My students recently created their own blogs following the directions in their text and seem quite interested in using blogs in their future teaching. I asked them to create a blogroll of links to either other students’ blogs or blogs of well-known bloggers.
Practically no one chose the well-known bloggers and that disappointed me because I was hoping that this would be a good way to expose the students to the blogs of experts in the field. Perhaps they will become familiar with these authors when they do their rss feeds, but if not, the next time I teach a similar course, I will require that they link for expert blogs.
3 comments:
Hi Maryanne,
I'd be very interested in seeing what blogroll they DID come up with. I'd love to see those lists side by side (expert list/student chosen list) to see what kind of work is being done by both. http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_the_problem_of_expertise.php
The above link goes to someone as suspicious of 'experts' as i am. Thanks for the thought provoking post.
Hi Dave,
I read the article you suggested on experts defined as people whom "society typically recognizes ... through some process of credentialling, such as the granting of degrees, professional certifications, or institutional engagement." Perhaps I should clarify that by experts, I'm referring to the term used in educational circles to distinguish between experts and novices, such as expert vs. novice writer.
In that sense, I was lamenting the fact that by linking only to the blogs of their classmates, my grad students were not taking advantage of the opportunity to view blogs from people such as yourself, Barbara Dieu, Will Richardson, etc. I want to them to view such blogs in order to continue developing ideas on how to use blogs and other Internet tools in their own classrooms.
The "experts" that I suggested that they could put in their blogrolls were those easily available to them p. 58 of their text, "Blogs, Wkis, Podcasts..." by Will Richarson. Will's "Blogger's Dozen of
Good Educator's Blogs to Read" include those of Alan Levine, Barbara Ganley, Anne Davis, David Warlick, James Farmer, Stephen Downes, Tim Lauer, Tim Wilson, Tom Hoffman, Ken Smith, Jenny Levine, Konrad Gogowski, and Clarence Fisher.
In the sense that these bloggers are no longer novices, they are experts. As far as the usefulness of their expertise, that depends on the reader and his/her needs.
Hi Maryanne
A couple of months back I also asked my students to start their own blogs. Some of them did. I have listed them here
http://sdmworld.blogspot.com
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