Educator blogs

Educator Blogs

Will Richardson:
http://weblogg-ed.com/
weblogg-ed: learning with the read/write web

This blog is a comprehensive source for information on the educational use of blogging. Richardson is clearly an expert in the field and his posts reflect up to date knowledge and credibility. His blog postings, which range from topics like using blogs for collaboration to how e-books are changing the way people read, are organized using Pageflakes. He has links to literally hundreds of other blogs with similar topics and has organized these blogs through the subheadings like Blogs on Educational Blogging, Blogs about Literacy, Brain and Cognition Blogs, Classroom Blogs, Teacher Blogs, and Student Blogs.

Richardson's blog postings are organized using Pageflakes and although it is hard to discern from the Pageflakes page the date of his postings, they are very current. His last posting appears to be from the 19th of this month and he appears to post almost daily. Judging from the number of comments on most of his posts, Richardson has a strong following and an active web audience. Overall, his blog seems to serve two purposes: advertising and promoting his workshops and reflecting on current trends in the use of the Read/Write web.

I found Richardson's blog to be the more user friendly of the two blogs. It was easy to navigate through his separate pages without having to re-enter the url to get to the home page. His page on RSS feeds (from his book) struck me as particularly helpful and as a teacher who is just learning about the possibilities of the Read/Write web, this would be a good place to start for general information.



David Warlick
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/
2 Cents Worth: Teaching and Learning in the New Information Landscape

In Warlick's "About" page, he describes the purpose of his blog as a place to have his ideas "criticized, deconstructed, recombined, added to, and, when possible, to be used." Just as Richardson explains in his book, Warlick resists the idea of comparing his blog to a diary--yet he acknowledges that it is not entirely unlike a diary. He points to one difference--many of his blogs are questions, designed to spur thinking about the effectiveness of our educational system. One of the neatest features of Warlick's blog is the Tag cloud that highlights the most used phrases in his blog, comments, and posts in the past 30 posts and 120 comments. At the time of my reviewing his blog, the 4 most commonly used terms seemed to be: Warlick, conferences, e-learning, and video games.

To learn more about David Warlick, visitors to this blog can also go to http://davidwarlick.com/. This is where information about Warlick's credentials can be found. Warlick's content in his blogs seemed a bit more related to personal interest than Richardson's. While Richardson focused primarily on the classroom and on the use of technology in education, Warlick's blog seemed more general, asking and answering questions about education, in general.

I had a problem navigating easily through Warlick's blog, not all his links to separate pages led back to the home page of his blog. I did enjoy Warlick's Podcast link, which featured interviews with experts in the area of technology use in education. His "guests" credentials were clearly stated in the introductions to the podcasts. Judging from his "Reading" link, Warlick stays extremely current with his reading on topics of education. His latest post was from yesterday, and there were a good deal of posts he had written in response to research he has done just this month. There didn't seem to be nearly as many comments on this blog as on Richardson's.