My first experience with blogging was some years back - a blog I set up to promote the launch of a work of fiction. Once the book had finished its print run, and had 'gone digital', I abandoned my post. For one thing, as a teacher, I found that some of my students had accessed the blog and found amusement at the thought of teacher as author. I can take a joke at my expense, but for various reasons, I wished to move on.
Blogging involves a risk - you can be accused of various forms of narcissism: naval-gazing, pretentiousness, self-importance or self-promotion. In the case of the novel blog, I was attempting to promote something, though in that kind of low-key, understated Australian way. After some years in the virtual wilderness, I return to digital writing. My purpose this time is both simpler and more complex: I wish to write about educational issues - something important in my job as a director in a Sydney school - with a particularly interest in contemporary issues related to curriculum and pedagogy change.
The blog is personal and not meant to represent the views of my employer.
I hope to write about once a week though I doubt I will be successful in this. I am far too busy at it is to make rash promises. This entry has the theme 'Going Digital' and I will be very, very brief. Last year, as part of a Masters course, I completed a literature review related to the topic of digital literacies and pedagogy. Today, in reading an article (referenced below) I found this nice little summary which addresses some of the key issues I wrote about in my review (and in a sentence or two, which is perfect):
"Web 2.0 is a set of communication practices: distinctly human activities that are made possible by this infrastructure ... This pattern of features has been shown to reconfigure practices in four areas of human communication (Crook, 2008) - each with particular significance for what might be experienced within teaching and learning [my layout from here - for clarity]
1) Inquiry. Web 2.0 creates new structures for organising data: new sources to refer to, multiple forms of authority, and new tools to interrogate this rich space of information
2) Literacies. Widely accessible digital media offer new modes of representation and offer tools that invite developing fluency in the related modes of representation and offer tools that invite developing fluency in the related modes of self-expression (cf. Manovich, 2010
3) Collaboration. This concept of join activity implied by this term is extended by the range of loosely-coupled co-ordinations that can exist within structures of large scale network participation (cf. Tapscott & Williams, 2006) ...
4) Publication. Web 2.0 structures can support users in creating original material for dissemination, providing for that both tools and an audience.'
Charles Crook, 'The "Digital Native" in context: tensions associated with importing Web 2.0 practices into the school setting', Oxford Review of Education, 38:1, 64.
For teachers, and for school leaders, these four areas provide a range of challenges: how and what we teach; how and what we share of this within and beyond our organisation; how changes are managed and innovations and transformations are balanced against traditional forms of assessment which measure our academic successes regardless of our progress in these areas.
In trying to find the right balance between a personal and professional tone, I end on this note: starting this blog has distracted me from the formal task of writing an essay. My topic is to identify and discuss the major challenges faced by curriculum leaders in my educational context. I could write a lot about this informally, but within the educational community of a Masters degree, I am confined to a single audience, in traditional forms, with collaboration at the pointy-end of assessment discouraged.
It is important for educators to keep moving back and forth between the 'participatory attitudes and participatory aspirations' of Web 2.0 and the more formal structures of education and assessment that constitute real-world experience when it comes to accreditation. Otherwise, we can be accused of naval-gazing, pretentiousness and self-importance in blogs and tweets that are little more than dressed-up thought bubbles that might be better kept to ourselves.
