Response to Chapters One and Two

Will Richardson does a really good job of selling his passion. I get it; I believe it; I'm gonna try it when I get into my own classroom. I do have some concerns, however, about his enthusiasm for online learning and collaboration through blogging. I'll post those here.

1- I am not a writing or reading snob at all. I agree with the author that students should find things of interest to them online and reflect and write about them. Students should definitely be reading and responding to one another's work. Blogs are an amazing opportunity to give students a real voice beyond the walls of the classroom. That's powerful stuff. My question is about the quality of writing found online, though, and whether boundaries should be set up with some type of list of standards that students should look for when choosing what links they will write about in their blogs. Shouldn't students be reading the BEST writers out there so that they have examples to emulate? When "publication" becomes as easy as the press of a button, when there is no filter to keep out the mundane and second rate, how do we guarantee the quality of this work that our students are reading? When there are too many cooks in the kitchen, the recipe is bound to get misinterpreted. In the same way, with their lives so saturated with bad literature, how are students supposed to learn to write well (by this I mean: interesting, detailed, imaginative work with clarity) when there are so few examples? Classrooms, I believe, should be the one place where students are given and expected to read high quality literature. Will Richardson doesn't address the "quality" component of the read/write web. This surprises me since he is an English and Journalism teacher. The one example he supplied of a solid piece of writing from a blog was a post in response to Amazon's marketing of a new electronic reading device called the kindle. The type of technical and persuasive writing available on amazon, in newsweek, in the digital library service is informative, yes. I would have to say, though, that this writing has no heart and it certainly has no soul. I do think students should be writing about things they care about, but I think controls should be set in place to keep students reading solid literature (whether it be fiction or nonfiction) from the very best writers.

2- American students are bombarded with advertising in their every day lives. Our mercenary culture has turned even the youngest among us into consumers. I feel like our classrooms should try to preserve the purity of the learning experience for as long as possible and shield kids from the constant intrusion of advertising in to their lives. The blog posting from the text that I cited earlier basically reads like an advertisement for Amazon's kindle product. This made me very uncomfortable. In an average day, how many ads do we see on the Internet? I don't know the number, but I bet it's a lot. Our classrooms should be a place where students can escape the constant noise of our buying-obsessed society. I think the Internet in many ways reinforces this idea that our value as Americans is our ability to consume- and endlessly at that. I think we need to fight this pervading culture of thought for the sake of our hearts, our minds and our earth- for us, for our students. Again, I want to utilize the best of the tools Will Richardson speaks so passionately about, but I do think we should keep these dangers in mind as we put the Internet to use in our classrooms.