I had an absolutely great time during my online session on RSS with the Webheads this morning. There were over 20 people from Europe, Asia, South and North America, and the Middle East that participated. The Elluminate Live software over at Learning Times is incredibly easy to use and really powerful for presentations like this. I was able to run some slides, take them on Web surfs, and narrate the whole thing as I went. I know they recorded it, and I’ll see if I can post a link if/when it’s up.

What was really interesting was the talking to an audience without seeing an audience part. It was almost like doing a somewhat interactive podcast. (Which, of course, is still on my list.)

Have I mentioned how much fun doing stuff like this with technology is? Have I???

UPDATE: The link to the presentation is up on the Learning Times site. You’ll need to do some configuring, but it’s all free.

Google has just launched its “new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers” named Google Scholar. Hmmm… A quick search for “Weblogs education” brings up 255 hits.

Oy.

Can we split this up somehow? Anyone?
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I can’t believe Barbara Ganley only has 8 subscribers on Bloglines. She’s a constant source of good thinking about education in general and in specific the use of these technologies with kids:

It’s what we’re talking about with blogs in the classroom–how their very mutability and the fact that they are socially based allow them to adapt to whatever learning situation we are in–bending to personalities, tasks, disciplines and goals–and move students to think in terms of community instead of in terms of self. The blog is a catalyst for emergent behavior in the classroom, and even though we rarely arrive at where we thought we were going, isn’t that the point when communities convene to discuss the pressures of development, say, or students explore contemporary Irish literature, or fifth graders engage with a local issue?

Today’s theme is obviously “local.” (Check out this “Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media” study from Northwestern as well.) It’s another part of the direction this all takes…more local…more collaborative…more participatory.
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(via George Siemens) This appears to be a list written by Stephen Downes a few years ago that I hadn’t seen before but has some interesting context for Weblogs. I think there’s only one of the rules that isn’t applicable, namely a lack of standardization.
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(via Pam, who I’m glad to see is back in bidness…) Ok…I’m totally green with envy. This school in Washington is giving their students the vehicle to create a personalized, four-year, online, multimedia, standards-driven portfolio of their work. It was created by an assistant superintendent at the school, and it has the capability for parents or teachers or mentors to leave feedback. Teachers can get online access via their class lists and parents and students can log in anytime from any Internet connection. And for me, here’s the best part:

Teachers say one of the most innovative parts of the eFolio may be the “reflection” section, where students are asked to analyze what they have learned and show teachers they have moved beyond memorization to a deeper understanding.

I believe so strongly in the power of meta cognitive reflection, and I don’t think we’ve even begun to tap the potential of facilitating it. But eFolio is a very cool step in the right direction.

Now what I really want to know is if there’s a Web logging piece to it…

I really wish Marion had more time to write in her Web log because when she does she usually brings some really eye-opening insight on what we’re doing.

I hope the combination of TOS [teacher over shoulder] and RWC (readers with comments) will bring educators closer to achieving Vygotsky’s ideas of increasing the learning zone for students. In Mind in Society, Vygotsky says that the way to achieve greater learning is to combine problem solving activities with adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. With web logs, educators have the opportunity to create a learning zone that unifies thinking and problem solving, adult guidance (teacher/guest experts), and peer collaboration. As this learning zone enhances a student’s writing voice in a space that can become like a portfolio, this allows a student to impact their digital identity as knowledge collectors and creators. The skills involved take students beyond the skills used in the IM world and might help them appreciate the importance of TOS and RWC. Appreciating POS [parent over shoulder] is another thing altogether. (Emphasis mine.)

I think that’s a very articulate description of the potential here. Our role is to create the space and show the way, preferably by example. (Teach blogs, write blogs.) There’s more to think about here…
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Spent much of the last two days with my very skilled and patient wife digging into CSS and trying to make some more themes for my school Web logs. We pretty much ended yesterday with a concept, at least, and a pretty good understanding of how CSS work and the flexibility they give. I was inspired on Wednesday when I surfed into ZenGarden and saw some really beautiful designs that would fit Web logs well. The other area where I pretty much got caught up to speed was the creation of Manila templates in a HTML editor like GoLive. Figuring out where the macros go and what ones have to be in there was a bit hairy at first, but I’m getting there. I know what we came up with isn’t especially scintillating, but I wanted to work with the school colors and be able to swap in a bunch of different graphics in the nav column. Now I just have to get really clear on what sticks when I make a theme of this and what coding I lose. I think that most of the additional code in the main template gets lost, but that the CSS and all of the other settings get saved. If anyone knows of a resource that shows what themes save, please let me know.
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(Via JD)I think this is a pretty good question too:

Tony Perkins, creator and editor-in-chief of AlwaysOn and the event’s host, questioned whether newly emboldened readers will continue to be engaged by Web sites that don’t allow them to comment on stories, editorials or columns. What the blogging and social networking era has done for these readers, he said, was reveal “the power of participating in media… the average citizen out there has something to say.” As a result, he believes every Web site will eventually have to open itself up to readers’ comments, or risk losing their trust.

I know that I almost expect to be able to comment back to most of the writers I read. I keep wishing Josh Marshall would allow his readers to leave feedback because I’d love to see how his insights stand up to other interpretations. And as I’ve said previously, I think the power of comments in many ways defines and shapes what writing in Web logs is. Without that interaction, it’s primarily essay. With it, it’s something slightly different, I think. When your readers are “fact checking your ass,” you really have to pay attention to the accuracy and thoroughness of what you are writing about. That’s why I want to develop that Web logging style and voice in my students.

(via Hypergene Media) From a new textbook Web Journalism: Practice and Promise of a New Medium comes this pretty interesting concept.

“The idea of an Internet community is something of a radical departure for traditional journalistic thinking. These ‘communities’ may be short-term and topic-oriented. They may not be confined to the geographic areas that have traditionally defined audiences for journalists. They are likely to dissipate once the issue that brought the individuals together fades. On the other hand, they may survive and thrive beyond the control or the participation of the journalist who began them.”

One thing I’ve been working on with the school newspaper kids is coming up with ideas for the Web log site once we get it operational. (Just not enough hours in the day…) We’ve been having some fairly controversial issues come up lately like random drug testing (we’re one of the few schools that does) and overcrowding and stuff, and I keep thinking that an issues Web log would be a cool way to stimulate and archive debate. The usual concerns apply: vetting the participants, reviewing posts, etc. I really wish Manila had a feature that would allow the previewing of comments before posting just like news items. But the idea of “short-term and topic oriented” space for students is pretty appealing, and something that I think would be a great way to inform students and get them participating. So many ideas.
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Well, I don’t know if I’ll keep this one up, but I have wanted to dive into MT for quite a while now, and I have wanted to rant about my political views for almost as long…so this free MT hosting offer was almost too good to pass up. If this lives, it’ll be a lot of freethinking, freewriting, brain-dump like blather about my non-education life, if there is such a thing. No expectations…
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Over the last month, the one phrase that’s been sticking in my brain about Web logs is the one Jay Rosen offered up at BloggerCon and subsequntly included in his Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism. I’ve mentioned it here a couple of times before, but today I added t to the top of my nav bar because I think it’s just such a powerful reminder of something I’ve known for a long time but is becoming even more relevant now. “Every reader is a writer, every writer is a reader.” I just love the way Web logs facilitate the connection between the two, the ability to link to the reading we’re writing about. Really, when I get down to it, the thing I like best about this ease of publishing is the ease of connecting and reflecting. It is, I think, the most important skill we should be teaching our students to help them become information literate.

We are lucky enough to have a radio station here on campus and we’ve started a semi-regular broadcast named “Voices of Youth.” It started from a project we did with the PBS show POV last spring dealing with random student drug testing (we do that here, too.) Anyway, the result for that show was good enough that we decided to continue it this fall, and today we created the Web log for the site. Now, if anyone can give me some pointers on how to turn a .pcm file into something Internet playable…

I’ve also added a number of other feeds to my school RSS subscription page. I’m getting ready to have some of these sites go live next week, I hope. Just for the record, we’re up to around 225 sites…

Fifteen already signed up, including Mr. Winer, and I’m thinking we should be able to make 30 without a sweat. As I’ve said before, the Trotts of Moveable Type fame are expected as are people from Blosxom. And Erin Clerico and Bryan Bell will be working their magic on Sunday. If you are serious about Web logs in schools, or if you’re thinking about getting there…c’mon, what are you waiting for????? Click the link, book your flights, and get ready for a great couple of days in SF in Novemeber.

Dave Winer says:

I’m just about ready to flip the switch on the new archive for Scripting News. We’ve also made major progress on bringing a new management team on board for UserLand. Hope to have the deal ready to announce next week. And to celebrate 500 days of No Smoking Dave, I placed an order for two new servers, to run in a new cage here in Boston. This is where I’m going to put various specs and public services that are currently running at UserLand, so the new team can focus on Manila and Radio. Murphy-willing there will be quite a few changes, for the better, in the remaining weeks of 2003.

Fingers are severely crossed…

And from someone who’s coming up on nine, count ’em, nine years without a cigarette, congrats, Dave. Keep it up.

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Dan Mitchell at DeAnza College adds another nugget to this day of highly relevant posts in my aggregator:

A basic and easy web-based content-management system is a first priority. Most faculty members simply need to create a few web pages that can quickly and easily be updated, and possibly post some other file types for downloading. Frontier from Userland (and its Manila component) is the one I am most familiar with. Yes, it is a “blogging” tool, but it does a lot more than that, and I can vouch for the ease with which faculty can adopt this solution.

Me too. My teachers are sailing along with Manila right now.
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Now I ask you, how cool is this?

The mission of BlogAudio.org is to give you the resources you need to put audio files into your weblog and other web pages. It grew out of efforts to help Christopher Lydon put audio interviews into his blog and to build his BlogRadio.org website. Our ideal is to capture, edit (at least mark start and end points), and deploy audio through a browser interface, but you may need cooperating server middleware (implementing SoX and transcode, for example). We will also survey desktop tools and the hardware you need to capture the media.

And there’s a blogvideo.org too (although right now it bounces to a Chris Lydon site.) We’ve just been talking about a site that includes video and audio done by students.
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It may just have been a slight tremor, but I think some real gains were made in the educator Blogger cause earlier this month at BloggerCon. I wish I could find the audio of Pat‘s impassioned and articulate assessment of the needs and dreams of this community. I think quite a few in attendance took note. Witness the coming together of what once was a pretty much left-for-dead eBNvention that is getting ressurected next month in San Francisco. Dave Winer has pledged to attend, either Mena or Ben Trott are expected, Erin Clerico and Bryan Bell will be workshopping, social events are being planned and who knows what else. I’m really hoping we can have a mini edBloggerCon, since I found the Boston event so stimulating. But as Pat says, hopefully this will be the first of many such gatherings around the country. It’s November 21 and 22, around NCTE, so start making plans if you haven’t already.

Recently I alluded to a trend that I’ve been seeing lately of educator Web loggers starting to ask some tough questions about what exactly we’ve got here. James Farmer’s recent article in Xplana has provoked some pretty interesting response that I think bears attention as most of the feedback seems skeptical.

Bill Brandon sees a problem with adoption because of the chages Web logs require:

Weblogs require dealing with technology, not with intellect. Closer? They require changing the way things have always been done and they require re-writing lesson plans for the umpteenth time. They involve risk (what do you do when a student uses a weblog to write up dark and violent essays that you hope and pray are only fantasies?) and additional time to evaluate, without any reward for doing well with them. And so on.

I agree that there is risk in providing students with an audience, but I think the risk can be adequately mitigated by limiting the openness of the site and by allowing teachers to preview posts. And yes, Web logs entail more work, at first. But I can tell you that having my curriculum and plans archived make life much easier the second time around. And I have never felt that the Web log affected my lesson plans that much in the first place. It’s a tool, not a curriculum.

He continues to say:

Almost no one teaches people how to use journaling (read: weblogging) as a personal tool for building up a knowledge base, or as a record of personal introspection. Hardly anyone offers a course on how to go back through your old journals (weblog entries) and gain new value from them. Are you teaching scientists, engineers and mathematicians? Your task is different from that of the person teaching writers, artists, and philosophers, isn’t it? And wouldn’t the uses of weblogs be different for these groups?

This, I think, is a point very well taken. I know I have done little with my students in terms of the metacognitive thinking that effective Web logging requires. But I would argue that it’s early, that we’re all still just getting our feet wet. I think Pam and Anne‘s efforts at using Web logs with teachers is a great start at getting to some of those skills.

I have the sense that the key to getting learners to use weblogs effectively is to find a way to help each learner find, for himself or herself, the lifelong *value* in journaling as it contributes to their life’s work (whatever it will be).

Amen, and this leads nicely into a comment by Jeremy
Hiebert, who says:

We’ve been discussing this issue at work in the context of using blogs as part of a web-based portfolio to help students record and reflect on their future possibilities. We know that just providing the tool won’t ensure that it gets used. My current angle is that students would only voluntarily use a tool like that if they had something they really cared about to reflect on, but most of what they’re doing in school doesn’t fall into that category. Teachers may assign projects using the tool if it’s safe and simple, but the likelihood of students engaging in the process is certainly lessened by it being obligatory to begin with.

This ties in to what Seb has been writing and thinking about for a while now in terms of the value of a personal publishing tool. And I’m beginning to believe even more strongly that the eventual power of Web logs in education will be realized in the longer-term learning portfolio form rather than in the daily posting of assignments or simple reflections. But I would argue again that we’ve only just started down this road. And to be honest, I think there is much about Web log use in schools that is already working. We’re making connections for our kids, we’re providing them with an audience they never had before. We’re showing them more and more ways in which writing matters. And, whether we’re doing it conciously or not, we’re teaching them that learning doesn’t happen in isolation, that it is a process, and that bits of the process that may seem unrelated really do have relevance to one another. Sure, we’re going to need to get beyond the simple obligatory use of Web logs by students and figure out ways to get them actively engaged in their spaces just as we are. Until we do that, we might as well be using paper. But I think we’re moving more than a few more molecules in that direction every day.

Finally, Stephen Downes weighs in with:

Weblogging is not something we should make everybody do. And the impact of weblogs on education will not be that everybody has a personal weblog. So what will it be? I continue to view weblogs as a filtering system, a means by which individuals gather, assess, comment upon, and pass on items of value to a reader. The best weblogs are niche-oriented, and these weblogs benefit specific communities.

I agree to some point, but I would add that Web logs should also be a means to pass those items of value to ourselves in ways that we can reflect and think about and share.

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Don’t know why I didn’t make the connection earlier, but I just realized that Kaye Trammell of BloggerCon fame teaches with Mindy McAdams who I’ve mentioned many times before in this space. What they are doing with Web logs and journalism is really very cool. As imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m going to have to “borrow” some of their ideas for next quarter.

Pam is finally getting some recoginition for the great work she’s doing with Web logs as a mentoring and professional development tool. Her being featured in Teacher Magazine will surely do much to get others thinking and experimenting with this type of reflective journaling. I really like this quote:

“In my weblogging circle,” she says, “I’m able to discuss ideas and share with teachers from all over—New York, Chicago, Georgia, San Francisco, and Canada. When has that ever been afforded to teachers?”

Way to go Pam.

Also interesting to me in this article, however, is the caution that the author implies teachers must use when writing in such spaces. It appears that those gut-wrenching moments that all teachers go through when the kids or the administrators or the parents just get too much to deal with are not good fodder for Web logs. Showing the emotional side of teaching may get you in trouble. Doubting yourself, griping about the amount of work, even commenting on the political state of the world seems to be cause for some teachers to be called in to ‘discuss’ those feelings. That’s not good. I know when I look back on my own reflective journals, one of the best things about them was the vent space they provided. Sometimes it was the only place I had to really go off on the state of my teaching world. But Web logs require some balance, it seems, and that can be good or bad. The teacher in this article says

“With a weblog…I’m conscious I’m writing for strangers,” Thelwell says. “In education, you teach people how to think about doing things. Well, writing for an audience is one of the most metacognitive things you can do—why don’t I want to say that, write about this?…It helps me identify what’s happening to me.”

I think as more and more of us turn to the Internet to share our experiences or feelings or compare notes, Web logs are going to prove to be very valuable tools for professional development. But as with everything else we’re working through, the boundries of content are still unclear.

The Global Virtual Classroom is back online after an extended absence.

The re-launch of the new Global Virtual Classroom project will start with the two most popular programs: the year-round Clubhouse and the annual Contest. After we get started, additional programs will be added to enhance the goals of providing students around the world with experiences in communication, collaboration and developing the computer skills needed in the 21st century.

One of the principals tells me that blogging will be a component of the site in the near future.

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Note the list of participants on the right of the BloggerCon page. You go Pat! Now I’m REALLY looking forward to going! Education will be well represented for sure!!! Thanks, Dave.

A month-old post from John Kruper titled “Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?” has this description of the appeal of Web logs in the classroom:

And so we see why educators are so excited by blogs. For the first time, they have an easy-to-use tool that provides them and their students an authentic voice in the online classroom previously dominated by syllabi and class notes. And equally important, this newfound voice isn’t a glued-on afterthought one finds by jumping out to the “class bulletin board,” but rather is an equal citizen to the professor’s powerpoint slide, word document, and other forms of traditional “course content.” What on one had sounds insanely trivial is in fact a paradigm shift in online learning environments: blogs empower students to be co-publishers of the course and to easily comment on, react to, and debate any (teacher or student) contributed element.

One aspect of this whole process that I’ve thought about often but never felt prepared to delve into is this idea of student as co-creator of class content. It’s something that until this point has been logistically difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the bulky delivery process. But Web logs really do change this paradigm, even in a traditional classroom, if we let it.

My collaboration with Anne last year really brought home the effectivness of making students into teachers. I can say without question that some of the best learning my students did last year was when they taught Anne’s students about journalism. It was cool to watch. But who says that teaching can’t happen within my own classroom as well? We should encourage students to contribute their own learning objects to the materials that we bring with us or create. And those objects should be shared and commented upon and debated and improved, just like ours should be. For a long time, I tried to do the “guide on the side” act and let students take responsibility for their own learning. But one of the frustrations was the relative isolation in which that learning took place. Sure, we would share successes, but there were few ways to share process, the struggle of learning where most of the relevant “teachable moments” take place. I think that’s why I’m so captivated by this medium, if you want to call it that. Among other things, it makes sharing the journey so much easier and potentially so much more meaningful.

As much as we like to believe we’re the teachers and they’re the students, we all know that none of us knows it all. Education is a participation sport, and the promise of Web logs is in their ability to bring more “teachers” into the process.

(Note: Most of John’s essay compares Web logs to commercial CMS like Blackboard, and while he finds Web logs have a lot to offer, in the end he finds them lacking. I’m not sure I agree with his overall assessment, but then I’m coming from the K-12 world whereas he’s post-secondary. And, BTW, Charlie Lowe adds his typically interesting comments on this. Both are worth a read.) (All of this via CarvingCode.)
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