After I emailed Josie Fraser, who's managing this year's event, I decided to help pass the word around. The award is a great way to highlight education-related blogs around the world. Hopefully that opens up the often limited and negative perception of blogs and blogging by non-bloggers.
Apparently, the organisers consider library blogs are edublogs too -- which isn't far from the truth. Here's a frappr map of edubloggers (currently skewed towards Europe/ North America). This one is of blogging librarians (also currently skewed -- is it due to language barrier or lack of awareness about frappr?)
There are 10 categories for nominations:
* Most innovative edublogging project, service or programme
* Best newcomer
* Most influential post, resource or presentation
* Best designed/most beautiful edublog
* Best library/librarian blog
* Best teacher blog
* Best audio and/or visual blog
* Best example/ case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning
* Best group blog
* Best individual blog
There will also be a Best of the Best award from the winners of each category.
Terms & conditions for the nomination and voting:
- Only current edubloggers* are invited to nominate other edublogs (but everyone else is eligible to vote once the shortlisted nominees are announced)
- There is no country or language restriction for nomination. Blogs from anywhere in the world, bloggers of any nationality, non-English language blogs -- they're all welcome to take part.
* Who's an "Edublogger?"
If you keep a blog, and produce content which is related to education (even if you post about your haircut a lot too), you are an edublogger and are eligable to nominate. Please include your blog url with your nominations.
Dates to note:
- 21 Nov '05 to 4 Dec '05: Nominations (by edubloggers only)
- 5 Dec '05 to 17 Dec '05: Voting for the nominees (open to all)
- 18 Dec '05, 1500hrs GMT (i.e. 11pm, Sun 18 Dec, Singapore time): Winners announced 'live' at broadcast ceremony. Winners can join in the conversation and make their acceptance speeches. There will also be a parallel chat room for people give their reactions to the award winners etc.
Nominations are to be submitted via this template and emailed to 2005awards@googlemail.com
All submissions are treated as confidential; they won't be made public.
If you're interested in the rest of the clarifications I received from Josie, it's posted below. For details of the Edublog 2005 award, visit www.incsub.org/awards/
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Excerpts from my email correspondence with Josie (minor editing for brevity):
Who started the Edublog award?
The inaugral awards ran last year (2004).
Why was it started?
Alex Halavais posted a call for an award in response to the under representation/recognition of educational uses and users of blogs in existing blog awards. James Farmer ran with the idea, then Alex posted a form. Here's a post from those heady early days.
Who administers the award?
This year James is pretty much drowning in initiatives! So I offered to step in. I'm managing the awards this year, informed by the way things went last year, the things that worked well and not so well.
The major changes this year are that nominations are confidential and only edubloggers (broadly defined) are eligible to nominate.The other major change is the awards ceremony and build-up this year - Worldbridges will be hosting the awards, with me, Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier presenting. It will be broadcasted live, with the opportunity for winners to join in the conversation and make their acceptance speeches. There will also be a parallel chat room for people to join in the fun, give their reactions to the award winners etc.
What does it mean to win the award?
It's a mark of respect and acknowledgement of the hard work - that your contribution is acknowledged by the community as excellent and that you are very much appreciated as an edublogger.
The awards process helps to raise the profile of edublogging and encourages the community to come together in a positive and self-affirming way. The short list acts as a valuable resource for the community and a inspiration for what is possible through the power of blogging for learners and educationalists in general.
To be honest the winning of an actual category is just a very nice bonus for the recipient -- everyone after all needs to be told that they're valued from time to time. The main thing is the taking part -- whether you're nominating or just thinking about the current shape of the edublogging landscape.
Thanks for this very clear intro to the awards.
ReplyDeleteI really hope to see a lot of nominations from the international librarian bloggers - a section of the community which really doesn't have enough recognition. So if you know a librarian (or are one!) who deserves recognition in any of the categories, please do mail in!
Hi Ivan,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the alert! I got my nominations sent in. It helped reveal the depth of my ignorance about how little I still know about the blogosphere. I'm looking forward to adding the winners to my RSS feed!
I was pleased to see that my list of nominees included Australian and Singapore blogs.
All the best,
Doug
Thanks for picking this up, Doug. You know, "awards" like this can be easily setup, say, for your school district that you work for... like "best student blog", "best teacher blog". Showcase the "role models" or at least encourage them by saying "hey, we think you are doing good with your blog".
ReplyDeleteHi Ivan,
ReplyDeleteI also post a link to your site with three education/library lists I participate in: WWWedu, LM_Net, and ISTE's SIGMS - all with international audiences, I believe.
You really, as this year's host, come up with a clever name for this award - The Bloggies, The Eddies, or something far more original and clever.
Good ideas re: local awards.
Doug
Thanks for spreading the word, Doug. I'm not involved in the Edublog Awards at all, other than trying to pass the word around. Oh, I hope you will implement your own local awards.
ReplyDelete