The two teachers’ blogs I explored earlier have a lot of good content, but are rather plain in terms of design and use of media. So I followed a link on one of them that led me to another educator’s blog that offers much more varied content for analysis. This is 2 cents Worth, a blog from David Warlick, who is not only a teacher but also the author of several books on education. Warlick is an evangelist for a new, digital paradigm for education in the 21st century, so it is no surprise that his blog is sophisticated in its use of blogging, podcasting and hypertext technology.
Warlick uses WordPress, but has his own, non “WordPress” URL. A striking image of a china cup, filled with black coffee relecting a blue light, tops the blog. A Creative Commons bug inside the banner prominently alerts us that this blogger is eager to share his words and ideas (with attribution, in non-commercial, non-derivative works). Large orange RSS bugs just below the banner make it easy for users to subscribe to this blog.
The blog is composed in black and grey text on a white page with grey borders. Numerous images and thumbnails make the page colorful, but never cluttered.
The blog uses a two-column format, with stories on the left and a narrow strip of items (what should I call these?) on the right, including a photo of the author, a list of books by him (with thumbnails of the book’s covers), a list of books he has recently read, a series of thumbnails of Flickr photos from his recent travels, a Clustrmap showing where in the world visitors to this blog come from, a series of Seesmic podcasts, a blogroll, an archive, and finally a link to the International Edubloggers Directory. Whew!
The blogposts themselves are richly illustrated with photos, charts and screenshots. The posts are about events and developments in the digital world that relate to education. Recent posts include a story about a teacher who assigned his students to write Wikipedia articles, and comments on Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Every One.”
My eye was attracted to the Seesmic podcasts (are they podcasts?) in the right hand column. Warlick uses these to post random thoughts, but also to respond to inquiries from people who have commented on his blog. I liked getting to know the author a little better by seeing and hearing him.
One thing I missed on this blog was some kind of “About Me” section. Perhaps it’s in there somewhere, but I missed it. I certainly learned a lot about the author just by exploring his blog, but I had to go to to Google to find another Worpress page that gave me biographical information about him. But this reminds me that I don’t have any kind of “About Me” information on my blog either. I think I’d better get to work on fixing that right now.
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