Blogs that influenced this post:

Local Connections and Global Connections by Will Richardson
The Global vs. Local Connections 2.0-Step by Christian Long

So at EduCon this weekend, I talked about how I was noticing that, despite all the use of technologies — and specifically Web 2.0 technologies — at SLA, that we weren’t using the traditional Web 2.0 technology of blogging much. Our kids weren’t blogging to the world. In a few conversations thinking about why that was, I thought about how much social networking, how much sharing, how much presentation happens within our own community, and I talked a lot about how I thought that the community at SLA was enriching for kids to the point where they didn’t really see as much need to go outside the school community for that moment. There’s very little world that is merely a transaction between student and teacher at SLA… and if that "show the world" moment happens in positive ways in your own community, is it as necessary to go outside of it?

And then a funny thing happened after EduCon. People wanted to talk to our kids. They wanted to hear from them. So this week, our kids started the embryonic projects of working with Konrad Glogowski’s students… of working with Jason Levy’s middle school kids in the Bronx… and there are a few more projects in the pipeline that we hope will bear fruit. And all of the sudden, we have reason to blog and podcast — the kids have their audience.

So now I’m thinking a little differently… and I thought about Darren Kuropatwa’s work with his math kids… and all the work they’ve published. Darren is one of my "New Teaching" (trying not to say Teacher 2.0) heroes, and I think he’s one of the folks who is absolutely doing it right. And when Darren talked with our faculty this summer about his work, he talked a lot about the serendipitous moments that have come from having his students blog. I certainly can identify with that with my own blogging, and I wondered… why weren’t our kids taking to it the way his kids did? Was it that our kids were younger? Our kids had so many teachers using the technologies that it wasn’t unique? Why weren’t they willing to just blog and see what happens? And then, this weekend, I remembered… neither did his kids. The primary reasons they had for blogging were two-fold. One, they did it for each other… sharing notes and ideas… fulfilling the same purpose that we use Moodle for. And two, they were blogging for a specific audience — the mentors that Darren had enlisted to help his students.

Which leads me to where I am now in my thinking. There are those kids — just like there are those teachers — who will take to the idea of writing to an unknown audience and seeing what happens. But hoping and wishing for the serendipitous moment makes for bad teacher planning, and over the long haul I think it won’t get the vast majority of our students publishing their voices to the world. If we want to see kids embrace the power of communication technologies like blogs and wikis and podcasts, we need to be good teacher-planners. We need to give them reasons to publish. We need to help them see their audience… whether it is using a blogging platform for and art classroom exhibition that other students will critique or bringing in a group of math majors from a college to work with our math students, kids need to understand why they should share their work with the world, and then — once they do — we allow for all the serendipitous moments that so many of us in the edu-blog world have benefitted from to occur.