Bud the Teacher has posted a great idea for blogging workshop opening activity. He posted the activity as an untested idea, so I’ll be checking back on his site to see if the activity actually proved an effective way to make visible the interactivity of the read/write web.

A quote from Classroom Blogging: “It’s simple! Literacy is about communicating. It is about reading and writing. Blogging is about communicating. It is about reading and writing.

• Literacy = Communication (reading + writing)
• Blogging = Communication (reading + writing)
• Blogging = Lieteracy

I’ve just ordered Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts. In the meantime I’m catching up with Will via his recent podcast with Alan November. Good stuff!

This year’s CUE featured a number of sessions on blogging. I walked in on Bernie Dodge’s session just in time to hear him mention a white paper on the value of students blogging: Learning with Weblogs: An Empirical Investigation.

Here’s a summary I gleaned from Hernandez-Ramos’ blog entry:

The study investigates the impact of weblog use on individual learning in a university environment. Weblogs are a relatively new knowledge sharing technology, which enables people to record their thoughts in diary form and publish those diaries as web pages, without programming or HTML coding. The research sought to empirically determine whether the keeping of on-going (web based) learning logs throughout a semester would result in better overall student performance. This was hypothesized, because web based learning logs appear to promote constructivist learning, provide reinforcement, and increase accountability (non-anonymous idea sharing). Results from an information systems undergraduate course with 31 students indicate that weblog performance is a significant predictor for learning outcome, while traditional coursework is not. Weblogs appear to have highest predictive power for high and low performing students, but much less predictive value for medium performers. Results also suggest that there is a learning effect for weblog authoring.

Many thanks to Edublogs.org for providing teachers with free spaces for exploring the blogosphere.  Given the growing bad press given to MySace and other blogs that our students are flocking to with little regard for the do’s and don’ts of electronic writing, I am in search examples and evidence (both anecdotal and empirical) that supports the use of blogs in the classroom.