More Preparation for Weblogs in Education and Training Lecture

Today I've been struggling with what readings to assign to the class I'm guest lecturing in a week from tomorrow. I haven't been working on this all day, actually; the weather was gorgeous, so I went rollerblading on the trails in Como Park for a while, after which I felt remarkably serene. Anyway, I had originally intended to have the students read the pedagogy articles in Into the Blogosphere and Michael Angeles' presentation notes. Then I realized that I'd be assigning them about 100 pages of reading, so I decided to use the KISS approach and just have them read a few short articles and look at a few weblogs. Many of them haven't heard of weblogs anyway, so they might have been lost had I assigned the Angeles and ITB pieces. Here's what I'm having them read:

Jill Walker, Definition of Weblog

Jill Walker, notes for “Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network”

Meg Hourihan, What We're Doing When We Blog

Then I'm asking them to look at Kairosnews, Chez Miscarriage, and this semester's Rhetoric 1101 weblog.

I hope they'll appreciate this basic overview of weblogs. I'll draw upon the Angeles and ITB articles for what I'll talk about, but I definitely want to put them in small groups and have them brainstorm some ways they might use weblogs in education and training; perhaps they can synthesize possible application of weblogs with the material they've already covered in the class.