XplanaZine

The Potential of Personal Publishing in Education I: What’s doing & who’s doing it?

Having spent most of the last three columns whinging (well, what do you expect of a pom downunder ;o) I thought for this one I’d kick along with something constructive, well, try to…

Personal Publishing (PP) works… there’s no doubt about that: look at weblogs.com, Google’s new toolbar, Blogger, Livejournals and the rest. It works in a ton of ways:

• For sharing
• For expression
• For collaboration
• For, well, publishing in the traditional sense
• For discussion
• For all of the above both integrated and apart
• And a fair bit more

But I guess what interests me most is the potential that’s there. As a weblogger myself I feel and sense it in the my work and the weblogs I aggregate, as a theorist it’s blatantly obvious that PP offers a range of unique, exciting opportunities and as an educator I can see the learning that goes on (and do a fair bit myself!).
Assuming that PP becomes as simple as the desktop or using Word (some might argue it already is… but that’s a concept-shift ‘aint it), assuming that the acceptability of publishing online grows and the fear of it diminishes and assuming that we roll with what works (hmmm… that could be the tricky one!), the potential use of weblogs in education in enormous.

I’ve tried to outline this before in a couple of documents, here and here, but what I’ve continually run up against is the ‘but what specifically will it do for us’ question… which is fair enuf! So, what I’d like to do here is take current uses, refer to some of the amazing people who are writing and doing just this, assume a number of contexts and trundle out some ideas of how PP can really kick off in education, ahem, here goes…

So what’s already going on:

Anne Davis is training student teachers in using weblogs and offers up a host of possibilities for use by teachers and a host of reflections of using weblogs by learners.

[What seems like] A very long time ago… I was setting up personal publishing as ‘reflective journals’ (.pdf) for English language learners.

Pattie Belle Hastings is asking her learners to PP for design research and reflection.

Dave Winer at has set up a system where anyone with a harvard.edu email addy can set up a weblog here and do, well, whatever they like with it… for example.

Will Richardson ran a pretty amazing journalism course and got some pretty amazing feedback from the learners.

TBC