Beyond School

Colorful eagles, in cages LABELED canaries
Originally uploaded by qwurky.

Interesting development on Support Blogging’s listing of edublogs: the list of individual student bloggers is growing. I’ve been banging this little drum for months about this (most recently on a comment on Scott McLeod’s “Top Edublogs” post - and see the afternote for Scott’s awesome response*), and was frustrated to see, month after month, the handful of fine student bloggers in my classrooms in Seoul listed there all by their lonesomes, while the list of adult talkers continued to grow apace.

And not to play the prophet, but I’ve said more than once that non-American schools can lead on this (since American schools are facing social and institutional intimidation on this front) by growing this list. Americans can follow when they see that students from other countries aren’t getting torn apart by wolves because they blog.

And Lo! The list has grown thanks to our “Antipodean” friends in Australia (”ta,” Jo!) and New Zealand (I can’t tell who posted those! - Update: Eureka! It’s Lynn of “Rambling Reflections.”).

One thing I notice about the way we’re listing these blogs is that it’s hard to tell what age groups each student belongs to. It’s my own Yank-centric fault, since I used the American-based “grade levels” of my school instead of something more universally understandable. If we want to play match-maker for our student, we need to fine-tune that.

I’m curious, too, to know what, if any, parental and privacy steps were taken before adding the students to the lists. Another thing to fine tune.

Finally, I had a Skype chat with a senior (17) who left my school last week to go to Los Angeles, and she’s interested in becoming not just a student blogger, but a student edublogger, participating in the conversations about education in this so educator-centric sphere - the first in the “LearnerTalk” idea Scott Schwister and I have been talking about.

I’d love to talk to a few teachers interested in inviting their own select students to engage as equals in the edublogosphere on maybe a shared blog a la LeaderTalk. They wouldn’t be doing homework on these blogs. They wouldn’t be doing it for grades. (Sorry, but both of those types of student blogging are still to a degree “schooly,” inauthentic, and infantilizing.) They’d be doing it because they want us to hear what they have to say, from their own experience, about education anything-point-oh.

We can make this happen. A simple parent permission form consenting to the “adultilizing” of this core of young educational philosophers should do the trick, with a bit of further guidelines in place.

Any takers?

–

Fourth on Lake Austin
Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

*I just discovered some new responses to my comment on Dangerously Irrelevant. Scott McLeod has offered to sponsor a LearnerTalk blog, add the users, and even pay for the hosting - way too cool, and a great example of can-and-will-do leadership. Vivek in India and Kelly in Saskatchewan express interest. So we seem to be seeing a new milestone in the edublogosphere: the beginnings of democracy with the inclusion of our student Silent Majority. How freakin’ cool is that.