Been a crazy week back after Thanksgiving. I’ve been busy with grading, writing a couple of assignments, catching up on the wiki relocation, and sharing a cold with my daughter. A few brief thoughts:
- I think the wiki’s back up to speed — perhaps a little better organized than last time, perhaps not. But I suspect that it will continue to grow. I hope so, at least. It’s funny — I know that several teachers have drawn ideas for their blogging policies from the wiki, but I’m still not sure what my final blogging policies will look like. Heck, that’s why I started the wiki in the first place. Please, if you’ve found it to be useful, share the resources that you’ve created with the community — we can only get better.
- One blogging teacher that’s doing some neat stuff with blogging and podcasting is Paul Allison, a tech liaison with the NYCWP in New York City. His most recent podcast, a jog-cast (he’s jogging while he talks — I’m pretty impressed!) is a reflection on some recent trouble in his school’s blogging program — really relates to some of what we’ve been discussing in regards to safety and liability, etc. Worth a listen. (Paul — I like your thinking — but the video version of the jog-cast made me a little bit sick. Cool experiment, but a bit nauseating.) Paul’s other recent videocasts took me right into the heart of the NWP Annual Meeting, which was a mice way to make a convention that I otherwise would have missed completely.
- The Red Cedar Writing Project helped me to catch some of the other happenings of the NCTE/NWP meetings. They got some interesting conversations started by simply walking up to someone with an iTalk/iPod combo and asking some questions. Thanks, Red Cedar. You know, it was the RCWP’s presentation a year ago on digital portfolios at an NWP meeting that was one of the big pushes for me into blogging. Keep up the good work.
- It looks like we’ll be getting our laptop lab in time for the next quarter. That’s good news, because I didn’t have access for my students to begin blogging regularly with them without those computers — and that was getting frustrating. Look out, y’all — I’ll be pushing blogging in my Science Fiction course this year.
