Chapter 1 Summary

Andrew Thonstad
September 20, 2009

Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Chapter 1: The Read/Write Web

This chapter shares a brief history of the goals that Tim Berners-Lee had when he began developing the World Wide Web. His desire to make it a “collaborative medium” for anyone to add content was slow to realize. Many people were excluded from adding content due to their lack of knowledge of HTML code. This has changed over the past few years due to the development of many, easy to use, Internet publishing applications. These new publishing tools, including Weblogs (blogs), Wikis, and multimedia publishing, have given millions the ability to “write” content to the web.

How does this relate to education? The author, Mr. Richardson, points out that education has been very slow in reacting and adapting to the changing world. Students are using these technologies on a regular basis. And when these students come to school, we limit the technologies they can use. We take away their phones, set up filters to limit the websites they can visit, stop them from participating in the social network we expect them to be when they are outside of the classroom.

As with using anything new, it is important to test drive this technology before we use it in the classroom. Mr. Richardson shares that even he had to fully understand the power of the technology and how to use it before he was able to see the changes that needed to be made in his own curriculum and teaching. While there are many tools we can use, the remaining chapters in the book will cover these technologies:
· Weblogs
· Wikis
· Real Simple Syndication (RSS)
· Aggregators
· Social Bookmarking
· Online Photo Galleries
· Audio/video casting

The final section of the chapter discusses difficulties in balancing the why and the ways to keep students safe with the benefits of publishing their work online. This also includes following the requirements of the Child Internet Protection Act, requiring schools and libraries to filter internet content. While this might keep potentially inappropriate sites from being viewed by students, it may also limit thousands of sites that would be considered appropriate.

I find this idea of a chapter summary lacking of importance for this chapter. My summary of this chapter: the history of the Internet; the changes and adaptations of the Internet to where we are today; the tools that can be used by educators; and safety concerns regarding students publishing to the Internet. This assignment requires us to regurgitate information based on what we get from the chapter. This is one thing I have never been very good at – just ask all four of my high school English teachers – I never seem to pull the “correct” or “important” ideas from the texts. As this is a Technology class, I decided to research Will Richardson. In doing so, I found some interesting links to other educators and their use of technology in the classroom. These websites lead to by additional educators and parents about the uses of technology in the classroom. I have included a link to one of these blogs: http://lonewolf30.blogspot.com/2009/09/my-shocking-discovery-of-students-take.html.