Real Professional Development on the Brave New Web–a brief reflection
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This blog has been alive for only a week or so (blessed holidays!), and I’ve already learned one remarkable thing:
Professional development and collaboration are without walls (and free) when you blog. Through this blog, in one short week, I’ve engaged in teaching-and-learning discussions with
- an English teacher/tekky in Shanghai
- a English professor/tekky in Virginia
- a Vancouver history teacher
- a California English professor
Though these people don’t work with me, or for my school, they enjoy exploring 21st century teaching ideas so much that they’re helping me think about unit plans–for use only in my school! (Unless, of course–and here’s the beauty–they want to borrow these ideas and units they’re helping to create.)
That’s real collaboration and professional development–voluntary, unscheduled, passionate, creative, democratic. Nobody playing the Expert (though sure, we’ve all got stuff to share), and everybody being the Explorer.
Best of all, it’s FUN: A global dialog via the “Brave New Web.”
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Clay - I’m not sure how I found your blog, but I too have just recently jumped into the edublogosphere. And I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed an idea of yours for one of my blog posts - the unit think aloud. I may not be as prolific as you, but I do enjoy the professional collaboration that blogging provides in this day and age. Thanks for your thoughts.
literaturecirclesintheclassroom.blogspot.com
[Reply]
Miller
1 Jan 07 at 1:46 pm
Hi M,
I’m not as “prolific” as all that–I just migrated eight days’ worth of posts from an old blog to this new one
Open to tips? Embed technorati on your blog to get more connected and collaborative!
And how DID you find this blog?? It’s less than a day old!
I’ll check your blog out after some overdue sleep.
Thanks for the comment~
[Reply]
Clay Burell
1 Jan 07 at 4:51 pm
Aha, talk about instant gratification! Nice to see you over on Blogspot, Clay - how long did it take you to migrate all of that info… and did you wind up selecting a bloglines folder to create an automatic blogroll?
Back on topic, Jeff was adamant about this topic when we had a ‘critical friends buzz’ happening around the school a few months back. Those of us who are highly connected online were sitting there wondering what century we were in.
As an extension of the ideas that you have about having a professional network that spans continents, which is obviously something I benefit from, I seriously have to reflect on how the same type of networking is absolutely essentially to me at my own school!
Honestly, I have the people who I spend plenty of “face” time with, and then I have the guys at UTechTips.com … we all work at the same school (on 2 campuses), but in reality we very rarely talk to each other in person. That blog IS our professional development zone.
As I recall, Clay, this is pretty much exactly how you and I used to operate when we worked in the same school - manically, passionately - but via email and on a private bulletin board system. This is, however, another step in the evolution of the deprivatization of education…not to mention a “giant leap” forward in terms of creating global think tanks.
The fact that you can have a blog up for less than 24 hours and then find that someone has already benefited via asynchronous collaboration is an example of the ‘Brave New Web.’ Now to mix metaphors:
“For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn? … For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”
- Winston Smith, from Orwell’s 1984
[Reply]
JonathanChambers
1 Jan 07 at 10:17 pm