Edublog Eruption

Suddenly my Bloglines came up with 23 new posts from Ewan McIntosh.

And I thought he was off to France getting married and here he was, unlike the rest of us, working away at his educational blog during the hot summer days delivering us his usual pearls of wisdom.

My mistake if you see what I mean.

Anyway Ewan Congratulations to you both!!

Blogging Dumbs Down

One of the commonest misconceptions of non-bloggers is that blogging is a dumbing down of “real education”.

Anyone doubting the educational value of blogging should read Darren Kuropatwa’s blog OLE and particularly the piece about scribing.

Quite apart from the serious look at blogging, this piece is a massive exercise in teaching methodology.

It was, I believe, originally presented at the Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston this year.

A New Voice

I have taken to clicking the button for Next Blog when looking at page on wordpress. Most of the time they are only of mild interest; some are in languages I cannot read and some are plainly illiterate or manic.

But today I came across a new educational blog from

Justin Ashworth in central New York. This could be a further diamond in the slurry of the Internet.

Summer and Other Priorities

It would appear that

Ewan McIntosh has now married, at least according to his mother’s blog. He therefore has an excuse for silence.It is partly the heat, partly the long list of household jobs which has kept me from my blog. I have also let my Blogline mount up to nearly 1000 unread posts.

Diagrams in your Web Browser

I came across Gliffy through reading Alan Levine’s blog. I have not yet tried it but he recommends it so i will give it a whirl next time I need a diagram here.

Encouraging Comments

The comments on Will Richardson post about blog statistics are very encouraging to those of us seeking to change education.  They are well worth reading.

New Blog

In the past, I have tended to add the odd rant and rave against life into this blog.  However, it is becoming more and more about education so for those who really want to read my rants and raves they will need to go to my second blog.

Art Across The Curriculum

Many of us ICT people tend to think that change in the classroom is all to do with computers and the like.

But I am involved in a very minor way with a pilot project, using a variety of artists, dancers, painters, musicians, etc., to interpret the curriculum differently. For instance I have observed a class of thirteen year olds creating movements to visualise different types of mathematical symmetry.

So here we have a model of teacher as facilitator and live artist as expert. This is along the same lines as Will Richards‘ ideas of Web 2.0 bringing in the virtual expert. It is again challenging the solitary role of teachers as the fount of knowledge within the classroom. It also is another way of opening up the types of learning available to students.

Implicit and Explicit Knowledge

I noted this link to Jay Cross some time ago and have still not explored it fully but it does seem to have some bearing on what I am thinking.

The Rise and Rise of Web 2.0

Will Richardson at the start of the NECC conference points to some

quicky statistics which David Warlick has produced on the increase in Web 2.0 words in this year’s conference programme.Here in Britain I get the sense of a huge increase over the last few months. I wrote an article about podcasting a few months ago and I felt then that there were only a few in education in the UK doing podcasting and not a huge number doing blogging. Now every day I come across somebody else. This may be because I am searching more, but I think not.However, I still ask the question if this is bringing about real changes in classroom practice? I have referred before to Clarence Fisher’s wiki on classroom change. It is not exactly firing on all cylinders just yet, but it is still worht a look and a contribution. Few contributions there would tend to confirm my pessimism about real change.