http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/adeta_blogtalk.ppt
The above points to the powerpoint slides for an online presentation I just gave to the Alberta Distance Education and Training Association (ADETA). Likely nothing new there for the old hands, but I promised James I would post it once it was done. Like everything else on this site it is posted under a Creative Commons license, so reuse as desired.
I tried to build on the work I did a few years back on the ‘Matrix of Uses’ for blogs in education – truth be told I haven’t spent a lot of time since then focusing on the issue, so don’t know if my thinking has progressed that far.
In a nutshell, my messages were
– focus on ‘blogging’ as process and not ‘blog’ as noun
– blogging is important in representing a number of significant ‘firsts’ (easy XML publishing tool, easy personal publishing, networked writing, easy way to create identity online)
– yet important to learn the lessons these ‘firsts’ teach irregardless of the specific manifestations (I know I’ll catch flak for that one)
– represent a move towards bringing our educational life online and are online lives together (for better or worse, you decide)
It’s hard when you don’t know your audience/can’t even see your audience. I ended up with too much background and not enough time for the meat. Maybe someday there will be enough awareness of blogs as a phenomenom that all of us can forsake all the introductory comments, but it still feels fringe enough to me when I talk to educators ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, that I feel compelled to include it in these kinds of talks. – SWL