WeatherBug today announced that it has selected David J. Thon, a fifth grade science educator from William Appleby Elementary in Marathon, NY, to join a team of its meteorologists on a five-day-long tornado chase called WeatherBug Storm Chase 2004. The team will set out in search of storms beginning Monday, May 3 in Oklahoma City.

Thon will play a key role in gathering/analyzing data and readings and in learning more about how and why tornadoes take place. He will write a Weblog — or ‘blog’ — about the experience daily and also answer questions from students and colleagues via email. The Storm Chase blog can be found at http://www.weatherbug.com/stormchase.

Is there any reason why this type of thing shouldn’t be happening more and more? I mean, teachers by their very nature are experts…why shouldn’t they be sharing their experiences and expertise outside of the classroom? This is a great example of how Weblogs can take students beyond the traditional school walls.
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(via ebnWL News) I mentioned this course on Weblogs for Alaskan teachers a couple of weeks ago, and after the first week, the reports are pretty interesting:

I selected the term metablognition for this course because I like to think about weblogs as another layer of thinking for teachers and students. There are class discussions, private conferences and conversations, interactions with all types of texts, response journals, all sorts of formal and informal writing assignments that take place in the classroom. What if we were to consider the blog as another part of our classroom brain, another lobe where different elements of our learning and teaching are synthesized, questioned, rejected, combined, altered etc.? Think of it as a digital zone of proximal development.

Yes, yes, yes…blogs and blogging as metaclass or metaschool even. This is what I’ve been moving toward too. Could the Weblog serve as the space where learning from the various disciplines comes together, gets synthesized? I mean, is this departmentalized construct of learning that we impose on our students anything like the way we learn when we get out of school? Could a Weblog space be the place where students make the connections between science and English, social studies and math, etc.?

That’s why I think blogging (v) is potentially different from any writing that we’ve asked students to do, a genre that may have great value in terms of developing all sorts of critical thinking skills, writing skills and information literacy among other things. We teach exposition and research and some other types of analytical writing already, I know. Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a sustained period of time, maybe a lifetime, c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking and d) synthesize disparate learning experiences and understand their collective relationship and relevance. This just seems to me to be closer to the way we learn outside of school, and I see those things sorely lacking anywhere in traditional education.
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Terry sent along this link that talks about the problems with implementing the “distributed content creation model” that I’m trying to put into place here. And in case you’re wondering, it’s going pretty slowly here. Maybe if I’d read this beforehand:

So how come nobody actually uses these systems once they’re in place? The answer is easy: People don’t like to change the way they work, particularly knowledge workers. Knowledge workers spend years building strategies to accomplish their jobs, practices that likely date back to study skills acquired during their education. So changing those processes — no matter how valid the provided technical solution — is nearly impossible. Users will rebel, even after substantial training.

Now the same could be said of students, who by all accounts are knowledge workers (I would hope.) I’ve been mulling over the blog as e-portfolio idea again and the more I dig into it, the more disruptive it seems. All the more reason to forge ahead.

The article goes on to say:

Put editors in charge. You need an editorial staff in place to make the content on your site as interesting and consistent as it can be. That staff may just be one executive editor, but nothing should go online without that person’s approval. As your Web strategy grows, so too should that staff.

And I have a feeling that’s where this might end up. I have a meeting about the Website with the Superintendent tomorrow where I might pitch the idea of incentivising departmental editors to update and produce content. And by the way, here are my latest departmental Weblog banners. I’m really loving this stuff…
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