One blog I’m following with much interest this week is at this one. It’s a blog being written by a group of 35 high school journalism teachers taking part in an ASNE fellowship in Arizona. I have it on my reader and am really enjoying the news coming out of the conference each day because I will be heading for a 12-day ASNE conference in Columbia, Missouri, in mid-July. The blog is giving me a great perspective on the kinds of training, lectures and activities to expect.

It is interesting to learn that some of the teachers are reluctant bloggers, while others seem quite comfortable. I think those with journalism backgrounds take to blogging more easily, which makes sense. They are used to producing “news” and sharing information.

When I was a reporter, I was given a weekly column (at age 23!) which I wrote for the next ten years. I could write about anything that interested me, and so it was basically blogging but in print. It was prestigious at the time because only a handful of journalists in the newsroom were selected to write a column, and I was certainly the youngest and also the only female.

Now, writing a column for the newspaper has less prestige because the internet has opened the door wide to everyone who wants to speak out. There’s still the matter of finding an audience, of course, and a newspaper helps provide that, but some of the most popular blogs (and profitable ones) are produced by independent writers who came up with a good idea and worked it well. Their publicity grew and they are now media companies in their own right.

The wonder of the internet is that you can write in a tiny niche space and sometimes find a sustainable audience that is unbounded by geography and time. Sometimes when I run across a great blog post, I spend hours going back through the years-old posts on the site before adding the address to my Google reader. You couldn’t do that with a great newspaper column 10 years ago. Blogs live forever.

[Photo credit: "Blogs" by dalequetepego on Flickr]

I am so incredibly grateful to be living in the 21st century! I’m an information junkie through and through, and with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks it seems like I can find anything I want to find. This makes me as happy as the day I learned, at four years old, that I could check out as many books from the library as I could carry. (Really, I remember the librarian saying that to me and I remember the stack I shuffled out to the car, the corners of the picture books poking the insides of my elbows, the way the books smelled when I got them back to my room). It was unbelievable and glorious, and now as an adult living in the age of high-speed internet, MacBooks, free content and open source software, it’s even better. 

Of the experiments I incorporated into my teaching in the last year — the nings, the wikis, the google forms, joomla and edublog, apture, animoto, zamzar, zoho, teachertube, etc… — 90 percent of them were triggered from tidbits on a blog (the school, a technology-centered high school, already had a wiki). I have learned so much this past year and it has energized by life and my teaching by opening up possibilities for creative experimentation and play that did not exist when I used the old 20th century tools of teaching: the overhead, the whiteboard, the VCR. 

I am still amazed at the generosity of bloggers. You can see the list of blogs I read on the right of this page; I check them daily (okay, several times a day, by logging into my Google Reader to see what’s new). It seems impossibly kind that bloggers will take the time to provide advice — and links! — on tools, to share notes from conferences, to relay concerns about the state of their minds/hearts/jobs/education/the world… all at no cost to me. Do they know they are impacting a classroom in Ventura, California? No. Do they understand that 170 sophomores spent a year building a Ning community because of them? No. Do they get it that a teacher who thought so many times about bailing on the profession has been reenergized? I hope so!

[Photo Credit: "Information Superhighway" by nickwheeleroz]