Very thoughtful reflections on blogging and it’s relation to Education (as in Lifelong Learning/Real School) from the sessions devoted to educational blogging at the recent 2006 Northern Voice Conference.
Education is not limited to the classroom or even courses. Blogs which are defined by/limited to specific courses will be incomplete/artificial records of one’s thinking at best.
Learner-Centered Education implies that students should “own” their own blogs, in other words, blogs should be tied to students not courses. True ownership, of course, implies that learners will take their blogging seriously, not merely to complete an assignment.
Instead of having a “class blog,†why not have a class aggregator – pulling in the relevant feeds from the learners in a cohort? Learners publish to their own space (blog, Flickr, del.icio.us, digg.com, etc…) and tag content as being relevant to a course or topic – and have a “class aggregator†do the work of bringing the content together into one place.
