Will Richardson Blogs, Wiki’s, and Podcasts Activity (tech piece 2)

After reading the first two chapters of Richardson’s Blogs, Wiki’s, and Podcasts, I was both intrigued and a little annoyed (not only because he used the phrase “by in large” a dozen times). But he made everything sound so easy and cool. In fact, he writes “Writing to the Web is easy.” I beg to differ. Maybe I’m annoyed that with myself because I would be totally lost trying to do some of that stuff. Everything sounded really cool and interesting, yet I felt he did not address the time and effort it would take to 1. talk principal, school board, tech person into allowing half that stuff and 2. teaching the kids how to use it. Richardson seems to be under the false impression that all children have unlimited access to computers and high speed internet. It is definitiely a hole in the curriculum that most of the things he discusses, especially blogging and even email, are not really expressly taught.  I feel like those teachers who complain they can’t use writing in their classroom because they’re not a writing a teacher. I kinda feel their frustration. I have a hard time using technology in the classroom because its scope is limited by privacy issues, my own lack of knowledge, and coin toss of whether students can even open a browser page.

On the other hand, I totally fell in love with the whole idea behind using the blogging. In his opening, Richardson quotes Barnes-Lee in saying that “The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write.” I was flabbergasted- that’sthe idea behind the Internet! To read and write! Not to date or gossip or shop, but to read and write? What medium could be more suited to a classroom? Especially one dedicated to that  very vision. In chapter 2 entitled “Weblogs”, Richardson goes on to write that “. . . blogging is a genre that engages students and adults in a process of thinking in words.” That last phrase caught me “thinking in words.” It seems obvious- what else do you think in? Yet at the same time it encapsulates all  of what writing is and strives to be. Putting ones thoughts into a format that is both understandable to the self- one knows what one wants to say- and then being able to effectively communicate those ideas to another human being. The power of language itself awes me every time I try to contemplate it. Who thought blogging could fit so well into that? I certainly didn’t. I was kinda on the side of the fall of Western civilization, but he just might have me there- thinking in words!