As a new facilitator in Australian public education, I often feel a little lost for long-term direction - the educational landscape here seems to be changing faster than I can keep up - and often I can only look to the US system to see where I’m headed (for better or worse).
Doug of Borderland posted “Deschooling Revolution” where he was stressing the need for teachers to dialog with those around us - students, parents, other facilitators, administrators, politicians - about the issues we’re facing in education… rather than just vainly waiting for technology to revolutionise education. But having only been in education for two years, I’m only just beginning to grapple with these issues myself…
Doug’s post was partly inspired by Miguel’s post about teachers having no middle ground - teachers who are wanting to help students genuinely learn (using technology as one tool for information-problem-solving) while at the same time trying to fulfil seemingly shallow indicators of learning. Miguel writes:
What, there’s middle ground you say? No, there isn’t…not anymore. We either use computer labs to support information literacy or do online state assessments/test prep. We either train teachers on how to help students learn information-problem-solving strategies or how to help their students maximize scores on tests. We can no longer do both.
What follows is Miguel’s call-to-arms in a war for the survival of his Nation… striving to move education towards Problem Based Learning (PBL) and technology enhanced PBL… perhaps along the same vein as Doug’s push for “critical literacy”… soo much to learn…
So far I’ve narrowed it down to two options (but am open to suggestions!). First, there’s the 
The other option that seems to fit my wants is the 
The title for this blog is pretty self-explanatory… the author (most posts by Kathy Sierra) has an amazing way of relating ideas for helping people learn with passion. Each post begins with an image (great idea, but expensive time-wise) and is incredibly engaging to read. I’m attracted to this site mostly by the style of writing – it’s so interesting to read! Notice it has a category for “Past Favourites”, pulling together all the pearlers for the casual browser (I find this handy when I find a site that I like… and it helps me to evaluate whether the blog is one that I want to track).
To be honest, I normally read this site via an RSS reader rather than the actual site. It has all the normal categories for blog sites (Home, About, Contact, Archives, Activity, Links and photos). I’ve included this site mainly as an example of a standard educational blog. It doesn’t have any bells-n-whistles, or any extra functionality… which is probably why I only read the RSS version without ever visiting the site.
IncSub integrates a blog by the founder, James Farmer, with a community of other educators. The site offers free hosting for educators to try out new tools, a consulting service, as well as James’ own regular posts. An interesting idea, but I tend to read the blog through RSS only. I think the sites focus is more on marketing a service (or services), by someone who wants to make a full-time living as a consultant – something I’m definitely not interested in!
“The read/write web in the classroom” is an apt title for this site – lots of very practical thoughts and ideas for learning with technology. Categories are interesting: about, workshops, ed-blogs, practices, resources, why weblogs. “Workshops” is like a portfolio of quotes from workshops/presentations categorised by year. “ed-blogs” is simply a link to the author’s blog-lines listing… great idea. “Practices” links to an auto-generate list of Furl links that the author collects for blogs being used in practice in education…possibly useful idea (although I’d use del.icio.us rather than Furl). Similarly with Resources… it links to categorised Furl links.
OK, here’s a great site that says much more through its design than it does with words! It has a recognisable brand, it is incredibly easy to navigate, and it contains incredibly useful information! It’s beautifully simple… each of the categorisations “Services, Publications, Presentations, Resources, About, Contact” has a sub-description so I know exactly what I’m clicking on… (for e.g., “Presentations – topics in web usability and accessibility” - Note, on the inner pages this is condensed to a simple horizontal navigation bar). The landing page also includes a Recent updates section – very nice. I love the simplicity of this landing page and would like to do something similarly simple. No need for drop-downs, the Resume and portfolio are accessed from the “About” link. Personal pages are also linked from About… very easy to navigate, and not too many options initially! (See the 
I love the way this site links in the latest post and latest links to the landing page. Notice that the page is kept relatively uncluttered by the fine-print at the bottom of the page. In-fact, this is quite a strong design decision to have lots of goodies in the footer as you can read in the post: