Transcripts
June 20, 2008 - Interview with David Warlick
Catherine Imperatore: This is Catherine Imperatore with ACTE. I’m speaking with David Warlick, a 30-year educator, author, consultant and public speaker on 21st century teaching and learning. Hi David, it’s great to talk to you today.
David Warlick: Wonderful to be here with you.
CI: Why is blogging a useful tool to use in the classroom?
DW: Well, I think it’s important to understand exactly what blogging is about and what’s really in the … I like to call it the spirit of the new Web tools. Let me just start off by giving you my definition. If you listen to podcasts about, you know, Web 2.0, always the first question is “what is your definition of Web 2.0?” Cause it’s this nebulous thing that’s really kind of hard to understand. In my way of looking at it, Web 1.0 was like a library. It was a place where you went to find information. Web 2.0 is different in that in Web 2.0 applications, information is more about conversation. It’s more about information, but it’s about the conversation that takes place around the information. So in a blog, you have content being generated by the blogger, who may have some established credential or expertise in that area or may not have. But what gets wrapped around that blog is a conversation in the form of the comments and in the form of other bloggers who blog about what you blog about.
So I have a blog called 2¢ Worth and I post ideas and observations and reflections on things that I see in my work and depending on the time I have I will polish it and try to refine the quality of the writing because it is very much about publishing. But then what happens is people will comment on the blog, people will write about what I wrote about in their blogs and of course their blogs come to me through RSS. And then this conversation wraps around it, and the thing is, that’s where the real value happens in many blogs is in the conversation. The idea goes out but then the idea gets built upon and it becomes a part to larger ideas. I think it’s what’s really powerful educationally in that the reader actually becomes part of the content.
So, you know, you may have the teacher has a blog and the teacher writes something about what’s being studied and then the students are required to come in and read the teacher’s blog and then comment on it. So this conversation starts to take place around the document in a way that’s difficult to see happen in a textbook. But with a blog, it’s all built in so that you have this conversation going on and the result is the students get a chance to reflect on what they’ve read in the blog, they share their reflections with each other, they build on each other’s reflections and very often the teacher actually learns from this. The teacher learns from a perspective that a student or a group of students have shared. And it actually becomes a learning experience for the teacher. So you can have the teacher writing a blog and the students are commenting on the blog, you can have students writing the blogs and the teachers writing the comments. There are teachers who are actually using blogs as the platform for the writing assignments. So the students are studying some concept in physics or engineering or whatever and they’ve been asked by the teacher to reflect, you know, “here’s what you’ve learned how to do, how do you see this impacting on your industry or impacting on the service or the customers” whatever. And the students are writing and the teacher comes in and comments on the students’ writing. So it becomes a platform for the homework.
And then you can step back another level and have the students commenting on each other’s writing. The written homework assignment takes on whole new dimensions where it’s not just a conversation between the teacher and the student where the student, you know, does the assignment, turns it into the teacher, the teacher reads it, gives them a grade, turns that back into the student, you know, a very narrow conversation. But the students are actually required as part of the assignment to read the reflections or the work of each other and then respond to that. So it becomes more of a class-wide assignment, which adds a whole new dimension. And it doesn’t have to just be writings, it can be images, it could be, you know, some motor that a student has put together and they video the motor and they install that on their blog so that other students after class can come in and see the video and they can respond, you know, “I liked the way you solved this problem, have you thought about doing it this way.”
It takes education to a whole new dimension because, again, it turns it into a conversation. If I had to give one word to 21st-century education, it would be a conversation. It’s a whole different kind of conversation that happens in the learning experience. You’ve also got the comments coming in from the community. You’ve got that additional dimension where your students are learning, they’re working, they’re building, they’re reflecting, they’re taking what they’re building, they’re taking pictures of it, making videos of it, they’re writing about it, they’re putting it on their blogs. And the teacher has invited a community of people already in that field in your local community or globally. And you’re inviting, you know, practitioners to come in and reflect on the students’ work. So you’ve expanded that conversation out well beyond the classroom.
CI: I wouldn’t think that very many classroom blogs are open to the general public, are they?
DW: That depends on the age of the student and it also depends on the country. Here in the US very rarely do you see that happen although with my particular tool, Class Blogmeister, the teacher can switch that feature off and switch it back on again. I know a lot of the teachers will have the students do a blogging assignment and then they work on the assignment and they comment on each other’s and they polish it up to a point where it is ready for the community read and reflect on. And then the teacher can then open it up so that it becomes available to the parents, to the community, to a global audience. Once that part of the activity is done, then they shut it back down again. With Class Blogmeister, the commenting is controlled by the teacher. So anything that gets commented to a student’s blog comes to the teacher’s mailbox first and the teacher has an option of letting it through or blocking it. Or the teacher doesn’t want their mailbox getting filled up with comments, there’s a Web page that the teacher can go to read each comment as it comes in and approve it or delete or, you know, postpone it, or whatever. So the teacher has control over it. Now that’s K through, you know, 10, 12. Once you get on into postsecondary, then it’s a lot safer to leave it open.
CI: Can you introduce a little more about Class Blogmeister?
DW: Well, Class Blogmeister was developed in 2004. I’d been blogging since sometime in 2003 and talking to teachers at conferences about it. And teachers got very excited because they saw, intuitively they saw the value of this sort of thing because it gives voice to the student’s learning. It gives the student an opportunity to reflect and give voice to what they’re learning. And we’ve known for a long time that when students have an opportunity to talk about, to publish about, to express what they’re learning, they’re learning very well. IN fact, teachers know this as teachers. You get a group of teachers together and you ask them, you know, “how many of you learned what you teach better after you started teaching it than you did as a student in university?” And every single hand goes up because you have to organize and express and publish something to a real audience with a real goal in mind, to actually teach them something, you learn it very, very well. Problem was what you just asked, about, we get kind of nervous when we think of an 18-year-old, 15-year-old, 9-year-old writing into a Web form, a blog, and then hitting the submit button and it be suddenly available to the world and everybody, that makes us a little bit nervous.
So in 2004, there weren’t any blogging engines available that gave a teacher, a central person, control over the content for the sake of safety. So I built Class Blogmeister and it was opened up January 2005. It took off, there’s now about 160,000 users of Class Blogmeister. I’m not really promoting it now because there are other tools out there. What’s good about Class Blogmeister is that most of what is there that is good is there because teachers who are using it have suggested, you know, “it would be really cool if we could do this.” You know, “I like this feature but it would even better if we could do this.” So that’s what I’ve gotten out of Class Blogmeister is learning from practicing educators how these sorts of things can be integrated into the teaching and learning experience. The problem with CB is that, as you know, I’m almost constantly on the road with speaking engagements and if there’s a technical problem it can take a couple of days for me to get to a point where I can fix it. So I’d recommend some other tools: ePals, ePals.com has a blogging engine now; Gaggle.net has a blogging engine; there’s one called 21Classes, which I’ve heard some good things about. I don’t know a lot about it but there are some education bloggers who I respect a great deal who use it and like it. And there are a number of others that have full-time technical staff to support them. And I usually try to aim people in those directions because I know how important reliability is. But I continue to keep Class Blogmeister going because there’s so many people using it and I’m probably adding 20 or 30 new teachers a day. It’s what they want to use. Feature-wise it gives the teacher control over the content. Students’ blogs don’t go live until the teacher has seen it first and approves it. Comments that are coming in—students can’t see it until the teacher’s seen it first and approved it. That’s what educators, K-12 educators in the United States, need.
CI: So would you say that most blog applications in the classroom revolve around assignments?
DW: Yes, but also one of the things that I’m hearing from teachers is that the students take it on themselves. I remember specifically, and I hear this a lot, but I remember specifically a blog that was written by a teacher who uses Class Blogmeister but it could have been any blogging engine. Basically it was toward the end of the year and he was blogging about, it was basically a diary of the day. And he was talking about what he as a normal fifth-grade, I think it was a fifth-grade teacher, did that day. And throughout the description he was talking about approving this article or that article written by this student or that student in a blog. And at the end of the article he said, “You know, it only just occurred to me that none of the blog articles that I approved where a result of an assignment.” This was writing that the students were choosing to do on their own and it’s one of the first comments that I heard from teachers as they started using blogging was, you know, they writing back to me and saving, “I can’t believe this, my students are begging me for writing assignments.”
And I think that the key is that when students are blogging or whatever type of collaborative, communicative technology that they’re using to do their writing—when they’re blogging, it stops being a writing assignment and it turns into a communications assignment, it turns into a conversation assignment. When it’s a writing assignment, they are writing to the teacher, they are writing what they think the teacher wants to read, they’re writing for a grade. However, when they’re writing in their blog or their wiki or whatever, they’re writing knowing that at least their classmates are going to be responding. So it becomes more of a conversation and that’s what digital natives, if I can use that term, that’s what they do with the Internet. You know, when they go home, they’re instant messaging, they’re communicating through their social networks. You know, communication is really at the heart of much of who they are. And if we can give them assignments in the classroom, within the context of what they’re supposed to be learning, the curriculum, the standards, whatever, but that involve communicating, not just proving to you that they’ve learned what they’re supposed to learn, but they’re actually communicating, then it’s an assignment that becomes part of them. It’s something that they can climb into and work, rather than just performing.
CI: You mentioned wikis. Can you give us some tips on how they can be used effectively in the classroom?
DW: A wiki is really a work tool. It’s not like a blog in that you can give an assignment, and they write the blog and you have the conversations and then you get on with the next blog. A wiki is something that really takes on a life of its own. And the best wiki applications that I’ve seen in the classroom, it’s actually part of the classroom. For instance, if I were still—I taught history—and if were still teaching history, I would probably never make another study guide for my students for the tests. I would have a classroom wiki and my students’ job would be to develop their own study guides through the wiki. As we’re going through the unit, their job is to take their notes through the days and add those notes to the wikis and organize those notes so that they are constructing their own guide that they’re going to use to study for the test. Now as the teacher, I monitor their work and if see that they’re adding a lot of notes about something that’s not going to be on the test, I’ll tell them. You know, “I’m glad you’re interested in this, I’m interested in a lot of the content that you’ve put together, but to be fair, I need to explain to you that there aren’t going to be any questions on that on the test. However, there are going to be questions on this topic and you need some more content over there.” So I would continue to guide them but their job would be to produce an information product that will help them study for the test. I know one teacher, a computer science teacher down in Georgia, who doesn’t use a textbook anymore. I mean, she used to say to her class, say, “I want you to write a report about word processing, I want you to write a report about quantum computing, I want you to write a report about virtual reality.” And now she says, “I want you write the chapter on word processing, I want you to write the chapter on quantum computing, I want you to write the chapter on virtual reality.” The students are using a wiki site to actually produce their own textbook.
So part of being the student is not just learning, but it’s expressing what you’re learning and actually building your own information product, your own textbook. And the students become responsible, and I think that’s one of the biggest benefits of this type of assignment is if I’m writing a report for you, it’s like a two-way contract between me and you. I’m writing this report, I’m writing what I think you want to read, you’re going to read it, you’re going to give me a grade, and that’ s it. But if I’m responsible for writing the chapter that all of my classmates are going to be using to study for the test, I’m not responsible just to you, my teacher, and just to myself but I become responsible to the entire class. I become responsible for the learning that I’m doing and what I’m doing with that learning. Another application of it that I just read about recently, a college professor up in British Columbia who assigned the students to write a report as a Wikipedia article, to submit it to the Wikipedia as an article. The grade was based on the quality of their article, but the only way that you could make an A was if your article were elevated to a featured Wikipedia article. Each day they feature articles. And he said, “if you’re article is good enough that the Wikipedia includes it in their featured articles page, then you get an A.” What’s important about that is the authenticity of the assignment. You aren’t writing just for the teacher within the context of just the curriculum but you’re actually taking what you’re learning and then you’re putting it into a community and the community is responding by judging it worthy of being a featured article or just staying as an article or getting rejected. I mean, if you’re article gets rejected, then I guess that’s a good way to make a D or an F.
CI: I imagine it’s also a good place if you’re working on a special project to let the teacher and your classmates know your progress.
DW: Absolutely. In fact this is one of the biggest benefits that I hear from teachers on using wikis is that the teacher, because of how wikis work, the teacher can keep track, not only of the progress of the students but actually what individual students are contributing because the students have to log in to the wiki and the wiki keeps a record of every single edit. So the teacher can go through and look at the history of the students’ work and see who submitted what, who published what, who edited what. From an assessment point of view, it’s absolutely perfect for education.
CI: And just to clarify for our listeners because I know this … we all have trouble with this. Wikipedia is just one public example of a wiki—
DW: It’s actually an aberration (laughs)—
CI: An aberration, okay.
DW: –of the wiki. Wikis were never intended to be something like the Wikipedia. Wiki was intended to be a collaborative tool that a small group of people would use to build some sort of information product, a manual, a guide or whatever that would be useful to that small group of people. Wiki was never intended to be a global thing like the Wikipedia. Yet the Wikipedia has been a sensational success. It is, you know, it’s far more reliable, far larger, far deeper than anything that we have any right to expect. It’s an amazing source of content.
CI: Do you know of any particular applications for blogs or wikis in career and technical education?
DW: Well, the one that I just mentioned about the computer science teacher. And this could easily be done in any type of a technical or any applied area is having the students as a class contributing to a manual, contributing to, you know, a guide. If you’re doing networking, the class has probably got a project going on where you’re networking a business or a school or hospital or something like that. The administrators of that network need to have some sort of a guide or a manual—I’m sure there’s a better term for it—but that they can use to troubleshoot through problems that occur in that particular location. It could be part of the project to have the students use the wiki to build out this manual.
If I could add, there’s one other area of Web 2.0 that you might not have gotten into in your previous conversations that I think could possibly be the biggest benefit to educators, and that’s the use of RSS and RSS aggregators. We live in a time of rapid change, and especially as educators and practical skills, those skills are changing, the technology is changing, the clientele is changing, where the services are coming from is changing. And it’s become more important than ever for teachers to actually practice lifelong learning. And one way of doing that is to stay connected to the community of practitioners, of experts, in order to get the latest information, the latest techniques.
And one way of doing that is by reading blogs and one way of reading blog is by literally subscribing to those bloggers who have things to say to help you do your job. You do this with an application called an aggregator. An aggregator may be a piece of software that you download off of the Internet; in most cases it’s a Web site that you go and set up an account on such as Bloglines.com or Google.com/reader. There is a very interesting one called Netvibes, n-e-t-v-i-b-e-s.com. And with these aggregators, the instructor can subscribe to bloggers in their field who are actually researching or practicing that field and reflecting on what they’re learning and then reporting it back out again through their blogs and a teacher can take all of this information in. You don’t have to wait on professional journals, juried journals, you don’t have to wait on that sort of thing although this doesn’t mean that those types of sources become less valuable. In fact they may even become more valuable. But it gives you access to daily developments in the field that you’re teaching.
But what’s really interesting about RSS is that it goes way beyond blogs. It started out as a way for people to be able to pay attention to a group of bloggers that they’ve, you know, found to be valuable. But now, most newspapers, television and radio journalists now RSS feed their material. So you can go to the New York Times, if there’s a section in the New York Times such as media, well you can subscribe to all of the stories that are published in the New York Times that are published into that section, and every time a new story is submitted in the New York Times, then it goes to your aggregator. You can now go to Google News, you can do a news search for all the news stories that mention whatever field that you’re teaching and you can actually subscribe to that search. Then, and of course Google News includes news stories from all over the world, thousands of news sources from all over the world. And any time any of those news sources adds a new article that includes that word, then it comes to you. So we’re literally training content to find us.
CI: Well, great. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, David.
DW: Thank you, I enjoyed it.
CI: You can read David’s blog at www.davidwarlick.com/2cents. That’s d-a-v-i-d-w-a-r-l-i-c-k.com/the letter 2 c-e-n-t-s. You can also check out Landmarks for Schools, a resource site for education technology tools, which includes links to Class Blogmeister and the popular Citation Machine, at landmark-project.com. That’s landmark dash project.com.
