"If we simply take notes when sitting at technology conferences, we become the blind following the blind" (p. 25)

Of course my pathetic brain saw this and immediately started thinking about educational technology. How sad is that?!

This MQF (gotta love those government acronyms!) got me thinking about whether we technology early adopters need a self-imposed moratorium on talking about new technology tools, at least in certain settings. One of the most common refrains heard from teachers or administrators who listen to us talk or blog about all of these new cool tools is “Why do I care about this as an educator?” In our eagerness to share our nearly-palpable glee and excitement, we often struggle to adequately answer the “So what?” question in ways that are substantive and meaningful to the average teacher or administrator.

So when a new tool comes out – Twitter, Diigo, whatever – maybe we should hold off for a bit before we start blabbing to educators who don’t live as close to the ed tech edge as we do. Maybe we should voluntarily follow a process that looks something like this:

I believe that an emphasis on pilot testing, experimentation, and identification of both mainstream educator use(s) and optimal training mechanisms before introduction to other educators often would help us quite a bit. Instead of turning off the very educators that we want using many of these tools, some time spent in the ed tech quarantine might go a long way toward facilitating our overall goal of greater technology adoption in K-12 classrooms.

I don’t know if I’ve gotten the quarantine process exactly right. And of course many of you already do some version of this. But I think this is a concept that generally should be kept closer to the forefront of our brains. What do you think?

"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go but ought to be." Rosalynn Carter

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences." Susan B Anthony

...two significant disruptions of this sort have swept through the U.S. public schools, marked by the Nation at Risk report and the No Child Left Behind Act. Assigning schools new jobs for which they were not built--and therefore are not necessarily doing--has meant that schools don't look as good in light of the new requirements. But given how difficult it is to negotiate these disruptive currents, as we show in the pages that follow, the schools have done remarkably well--which provides some hope that they may be able to switch to a student-centric learning mode, too, through a disruptive implementation of computer-based learning. (p. 45)

1. Maximize human potential. 2. Facilitate a vibrant, participative democracy in which we have an informed electorate... 3. Hone the skills, capabilities, and attitudes that will help our economy... 4. Nurture the understanding that people can see things differently--and that those differences merit respect... (p. 1)

• "[S]chools are underfunded." However: "The U.S. public education system spends more per student than all but a few countries, and yet, on average, its student often perform at or below the level of those in other economically advanced countries" (p. 2).
• "[T]here aren't enough computers in the classroom." However: "If the addition of computers to classrooms were a cure, there would be evidence of it by now" (p. 3)
• Students and their parents are to blame. However: this is a serious factor (especially in the light of the increases in minority-background students, who have historically performed least well), but there are enough exceptions to believe "[t]here has to be a better answer" (p. 4).
• "The U.S. teaching model is simply broken." However: we often make mistakes when imagining how our teaching model is compared with other countries (see the fascinating exercise the reader goes through on p. 4 here).
• "[T]he teacher unions must be the problem." However: "Like all explanations, this may be true to a degree, but as the definitive explanation, it doesn't hold up."
• All of the above are "conspiring collectively to constrain" the U.S. However: Of course, they state. "[A]ll these issues are at work in other nations' schools as well--and yet the evidence is that many of them obtain better results than do those in the United States" (p. 5).
• Finally, the "way we measure schools' performance is fundamentally flawed." However: Of course, as well, but not the root cause. "Today a stunning proportion of the people in [the] offices and cubicles of [Silicon Valley] are Israeli, Indian, and Chinese. Those educated in the U.S. schools are losing share--and it's not because the United States is uniquely unable to measure true academic achievement. The United States has kept its technological edge in the world not because its public schools are sending the best potential technologists to U.S. colleges. The United States is clinging to its advantage because it has continued to be a magnet for the best talent in the world" (p. 6).

But, as usually the case with this sort of thing, it did raise doubts in my mind about the value of rubrics for this type of activity. They are useful, but they are also limited, and not nearly as objective as one might think.

• Top edublogs? (January 2007)
• Top edublogs - August 2007

Below is my latest attempt. I made a few changes from last time, which I describe after the table. Authority and rank are from Technorati as of June 2. Clicking on each blog name will take you to its Technorati page.

	Blog Name	2008 Authority	2008 Rank
1*	apophenia	1,256	1,880
2	Weblogg-ed	897	3,222
3	Joanne Jacobs	798	3,848
4	Stephen's Web	708	4,581
5*	The Panda's Thumb	563	6,314
6	2 Cents Worth	559	6,364
7	Cool Cat Teacher Blog	550	6,527
8	Moving At the Speed of Creativity	452	8,585
9	Ewan McIntosh's edu.blogs.com	434	9,073
10	Students 2.0	415	9,601
11	Dangerously Irrelevant	413	9,650
12	The Fischbowl	402	9,999
13	Larry Ferlazzo's Websites Of The Day…	292	15,222
14	Beyond School	281	16,003
15	EdTechTalk	255	18,132
16	The Thinking Stick	251	18,485
17*	Millard Fillmore's Bathtub	247	18,889
18	CogDogBlog	243	19,288
19	Angela Maiers	241	19,497
20	Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech	233	20,369
21	Techlearning blog	231	20,603
22	elearnspace	231	20,603
23	dy/dan	223	21,531
24	Around the Corner	219	22,034
25	Practical Theory	211	23,110
26	Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy	197	25,258
27	Steve Hargadon	194	25,760
28	Half an Hour	187	27,002
29	k12 Online Conference	180	28,355
30	Mobile Technology in TAFE	179	28,551
31	blog of proximal development	171	30,308
32	HeyJude	168	30,991
33	Blue Skunk	164	31,997
34	The Education Wonks	164	31,997
35	Drape's Takes	162	32,533
36	Always Learning	162	52,728
37*	The Learning Circuits Blog	157	33,890
38	Remote Access	152	35,296
39	PBS Teachers . Learning.now	151	35,621
40	Eduwonkette	150	35,920
41	So You Want To Teach?	149	58,157
42	Eduwonk	148	36,614
43	Teach42	147	36,964
44	History Is Elementary	145	37,670
45	LeaderTalk	144	38,026
46	Infinite Thinking Machine	137	40,556
47	Creating Lifelong Learners	133	42,160
48	AssortedStuff	131	42,997
49	Connectivism Blog	128	44,360
50	think:lab	122	47,149
51	O’DonnellWeb	121	47,646
52	iterating toward openness	119	48,680
53	Teaching Generation Z	119	48,680
54	Generation YES Blog	112	52,751

Information about the table

• This time I only included blogs that predominantly post about P-12 education. No higher education blogs. No blogs that are mostly about training, software tools, or other topics with an occasional P-12–related post. No education news channels that happen to have an RSS feed. Just ‘pure’ P-12 blogs. I was on the fence about four blogs on the chart; those are marked with an asterisk. I included blogs 51 to 54 in case you think those four should not have been included.
• I gave up monitoring the several thousand blogs on my previous list. There were just too many to catalog and also too many newcomers. There are over 100,000 edublogs!
• I feel fairly confident about the accuracy of this list. I considered listing the top 100 but was not as confident about blogs 70 to 100 because I kept finding new ones in that range.
• If I missed you, I’m sorry. Please let me know for next time. If you don’t like or disagree with my selection criteria, feel free to make your own list. It would be interesting to compare yours with this one.
• The very notion of what constitutes a ‘top’ edublog is very personal and individual (see, e.g., posts by Stephen Downes and Peter Rock as well as the numerous comments regarding my last two attempts). Also, Technorati has a number of issues, but no one has yet suggested a more viable alternative. There are many, many great blogs not on this list. While a number of people are finding value in the blogs in this table, some excellent writing is occurring on blogs with lower authority. Read and write blogs for your own reasons rather than worrying about the numbers.

Other lists of top edublogs

Other attempts have been made to catalog the top edublogs. Of note are the following:

• Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop Education
• Aseem Badshah’s Live Mocha list

Some stats on Alltop

Only 19 of the top 50 blogs in the chart above are on Alltop Education. Interestingly, I also discovered that at least 9 of the blogs on Alltop Education have an authority of less than 26, meaning that they have less than one inbound link per week.

Blogs with big gains in authority

Take heart, bloggers who want more readers / links! As the chart below shows, a number of the blogs on this list had large gains in authority over the past 11 months. Some of the top blogs (including Students 2.0, Angela Maiers, and Eduwonkette) didn’t even exist a year ago.

Final thoughts

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts or reactions regarding this post. I am deeply honored that so many of you choose to read my blogs, appreciate any and all feedback, and look forward to the conversation!

[cross-posted at Dangerously Irrelevant in case you can’t comment here]