Blogging in the classroom - and fighting advertisements...
For those of us who are trying to use blogs with students in K-12 and higher education (since they're such great digital text--and support hyperlinks--and on and on), we're facing a tough battle against advertisers who have successfully infiltrated our blogs.
Click on http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/508216.html to read a November post about how a university instructor had "several of my students...host their learning logs using Edublogs which seemed at the time to be a reasonable solution. As I was reading through students weblogs I found links embedded in their content that seemed rather odd. For example one student mentioned the word "energy" in her blog entry and I found a pop-up link directing me to Exxon/Mobile. Hmmm? I thought and I read on."
Read his post about how these links were being added to student's Edublogs content without their notice. He notes that there is an Edublogs forum discussion where several Edublogs users were concerned about this practice.
It's a tough road, but we'll keep going...just keep your eyes open!