Blogs = Invitations into Lives

I've been a subscriber to the main feed from Global Voices for only a few weeks and I find my Bloglines account constantly filled with new perspectives from around the globe.

Miguel originally picked up this post and I want to echo most of it:

"For many, blogs have become the door to the rest of the world. In writing a blog, you are inviting other people to know your life, and it is inevitable that this sentiment will be reciprocated. You ultimately read others’ blogs and discover their lives in other places."

This is exactly one reason why I want my kids to blog; and just as importantly, to read the blogs of others. Blogs are doors to the rest of the world. This is a powerful explanation of what we try to do. We "invite other people to know our lives," you "read others' blogs and discover their lives in other places." This is why I am adamant that my kids link to, read, and comment on the blogs of people who live in other parts of the globe. I want them to hear from Australian kids, from Brazilian kids. From kids who live in major urban centres, and from those who live in small towns just like they do. They need to learn about their differences, see their similarities, and understand about how, on this ever - shrinking globe, they are a generation of people who will have many problems to solve when they inherit what we are leaving behind.

Blogging may bring us into a new community of learners, but it also drives us from a "regular" place of comfort where the rules are steady, change is slow, and things are predictable. Instead, we leave this behind, and are driven towards trying to understand concepts of change in all of its facets and its impact on our lives, the lives of our students, and what we are trying to accomplish in our classrooms. This process is not easy or steady, and it provides us with little comfort outside of the constancy of change.

But it is only through this exile from "regular" teaching, a place I feel driven more and more towards, that we can open the peek through the doors into the lives of others in ways that are honest, respectful, and open to dialogue and understanding.  

technorati tags: blogging, networks, classrooms, learning,

Comments

[Vicki Davis]

Blogs are doors to the rest of the world! How very true! You and I see eye to eye on this one! GREAT post!

[Mark Ahlness]

Clarence, you are so on the money with why kids should blog! Now, I live in a big city, and I teach third graders, but the reasons we should teach our kids how to blog are the same. I would add one, with my age group - I want to teach them how to behave responsibly on the Internet - which I would argue is a new responsibility we all share as teachers.

[Stella Sabian]

This is also a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's is a real place of fun and learning and stuff (which is the priority in case with children), on the other - it might be somehow dangerous relative to any undesirable demoralizing and corrupting "information".