Blogging Best Practices (Techlearning blog)

There has been a background buzz going on in the edublogosphere, a conversation that seems, to me, to be a net that is surrounding and bringing more relevance to a lot of the conversations that are taking place right now. It actually started with a conversation at NECC that was webcasted by the conference. The participants were Will Richardson, Tom March, and Tim Wilson, and the topic was Web 2.0. During that conversation the issue came up about there not being a central location for finding instructional and professional applications of blogging in the classroom. Of course this is not entirely true. There are lots of locations, including Richardson's book, which he was to professional to mention.

76 180284466 6B255Fd2F6 M But it seems to me that it was years, even decades before there was such a thing in the general educational technology community. In fact, there are many. What's truly different today, is that the nature of this new highly connected and highly participant controlled information landscape makes it possible for us, you and me, to establish our own clearinghouse of blogging best practices.

All we really have to do is agree on one tag, one word, that will label a blogged or wiki'ed description of a useful instructional or professional applications of blogging (or wikis, or social bookmarks, or social media). This emerging thread of conversation can be captured by our aggregators and made available to us as a clearinghouse of blogging best practices.

The open source guru, Steve Hargadon, has established a wiki page for our best practices on his Support Blogging wiki, a collaborative site where blogging educators are compiling evidence for the educational value of blogging and the other second web applications. Hardagon is using Wikispaces for the site, which supports RSS feeds. (Wikispaces is also available free to educators.)

Just go to the Support Blogging site, and click on Best Practices.

So there are only three steps necessary to continue this very focused conversation about blogging best practices.

Establish a tag and use it on all blogs we write that describe an educational best practice. I will suggest bloggingbestpractice (singular). It's a bit long, but very clear. Use it!
Not everyone, who is talking about their educational uses of the new web in their blogs, will know to tag them, or even how. So as you encounter such articles, blog them and tag them. We only need a handful of diligent blog-savvy, blog readers to make this work.
Visit and talk about the Support Blogging wiki. But the true beauty of the second web is that any of us can now set up our own clearinghouses, on our own online handouts or our own personal aggregators.

We don't need the government to do this for us. We just need access to the conversation.