Calling All Bloggers:
Understanding Current Events through Global Collaboration

After reading a comment left by Clay Burrell on a recent post of mine, I thought it was time to share an idea with the educators of the world. I have the luxury of teaching a group of highly motivated students who have embraced the tools of collaboration beyond my wildest expectations. They have become a ball of energy, spending week nights, as well as portions of their weekends, working online together in ways I could not imagine when the school year began this fall. Looking to stoke their intellectual fires, I am looking to go global. Here is my proposal.

As a history teacher in the United States, I feel a great opportunity awaits my students with current events. The study of current events, the media that reports these events, and the opportunity to conjoin multi-global points of view, allows a truly unique opportunity to study history in the making, while exposing students to a dynamic global perspective.

I would like to construct a super community that utilizes a common set of websites, such as daylife (thanks Will Richardson, again), and have students blog these stories and comment on each others blogs, discussing points of view and literary analysis. Students could develop a sub-community using their delicious accounts, allowing social networking that reaches beyond their individual classrooms. Students could utilize skype and online white boards like vyew, to develop inter-continental collaborative blogs on particular topics. Students can develop their own extensive library of thought using diigo and clip notes. It is a simple project in design, with truly a limitless opportunity to develop a global perspective of real-time historical events.

Imagine, constructing an intellectual community that offers its participants a wider audience then ever before. The community would expose students a truly multi-cultural perspective of an event. The community would utilize the potential development of thought that blogs were meant to develop. Students, aware of the global audience, would become motivated to cultivate insightful analysis on political, economic, social, artistic, religious, and intellectual movements occurring in their lifetime. This maybe limitless.

Anyone interested?

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