On blogging and student engagement

Konrad Glogowski posted today on his experiences in establishing a "community of grade eight student bloggers". He writes with excitement and enthusiasm about how his students went from being solitary writers, to leveraging off the knowledge of their peers to deepen and broaden their own understanding. He writes:

I noticed that Student A, writing about genocide in Darfur, started following and linking to the work of Student B who was investigating current human rights abuses. Student A did not learn anything new about genocide from Student B, but she did learn a lot about efforts (or lack thereof) to stop hatred, violence, and discrimination. Entries about human rights abuses taking place all over the world (including the so-called developed nations) were helpful in expanding her understanding of why violence erupts, of why we are not effective at stopping it. Both continued to pursue their own topics but relied on each other to gain a better understanding of human nature, of discrimination, of official responses to these issues.

Read the full post here.

There's been a bit of blog madness happening around the place here, most of it creative and innovative, some of it being driven from a new(ish) buzzy technology. I'll be converting a spare server into a 'miscellaneous web applications' server this month to allow us to organic experimentation with in-house hosted open source tools such as Wordpress. Must write up guidelines for use too, although the last thing I want to do is squash enthusiasm with policy.