Daniel I’ll speak to yours first since it is the freshest in my head.

Great point. While I still have a long way to go to really get my own head around what curriculums do and are, I think you have a point there. There are curriculums out there that do inspire thought and discussion - interaction and personal growth. We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the old saying goes. But I really think there is something to what Alger is saying. (Still trying to get my own head around it.) I guess I am wondering, at the moment anyway - the jungle is a wild place - if curriculums in general tend to be a thing that limits. So many teachers have mentioned how they have wanted to explode off the “curriculum highway” and take advantage of teachable moments. (Check out the Barbara Ganley skypecast I posted about today, Nov. 7- she speaks about this as well.)

Curriculum is great for setting out a frame of basic “must knows” - but what the freeze framing that seems to happen. I’ve heard it said that a course is taking knowledge and freezing it in time. The world is not like that at all. When you step outside the classroom you step into fluidity. A constantly chaging environment.

So yes..to sum up, I think curriculums can be good things…but I also wonder at their true effectiveness in our digitally driven and ever changing world. No clue.

The rest of you..I will comment a little later.

My point? Sure, students (and others) can blog whatever they like but it doesn’t mean that what they have to say will inspire comment or provoke discussion which are the elements that make a good blog. And just as there are good blogs that promote communication and expanded consciousness there are also good curriculae which do the same or similar things. The converse is true as well.

BTW: CzechTEFLer makes sense to me.

Having read quite a bit on this topic, but presumably nowhere near as much as you, I’m just beginning to wonder whether all this buzz about classroom blogging isn’t going a little over the top. Isn’t it just a tool, one of many tools actually we’ve got to our hand? One of the many tools that work in some circumstances and in some they don’t?

I really like Alger’s definition of curriculum and I think it’s spot-on but to me it suggests that questioning the very existence of curriculum in education is like questioning the role of laws in democracy. It’s the content and its flexibility that matters.

Great post!