Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent
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So many things to read and learn and so little time to do it that it really gets frustrating sometimes. Random thoughts…
…seems as though Joe is making some Earth move in Brooklyn, and that’s a good sign. Some hints of that here too as some in my Ed Tech Committee are actually starting to post to the Web log. And I’ve started another project for a colleague who is looking to do online lit circles. Some other nibbles at the fringes too.
…Pat‘s idea of a blogvention piggy-backed on Dave Winer’s Weblogs in Meatspace idea makes sense to me, although I still like the idea of just the edu-focused of us copping our own space. Try as I might, a lot of the big blogging guns are just too far above me to get my heartrate up. I’d rather talk and think about things I can do in the classroom. (Course, as Seb suggested a while ago, we could always go here.)
…now that we got our cable modem, finally, we went WiFi at home this weekend…oh what fun it is to read recipies right off the Web while sitting at the island in the kitchen. I cannot believe the speed…just like sitting at the desktop (especially when compared to the 26.6 kbs I was connecting at from home!)
…going to tackle Smart Mobs over the break. The subtle yet fascinating ways that connectivity is changing the culture. Any one read it yet?
Jenny is great at finding cool new features for the Web life, and the latest is UltraBar. Just like the Google Toolbar except you get a customizable dropdown list of other search engines to fire up all from one place. It even highlights the words you are looking for on the page it returns. I added a couple of my favorite site-specific searches to the list like the ones at magportal.com and Google News. Between this and Amphetadesk, I’ll have a few more hours to go shopping! (Yeah, right.)
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…is Manila really flaky with older versions of Netscape (4.7)? And does anyone else have issues reading certain templates (like this one) where the words seem to cut off? The inconsistency of the Manila browser templates in different browsers is starting to be a point of concern as a few teachers are actually attempting to use the Edtech Web log I set up. I keep telling them to use IE for now, but our e-mail defaults to Netscape when you click on a link and things go downhill from there. I had attempted to contact Brian about this issue some time ago since I know he did a lot of work on his template to make is compliant with different browsers. Any one have any advice?
This is the coolest! (Via Jenny.)
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Quote: “Given past patterns where technologies like portals, personalization etc. have found their way from the public Internet to mainstream enterprise use after 3 years or so, I figure blogs
have about 12-18 months to go. Here’s a preview on what I think is coming-and why.” Joe Katzman (via David)
I found this presentation (.pdf format) really interesting, probably because I’m getting more and more interested in this idea of Web logs building what he calls “Communities of Practice.” There is so much good stuff going on in our classrooms that is just waiting to be shared…it needs to be published. In fact, if you want to make teaching better, it requires publication. I keep reading all these Web logs with such amazement because I LEARN SO MUCH from them. Pat and Joe and Seb and Sarah and countless others inform my teaching and my practice every day. They push my thinking, in some ways demand that I articulate that thinking, and in some way it all translates. Why shouldn’t we be doing that for each other here at my school, or among many schools?
That question I asked about teachers being more afraid than kids to “publish” their work has been tumbling around in my head for the past couple of days and it just keeps making more sense. Teenagers are the digital gurus in our school. In my media class yesterday, one group produced a video commercial that was worthy of any 2 a.m. major channel time slot. Another cranked out a rap CD that was “produced” in ways that boggle my mind. (I went to both groups after class and told them they need to show me how they did those things.) But this happens all the time, students teaching their teachers. Now, we come along and ask those teachers to follow their students to foreign turf, and it’s no wonder they balk.
But why not sell Web logs as the pretty painless way to enter the next phase, where publishing is king?
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Funny world…(via Sarah) title links to the same Pam who I spent hours playing pinball with at Ohio University in the late Seventies, now diving headfirst into whatever mess this is we’re creating. Soon I’m sure we’ll be sharing picture space in Seb‘s Edublogger’s Yearbook! Welcome to the party, Pam.
She’s no slouch, either:
“Focus on process of learning rather than the product of learning. The responsibility will be to challenge students and to provide situations where the inquiry approach are utilized and learners are lead to investigate in order to formulate their thoughts and ideas. Educators will need to learn to think in terms of future, not today, but tomorrow on down the road. The world is in constant change mode.”
Echoes of today’s Webtools newsletter that is filled with some interesting resources on constructivism. But like Terry, my mind is saying “puhleeeese don’t let it be this hard…”
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“We bloggers are playing with fire and, if allowed to continue, we will burn down the fucking house.” Terry, back with a vengance, bucking up Pat who is fighting the good fight and feeling justifiably frustrated. Puts me to shame.
Is it me or is there a shift in focus afoot? Seems like more of us talking about barriers to implementation rather than software, though I know there will be plenty more talk about software. Pat isn’t getting props from an administration that is unable or unwilling to have an out of the box thought. And Brian is banging up against some hard questions as well:
“As we have tried to make websites more and more manageable all of the time, we are really past the point of making it simpler, technically. It is now so easy to type your content and hit the submit button, that I’m convinced through experience that if someone isn’t doing it, they would not do it regardless of the situation. You could give them a pen and a simple form to fill out and they would be the ones that never would get around to completing it. Once a simple solution for updating web pages has been delivered, it becomes pretty hard to convince me that the reason web pages aren’t being updated is because of the solution. So what questions DO you start asking? How about, “was there ever content to go here in the first place, or are we creating houses with no buyers and then getting mad when we can’t find anybody to move in?” Echos of my If you Build It post from a few days ago.
Seb says “it takes time and effort to build up new habits of work and communication.” And that’s the worst part, I think, the real difficult and time-consuming commitment it takes to really change the way you teach, the way you’ve been teaching for 10 or 15 or 20 years. It’s hard enough just recycling the good stuff from the last time you went through it and now here comes this whole new idea that on the surface at least glows with potential. How’d I get so “lucky” to get to the point where I feel like I’m playing with Terry’s matches? And unlike Pat and Joe who can’t get a commitment from their discricts, here the problem comes with technology being “rammed down our throats” and the whole angst that comes with that. (And no, I am NOT complaining.)
Maybe putting your ideas and your work up there for everyone to see scares teachers more than students. Hell, kids are used to publishing their stuff in a variety of guises (chat, IM, etc.) Which makes it even more important for teachers to get with the program. Think about it, was there ever a time in teaching when kids really did come in knowing more than the teacher about methods? Hey, that IS a scary thought!
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…will they come? Been thinking about that more and more as I try to get teachers to start using Manila’s collaborative space and CMS capabilities. My Tech Committee and English Department sites are pretty much non-starters in terms of teacher participation.
Case in point: I try for the second time to get a conversation started on standardization of curriculum at our school by posting to the English site. In response, I get an e-mail back from one of our teachers. I suggest she post her thoughts to the Web log. She says no “cause it’s harder and takes more time!!!!!!!!!!”
I say nope and nope, that if she posts to the Web log, the conversation continues among all of us. She says “it’s much harder for me to log onto the Internet and wait for things to happen than to just reply to an e-mail (and I think the lack of use of the weblog up to this point bears that out…)”
I tell her she’s missing the point, that the whole point is to create a space for sharing ideas and information as a group, that from a collaborative standpoint, individual e-mails are not nearly as valuable. She writes “I hear you – unfortunately, people who are teaching three [out of four blocks per day] probably don’t have time to do it and that could be why we’re not hearing from a lot of dept. members…”
Obviously, I need to do a better job of a) selling the concept, and b) teaching the process. Time is an issue, but it’s not MUCH more of a time commitment to post. I guess I keep hoping (assuming) that colleagues will see the value inherent here and dive in by themselves. ASS-U-ME.
I’m going to do some training at the tech committee meeting this week…
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Although I think Joe might take exception to this:
“Hola! My name is Valery I’m a 17 year old Costa Rican, I came to the USA 3 years ago, and I am really excited about having a professional helping us.”
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Via eSchool News…accompanying article here.
Pretty interesting undertaking by Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools (CMS…funny huh?) to redesign their Web site. At first blush, it looks almost like a Weblog. (Compare to Kern County.) I wonder if they even considered a CMS as a solution.
Quote: “We wanted to create a Web site that CMS and the community could be proud of, onethat would move us from static pages to a site that is news-driven and easily updated and maintained by CMS staff on a daily basis. We wanted to present online content that is fast to download, easy to navigate, and simple to search. We also wanted a design that helps build CMS’s overall image by providing consistent graphics, navigation, and written content. We also wanted a site that works with a multitude of browsers, operating systems, connection speeds, and monitors and is easily indexed by major search engines and spiders.”
Hmmm…sounds like Manila to me. But this is a huge school district, 148 schools, a Web staff of three developers and one associate, a project manager and a IS person to boot. Probably even more reason to give the individual schools the ability to do easy updates.
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Now that Joe is using Radio and I can snag his feed, I think I’ve got all my favorite edu-Web loggers in one place on Amphetadesk, and I have to say, it make my life a lot easier. I’m getting 25 channels that usually take me about half and hour to scan and delve into when necessary. It’s a very cool concept that if I could get it tweaked here would eliminate the need to clog up my mailbox with e-mail copies of all the posts being made to my many student/teacher/group/parent Manila Web logs. And, I’m wondering if there is a way to access the same feed page on Amphetadesk from a different machine. Anyone know?
Feeling buried these days under a mound of work…new classes, teaching portfolios, tech committees and on and on. I sometimes wonder how I keep afloat, yet I don’t think I know any other way. Haven’t been able to do much reflecting here, and there is so much to reflect on. Instead, I’m building blogs and slogging through.
Four additions to the Will Blogs list…my new Secret Life of Bees site, the Parents’ Online Book Club, the English Department Web log (which is pretty much a non-starter to this point) and my Media Lit class. Whew.
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“I received your letter in the mail and think your idea of having a Secret Life of Bees Parents’ Online Book Club is a brilliant idea. Please count me in. Even if you don’t get enough parents interested, I will read that book at the same time as my son. It sounds like a lovely novel.”
And I’ve already got three more parents signed up. If I can get to 10, I’ll be very happy.
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Added two sites to the Best Practices list: Charlie Lowe’s Writing About Digital Culture class at Florida State University, and the U. C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism site on Election 2002. Both are news Web logs, and both just reinforce the whole Newswire and MLK News concept of facilitating real journalism with real audiences for students.
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I really liked the Newswire experiment that I ran in my journalism classes. Sifting through the feedback I got from my students, most of them seem to have enjoyed the process and learned something from it. (Of course, there were dissenters.) I’m looking forward to expanding on the idea in the spring when I teach journalism again.
Although very similar in concept, The Annenberg Onlinejournalism.com site linked above offers a little twist on what we did. Students there write their own stories/summaries which are subsequently edited and then posted. There is more in the way of summary and linking, which shows a bit more reporting than I asked my kids to do. But we could take it a step further without too much trouble. What if students find the stories for their beat, do the summary, link to relevant re-sources about the topic, dig for both sides of the story, peer edit and then post? They could even do some local reporting on the topic.
When I see this, the more I think about doing just one Web log in media class instead of smaller group ones. Stories are submitted in different categories similar to the USC site but offered with some pertinent research to go along with it. We’d have five posts a day dealing with various topics, but the authors would have to do more than just summarize.
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Ok…just for the record…nothing earth shattering here, but…cutting and pasting from MS Word…bad. Cutting and pasting from Wordpad/Notepad…good.
Ed my tech guy says giving kids access to Wordpad is no problem. So it looks like the solution is if students have posts that they have created in Word, they must first save them as text only files, then open them in Wordpad or Notepad, and then copy and paste into Manila. A bit cumbersome, but a workable solution for now.
Ironic thing is I downloaded and installed Microsoft’s own plug-in to clean the HTML and it didn’t work either. Even though the option to “Export to Compact HTML” appears, it gives me an error every time: “Compile Error in Hidden Module”. Uh, yeah, I can figure that one out…
So finally warming up to this whole RSS thing, getting the kinks out of the code, getting Amphetadesk up to speed with a little help from an add-on from David (no troubles this time.) Getting all the feeds from Pat and Karen and Brian and others all in one nicely organized space (though for some reason I can’t get Seb‘s to work!?!). Talk about a time saver! EZ drop down lists of posts, easy to read and click through to if I want. So now I can get all my favorite Web loggers in one place and use Manila Express to post to this space from the same spot. I think I’m getting the hang of this.
Now, one step further, of course: set up all my students and committee Web logs in an aggregator and make it one-stop reading instead of opening up 24 separate ones or clogging my mailbox with update notifications. If I see something I want to respond to, just click through to the site and discuss away. Think of how easy it would be to compare the efforts of the kids since all their work on a particular assignment would pretty much be side by side on one page. That is an awesome concept, and would be a MAJOR step in the right direction in terms of the pressed for time issues.
But this validation issue is stopping me cold. Currently, I can’t get any of my kids’ Web logs to validate because of the apostrophe and quotation mark issues that we were trying to solve, with little success, earlier. Not sure if it’s because they are copying and pasting their posts from Word (which is what I urge them to do.) If so, I need to find a formatting fix, or I need to try David‘s Tidy program again (gulp). Any other suggestions?
And so it goes…
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Took a mini-vacation from posting about Web logs, and my mind has been drawn more and more to the new, changed state of the world and it’s implications for teaching. Been thinking a lot about what we don’t seem to teach our kids in any contextual way: living with less impact on the environment, understanding media messages, the impact of consumerism on the global society, the now-more-than-ever duty that falls to all of us as members of a participatory democracy. We don’t give all of our kids practical skills to deal with these issues which I think are among the most important we face right now. They get them piecemeal here and there, but we need a “Living in the 21st Century” class that’s mandatory for every student.
Found this quote: “This is a time in which it is profoundly tempting to withdraw into old certainties, to return to familiar landscapes of teaching and learning whose routines and well-worn grooves give us comfort and a sense of control and order. But the world itself holds a different lesson for us: a lesson about the importance of teaching the young to live well when the very shape of that world emerges every day in ways that are unlike anything we have ever known before.” (Emphasis added.) (From CITE.)
I think a lot about what this all must be like for my students. This week, here is what they’ve had to “consume”: The U.S. is nowhere near prepared for another terrorist attack, and the next one will likely dwarf 9/11; snipers who get 24/7 coverage while their victims names have already faded from our memories; hundreds of innocent people gassed to death by their own government; tales of war in Iraq; 16,000 people murdered in this country last year; suicide bombings and killings left and right…and the list goes on. I struggle to process all this, to maintain some sense of balance and usefulness in the face of all of this out-of-my-control stuff.
This is a changed world, and we need to change our definition of what it means to live well. With our students, I think we have to do a better job of giving them some context for their own definitions. And I think technology can facilitate that, maybe even Web logs, in bringing people together in shared spaces to understand more of what it means to be human, and American, and white, and male or female or whatever. Just thinking about it…
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Quote: “But now comes a development that really does look like a threat to traditional print media: Google News.”
Ironic, since I found this using Google News, which is my new favorite obsession. Sorted news stories from sources around the globe offers an incredible mix of viewpoints and interpretations. As this editorial says, “just think what Google News implies in terms of balanced coverage.” Something to add to the media curriculum in terms of information literacy. Not that it will always show both sides, but at least it’s an easy way to compare angles and biases in the presentation.
PS…Posted using David’s manilaExpress for News Items.
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Sometimes the basic stuff takes longest to sink in. One tool in Manila that I need to think through more is the e-mail notification, especially with the Ed-Tech Web log. It’s obviously a great way to keep everyone in the loop without necessarily visiting the site. I guess I get worried that we’re getting buried under so much stuff already that people would recoil at the idea. From a classroom standpoint, when I do the media weblog next quarter, I’ll definitely set them up so that everyone in the group gets a notification when stuff is posted or commented upon.
I could also do a better job with shortcuts, namely the creation of same. I keep forgetting that I could just type Pat in quotation marks (like I did just then) instead of going through the whole link process. And what’s up with Bulletins? I could use them to communicate directly with my students if they click the button during sign up.
Things I gotta learn/do:
BTW, in case I haven’t linked it before DeAnza College does have some awesome Manila support set up. (Via John Robb)
First, let me say that I am humbly thankful for all of this. I understand that this is not reality, that there is little to temper my dreams and ideas for the technology. As Pat says, “privilege makes naivete not just sustainable but enviable.”
Second, again, as Pat says, there is a political/class aspect that shouldn’t and cannot be overlooked. My optimisim is fueled by my autonomy and support both in people and money. Reading Joe’s and Pat’s accounts of their struggles and small victories both with connections and ideas grounds me, reminds me of how different it is for me.
All that leads me to wonder if I’m living up to the responsibility that comes with that privilege. What is that responsibility, in fact? Students first, I know, but after that…? Is the stuff I do or can do even relevant to the vast majority of teachers out there who don’t have the same resources? Just thinking about it…
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Pat writes: Maybe all this ed-blogging ranting and raving is beside the point, even initially, even when there are (truth be told) only 15 or so of us fiddling with these tools. And especially when we all know deep in our seasoned-teacher hearts that the districts will in the end cave and buy some blunderbuss of a Blackboard or a PeopleSoft or an MS tool to make all this Manila and MoveableType and Blogger stuff look like the valuable and doomed CLAS (California Learning Assessment System) reform chimera of 8 or 10 years ago.
Call it naivete, but my seasoned-teacher heart isn’t convinced that my district (at least) will opt for some Blackboard-esque app if I can do a good enough job of showing them what we can already to with a regular old Web log. Already I’ve been able to create classroom portals, collaboartive project space, knowledge management space, interactive discussions, teacher and student portfolios, online learning logs, and personal writing space. I’m thinking the school Web site isn’t far behind. All for $299 and a dollop of server space (for which I feel very fortunate.)
Granted, Manila probably is NOT where this is all going to end up a few years from now…it’s not built with teachers and students in mind. But the ideas that we develop now will inform whatever that ultimate tool becomes down the road. Maybe we’ll even create it. And Sarah and friends are running workshops and publishing articles and Brian’s working with his teachers, and I’m presenting at JEA next month and working on a couple of journal articles, and Pat is publishing in ERIC, and I don’t think any of it is beside the point because I’m looking at what I’ve been able to do in just a few months in my classroom and I’m even more excited about the potential. Yes, the obstacles are many and complex. We’ve all been talking about how difficult it is to move more educators to the table. But it’s so early yet. Even if there are ten times as many of us out there as Pat suggests, it’s just a blip. But I keep getting e-mails from teachers who want ideas and questions answered. And I keep getting feedback from my kids that, while it certainly isn’t yet statistically proven out, seems to indicate that they’re getting a charge from it, that they’re learning more about communicating and organizing their thoughts and working with others and audience and a whole bunch of other stuff that I used to find so freaking difficult to provide for them.
So, back to Pat: One of the best things I’ve read on an education-related blog this year is this posting of newbie Evan’s. Nothing about Rss feeds, competing blog platforms, teacher training issues, hardware and infrastructure obstacles. This is related to the oh-so-natural-and-easy adoption of blog skills by the mlkNews 8th. grade editors. The tech is already invisible to them.
Yeah, that’s right. My kids too. Tell them once, and they got it, pretty much. But it’s those discussions and rants about Rss and competing blog platforms and all that other stuff that got me to where I could give it to them. I need to think it through, and this is how I do it, by ranting and raving and learning, so they can just do the learning part.
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