This exchange happened in March 2004 and I meant to post then… Like my previous posting, it has been sat in Draft ever since…
The text is from Will Richardson who pushes out some excellent stuff on the educational uses of weblogs. The subsequent comment is from The Shifted Librarian
From Weblogg-ed News
Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School
“English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk.
Its 6:50 in the morning. After logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in.
With a quick click, Tom uses the ‘Furl it’ button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in.
Next, he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before.
With one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the students personal site and adds a positive comment to the assignment post. He also ‘Furls’ that site, putting it in the Best Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. Its 7:00….”
Check out the full text of this amazing post by Will Richardson. In it, he pulls together the beginning threads of integrating blogs, RSS, and social bookmarking in an educational setting. It’s a great vision, one that I fully believe will eventually happen in one integrated app.
However – and this is a big however – the only time the library shows up in Will’s post is when the teacher unsubscribes from the library’s feed!
There’s no mention of a topical feeds from the library, use of library databases to support research or assignments, no collaborative collection of web-based resources managed by the library, or any other daily interaction with the library and its resources.
It’s actually pretty sad when you think about it, but unfortunately, it will be accurate if librarians don’t start understanding, using, and providing information to these types of tools.