Like reading,
writing, and arithmetic, web blogging is both content and activity. You don’t
just learn “about” reading: you learn to read. You don’t just learn “about”
arithmetic: you learn to count and calculate. You don’t just learn “about” the
web: you learn to make your own website. As with these other three literacies,
web blogging begins simply, with basics you can build upon. For some it can
lead to a profession while for most it becomes part of the conceptual DNA that
helps you to understand and negotiate the world you live in.
No one would have believed that peers could contribute knowledge and advice, helping one another to learn through YouTube videos, Wikipedia, or other sites. In fact, if you go back to 2000, before any of those things existed, you cannot find accepted theories of human nature, economics, or earning that could predict that those things could and would exist in less than a decade. No one guessed Wikipedia’s success, not even its founders. We simply didn’t know that, without a work plan, a lesson plan, or a taxonomy of what “counts” as knowledge, without leadership or payments or designated roles, people--non-experts--would build the largest encyclopedia the world has ever known, because we love to share what we know with others, and we’re even willing to spend endless hours creating our own community standards, editing, and making it right.
Right now kids can go online outside of school all they want. Some schools drop iPads into the schools as if that makes kids literate. But if web blogging, including web edublogging, was adopted by every school as a fourth basic blogging, kids would not only learn how to code, they would learn about interactivity, collaboration, the melding of the artistic and the scientific, creativity, and precision. We’d also benefit from a far more diverse technology world if every boy and girl, from every economic, cultural, and national background, were learning about edublogging from the time they started school.
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