I would like to thank everyone who attended the SIG meeting on Thursday afternoon. For those of you who were not able to join us – I’m breaking the rule and letting what happened in Vegas out of Vegas. We had a wonderful conversation about the things we are doing with technology in our various educational lives. As a way to keep the conversation and sharing we started in Vegas going, those of us at the meeting planned to use the SITEBlog (www.siteblog.org) to post stories about our work. These posting can take form however you would like – as long or as short as you like – focused on any area of interest to you. We talked about individuals “signing” up for a post each month (thanks Sara McNeil for this idea!). I am going to get things started this month and I hoped that you all might respond to this post with a comment on a time that you will post to the blog. Of course, we can rearrange things, but it would be nice if we can at least get things started with some folks committing to the blog.
I want to say a couple of other things about blogging that I got from Troy Hicks who is a colleague in English Education. Troy is a quite prolific and insightful blogger (http://hickstro.org/) and I asked him, basically, how do you do it? (look at what Troy posted from SITE in Vegas!) He said that part of the process was simply unpacking his thoughts after meaningful experiences, without as much concern for form and shape. Troy said there seem to be several profiles for bloggers from the “white paper” posters to the folks like himself who just let it flow. It seems to me that one impediment to posting on blogs might be this expectation that what we write has to be a perfectly formed piece of prose – all academic. I am hoping that we can use this blog to just talk to each other. I know that is easier said that done, but for one I am going to “just let it flow” on this blog and see where it takes us.
One last thing – for those of you not familiar with blogging technology, you do not have to visit the website every day to find out what has been posted. SITEBlog allows you to set your preferences so that you can receive an email whenever something new has been posted. Another approach is to “feed” the blog to a reader or your favorite web-based portal space (My Yahoo, iGoogle, MSN Live, ect).
So, thanks again – look for a post on something from me to follow
And!! Tell your friends and colleagues in social studies about SITEBlog. You do have to be a member of SITE to post, but anyone can comment. I think we would all appreciate broadening the conversation, so the more the merry!
John