Designing Learning Technology

Fri, 02 Jan 2004

Y2K redux
One of the primary ways to track time on the Macintosh regards January 1, 1904 as the "beginning of time." Often, when there was some kind of problem with the computer, you'll see the date stamp on files reset to this date, which was a bad sign. So I've been spooked a couple times already seeing "1/1/04" show up on my Mac. Let's keep using those four digit years, folks...

@15.40 #

Political blogging hits USA Today
This article in USA Today, of all places, shows where blogging is starting to hit the mainstream, and roughly sums up where my weblog attention has been the past few months. Within the political blogosphere, we're seeing huge traffic and growing communities appear around many sites, most of them openly partisan. At the same time, I think these sites are a great place to look to see how well the scaling of weblogs works, both in terms of technology (many of the sites are generating hundreds of thousands of hits a week) and community (the Daily Kos site, for example, recently evolved from a typical weblog + comments site to a full-blown online community in which many other people can start and contribute to their own weblogs).

Are there lessons for educational weblogs in the blogosphere? By next fall, weblogs will likely have a high enough profile to make it easier to explain and promote the technology within educational settings, although since most students can't vote, K-12 students may not have direct experience with the nature of discussion on political blogs. (Given the contentiousness and downright vindictiveness of much of the discourse online, this could be a good thing.) But a more important lesson, I think, is that the success of the political blogs points to the strength of the technology for building communities around passionate ideas. A year ago, people had to work to find these blogs. Now, the community has grown enough that you can pick up the paper outside your hotel door and read about them on the front page. That's a testament to the energy and passion that people have brought to these sites. For educators, it speaks to the need to tap into students' intrinsic motivations, find similar passions, and find ways to build online communities around those ideas.

@13.23 #