If you are on the same mailing list as me, you too have been invited to attend the ED in '08 Blogger Summit on May 14-15 in Washington DC. The event, which features a keynote from former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich is sponsored by Strong American Schools.
I learned from reading the information on their website that the organization is interested in bringing attention to "issues in education" to the current US presidential campaign. This conference is focusing on the use of blogs and bloggers and their influence on the process.
As part of the website, they feature something called Voices from the Campaign which are invited commentaries from "guests." I read the April 29th response from someone named Joanne Jacobs to the question: "What impact have blogs had on the education debate?" Her honest response was rather interesting. To summarize, she states, "So the effect of education blogs has been . . . let's say subtle."
I interpreted this as "zero."
In the rest of her response, she makes some interesting observations.
There are dozens of wonk blogs discussing national education policy, as well as thousands of blogs by teachers and parents (homeschoolers and public schoolers) looking at education from the classroom and home perspective.
Principals and superintendents are blogging. Students are blogging. I just hope someone's reading.
One might wonder - is anyone reading this?
BTW, the conference is FREE - so if you are in the DC area...and, if you are reading this...
~John Brandt
PS: After posting this blog this morning, I had the opportunity to read Rush Kidder's Ethical Newsline entry for this week. It this article The YouTube Illusion, Kidder speaks about the predictions of unparalleled computing capacity and the moral dilemmas it creates. What is profound is the following observations:
And that raises one of the most subtly ethical challenges of our day: the marketing of new communication technologies as though they could actually democratize access to information. The central point of democracy isn’t that everyone gets to speak. It’s that others listen, that everyone’s voice matters, that every vote is counted (emphasis mine). The grandly democratic promise of YouTube and its ilk — that they allow everyone’s work to be posted and shared — may ironically have the opposite effect. It may end up burying each individual work under so many gigabytes of other data that it stifles, not amplifies, the identity yearning for recognition and response.
I just ran across a website called Not on the Test which is a call to keep music, sports and arts programs in the curriculum and one more voice against "teaching to the test." The site, owned and operated by Tom Chapin, features a cute music video of the site theme song, "Not on the test." 
