As a budding new writing project technology team, we found David Warlick’s Classroom Blogging (2nd Ed.) to be an accessible and productive text with which to read and think together about using new “Web 2.0” technologies in our personal and professional lives and more specifically in our classroom teaching. Within the first few chapters of the book, Warlick makes some pedagogical assertions regarding intersections between new technologies and literacy that aligned philosophically with our approach to teaching and learning. For example, the increase in potential for generating multimedia content online, rather than simply consuming it in previous paradigms, positions online technologies with potential to amplify voices often hidden in traditional forms of media. This notion carries with it a profound possibility to impact democracy as we know it, and Warlick makes mention of “citizen journalists” and the pedagogical responsibility for educators to help students become skilled thinkers regarding the authority and accuracy of online content, both in its consumption and production.

As the title suggests, Warlick foregrounds blogging as a literacy practice that enables what he calls a “new publishing paradigm,” the benefit to education he argues allows for an environment in which learners can dialogue together, “observe, reflect, and share, and where the reader has the right, and the skill, to make his own decision about the information he uses” (p. 14). Admirably, Warlick actively practices what he writes about in Classroom Blogging, and several of our tech team members followed http://2cents.davidwarlick.com/, an noteworthy example of blogging within a community of individuals who seem to strongly value the type of dialogue regarding technology in education that invites conversation, constructive criticism and respect.

Online information is continuing to increase at an astonishing rate, and Warlick uses statistics from the Pew Foundation to help foreground the call for teachers to foster literacy practices among students and teachers that both evaluate blogs and utilizes this new publishing paradigm to write, market ideas and participate in conversations relevant to school curricula or other specific learning communities.

Warlick doesn’t suggest that blogging is changing the existence of hierarchies of information and knowledge, but does argue that the blogosphere and Web 2.0 applications have changed using the web profoundly, stating that “the relevance and importance of a piece of information should be based not on a single authority’s judgment, but by the practices of many authorities” (p. 38). Warlick, commendably, brings attention to both the potential benefits these applications have to enhance teaching and learning and the simultaneous cautions these applications bring with them regarding issues of Internet safety, copyright, content authority and accessing public versus private audiences. In addition, Warlick gives practical resources for those interested in exploring blogging platforms (i.e., http://www.blogger.com) and blog search engines (http://technorati.com), which ranks blogs based on tagged key words, links and frequency.

The middle section of Warlick’s book is helpful, although we concurred it becomes somewhat how-to-ish, an arguably paradoxical format for exploring these online technologies. On one hand however, it’s valid to balance the needs of those who prefer a book description of procedures detailed step-by-step; on the other hand, on the other hand we found ourselves skimming those sections and diving into the applications themselves. We relied on the variance of each other’s familiarity and application help buttons to troubleshoot questions that arose. As a team, we pondered if Warlick’s how-to sections in the book might prove more effective formatted online, allowing changes in the technologies to require online how-to updates, rather than new book editions.

That said, Warlick packed a lot in a small book and we greatly appreciated the attention he pays to applications other than blogs—RSS feeds, RSS readers (http://bloglines.com), and wikis for example. When talking about RSS feeds and aggregators specifically, our connections to how these applications might impact literacy education grew dramatically, namely with the ability to create a personalized “newspapers” that, as Warlick describes, allows people “to train the information to find us. It is radical and dramatic, and it adds one more element to what it means to be literate within a networked, digital, and overwhelming information landscape” (p. 59). In other words, we no longer have to spend time going to a site we value; instead, new information dynamically updates to our RSS reader instantly for our access. For an entertaining and informative description of how RSS works, along with other Web 2.0 online applications, visit the folks at Common Craft (http://www.commoncraft.com).

As a writing project technology team, we honed in on how these applications might also foster productive practices of professional learning. Although Warlick spends less focus here, he alludes to the potential, “If teachers in a school are encouraged to blog about what and how they are teaching, then educators who teach at the same level or the same subject area will be more aware of the happenings in their part of the school” (p. 121). While several members utilized blogs in their classrooms with students, and as a tech team we used a private community blog to discuss readings and classroom explorations, it was a wiki that we found extraordinarily productive when working with other educators during workshops about technology and literacy with educators outside our team (http://satbrownbag.wetpaint.com, http://www.redclayai08.wetpaint.com). Though Warlick distinguishes between purposes for wikis, blogs and discussion forums, we found wikis to overlap his differentiation scheme and provide a space for us to achieve a collaborative learning setting, as well as, albeit with more limited capacity than blogging, a place to individually publish and receive feedback. Perhaps the most recent example of this potential for us is the collaboration on this very book review, a process that included penning thoughts to our Advanced Institute wiki site and one that involved multiple readers. Much like using Googledocs, this wiki approach differed from passing a Word document around via email, allowing us to keep our revisions and suggestions in one location. Undoubtedly, Warlick’s Classroom Blogging jump-started our thinking as well as our exploration of online applications as they apply to our classroom teaching, our personal and professional lives, and our professional learning goals as a technology team and local writing project chapter.