the Design Experience Weblog Archive

But the one thing the blog allows me to do that I could not do easily in my classroom before is to link, to connect ideas, to make transparent my thinking about those ideas, and to have others link to them and do the same. I've been down this road before, I know, many times in fact. But it is the essential piece of Weblogs to me: blogs allow me to create content in ways I could not before, not just post what I could create otherwise in a different form. And in the essence of that creation I use and learn all of those skills that will serve me in my lifelong learning that were (I think) much more difficult for me to learn before: close reading, critical thinking about information, clear and concise writing for a real audience, editing, and reflection, all of it understanding that whatever truth I may put forth will continue to be negotiated by readers and more reading. This, by the very nature of the process, develops reading, writing, information, collaboration and computing literacies, literacies which I think most of us would agree are going to be crucial in navigating what's ahead.

The idea of linking, connecting ideas, and revealing thinking processes is the value in a weblog. Or well, anything that puts those things together will amplify your thinking. I think this is they key in showing why weblogs, and the web are so valuable to learning. Weblogs improve learning by helping to build patterns and connections.

He also refers to a conversation with a colleague about the potential of new techonologies to open up more ways for learners to interact with their learning. This is great, but his colleague suggests that anything that takes control away from schools will be discouraged. Schools as an institution are enemies of real changes. His colleague goes on to say "But things were 'different' in the 40s and the 60s and the 80s...all these things that were supposed to change education and never did..." This reminds me of John Holt. He started out trying to change schools, and ended up deciding that was too big. Changing schools in a fundamental way, turning them upside down, is too hard. His goal became encouring families to find a new way to learn. To find learning everywhere in life. To realize that life is the place where real learning takes place, and that school seperates kids from that kind of learning.

Using RSS or any other noticiation system to synch the interesting catalog data for use by the public would be very exciting. Already my local library can output the books I have checked out, and search results in XML, but its not pretty. There also isn't any sort of standard format that works across platforms. So I could work on an application that shows the books I am currently reading according to my library records, but it would only work with a library with the same platform.

Anyway the post was more about a public inteface to the catalog. I would love that. It would be great to aggreate comments and reviews and link them to a local library catalog. There all all kinds of exicting options. Art says "the trick is to create sustainable web representation of the contents of the catalogue, with dynamic hooks for status information "