Tuesday, March 08, 2005

David Warlick on Blogging and Community Building

Tacking on to my recent post on Community, it seemed worthwhile to dredge this on out of my aging blog post drafts: Blog Together -- David Warlick
A
t any rate, we're here to talk about community building. "Te He!" We're teachers. We're professionals. We have a critical task, to shape futures through the skills and knowledge that we help our students to learn. Our job is perhaps the most information-intensive occupation there is, and a large part of what makes us successful are the skills and experiences that we gain on the job. A perfect setting for a networked community.

"Wrong!"

Why is establishing valuable, interactive, and information-rich communities among front-line teachers so difficult? Just ask any teacher you know. "When am I going to have time to participate in an online community?" I have to grade papers, write lesson plans, conduct research, attend committee meetings, attend staff development -- and these are the things I do after the school day is over.

I do not have an easy answer. There is no easy answer. The hard answer is to redefine what it means to be educated in an information-driven, technology-rich world, and rewrite the curriculum, restructure the school day, reinvent what it is to be a teacher and a student, and retool classrooms for 21st century teaching and learning. Our current track only helps us to do a better job of preparing kids for the 1950s.

Alright! I'm supposed to be talking about community-building. It occurs to me, that the bottom line for the success of any community, live or online, is that it helps its members solve a problem, or problems. In the case of teachers, it must help them do their jobs. Teachers will adopt a technology or technique if it helps them do their job. However, do I really want to help teachers to assure that every child can read...at the expense of social studies, science, higher order thinking... OK! Off subject again.


Read the rest!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home


Full Circle Associates
4616 25th Avenue NE, PMB #126 - Seattle, WA 98105
(206) 517-4754 -