The Moss-Free Stone

As I sit monitoring the Tech Staff room, I’m listening to an interview of Will Richardson from K12 Open Source.

Will Richardson’s biggest tip on getting started blogging:

1. READ other blogs. Look at what is happening for a few days/weeks. By doing so, you can see how the discussion occurs, view the tools used by bloggers, and develop an idea of what you want to accomplish in your own blog.

By reading other people’s blogs, he adds, a person also acquires writing material for their own blogs, in the form of responses to other’s blog posts or spinoffs of their topics. This addresses a common statement by people new to blogs–”I don’t have anything to say!”

Richardson discusses methods of getting a broader audience. He suggests visiting other blogs that are related or that have provided material for your own blog and sharing comments that point readers to your own blog. I would add that many blogs ask readers leaving comments for their URLs. This is a great opportunity to attract a wider audience.

Richardson also states that we need to focus less on simply using the tools, and more on safety and on “leveraging the potential of the tools”. This requires, for many educators, a paradigm shift, as education has not been traditionally social and collaborative. I like the metaphor he uses: We don’t teach kids how to drive by just telling them how to do it–we put them behind the wheel and take them out driving.

On his vision of the possible impacts of the read/write web in education, Richardson states that the “classroom walls need to be obliterated, not physically, but virtually.” Educators need to begin thinking more collaboratively, more globally. We need to involve our kids in real work, for real purposes and real audiences. Additionally, these tools can unite the local community in educating students. Richardson contends that our teacher preparation programs must be re-envisioned. We need to prepare teachers for a role that is more content-oriented and continual-learning oriented, and less “sage on the stage.” He adds that, if public schools do not make this adjustment, there will be numerous alternatives that arise in the next decade which will pull kids away from public schools.

The question of how to educate teachers in the age where available tools are changing almost daily is one that has kept me awake on more than one night. Richardson believes the key is to teach kids to be adaptable, to teach them how to network, to find their own trusted sources of information, how to publish. They need to be creative and have the ability to view information critically. He adds that change is inevitable, and “we must teach our kids to deal with it, to learn from it, and, as much as possible, to get something out of it–to leverage it.”