eastwikkers

Reading, Writing, ’Rithmetic… and Blogs

On the education beat this week…

A discussion with an educator at the State University of New York's University at Buffalo about blogs and their benefit in the classroom: “In some cases, the blogs also outlast the course in which they are offered.” And, the Washington Post details how a New Jersey high school teacher set up a blog for students to converse about "The Secret Life of Bees." The result: the book’s author herself made a special appearance to talk to students, commending students for their insights about her own book.

And the teachers’ lounge hits the blogosphere. Click here to read what life is really like in the classroom, as teachers share frustrations about lack of tech funding, opinions about educational debates and more. Blogging in education will be one arena worth tracking, along with issues surrounding teacher anonymity (how open will educators be, with administrators and others reading?) and transparency.

Business Week on the New Web

Wonderful special issue coming next week, with articles on the leaders of the new Web, Ajax, tagging (why markerters love it), the power of participatory sites (with very cool snapshots of companies like Pandora and Postsecret ), and blogging in education (a new interest of ours).  Main story quotes Ross Mayfield, CEO at Socialtext, an Eastwick partner and client:

"'The Web isn't so much a place anymore', explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, 'They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs'