Blog & Education

The educational potential of Web logs in the classroom can be used to access information, opinions and the point of view of millions of other people, a University of Illinois philosophy of education professor told a full house in the engineering auditorium Thursday morning.

"I am not a tech person and did not even know what a blog was before I came here," said Thao Nguyen, a student working on her teaching credential. "I think blogging in the classroom would be a good idea." Web blogs its potential in education SJSU Spartan Daily

I had to skip a day of student teaching in order to catch a presentation on the educational purposes of blogging - A few interesting ideas involved, including the idea of teachers posting blogs as a form of accountability - Communication between the parents where teachers would be able to describe what they are doing in the classroom and to get input from parents within a community. It all sounds theoretically doable, albeit not practical today, but maybe tomorrow? He spent a ton of time explaining and rationalizing the constructiveness of blogs in general, unfortunately. A question I had hoped to ask during Q&A that did not get answered was his opinion on the anonymity of comments (a point he illustrated was important for the potential of blogs in that it provides a communication between author/audience that is not possible anywhere else, especially in the publishing world) and whether or not there needs to be some form of identity, otherwise it could cause slander or name-calling behavior within the feedback.

Anyway, it got me to want to fix up my blog a little. Which is the cause of the change (for the blogger site, that is)