thomas leverett weblog

WiAOC presentation

Leverett, T. and Montgomerie, J. (2005). This is your class: This is your class on weblogs. Webheads in Action Online Convergence, online conference, Nov. 17-20.

A few words about this presentation, which was held as part of the online conference mentioned. Both Jessica and I spent time organizing the weblog (linked above) and spent time at the Tapped In teachers' chat space talking about the cesl weblogs and what we and our students have done. A number of interesting observations came of the presentation.

Jessica went first; it was 8:00-9:00 PM Illinois time (Nov. 20) and thus had more North Americans and more serious weblog-in-the-classroom people attending. Questions were asked about evaluating weblog writing and how to encourage them to write on their own; a number of things were discussed, including the immediacy of weblogs; the heirarchical nature of our weblogs; getting s's to comment on each others' blogs; the use of sound on weblogs and how that tends to overload them; the relative low-tech nature of weblogs; Aaron Campbell's article on evaluating weblogs (see the This is your class website where the URL will appear soon)...); differences in bandwidth and access; and s's who type faster on cell-phone pads than on keyboards.

I came on at midnight on the same night; much of the conference was over, and we North American late-nighters were finishing it up. Questions were asked about weblogs' contribution to writing competence; revision on weblogs; and their relation to student interaction with each other. Various topics were discussed, including how to get around it when Blogger is blocked- as it is in China (again, see the weblog if you're curious); why some religious group would be shadowing our site with url's like ceslteachers.blogpsot.com; aggregating the weblogs (so that you know whenever someone posts); and whether blogs support right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic (they do).

I hope to put a number of quotes and links on the weblog shortly but will probably not publish the entire transcript. It was an excellent conference, and I'll say a few things about that too...stay posted!

posted by tom @ 9:38 PM