Dangerously Irrelevant

Social network overload

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

What social networks do I belong to? Let me see…

MySpace. Ning Classroom 2.0. Facebook. Ning EdubloggerWorld. LinkedIn. Ning Stop Cyberbullying. The blogosphere. The Did You Know? 2.0 wiki community. And my burgeoning list of Twitter friends. And the folks in my Skype and other instant messaging networks. And also my only-sometimes-electronic personal and professional networks: other professors, principals, superintendents, technology coordinators, assessment coordinators, former students, friends, family. And so on… (do listservs count? Second Life? my classes in WebCT?)

A few things are becoming clear to me about all of this social networking that is occurring:

1. I don’t have time to do much of it. I see the active Twittering that’s going on, the vibrant dialogues occurring in Ning, the questions that others are asking and answering in Facebook. I’m already exhausted trying to balance everything. I can’t keep up with the reading, not to mention the posting and participating. I’ve essentially chosen e-mail, the blogosphere, and live people over more formalized social networking and instant messaging tools. Maybe I’m starting to become one of those antiquated old fogies that the young whippersnappers complain about… (Q: if I have a bunch of social networking “friends” but never participate, does that make me “antisocial?”)
2. I spend more time in the networks that push notifications out to me via e-mail or my RSS aggregator. I’d likely be more active in Facebook, for example, if I could subscribe to all of its functionality rather than having to remember to go visit.
3. I agree with Wired.
4. We need to be sure that one of the 21st century skills students learn is “navigating and managing multiple, potentially overlapping, worldwide social networks” (or something like that).
5. As some of us encourage educators to dive into social networking, it behooves us to explicitly acknowledge the challenges of time management, multiple network management, etc. It’s not all glam and glitz.
6. There are a lot of social networks out there. Some of them are a little lame (wait a minute! I belong to one of these!).
7. Right now RSS is the key. Services like Feedburner’s subscribe via e-mail are stopgaps to bridge old technologies with the new.
8. Maybe I need a dedicated widescreen social networking monitor, one that I just load up with open social networking, IM, RSS, Twitter, and e-mail windows. That way I’ll never miss a beat (and also never get anything else done).

I need to get over my worry that I’m going to miss something. I’m saying no to the next social network invitation I get. I don’t care if it’s the “People who want to give Scott McLeod a million dollars” network. Sorry. My brain is full.

P.S. #4 is really important.

It's the first day of school (again)!

In honor of the first day of school here in Ames, Iowa, here is the checklist I posted last year at this time. Hmmm... I wonder if schools have made any improvements on this list over the past year?

Not so thrilling?

A video of prison inmates in the Philippines remaking Michael Jackson’s Thriller is a big hit on YouTube. As is typical, the rebuttal is getting much less attention.

The truth is somewhere in all of this, although as an outsider I can hardly presume to know what it is. But this much is certain: these two videos certainly highlight yet again the importance of media and information literacy.

Did You Know? predicts Armageddon?

Karl Fisch just sent me a link to this video. If you watch the first 10 minutes or so, you'll see Hal Lindsey of the Trinity Broadcasting Network use Did You Know? (Jeff Brenman's adaptation of the original version) as an indicator that Armageddon is near.

Oh, and if you like the video, you can order it on DVD at 1-800-Titus35.

Urban school decay

I don’t know how Will Richardson came across these pictures of the Detroit Public School Book Depository, but I can’t get them out of my head so I’m sharing them here. [click on each image for a larger version]

As a former urban educator, these pictures really speak to me because they’re photographic metaphors for the decay and rot that we have allowed to take hold in our largest urban school systems. Detroit. Chicago. New York. St. Louis. Houston. Miami. Philadelphia. Los Angeles. Washington, D.C. And so on… They all have wonderful schools, but they also have dozens/hundreds of schools that would make you weep if your child had to attend them.

Where is our moral shame? Where is our humanity?

Game mods for the elementary crowd

Many gaming-savvy teenagers and adults create modifications, or mods, of the video games that they play. By doing this, they transcend from mere players into virtual world creators. Conceptualizing, designing, building, testing, revising - these are all complex cognitive skills that go far beyond the relatively simplistic skills required by many educational software programs.

So I was delighted to see my 2nd-grade son and 4th-grade daughter breathlessly rush up to me today to show me the levels that they created for their newest Nintendo DS game, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis. At ages 7 and 9, they're already engaging in complex world creation on their little Nintendo just like they can with SimCity, The Sims, Zoo Tycoon, and RollerCoaster Tycoon. Best of all, they are finding that creating new worlds may be more fun than just playing the game.

Elementary kids as world builders. Very cool...

[image credit: http://tinyurl.com/282woz]

Happy birthday!

Has it been a whole year already? Today Dangerously Irrelevant is one year old!

Linked

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Two weeks ago I reported on my second effort to catalog the edublogosphere, to put some shape and form to the amorphous network, to try and measure the largely unmeasurable. Some of my blogging colleagues raised various concerns and objections. Here’s my take…

1. As is described quite clearly (and eloquently) in Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, the Internet and the education blogosphere are both examples of complex, self-organizing networks. As such, they have multiple hubs of varying sizes, each connected to each other and to multiple individual nodes (i.e., blogs and web sites). [click on image for larger version]
   
   Some hubs are connected to thousands of other hubs and nodes; we might call these superhubs (e.g., A-D). Other hubs (e.g., E-H) are connected to less than a dozen nodes. The key here is that many nodes never would come into contact each other except for the hubs. For example, edublogger 1 only finds out about edublogger 2 because edublogger A highlighted and linked to something edublogger B wrote about edublogger 2’s post.
2. The hubs and superhubs are the essential connectors, the glue that holds the network together. For example, if edublogger 2 quits blogging, the only one that loses access to that voice is edublogger B. If edublogger C stops blogging, however, the rest of the network not only loses access to that person’s voice, it also loses access to the voices of those edubloggers to which only C linked. If edublogger A quits blogging, the network loses access to edubloggers E and F as well as all of the individual edubloggers to which only they were connected (at least until those nodes get reconnected to other hubs). The process is all very fluid, shifting and changing with each hyperlink.
3. There are advantages to being first, but over time quality wins out. One of the reasons that edubloggers like Will Richardson and David Warlick are superhubs is because they were some of the first ones in the education blogosphere. They had first-mover advantage and have had time to build up their audience compared to the new edublogger who started yesterday. That said, over time their advantage begins to diminish as others enter the network. If Will and David’s posts didn’t continue to be of high quality, people would link to other bloggers instead and Will and David’s audiences would dwindle. Hubs and superhubs must have ‘sticky’ content in order to retain their roles in the network. It’s a testimony to many of the top edubloggers that they’ve been able to be consistently good, as defined by their audiences, for a long period of time.
4. If you are interested in making change, the hubs and superhubs have important roles to play. Why? Because they’re the ones with the ability to reach many. They’re also the ones with the ability to bring important ideas generated out on the fringes of the network into the mainstream center of the network.

So, in response to some of the objections…

• It’s not just an issue of ‘popularity.’ Because we voluntarily visit / subscribe to blogs, content wins out over superficiality in the end. High-ranking blogs are there because others value their voices. You may not think an individual blogger is interesting, but others often do in large numbers. So Terry Freedman says, “Quality not quantity.” And Vicki Davis says “meaningful” is more important than “popular.” But as item 3 above notes, these supposed dichotomies actually are conflated.
• I see knowledge and identification of the hubs and superhubs as important for facilitating change. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach advocates focusing on impact, not just ranking. To me, impact and ranking tend to blur since I think about large-scale, comprehensive reform of schools, not just localized change. Most of us are change agents – whether our agenda is K-12 technology, home schooling, back-to-basics education, or whatever – but it’s hard to make change when no one is listening. If I want to influence the educational technology arena, I need to catch the attention of folks like Will and David and Sheryl and Terry and Vicki and also be able to point educators to them. If I want to influence the homeschooling arena, I need to catch the eye of SpunkyHomeSchool. And so, again, I believe that impact and ranking are somewhat intertwined.
• Each of us has our own reason(s) for blogging, and of course we always must respect those. I would never presume to either guess others’ reasons or judge the legitimacy of those motivations.
• Maybe it’s the academic in me, but I think there is worth in someone doing a systematic study of the education blogosphere. It doesn’t have to be me, but someone ought to be able to cite some basic statistics about what’s going on. For example, those of us who advocate educational blogging gain legitimacy from the fact that we know that there are 50,000+ education blogs rather than just a few hundred. In other words, we have the numbers to show that educational blogging is not a fad; whatever form it takes down the road, it’s here to stay. I also don’t know how else to identify the hubs and superhubs other than to do what we did. Although we may have missed some blogs with smaller audiences, I’m fairly confident that we got all the big ones (maybe not in the right ranking order).
• I personally feel that there is no better way to recognize and honor voice than to share new and powerful voices with others. When I see interesting, illuminating writing, I want to share that with others and to do my part to help those writers gain large audiences. Sheryl said “What is important is giving our students and teachers ‘voice.’ We need to focus on helping them develop as communicators and writers, not rankers, so they have a place at the policy table and can help to leave this world better than we found it.” I concur, but I disagree that ranking is unimportant. If we want students and educators to ‘have a place at the policy table,’ the inherent nature of a complex, self-organizing network almost demands that those folks become a hub or superhub in order to gain the attention of policymakers. Policymakers rarely, if ever, listen to folks who represent small constituencies, so the larger the audience we can give powerful bloggers, the better.
• I could have listed just the top few dozen edubloggers in my results, but I didn’t. Instead, I included every single URL that we found so that others could find new voices and bring them to the attention of the hubs and superhubs. I will continue to do this and encourage others to do the same. Indeed, illustrating that perhaps I was deeper in the ‘echo chamber than I suspected, I found some new hubs and superhubs that I didn’t even know existed (for example, how many ed tech bloggers knew about The Panda’s Thumb or Classical School Blog or that they were reaching large audiences?).
• Terry is right: Technorati has many issues. But until someone points me to something better, that’s the best I have. I, too, am somewhat confused by the different rankings that occur when different URLs are used for the same blog, but I don’t know what to do other than to provide an online form that people can use to fix or include their URL for next time.

So with all due respect, Vicki, Sheryl, and Terry, I understand and respect your perspectives but I don’t share them, at least not on this front. As always, I appreciate everyone’s input and welcome further suggestions for how to improve this ongoing project. Many thanks…

Liability for linking?

Chris Craft has posted an interesting scenario about the potential legal liability of using Slideshare, or any non-district-sponsored web service, that has advertisements that may be inappropriate for school-age children.

I will first offer my typical caveats that

1. I am not in an attorney-client relationship with anyone reading this;
2. Although I’m pretty sure that I’m correct, you rely on my opinions at your legal risk; and
3. I always encourage educators to consult with their local school organization’s attorney about any legal questions that they may have.

That said, here are my thoughts…

It seems to me that Chris’ practice of embedding his Slideshare presentations within his district-sponsored Moodle system, combined with his district’s blocking of Slideshare, should be enough to protect him from claims that he negligently exposed children to inappropriate Web content. He’s not sending students to the Slideshare site directly. In fact, his district is blocking students’ ability to do so. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that Chris could be liable for students accessing the site from home. That would sort of be like trying to hold Chris accountable when a student used Google at home to look up inappropriate images just because the student also used Google at school (where access to such images was blocked).

If he wanted, Chris might be able to strengthen his case by including an explicit notice that he and the school have provided safeguards against access to inappropriate content, that students should access school-related content only within those safeguards, and that he and the school are not liable for students’ deliberately bypassing those safeguards at home. Such a notice could be on his Moodle site, in a note sent home to parents, part of the student-signed acceptable use policy (see, e.g., a model AUP from the Indiana Department of Education), or all three. Another potential safeguard might be a popup window that appeared whenever a student clicked on a link to an external site. The text in the window could note that the student was leaving the district web environment and disclaim liability for any further actions by the student on other web sites.

The essence of negligence is whether educators acted reasonably under the circumstances. Given the safeguards already in place and maybe the additional ones that I’ve briefly described, I think Chris is probably okay when the situation is viewed in its totality. It’s one thing to hold him and his school liable for a direct link to inappropriate content. The further away from direct linking a student gets (2 links? 5 links? 10 links?), the less likely a court would be to hold Chris and the school responsible. There’s no bright line here, but ‘reasonable conduct’ should win the day…

8 random things

I’ve been tagged by several people to participate in the 8 Random Things meme. I usually don’t post about personal stuff on this blog, but given that my last post opened me up a bit, here goes…

1. Superman : Kryptonite. Me : birthday cake or Dove dark chocolate.
2. I spent four summers working at Camp Nock-A-Mixon, a summer camp for wealthy Jewish kids from New York, New Jersey, and Philly, the last three supervising five bunks of 6– to 9–year-olds. It was a fantastic experience where I learned that even the well-to-do have issues, fell in love with bagels and lox, and picked up a little Yiddish.
3. I was the first untenured professor in the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development to ever win the college’s Distinguished Teaching Award. I’m pretty proud of that one.
4. I’m the only member of my immediate family that swims more like a rock than a fish.
5. My three favorite books of all time may be Ender’s Game, The Dragonbone Chair, and Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community (the latter should be required reading for every educator across the globe). I’ll read anything I can find by Orson Scott Card, Tad Williams, Alfie Kohn, Jonathan Kozol, George R.R. Martin, or Richard Florida.
6. I think The College of William & Mary might the greatest place in the world to spend your undergraduate years.
   
7. I'm a big fan of indoors. Outside has allergies, heat, dirt, bugs, etc. If I were a character on Little House on the Prairie, I'd be the sickly kid in the back room that was the shame of my parents and died at age 7.
   
8. When I was 10 my dad thought it would be cool to buy me a tarantula. I would lie awake for hours every night, afraid that if I fell asleep it would get out and I would wake up to find it crawling up my chest toward my face. Aaahhhhh!

Here are another 5 random things if you’re interested. Seems like this is a recurring meme. I’ll look forward to the next one (4 random things? 10 random things?).

First ... Then ... Now ... Next

I’m a judge for Dan Meyer’s 4 Slides contest (entries are due Friday!). But here’s what I’d submit if I wasn’t… [click on each slide to see a larger version]

[photo credits: http://tinyurl.com/yo23zm and http://tinyurl.com/yonwnv]

Moving Forward - Example blogs to use for presentations?

Many of give presentations or deliver training workshops for K-12 or postsecondary educators. As part of those professional development efforts, we have a variety of resources and favorites that we use: background readings for participants, videos that we show, example blogs or wikis that we highlight, etc.

I’m working on a wiki, Moving Forward, which I’m hoping can be a good resource for all of us. Miguel and David and Wesley and Will and Sheryl and Karl and Jeff and John and Vicki and … Each has their own private list of examples and resources that they use when they present. I’d like to encourage everyone to contribute at least one resource to the Moving Forward wiki.

To start, let’s focus on blogging:

• What are some good background readings and other resources on K-12 and/or postsecondary blogging?
• What are some good example student, teacher, administrator, or staff blogs to show audiences?

Please contribute your resources and URLs to the Moving Forward Blogs page. This is a great way for everyone to create a resource that can be used by all of us as we work to facilitate technology-related change in schools and universities. Just one resource or example blog, that’s all I ask. C’mon, that’s nothing! You can do it!

Feel free to add to the other pages as well. I'll issues calls for contributions for other sections of the wiki over the coming weeks. If you make a contribution, please add your name to the contributor list!

Soliciting submissions for new P-12 technology leadership research award

We are soliciting submissions for a new award honoring the best research article of the year related to P-12 technology leadership issues. The article may be published or unpublished, empirical or conceptual, but must be of publishable quality in a peer-reviewed academic journal and must pertain to P-12 school technology leadership, administration, and/or policy. Professors, graduate students, and other researchers in educational leadership, educational policy, instructional technology, and other fields are encouraged to submit any article written or published between August 1, 2006 and August 1, 2007. This award is co-sponsored by the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE) and the UCEA School Technology Leadership SIG.

The award recipient will be formally recognized at a brief ceremony during CASTLE's session at this year's UCEA convention in Alexandria, VA. The awardee also will receive a plaque and $250 toward conference travel or other expenses. Submissions will be reviewed anonymously by a five-person committee of professors and practitioners. Articles should be submitted as e-mail attachments to Dr. Scott McLeod, Director of CASTLE, at mcleod@iastate.edu no later than August 24, 2007. Applicants will be notified of their status by September 15, 2007.

Please contact Dr. McLeod if you have any questions about this award. Feel free to pass this notice on to additional listservs and other entities that may be interested.

Important questions about school leader preparation

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

A lot of folks have been asking important questions about school leader preparation lately. The most recent issue of AASA’s The School Administrator magazine profiles four key concerns.

Are school leadership programs any good?

Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, angered a number of folks with his 2005 report, Educating School Leaders, which was a scathing indictment of university educational administration programs. In this issue of The School Administrator, he and Diane Dean continue the theme that most school leader preparation practices are out of sync with the needs of schools:

The mission of the field is confused; the curriculum and degrees awarded have little relevance to practice; clinical experience is weak; the faculty is overly dependent on adjuncts and insufficiently involved with schools; admission and graduation standards are low; and research is of poor quality.

Do we have too many school leadership preparation programs?

In her article, Margaret Terry Orr chooses to focus on the growth of educational leadership doctoral programs and the resultant impact on quality and student selectivity. Orr notes that the growth has occurred mostly in smaller regional universities:

[T]hese programs lack the institutional resources, breadth and history of other universities to support a doctoral program. New programs are more likely to start up with fewer full-time dedicated faculty members and be more reliant upon adjunct faculty. They may be less able to develop more advanced-level coursework, offer more diverse specialized course options, support research and research skill development or have other educational developments in their institutions that would enrich their content. . . . [As smaller] institutions expand both doctoral program availability and number of admissions, access becomes less competitive. But does greater access diminish the value and quality of the degree?

Should we be skeptical of superintendents who don’t have an education background?

Tim Quinn, managing director of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendents Academy, writes about preparing effective leaders for large urban school districts. Although teachers and principals often are wary of non-educator superintendents, Quinn notes that running a large district can be similar to running a large, multinational company:

It takes strong leadership skills to successfully run an entity as large and complex as an urban school district, much less turn around one that is low-performing. Most people don’t realize many urban school systems are as large as the biggest companies in America. The New York City Department of Education, with a budget of nearly $13 billion, ranks among the top of the Fortune 500 list in terms of size, alongside companies such as Sun Microsystems and Continental Airlines. Many urban districts have more employees and larger budgets than any other entity, business or government in their city. Urban school district leaders have a massive scope of responsibility. . . . [M]ost current educational leadership programs are not preparing leaders - whether traditional or nontraditional - to handle the realities and complex challenges of leading an urban school district.

Can school leaders be prepared effectively online?

In the issue’s final article, Patti Ghezzi writes about online doctoral programs for school leaders. Although school systems and traditional university programs tend to be skeptical about the quality of online leadership preparation programs, participants often claim that their coursework is more rigorous than anything they’ve done in face-to-face graduate study:

One critic, Thomas Glass, a professor of educational leadership at University of Memphis who tracks superintendent trends, believes online programs run by online colleges cannot prepare educators for executive-level positions in a school district. “They are definitely second class or third class.” . . . Leaders at the institutions now offering online doctoral degrees say their programs are as rigorous, if not more so, than programs at bricks-and-mortar universities. They contend their electronic classes emphasize practical skills and applicable research over education theory and say their instructors are practitioners who understand the public education landscape better than tenured professors who may be decades removed from working in school settings. . . . Dolly Adams, a lead teacher for gifted education in Richmond, Texas, who is working on her Ed.D. in educational leadership [says,] “You’re not sitting in a lecture listening to a professor who likes the sound of his voice.”

As the new coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University, I obviously am concerned with effective leadership preparation practices. If you are too, I encourage you to read one or more of these articles. Then, since there’s no discussion area at AASA, come back here and give us your two cents. There’s plenty of fuel here for discussion!

P.S. In addition to these four interesting articles, you also should make it a priority to track down a copy of Joe Murphy’s phenomenal article in the April issue of Phi Delta Kappan regarding the disconnect between university educational leadership programs and the needs of practicing administrators.

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

A lot of folks have been asking important questions about school leader preparation lately. The most recent issue of AASA’s The School Administrator magazine profiles four key concerns.

Are school leadership programs any good?

Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, angered a number of folks with his 2005 report, Educating School Leaders, which was a scathing indictment of university educational administration programs. In this issue of The School Administrator, he and Diane Dean continue the theme that most school leader preparation practices are out of sync with the needs of schools:

The mission of the field is confused; the curriculum and degrees awarded have little relevance to practice; clinical experience is weak; the faculty is overly dependent on adjuncts and insufficiently involved with schools; admission and graduation standards are low; and research is of poor quality.

Do we have too many school leadership preparation programs?

In her article, Margaret Terry Orr chooses to focus on the growth of educational leadership doctoral programs and the resultant impact on quality and student selectivity. Orr notes that the growth has occurred mostly in smaller regional universities:

[T]hese programs lack the institutional resources, breadth and history of other universities to support a doctoral program. New programs are more likely to start up with fewer full-time dedicated faculty members and be more reliant upon adjunct faculty. They may be less able to develop more advanced-level coursework, offer more diverse specialized course options, support research and research skill development or have other educational developments in their institutions that would enrich their content. . . . [As smaller] institutions expand both doctoral program availability and number of admissions, access becomes less competitive. But does greater access diminish the value and quality of the degree?

Should we be skeptical of superintendents who don’t have an education background?

Tim Quinn, managing director of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendents Academy, writes about preparing effective leaders for large urban school districts. Although teachers and principals often are wary of non-educator superintendents, Quinn notes that running a large district can be similar to running a large, multinational company:

It takes strong leadership skills to successfully run an entity as large and complex as an urban school district, much less turn around one that is low-performing. Most people don’t realize many urban school systems are as large as the biggest companies in America. The New York City Department of Education, with a budget of nearly $13 billion, ranks among the top of the Fortune 500 list in terms of size, alongside companies such as Sun Microsystems and Continental Airlines. Many urban districts have more employees and larger budgets than any other entity, business or government in their city. Urban school district leaders have a massive scope of responsibility. . . . [M]ost current educational leadership programs are not preparing leaders - whether traditional or nontraditional - to handle the realities and complex challenges of leading an urban school district.

Can school leaders be prepared effectively online?

In the issue’s final article, Patti Ghezzi writes about online doctoral programs for school leaders. Although school systems and traditional university programs tend to be skeptical about the quality of online leadership preparation programs, participants often claim that their coursework is more rigorous than anything they’ve done in face-to-face graduate study:

One critic, Thomas Glass, a professor of educational leadership at University of Memphis who tracks superintendent trends, believes online programs run by online colleges cannot prepare educators for executive-level positions in a school district. “They are definitely second class or third class.” . . . Leaders at the institutions now offering online doctoral degrees say their programs are as rigorous, if not more so, than programs at bricks-and-mortar universities. They contend their electronic classes emphasize practical skills and applicable research over education theory and say their instructors are practitioners who understand the public education landscape better than tenured professors who may be decades removed from working in school settings. . . . Dolly Adams, a lead teacher for gifted education in Richmond, Texas, who is working on her Ed.D. in educational leadership [says,] “You’re not sitting in a lecture listening to a professor who likes the sound of his voice.”

As the new coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University, I obviously am concerned with effective leadership preparation practices. If you are too, I encourage you to read one or more of these articles. Then, since there’s no discussion area at AASA, come back here and give us your two cents. There’s plenty of fuel here for discussion!

P.S. In addition to these four interesting articles, you also should make it a priority to track down a copy of Joe Murphy’s phenomenal article in the April issue of Phi Delta Kappan regarding the disconnect between university educational leadership programs and the needs of practicing administrators.

Bridge collapse

Yesterday evening a major bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River in the middle of rush hour. I’d like to thank everyone who checked in to see if my family and I were okay. We’re all doing fine, although we’re still anxiously checking on friends and coworkers.

As you can see, the bridge (red X) is very close to my office (green arrow).

It’s a terrible, terrible thing… My thoughts are with those who may have lost friends or loved ones.

Top edublogs - August 2007

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Back in January, when I had been blogging for five months but was still a blogosphere fledgling, I am embarrassed to say that I made a post that purported to present the top 30 edublogs as measured by Technorati rankings. The more time that passed since that post, the more chagrined I became at how laughably naive I was (I only analyzed 66 blogs!). So I decided to try again...

Step 1: Define the size of the education blogosphere

This in itself is a challenging and important task. No one knows exactly how big the education blogosphere is because it’s both dispersed and hidden. Here’s how my two phenomenal research assistants, Jenni Christenson and Eric LeJeune, and I tackled the issue:

• We started with CASTLE’s participant lists from LeaderTalk and our Principal Blogging Project, January’s education blogosphere survey, and the messages I received from my aforementioned January post on top edublogs. This garnered us a few hundred blogs.
• Then Jenni and Eric combed scores of education blogs’ blogrolls. We found over one thousand blogs this way.
• They dug through blogger lists like the ones at Support Blogging, BlogBridge, and ScotEduBlogs and got hundreds more.
• With the gracious assistance of all three organizations, Jenni and Eric scraped blog URLs from November Learning Communities, Edublogs,  and Class Blogmeister and found hundreds more.
• In the area that Edublogs uses to communicate with its users, James Farmer posted a link to an online form for us and we got another 224 that way.
• And so on… In other words, we tried to find every list, edublog hosting service, blogroll, etc. that might have new blogs that we hadn’t found yet.

Then we had the joy of finding and eliminating duplicates. Ugh.

Technorati lists 14,854 blogs with a tag of ‘education.’ It lists 23,807 blogs with a tag of ‘school.’ James informed me that Edublogs alone is hosting over 50,000 educator blogs, most of which are private and classroom-oriented. As you’ll see, we didn’t get anywhere near that many URLs.

How many edublogs are there? Over 50,000. How many are in this analysis? Over 3,600.

Step 2: Rank the blogs we found.

This was easier. Jenni and Eric copied each blog URL into the search box at Technorati.com and then entered into our spreadsheet the blog’s Authority (i.e., how many blogs have linked to it over the last 6 months) and Rank (i.e., overall rank among the tens of millions of blogs that Technorati monitors; lower is better). For example, at the time we checked, Patrick Higgins’ blog, Chalkdust, had an authority of 40 and a rank of 153,160. Many blogs had an authority of 0 or had nothing listed at all for either factor.

Step 3: Sort and present the results.

After doing a lot of cleanup (eliminating more duplicates!), we sorted by rank and authority. Here are some example results (click on the images to see the full-size charts)…

As you can see, Inside Higher Ed is the most popular edublog on our list according to Technorati’s Rank feature. Rounding out the top 30 is Infinite Thinking Machine.

If you look at the Authority of the top 204 edublogs, you’ll see the classic long tail distribution. The top blog, Inside Higher Ed, had nearly 2,400 other blogs link to it over the past six months. In contrast, the blogs near the end of this graph only had 45 blogs link to them. About two-thirds (2,542) of the blogs on our list had 0 blogs link to them in the last half year. Only 264 averaged more than 5 external links per month.

Caveats and disclaimers

1. Exactly what constitutes an ‘education blog’ is a matter of interpretation. Jenni and Eric looked for blogs by teachers, principals, superintendents, school librarians / media specialists, technology coordinators, education professors, education critics / commentators, and the like. They had to make some tough choices but tried to include anyone that blogged regularly and often about education. If you think they included a blog that shouldn’t be on the list, get in touch.
2. As hard as we tried, I’m sure we still missed a bunch of folks. If you’d like to be included in our next analysis (hopefully January 31, 2008), please complete the online form.
3. There are many reasons why educators blog and Technorati numbers are just two of many metrics of success. If you’re happy blogging, by all means keep it up! If you’d like more traffic, this list of tips is a good place to start.
4. Technorati numbers were compiled over a 2–week period in late July. All blog rankings and authority numbers are approximate and already out of date.

Next steps

If you want to play with the data yourself, download the Excel file. Please link back to this post or send me your findings so I can see what you come up with!

I’d like to do this twice a year, so the next time should be in January 2008. As the list grows bigger, it gets more unwieldy and time-consuming. If you’d like to lend a hand, get in touch. If you have any suggestions for how to expand this analysis or do it differently, please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

8/1 Correction: The data for Education Week, The Fischbowl, and eSchoolNews were erroneously omitted. The two graphs above, as well as the downloadable Excel file, have been updated to reflect the data for these two sites.