The ability to quickly assess a students understanding of the course material is huge. And teachers can easily interact with students in the comments section and in the classroom forums. Likewise tools can be create in which to rate, and/or grade posts to help teach students where they need to improve. Built in spelling tools will help students create a solid understanding of grammar and excellence in performance.
Blogging will change the way future generations of students adapt to an ever changing society. Homeschooling will become more prevalent as tools become available to network with other homeschoolers and share classroom materials.
In my opinion, one of the leaders in this “blogs as educational tools” revolution is Edublogs.org, a free blogging service for educators. I’ve been a long time fan of what Edublogs is doing. Using WordPressMU multiple blogger technology, the same as WordPress.com, educators, teachers, and students of teaching are brought together in one blogging community to share their experiences and expertise in teaching through their free blogs. Each blog is different but together they act as a community, providing resources for other educators around the world, and a place to discuss the future of teaching.
The concept was so exciting and popular, Edublogs.org expanded to develop learnerblogs for school students, uniblogs.org for university and college students, and eslblogs for those involved in teaching English as a second language and English as a foreign language.
Look at the possibilities blogging offers to the educational industry. Imagine a teacher in New Mexico learning about educational methods from a teacher in Kenya? Or the Ukraine? Or maybe even China. Ideas can be challenged and discussed through blogs. Teachers can learn from each other and help each other figure out how to interact with their students on a more profound and intimate level. It’s long been known that much of the educational system in the United States is not working, so blogs offer a way for teachers to explore all types of technologies and share their findings and observations with each other.
Educational blogs aren’t not limited to professional teachers talking with their peers. Blogs can provide home schooling, tutoring, and the support students need to get that little extra attention that inspires their learning process.
From my limited understanding of how the Montessori educational method works, young children are encouraged to learn on their own, with strong supervision, moving forward in their lessons when they are ready, not when the teacher or rest of the class is ready. The children are taught to discover the potential for learning within themselves, not have it drummed into them.
Blogging is built on the concept of self-discovery and expression. It also involves self-discipline, planning, some structure, and goal-setting. What better tool for kids to play with than something that encourages the core tools we need to exist in this world.
Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress, and is a long time support volunteer for WordPress. Lorelle travels too much and reports about life on the road in Taking Your Camera on the Road and covers family history and genealogy on Lorelle’s Family History, teaches and presents workshops and programs, and writes for many blogs, ezines, and magazines.
Hey Lorelle,
Thanks for the nice comment – we’re not just aiming to link people together but also to free them from the stranglehold of backward transmissive edu technologies that dominate most learning organisations, like http://blackboard.com
It’s actually pretty full on stuff – online education needs to be about the individuals not the ‘discussion’ board and about empowerment and conversation rather than posting .pdfs.
Cheers, James
Now that I have gone back to school, I turned my real estate related blog into a history type blog where I am posting all of my research papers. I like blogging and posting my work on my blog however, everytime I turn in a new paper, I get flagged for plagrism as a copy of my work on my blog shows up. I am doing a research paper on a massacre that took place during the Vietnam war. I am posting a little bit at a time and when I now go back and try to located additional information for the paper, my site is the first to show up so it makes it hard at times to find additional resources. Also with all the wordpress updates, some of the plugins I have experimented with to include academic citations no longer works so that is another issue for me as I am always having to go back and add the citations since the plugins in which I was using no longer works.
The issue of plagiarism as students who blog get tagged by teachers who are not paying attention to the real sources of the content will be one that need addressing soon. Good point.
Clear credit and citation is critically important.
As for searching on the net and finding your own stuff first, that’s a compliment, but it is a pain. When we started researching our family history, we had good luck finding information on the web, but as soon as I started publishing our findings, our family history blog started showing up in the first 3, 4, 10 listings as time went on. It is now harder for us to exclude our site in the searches. I totally understand.