Into the blogosphere

14. Looking for blogs that are useful to my teaching.

Time to go in search of more blogs to follow. How do you find blogs that are worth reading? I'm starting with a blank page here, so the best first step seems to a web search for 'education' and 'blog'.
Up pop pages and pages of them - everyone has something to say about education, or so it seems. Luckily, the first page of Google results has a few best blog lists, so I'm hoping that I can get past the chaff and go straight to the wheat.
The site Onalytica offers a listing of what it says are the 100 most influential education blogs in the world. It's analysis isn't just measuring popularity, they say, but influence too.
The obvious first choice is to pick the world's most influential blog, which is called dy/dan, and is the work of an American maths teacher called Dan Meyer. I'm a bit puzzled as to what has got it to the top of the tree; it's not really for me, for a start it's mostly about maths and it is very American.
Given the way the online world works the 100 are going to be mostly North American, aren't they? So Plan B involves filtering out everything that isn't coming from the UK. Lists are there to find, but they're not ones that are based on analytics - they're subjective, just bloggers listing blogs that they value.
Learning Spy is a fascinating read in itself, a lucky dip of a blog that had me clicking from subject to subject. But it is mostly about secondary school teaching, so isn't that relevant to my situation.

Of Learning Spy's top 10, the most interesting blog for me is, I think, Webs of Substance. It focuses on what's happening in education research and it's interesting to find out about what's new.
It's a fairly serious, business-like place to be. It's author, Harry Webb, doesn't bother  prettying things up with pictures or videos, but the writing is good and posts are well argued.
And for a student, it's feels a little dangerous because he's challenging some of what we're being taught. For example, take Bloom's Taxonomy. Webs of Substance says: "I think we can all agree that Bloom’s taxonomy is a terrible way of viewing learning."
Can we? He then goes on to say: "This is not because it really isn’t based on anything. Although it really isn’t; it’s just something that a committee of worthy people made-up."
He goes on to make a case against the taxonomy and how it's used. As a complete newbie I don't know enough to judge that case, but it's interesting to see orthodoxy being challenged.
It's also fascinating to read the comments that come in to Web of Substance. On the Bloom's post alone there are 16 and they're well worth looking through too.

Sources:
Dy/dan www.blog.mrmeyer.com (Accessed: 18.1.15)
Learning Spy www.learningspy.co.uk (Accessed: 18.1.15) 
Onalytica www.onalytica.com (Accessed: 18.1.15)
Webs of Substance www. websofsubstance.wordpress.com (Accessed: 18.1.15)