I am totally convinced that blogging is the next "big thing" in technology--one of Kurzweil's exponential curves, just like e-mail, and the the web. So as a recent convert, I'm trying to tap my new enthusiasm to evangelize. I think we'll be reworking the undergraduate web design course to use
Thinking about making David Weinberger's book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, part of the required reading for the course.
This is such a great thing. One of my advisory board members who teaches at Tokyo University has made it an integral part of his class as well since I turned him on to blogging just a few weeks ago! It is such an enabling technology and I WISH I were still a student and could spend more of my time learning and writing. How much more fun it would be to be in school right now with communications so much more integrated into what to me was such a lonely process...
I wish I was still a student, too. It's hard to find the time to learn and think and write when you have to teach and grade and attend department meetings.
But I'm very excited about using blogs in class. I think it will make a huge difference.
Have you made Small Pieces required reading? We're just putting together a reading list for next semester's Web Design and Web Aesthetics and I've been wondering about Small Pieces...
Our winter quarter starts in December, and I do plan on putting at least the online chapters of Small Pieces on the required reading list for the first week or two. Will be working on my syllabus more over the next couple of weeks, thinking about how to place the various pieces into context.
The things I was doing with my "blogroll" (see the comments from Joi and my responses under blogging as a research tool (in which I mention your site, Jill!). The kind of integration of CGI, SSI, and .htaccess that were required there is the kind of "computing in context" that I want to use for teaching.