$10k Annual Scholarship for U.S. College Blogger

The Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation has announced the submission deadline for their annual $10,000 college blogger scholarship. Full details and the nomination form are available at:

http://www.collegescholarships.org/our-scholarships/blogging.htm

Application Deadline: October 6, 2007
Award Dates: November 8 & 9, 2007, at the Blog World and New Media Expo in Las Vegas

Requirements:

• Student blog must contain unique and interesting information (no spam bloggers)
• Student blogger must maintain their own individual blog or blog on a community blog
• Student blogger must currently attending full-time in post-secondary education in the United States
• Student blogger must maintain a 3.0 GPA
• Student blogger must be U.S. citizen or permanent resident

Any college student with a personal or professional blog is encouraged to apply. Student bloggers may also be nominated by friends or family.

Application entries will be accepted until Midnight, PST on Oct. 6^th. Ten finalists will be chosen from the entries received, and public voting will begin at 9am EST on Oct. 8^th to elect an exceptional student blogger for the $10,000 scholarship. The grand prizewinner will be announced at the Blog World and New Media Expo to be held November 8-9, 2007 in Las Vegas.

Site visitors, students, and other bloggers will be invited to vote for their favorite student blogs. The winning blog, as well as runners up, will be featured on the CollegeScholarships.org website.

Why a blogging scholarship? Students with the drive, devotion, and passion, to put their individual voice into a blog satisfy many of the mainstream scholarship criteria attached to other more traditional awards, including creativity and imagination, motivation and passion, and technical savvy. And many of them do it every day!

Exceptional bloggers are typically prolific, must be passionate about their subject matter, offer engaging and creative postings, and able to inspire and welcome commentary. The Blogging Scholarship aims to reward student blogs that stand out in design and usability, and clearly create a unique and individual "personality." Previous winners have blogged on politics, technology, and science and have proven their mettle with online communication and savvy. Winners are often experts in personal communication and expression—an increasingly rare commodity in contemporary business and society at large.

About CollegeScholarships.org: CollegeScholarships.org, founded in 1999, provides free access to indexes of scholarship and grant programs. Students may search hundreds of free college money programs based on degree level, student type, or field of interest. The site also offers a spam-free search engine that frees prospective students and their parents from the cumbersome profiles required by most scholarship search services. The website has grown over the last few years into a multi-layered tool that lists scholarship and grant sources from federal, state, and private sources, along with sections devoted to student loans and lenders. The Blogging Scholarship is just one of a handful of lucrative scholarships CollegeScholarships.org extends to its patron students.

Contact Information:
Daniel Kovach
(919) 630-4895
daniel@collegescholarships.org

Big Questions About Web 2.0 in Education

Thursday, September 6th, at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, there will be a panel discussion on "Classroom 2.0" and the use of Web 2.0 software in education. A wiki with the panel members and more information is here.

As preparation for the panel, an Office 2.0 Conference group in our Classroom 2.0 social network has been formed to allow for the discussion of ten possible panel topics. We will be encouraging the Office 2.0 Conference attendees to join the group and participate in the discussions during and after the conference. We believe that some in the edublogosphere will be interested as well, and hope you will contribute your wisdom! The discussions have been placed in a group in order not to overwhelm the regular Classroom 2.0 dialog.

Here are links to the forum discussions in that group:
1. Is Web 2.0 a good fit for education?
2. Is Web 2.0 significant to future student achievement, workplace skills, information literacy, and digital citizenship?
3. Do we need to start teaching "digital citizenship?"
4. Are the formal structure of education changing because of online learning, and what roles can Web 2.0 software play in those changes?
5. Technology decision-making in schools: The divide between IT and the classroom, and why is it so hard to implement new technologies in education?
6. How much commercialization should be allowed in the classroom and in the school?
7. The conflict between school security issues and the innovative technologies of Web 2.0
8. Publicly shared lives: how transparent should students lives be, and is it appropriate for students to be "clickable?"
9. The training gap: professional development and rapid technological change. How do we train a huge workforce in skills that are just being understood?
10. How important is equitable access to technology, and do the tools of Web 2.0 change that?