Blogging curriculum draft

December 14th, 2007 at 04:59pm Deen Freelon Permalink

Here is a rough draft of my blogging curriculum in MS Word format. It makes perfect sense
to me, but I suspect some parts might not be entirely intelligible to
others, so please send any feedback you may have.

A brief note about executing this curriculum—I wrote it with a classroom-based instructional style in mind. In this it borrows much from Howard Rheingold’s digital skills exercises, with two major exceptions: 1) my curriculum assumes less civic foreknowledge and initiative on the part of students, and 2) it attempts to leverage peer feedback as an evaluation mechanism that lets students know whether their messages are being conveyed successfully. The classroom approach is superior to placing the curriculum exclusively online primarily because it is very difficult to inculcate civic interests via the web—that is, I don’t imagine that many kids will come to the PSO site in
search of instructions on how to blog deliberatively. Rather, I believe
that skills such as these are better discussed and taught in person and
among peers whenever possible. That said, I think the technical
how-to’s of blogging would be good to place on the site in a “Help” or
“How to use this site” section, and I also think that some of the video
PSAs might be able to address some of the more normative aspects of my
curriculum. But generally speaking, it’s probably not a great idea to rely on the web site as our primary medium for imparting
civic skills to kids. The learning goals my curriculum aims to fulfill—public voice, issue definition, deliberation, active listening—aren’t the sorts of skills most teenagers can (or would necessarily think to) teach themselves. Actualized citizens will find PSO on
their own and do great things with it, but their less-engaged peers would best
benefit from as much direct civic instruction as we can provide them.

Download YVO-blogcurriculum.doc

Entry Filed under: digital learning skills