So today is a sad day as I’ve decided to drop Alan Levine and Tim Lauer from my Bloglines blogroll. (Sorry guys.) Their blog feeds have just become, I dunno, so one-dimensional. Sure, they’re both writing about great stuff and linking to cool tools. But I just feels like I’m missing something…

The fix? Now I’m subscribed to Tim and Alan’s SuprGlu sites. In one feed, I get their blog posts, any links they post to del.icio.us, their Flickr photos and more. And actually, while the feed uptake is a little slower, I’m liking this a lot more. These are people whose ideas and links I trust, and I love being able to follow their practice and beyond the blog more deeply and easily. In fact, I’d love it if more of my nucleus of trusted teachers would do the same.

And btw, here’s my Suprglu page and feed in case you’re interested. (The way I’ve been del.icio.us-ing lately, you might be.)

C’mon…you didn’t think I be so silly as to totally drop Tim and Alan, did you?

(As an aside, believe it or not, it took me until this morning to subscribe to Stephen’s Edu-RSS feed. And I really wish I could wrap my brain around the whole concept of what he’s trying to do with it.)

(via Jon Udell) Now that I’m happily bookmarking at del.icio.us again (even though I hate the fact that I’m limited in the length of the comment I can leave) it’s great to know that I can use it to create private lists for other users as well. All you have to do is add a tag that says for:willrich, replacing, obviously, the willrich in the example with whatever username I wanted to add. So if I wanted to save something privately for Alan, I’d tag it for:cogdog. And the use of this with students is obvious. We could now send individually relevant bookmarks to individual students for their use only.

And, of course, now I can save all sorts of stuff just for myself too, like links to Cubs blogs that I’m sure no one else would want to see…

UPDATE: While this seems to store a bookmark in someone else’s private folder, it also adds it to your own public folder. Not sure if it stays in the other person’s if you subsequently delete it from your own…
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If you’re not reading the Connectivism Blog by George Siemens you should. I find his theories of learning and education as influenced by the Read/Write Web to be really interesting and in many cases profound (at least for my feeble brain.) But it’s just such a mind shift when you start thinking about how these technologies are all about connections, connections to people, to ideas and to information. It’s that last that he is writing about today:

As a learner, I need a way to have a connection back to the original knowledge source. Knowledge reflexivity is simply a means of ensuring that as the original knowledge source changes, we have a connection which ensures we remain current. The way most education is designed today makes this very impractical (imagine a designer emailing each learner who has taken a course informing them of a core knowledge change). The issue stems from the left over remnants of learning design from a society and era of greater stability. But reality has changed for learners. If I take a course, I should have some level of reflexivity for some period of time.

A couple of things in there jump out at me, the first being the phrase “an era of greater stability.” This is what I’ve been talking about when I say that we as educators don’t own the content anymore, that we can’t rely on traditional texts the way that we used to. Problem is that so many educators are trying to hold on to that design because it’s easy and familiar. I also like the idea of reflexivity with knowledge, that it’s a relationship, not just something we acquire.

So how do we stay connected to a knowledge base that is in flux? My favorite tool:

How can knowledge reflexivity be designed into existing learning processes? Probably the easiest method is some type of variation of RSS. Those who follow blogs (and use an aggregator) will understand that RSS is simply a means of staying aware of changes in blogs (or any other information source). Rather than requiring a learner to continually access a resource to determine if it has changed, an aggregator automatically performs the function. It’s a time saving process, but more importantly, ensures that the learner remains current and aware on a particular subject.

That is certainly how I stay connected these days. I don’t know what I did B.B. (before Bloglines.) Good stuff.
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Tomorrow is the first full day training for our Tablet PC pilot and I’ve been hammering away on the Moodle site I’ve created for the course. This is my first attempt at Moodle and I have to say I am very, very impressed. Once you get the feel for it, it’s very intuitive, and it’s got a very rich feature set. The wiki tool alone was enough to sell me. (No blog, however…)

Anyway, just thought I’d share a link to the site and invite anyone who is interested to take a look around. Just click on the “New Classroom Model Pilot Course” link at the lower left, and then login as a guest. It’s read only. If there are any Moodle-ists out there with advice, I’m all ears.

(BTW, my favorite thing in Moodle is being able to get up to the minute logs of all the users and where they are going. I’ve had five or six of my “students” digging around the site already, and it’s interesting (at least for now) to see the directions they go and the things they’re looking at. Good stuff!)

(via Jeremy) Is there anyone NOT talking about collaboration these days? This essay about Weblogs as e-portfolios reiterates a lot of the collaborative potential of Weblogs in schools.

Weblogs are a great reflective tool. A student can write something about their course,
perhaps categorise it in terms of subject or the piece of work concerned, and that
reflection can be accessed and searched by both date and context.

However, weblog functionality comes into its own when mixed with social networking,
as with LiveJournal: the student can then mark certain reflections as being for public
consumption, or viewable by certain groups of other users. They can then make
comments and perhaps add their thoughts in their own journals, with a link between the
two established via a trackback. Students then have use of not just their own reflections,
but those of their peers, and potentially teaching staff too: a much wider realm of thought,
which might produce conclusions a student may not have arrived at on their own.

A student could then, within a weblog post or portfolio page, provide a link to any object
in their digital repository. Perhaps a trackback link could be made from that object to all
the posts and pages mentioning it. This would allow a student or tutor to instantly see,
when looking at a piece of work, the personal reflections and inter-student discussions
relating to it.

Furthermore, it can also affect learning in the “real world”; through a social networking
enabled system, a student could find and communicate with a number of like-minded
individuals, who might then organise study or social groups. If an establishment’s
system was linked to other systems in other parts of the country (or the world), groups of
students doing similar courses could all compare notes and learn from each other.

Maybe it’s just that my radar is tuning into it more these days, but the idea of collaborative learning through Weblogs and social networking software seems to be just exploding. And when you really take a little time to think about the possibilities…
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So as an experiment in idea organization, I’ve started Furling my own posts into departments with related posts and stories. Just trying to see if it might not be an effective way of keeping track of the threads. At some point, I know it’s a lost cause, but…

I’ve been struggling with this whole “what is going to make Web logs use successful” question for a while as the idea is getting more an more interest here. The bottom line, I believe is acceptance by classroom teachers as a useful technology. To me, it all starts from there. I think potential users need to know the technology is easy to use, works as advertised, and enhances the educational experience of their students. Absent widespread adoption, it’s a tough sell to try something new on a district level for “managing our knowledge.” But I think there are enough models out there to at least whet their appetites and pilot some uses.

From a KM standpoint, Jim McGee finishes off a nice wrapup of Web logs as KM with this:

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex, which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work backwards from the answer – weblogs – to the problem – what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management. We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident.

As usual, this has me thinking. I’ve just been appointed to “champion” the KM/Internal Communications topic at our annual “Critical Issues” gathering next month. That’s when the administrative team sits down to talk about the solutions to the issues that we feel are most important (and this came in at the top of the list.) As such, I need to develop a problem statement, so Jim’s observations are once again distinctly relevant. What exactly are our needs in KM?

We have two dozen committees that never “speak” to one another. We have parents interested in our work that can’t access it. We have teachers who could use materials and ideas and opportunities for collaboration. We have students creating a whole heckuva lot of knowledge that gets lost when the day ends. We have data. We have results. We have a lot more situations like this throughout our organization. And right now, it’s so hard to get to any of that “knowledge” that it is resulting in a real lack of communication and growing frustration with that fact. I think here it’s almost a question of communicating knowledge more than managing it (although I realize they are the same thing on some levels.)

Web logs allow for inexpensive, easy creation and storage or publication of information (or knowledge) that is accessible, archivable, and searchable. Also, Web logs are flexible in terms of access and security. They are at first (and second) blush a viable solution to what is a growing problem. But only, and this is the big one, only if people use them.

What I need to keep in mind is to grow into the solution instead of implementing it. I can see the end result in my brain, but I need the patience to nurture it into fruition.