Developers+

Hi, my name is Greg, and I’m a blog addict.

I admit it. I check the feeds of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader before I hop in the shower in the mornings. At lunchtime, you’ll find me sitting at my desk, sandwich in hand, scrolling through the morning’s posts and spamming my colleagues with forwarded tidbits that I’ve gleaned from my mid-day dose. And usually at some point in the late afternoon, as the meetings and decisions and deliverables wear me down, stepping away from it all to check the blogs again usually nets me some new idea that gives me a rush, reminds me why I love the field of educational technology, and energizes me enough to get me through the rest of the day.

So this time around, I’ve decided to share a list of some of the educational technology blogs that make up part of my daily fix. What follows, in no particular order, are twenty of the best education blogs as judged by . . . well, me. It’s a totally subjective list and it’s by no means exhaustive, but all of these authors post regularly and all of them have introduced me to great new ideas at one point or another. But if you should get hooked yourself, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

(In case you want to subscribe to the RSS feeds for these blogs too, I’ve collected them all into an OPML file for your importing convenience. Download TwentyEdublogs.opml. OPML is a file format that feed readers like Google Reader (my preferred reader) use for exporting and importing subscription lists. Just download that file and follow your feed reader’s instructions for importing.)

Weblogg-Ed by Will Richardson. Will wrote the book on blogging in the classroom. Literally. Will’s got a passion for teaching and a passion for blogging and a passion for combining the two. And I’ve got a passion for reading his blog.

Dangerously Irrelevant by Scott McLeod. I just discovered this one not too long ago, but it’s become a regular read. McLeod, who teaches at Iowa State, ranges far and wide over a variety of education-related topics. Definitely anything but irrelevant.

The "Three Amigos" — Cogdogblog by Alan Levine, Darcynorman.net by D’Arcy Norman, and Abject Learning by Bryan Lamb. Okay, these are really three separate blogs by three separate guys, but their inextricably intertwined in my head. D’Arcy’s an ed tech developer at the University of Calgary, Bryan is the Emerging Technologies "Discoordinator" at the University of British Columbia, and Alan’s with the New Media Consortium and formerly with Maricopa Community Colleges. I met all three of ‘em years ago at the MERLOT Conference in Vancouver, just as they were all starting blogging, and I followed them as they developed a public collaboration through their blogs, culminating in team presentations at many conferences as "The Three Amigos." Smart guys with great attitudes and killer senses of humor.

Connectivism Blog by George Siemens. I’m not sure if George Siemens, of the University of Manitoba, actually coined the term "connectivism" but pretty much everything I read about this "learning theory for the digital age" tracks back to him. You can also find George writing at the eLearnSpace Blog.

FLOSSE Posse by Teemu Leinonen (and occasionally others). Although ostensibly a group blog, I haven’t seen anyone but Teemu, of the Media Lab at the University of Art & Design – Helsinki, post. FLOSSE stands for Free, Libre, and Open Source Software in Education and, as you might guess, the FLOSSE Posse focuses on uses of open source in teaching & learning.

The Shifted Librarian by Jenny Levine. Everything I know about libraries & library technology, I learned by keeping up with the Shifted Librarian. An Illinois librarian, Jenny’s got her finger on the pulse of technology’s impact on libraries.

Iterating Toward Openness by David Wiley. I first became aware of Utah State’s David Wiley years ago through his writing on re-usable learning objects. He’s since taken on "open content" as his new focus.

The Infinite Thinking Machine various authors. A group blog by a team of K-12 teachers and ed tech specialists, the Infinite Thinking Machine shares "a bazillion practical ideas" for using technology in teaching and learning. And a bazillion is a lot, my friends!

OLDaily by Stephen Downes. OLDaily, short for Online Learning Daily, is a a daily blog and email newsletter put together by Stephen Downes, a researcher at Canada’s National Research Council. Stephen sifts through hundreds of blog posts a day, and pulls out the best of the bunch.

Informal Learning Blog by Jay Cross. Jay is well respected speaker and consultant. Informal Learning Blog focuses more on corporate elearning, but Jay has a knack for taking complex concepts and boiling them down to a few effective paragraphs and maybe a diagram or two. You can also find Jay blogging on the Internet Time Blog.

Lanny on Learning Technology by Lanny Arvan. Lanny, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is not the most succinct blogger on this list. He can sometimes go on a ramble, but if you stick with him through his multi-page posts he’ll pull what seems to be a bunch of disparate ideas together in a surprisingly coherent whole.

Mohamed Amine Chatti’s ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning by Mohamed Amine Chatti. Mohamed, you definitely win the award for the longest blog title! Mohamed, a Ph.D. student at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, keeps us up to date through his blog on his research in "learning and knowledge management, collaborative adaptive learning, personal learning environments, communities & networks, Web 2.0/social software, and social network analysis."

Scott’s Workblog by Scott Wilson. Scott’s with CETIS (the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability & Standards in the UK). Scott probably leans a little more heavily on the "technology" in "educational technology" than most of these other authors, but if you’re looking to geek out, Scott’s your man.

The Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis. I love the sort of goof earnestness of this blog’s title (although I think the ‘Cats are a reference to the mascot of Westwood Schools in Georgia, where Vickie teaches). Lots of good tips, tricks, tools and advice.

eLearning Technology by Tony Karrer. Tony is with TechEmpower, a west coast elearning development company. His blog won the 2007 Edublog Awared for the Best eLearning Blog, a well-deserved win!

TechLearning Blog by various authors. The TechLearning Blog pulls together the best posts from a team of bloggers — some of whom are already represented in this list, and a lot more who probably deserve to be in this list as well.

The Wired Campus by various authors. The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s blog is updated multiple times a day. It’s a great companion to the Chronicle, sometimes extending stories from the main rag and sometimes breaking their own.

Teaching and Developing Online by Darren Cannell. Darren is part of the Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School. Darren is also apparently secretly the world’s first nuclear-powered blogging machine. That’s gotta be the case because there’s no other way he could post as frequently and interestingly as he does.