homoLudens

Tom Hoffman responds to Paul Allison’s two big questions:

Is blogging a means (or a tool) to achieve other goals (content knowledge or skills)?~~ OR ~~

Does blogging have a set of intellectual habits and skills that are worth learning for themselves?

Tom says the obvious answer is ‘both.’

I’m not sure I agree. The whole “blogging” as a genre idea makes me uneasy for some reason. Maybe I’ll have something to add to the discussion after I re-read Henry Jenkins’ ‘Confronting the challenges of participatory culture’ and then join Paul and Christina Cantrill from the National Writing Project (NWP) for a Thursday morning breakfast discussion about “things next.” Following Mark Bernstein’s experienced advice, two quick comments here from a vacation connection:

1. Kudos to Tom for the nod at NWP’s technology initiatives, where early advocates of blogging for the teaching and learning of writing continue to work thoughtfully and without a lot of fanfare or self-congratulation to implement this stuff in real classrooms with real teachers.
2. And speaking of real classrooms and blogging to achieve other goals, I can testify that having a blog gets you, if nothing else, the education discount for Nilaja Sun’s Off-Broadway “No Child???”. I showed up at the ticket office yesterday afternoon without my union card or any other proof of profession. With a little cajoling, the ticket seller checked our school weblog community’s url, selected library from the nav bar and saw my beaming face staring from the blog banner. Voila! 50% off. The show is worth more than even the full price of admission, btw. Sun stuns with her energy, wit, eye for realistic detail, and mind-blogglingly fast changes of character. Yeah, it ended on a note of qualified hope that I found a little precious. We need a k-12 version of ‘The Office,’ a relentlessly hopeless and funny BBC-style drama called “The School,’ to do justice to the working conditions, for teachers and students, inside of real schools. Until that happens, “No Child???” is the funniest, sharpest and most realistic dramatization of teaching that I’ve ever seen on the stage.