The Blogvangelist

Will Richardson, a high school English teacher turned edu-tech consultant, wants to share the good news about blogs, wikis, and podcasts. They could, he believes, change your life.

By Patrick J. McCloskey

“What’s your red paper clip?” Will Richardson asked the 30 K-12 educators assembled before him last July. The educational-technology consultant’s intent was not to kick off the all-day workshop outside Boston with an office-supply riddle, but to illustrate the snowballing effect of interactive software on teaching and learning.

Richardson is the author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms , a how-to manual in which he refers to what’s known as the Web 2.0 phenomenon as the Read/Write Web. He was recounting for his audience the story of Kyle MacDonald, a 27-year-old Canadian who began swapping items with readers of his weblog in July 2005. As the blog’s title, “One Red Paperclip,” indicates, his first offering was a seemingly insignificant item. Fourteen trades and one year later, however, he’d bartered up enough to land himself a mortgage-free house in a small town in Saskatchewan.

“The new Internet isn’t about technology anymore,” Richardson told the teachers, librarians, tech coordinators, and administrators from across North America, each sitting in front of a monitor in a computer lab at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts. Gone, he said, are the days when Web publishing involved manipulating HTML code and other complicated technical processes. New software is mostly “open source,” meaning it’s available online for free. “Instead, it’s about your imagination,” Richardson said, “about thinking, quite literally, ‘out of the box’...