“What is a blog?” — Actual people, almost ten years after Facebook.

The word ‘blog’ comes from the portmanteau ‘web’ and ‘log’. A blog is a new mutation, an update to writing; it is also a webpage. Humanity has been writing for thousands of years on different surfaces: rock (walls), papyri, and dried stomachs of mammals. Now we can write with 0’s and 1’s, binary code.

The goal of this blog is simple: to promote — and motivate — curiosity, creativity, and literacy. Literacy is very important. High School kids need to read more — plain and simple; but they need the tools to read properly. The mission of The Hypertextual Lounge (THL) is to share multimedia relevant to what students from high school talk, learn, and, most importantly, ignore. Also, a virtual community will develop from the sharing of texts, images, video, music, pedagogical resources, etc:

“The zone of reflective capacity is constructed through the interaction between participants engaged in a common activity and expands when it is mediated by positive interactions with other participants, exactly along the same lines as the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky), as Wells (1999) described. It is possible to measure the learner’s ZPD as an individual trait showing certain stability across instructional settings. The second perspective draws on work on interactive formative assessment integrated in classroom instruction. In this approach, assessment intervenes in the ZPD created by a learner’s on-going interactions with a given instructional setting.” (Allal, Ducrey 2000).

I will manage the content of the blog — according to my circumstances as a Biology teacher*. And, a very big circumstance, the pink elephant in the room: the Internet. Like a museum curator organizing an exhibit with a conceptual thread in mind, The Hypertextual Lounge will ‘curate’ the Internet; promoting responsible and significant media consumption.

Carl Sagan, sci-fi, Vygotsky, and blogging–weaved into a single pedagogical thread.

I hope it works.
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*Textbooks:

Modern Biology (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2009)

Campbell Biology (Editions 7, 8 & 9).

Biology in Focus (1st Edition)