Commenting Challenge
I will not be able to participate on a daily basis, or anything close to that as the school year winds down, but I did want to take some time to reflect on some of my online conversations, since there are some interesting and complex discussions underway…
It started with Clay Burrell’s post, Muhammad Ali: A D- Student? Or an F- School? | Beyond School and Ira Socol’s SpeEdChange: Not getting to Universal Design where I not only commented, but started a post thread myself, What do they need? posts which Ira has participated in. This started with two posts, one of which got a lot of comments, and one that had just a handful. It was important that I not just be saying “me too” (Muhammad Ali was unappreciated) or “me not too” (writing instruction and skills are important). I try to add some analysis that looked at it from a different tack. The back and forth that Ira and I are having through a series of posts (SpeEdChange: Changing Education?) and comments on them shows how a conversation can build with comments, and response posts. It’s also nice to see how this prompts other comments.
Next up was a post/comment/post conversation that I didn’t participate in, but enjoyed seeing. Dan Meyer put up a post about a lesson, which led to a regular commenter, Jason Dyer, asking other commentors to leave off their lessons suggestions, and giving feedback. Dan, who is not known as Mr. Diplomat in blog circles, shows how he keeps (and builds) his audience, with this post, dy/dan » Blog Archive » Jason Dyer Isn’t Human, where he praises Jason’s work in the comment section.
This is not the first time Dan has done something like this. He has a very open attitude towards his comment section, which I think it is how he gets a high number of comments on his posts. Whole separate conversations have taken place in his comment section. I’ve even “pimped” events, etc. of my own there, and it’s all good. This has been instructive to me (even though I don’t get near the number of comments).
Now, one task was to comment with someone who you disagree with. I did that not on a blog, but in the forum section of Classroom 2.0 Finding the Right Tool for Student Work – Feedback where someone wants to take a teacher to task for what they are calling a blog. The only problem I saw with this, is that it appeared that the person never asked her opinion.
Feel free to leave your advice, or other comments to me in the box at the bottom ;-).
I wonder how comfortable we are when the comments of a blog post take on a life of their own, and become The Conversation, and not our initial post.
You must be willing to cede some of the control, right? And still, you need to be there as moderator, I suppose. It’s an interesting situation, I would assume (can you tell it has not happened to me?)
It reminds me of the classroom and how much you see yourself as the “authority” and how much input you really want from your students (and not just lip service). That makes some teachers uncomfortable. For others, that enlightened classroom is the reason they teach.
Thanks for sharing, Alice.
Kevin
dogtrax: I like the comparison. Conversation breaks out when you begin to loosen the controls, and that’s fantastic. It does not eliminate the need for a “moderator” (or “teacher”) but it changes the role: One ends up guiding, suggesting, even helping to build some truly essential discourse analysis skills.
I thought of this just last night replying to “Socrates” on your last post. I finally realized the need to do some deeper research – I read his blog, I read the blogs of those he agrees with and disagrees with and looked for his comments. I also hunted through piles of KIPP generated reports and discovered that they publish no actual college success data – only that their students “went” or “go” to college. And then I sat back and thought about the philosophies behind my arguments.
Can we bring the teaching of a process like that into our classroom? Can we use technology such as blogs to help us teach that?
Great questions and interesting query. The fact that you went and dug deeper, instead of moving onward, says a lot about you and your process. That kind of reflective practice is so important and yes, we can bring that into our classrooms, and help foster thinking skills along with doing skills.
Take care
Kevin
It’s great that you dug deeper, but if you had dug deep enough, you might have found out that only one or maybe two classes of KIPP alums are old enough to have finished college. Perhaps that’s why they don’t publish college completion data – either they weren’t tracking it way back then or the sample size is so small that folks like you would rightly describe it as insufficient.
Thank you Socrates for repeating what I suggested that you say on May 12. (see previous post comment thread) That is a far better argument than shouting, “you’re a liar.” But I certainly hope they have been tracking this data from the start – an organization which throws the word “college” around as often as KIPP does is choosing their own measurement system. And they should be measuring themselves through that lens.