I hate spammers. I really do. I flipped the switch on trackbacks just now because it was just getting ridiculous in terms of the texasholdem crud that was showing up. Too bad, ’cause the idea is a great one. But I’ve been tracking references to this site via RSS feeds and Technorati already, and I’d say 95% of what turns up here turns up there. Without the spam, of course.

More disconcerting is that when I went to Flickr the other day, an extremely naked woman appeared in my “Photos From My Contacts” stream. Turns out it was spam. Flickr spam. Not good.

I got an e-mail from a teacher who had just done a Weblog training using Blogger, and the issue of the “Next Blog” button in the top right corner came up, as in what if students click through to some inappropriate site? Oy. If you haven’t tried this of late, you need to. Start here at a test site I put up a couple of months ago and click through to the 10 random “Next Blog” sites that come up. Here’s what I got:

#1. A page full of the same candlemaking link intended only to raise the Google ranking of the link owner.
#2. Another one, this time related to child support.
#3. Another one for sun screen protection.
#4. A site filled with picture of nurse porn.
#5. A personal blog written in Portugese (I think.)
#6. A link site for debt consolidation.
#7. A student blog (believe it or not!)
#8. A blog on quantum algorithms.
#9. A link site for golden retreiver pictures (???)
#10. A political blog.

So, six of the ten sites were either spam or porn. I’m sure your mileage may vary, but the point is pretty clear. Just the chance that a student might click through to a pornography site is enough to scratch Blogger from the list of blogging options. So, what to do? Here are a few options:

So Manila 9.5 is out, and the good folks at Weblogger, my most excellent host, are installing it this weekend. From the release notes, here’s one reason I’m looking forward to it:

The Access Control feature adds new controls for what content can be seen and/or responded to within Manila by users. This feature allows editors to restrict access to areas of your Manila site based on membership and/or editorial level. Access can be limited based on membership, eritorial access, or for a specific period of time. The site structure paths which point to a message can also be restricted to members or editors. A new Access Control Prefs page is used to configure Access Control. New access control macros have also been created.

This has always been one of the weaknesses of Manila, and it sounds like they have addressed in in a big way. Hopefully, setting these controls will be easy.

It does not appear, however, that Userland has addressed the issue of approving comments before they are posted, something that is crucial to K-12 users. I really hope I’m wrong.

Paul Chenowith links to a new Perseus survey of the blogosphere with some numbers that seem strangely out of whack, at least to me. First, Perseus expects around 55 million blogs to have been created by year’s end, which is like six or seven times more than any other estimates I’ve seen. It says MSN Spaces has like 4.5 million sites, of which maybe I’ve seen three. And what the heck is Greatest Journal anyway?

Oy.

The report goes on to say that the first BloggerCon was the “inflection point” for the industry. Huh? And here’s a statistic near to my own heart: at the infamous Myspaces.com only a “somewhat greater” than 4.7% of their 12 million (12 million!?!) users have a blog. Are we still calling that a blog site? (Rhetorical question.)

And here I thought I had a pretty good pulse on the blogosphere…

Paul sums it up nicely, however.

All in all, however, I believe the escalating growth in the use of blogs by teens and young adults means that there are learning opportunities available. Ignoring the potential of blogs as an accepted/adopted learning tool among teens is rapidly fading option. Blogging is neither the end of the highway nor the finish line in the chase for technology, it is merely a barometer of things to come.

Go Blogs. Go!

I’m feeling like one of the last holdouts here with Manila, and I’ve got open source issues that I need to come to terms with, but this news from Userland CEO Scott Young has me hoping:

We are getting closer to the release of Manila into public beta. Its been a fairly long process, but the size and scope of the changes will be worth it. Significant additions have been made and as we have finally worked through all the change notes and have come to discover that what we have is Manila 9.5 !!

After adding versioning for content and templates, access controls, enclosure support, Atom support for Manila’s aggregator, greater flexibility in the new member signup process, easier navigation of stories and pictures pages, improved static rendering support, and a large number of other enhancements and bug fixes for users and developers alike – we’ve set the version number for the next release of Manila at 9.5. (We’ve even got a few more surprises in store.)

We’re excited!

Fingers crossed for a successful release…soon!

Another small step for Manila users…we can now include enclosure tags in our posts. So, I guess that means that if I ever create another Podcast I can just plunk it in my post without using the Feedburner feed I had set up for it. Nice.

As luck would have it, I was talking about just this capability with a teacher in my current Weblogs class here at my school. He wants to pilot Tablet PCs with his kids next year and is envisioning a paperless class where kids access work from his blog, complete it on their tablets, post to their own blog, and he fetches it via the RSS feed. Well, it appears, now he can. This obviously harkens back to a post a couple of weeks ago about using enclosures. Looks like I’m going to have to dig into it a bit more now.

But, not to be a spoiled sport, I wish Manila would also support easy comment previewing, easy off/on comments, easy public/private choice in posting, easy check box deleting of comments or content, more complex editorial permissions… Looks like Drupal is going for the ed market, and I’ve already talked about how much I like Word Press. Manila has so many good things going for it, but it just needs a few more tweaks and an overhaul in the intuitiveness department.

I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at Word Press and Moodle for some time now, and I finally had a chance to play with Word Press this morning. Oy. I really, really like what I see so far.

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of James Farmer at IncSub, you too can set up your own free Word Press site. And if you have any blogging experience at all, finding your way around should be pretty straightforward. Word Press is a very robust open source software that has all of the features I’ve been yearning for in Manila in terms of easy to understand user levels, review of posts and comments, flexibility in what’s private and public, and a real nice, easy to understand “dashboard” that puts everything at your fingertips. Very nice.

Now here’s the news…it’s not that I don’t love Manila…I still do. But I’ve actually started some conversations with one of the department supervisors about the idea of creating blogfolios for all of our students at the beginning of their freshman year where they post their work throughout their time in high school. And my brain is just swimming with the possibilities. And Word Press, if it can scale, seems like it has great potential in terms of running upwards of 3,000 sites since it has all of the good stuff that Manila is missing. Hmmm…

Five to nine inches of snow coming tonight…a day off tomorrow for Moodling around, perhaps?

I’ve been using Manila both personally and with my classes for three years, but somehow the Site Access Restrictions feature just slipped by me. I’m not sure it’s the most, shall we say “elegant” solution to the some parts public, some parts private issue, but it is a solution nonetheless. This way, students can limit access to certain pages in the site to say, just the teacher, putting only finished work out there for everyone to see. The idea is crucial, I think, though an easier solution would be to include those access choices where you create the content. This doesn’t seem to work with News Items, but it does work with Stories.

So Alan has been calling out the spammers,
daring them to mess with him. Hmmm….don’t know that I would be so
bold. The good news here is that since I turned off Radio Hosting and
went back to the “gotta be a member and login before you can comment”
mode, the spam has been totally cut off. And, I’m happy to report,
people are still leaving comments. This is a good thing.

As is this, I think. Manila now seems to have the ability to approve or reject comments, though I’m not exactly sure:

The built-in callbacks do things like block a comment before it’s
posted or setup custom actions after a comment has been posted.

I
wish my brain got to the server side of things more easily. I’ll have
to dig around to see what this all means. At any rate, right now we
have all of our comment-able sites set to login first mode. Doesn’t
mean individuals still can’t come it and muck around with things, but
at least the bots are stopped.

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You knew that sooner or later all of these fun little disparate tools would start coming together in one app, and it looks like Onfolio has taken a first step in that direction.

Fully integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office, Onfolio has tools for capturing a wide range of content including links, text snippets, images, web pages, and documents. Onfolio lets you organize and find captured content quickly and easily. And with Onfolio, you can easily share your research in documents, presentations, emails, and research reports.

It’s an RSS reader too, so here’s a blend of Furl, Webnote and Bloglines. The feature list is pretty impressive, and it has something that seems to be trying to quack like a blog too:

Website Publish* – Publish your research in a Website, with selected links, comments and content that you’ve captured. Automatically, include an RSS feed as part of the output.

Hmmm…verrry interesting. But, aye, here’s the rub: I don’t work on one machine. I have the desktop in my office, my laptop, the desktop at my wife’s office…you get the picture. How do I synch up all of this stuff, huh?

When we get to Onfolio Web, I’ll really sit up and take notice. But don’t fret…it won’t be long.
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Jon Udell goes into great depth about the potential for using del.icio.us
as a collaborative tool. My head hurts after reading it, but I actually
think I see some of the interesting ways that del.icio.us can connect
ideas and interests. Just one example; I didn’t realize that it not
only tells you who else posted the same bookmark, but it also tells you
how they tagged that bookmark so you can potentially easily subscribe
to that narrow topic via RSS feed. Not so with Furl, I don’t think.

He also suggests saving your own posts, which is something I had started to do with Furl
a while back. It didn’t last, however. The idea of going back and
tagging each post with keywords is daunting, but I can see the
reasoning behind it, I guess. It’s the index to the blog, more or less,
and I really like that concept. I do wish it was easier to retreive
certain ideas and posts that were written many moons ago now (I can’t
believe I’ve got almost three years worth of writing here…oy.)

But one obvious classroom use of either Furl or del.icio.us is having
students subscribe to to one of the teacher’s topic feeds. What a great
way to disctribute information. Phil Windley posted something similar a couple of days ago:

I’ve found Del.icio.us to be a great way to organize bookmarks and,
using the RSS feeds, have my students follow what I’m book marking.
When I want to bring something to their attention, I can just bookmark
it in Del.icio.us and they see it in their feedreader. Very easy to do.

I think this whole concept has some great applications,
but I’m not sure my feeble brain can sort through all the different
ways to make it happen. I’m feeling like that overload point is near
again…

Maybe I should do a Podcast.

I know this whole I-Pod/Podcasting thing kind of strays away from the main focus of this blog, but it’s just been so interesting to watch the ways in which this particular little piece of hardware has exploded. And, I just can’t resist when I see people finding ways to adopt any of these tools into the classroom.

Hence this link to an article in Campus Technology about the ways that some professors are bringing the I-Pod into their teaching.

Several members of GC&SU’s faculty quickly rose to the challenge. According to Hank Edmondson, professor of Government, “My first vision for the iPod was to integrate music into a couple of my classes, so I started with War, Politics, and Shakespeare, downloading songs about war—from patriotic to protest—and adding some Elizabethan music. We also used the iPod to record the students presenting speeches they had chosen from one of the plays we were studying. After each reading, all of the iPods were updated for the benefit of the entire class; all of the students were made responsible for the material recorded by their peers.”

“Next,” Edmondson continues, “I incorporated the iPod into my freshman Ethics and Society class where I cover, in an historical organization, the leading moral philosophies. A big challenge in such a class is to convince the students that the material is relevant. The iPod is a tremendous help because I can choose a lot of popular music and associate different songs with different philosophies, showing the students how their own music reflects the ideas we are studying. Jim Morrison and the Doors were, by their own admission, influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.”

Now I think that’s pretty cool, and it’s a good example of technology improving the delivery of the curriculum. Not a big leap to think about how this might work on the 8-12 level either.

Here’s where to go if you want some more detail on how it all works.
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(via Stephen Downes) This is why I love the Internet and Weblogs…well, one of the reasons, anyway. Something new comes along (Podcasting), a bunch of people start throwing stuff at the proverbial wall to see what sticks, the meme spreads like the disbelief around the world at the results of our election, and someone like Steve Sloan at San Jose State University cranks up Edupodder.com to filter it all for us.

I have been thinking a lot of the potential of the medium. I really think there is something here for education!

In my opinion Podcasting is a great tool:

for distance learning

to facilitate self-paced learning

for remediation of slower learners

to allow faculty to offer advanced and or highly motivated learners extra content

for helping students with reading and/or other learning disabilities

for multi-lingual education

to provide the ability for educators to feature guest speakers from remote locations

to allow guest speakers the ability to present once to many sections and classes

to allow educators to escape the tedium of lecturing

to offer a richer learning environment

Way too much fun…now, if he just had an RSS feed.
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Aaron Campbell has some pretty interesting ideas for implementing some of these tools in his classrooms. He’s an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher who’s doing some great thinking about how to make all of this work. With Podcasting, for instance:

I just listened to Dave Winer’s Nov. 1st podcast this morning as he rambled on about this and that and I realized that it would valuable to produce a short 10-15 min weekly broadcast designed specifically for my students; one in which I could speak naturally about extensions on the various themes and topics covered in class while introducing relevant phrases and recycling vocabulary, not to mention current events, music, and movies. Not only could I present a link to the Mp3 file on the web, but I could also email it to their cell phones if they so wished. Now, if I only had an iPod…

(Btw, if you want a pretty decent rundown of Podcasting and some ideas for using it, see this post at Contentious.)
Aaron’s got ideas for flickr and wikis that are worth checking out as well.
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It’s taken me a while, but I think I’m finally starting to “get” the hype about flickr. Tim and Alan have been pushing my brain already, doing some neat stuff with creating learning objects with photos. And Steve Burt (who really needs to get blogging) is a phone to flickr to Weblog expert. But up until now, I haven’t really gotten the social aspect of the tool…I mean who wants to scroll through random pictures of random people doing random things randomly? Sure, I guess you could make family flickr pages and so on, but I can do that in a blog.

Today, however, Brian Lamb posted this really beautiful picture of the eclipse over Vancouver, and when I clicked on it, it took me to 214 other pictures of the eclipse that random people had posted. I clicked on the slide show link, and sat back, fascinated, catching some great views of an event I had missed.

Just like I had missed the point of the flickr tags that put all of those pictures together. Alan had written about it a month ago:

I’ve only explored a bit with flickr’s tags, but it is promising a great example of taking a large pool of assets from combines sources (everyone who published public photos on flickr) and then provide a way to easily mix and recombine them into new “super” collections based on the keyword “tags” people apply to their photos- like mine should end up in the grandcanyon collection, or my desert flower photos in the flower collection. Or now, I have the sole image in the flinstones tag set. Woohoo!

It would be cool to be able to combine tags?? Anyhow, can you see it is not a far stretch to exchange “photos” for “learning objects”, and have a simple way to pull up everything tagged as for “mid level organic chemistry”? Maybe not feasible, but an interesting model for Rip Mix and _________.

Doh! I get it. Have kids upload pictures they take to flickr, tag them, add titles, descriptions and hot spots with mouseovers, look at other similarly tagged photos from classmates or students far and abroad, comment back to the creators…and then blog about the whole experience. Construct. Collaborate. Communicate.

So, you can find out all sorts of interesting things about my office by clicking on the photo above. And, if you’re so inclined, you can also see 637 other pictures of random offices from random people…

My “Teacher’s Toolbox” workshop concluded yesterday on what I would consider a pretty good note. We didn’t get to Wikis or Webnote or Flikr, but we did dig in pretty deep to Bloglines and Furl. As I told the group when we finished, at the very least I wanted them to leave with an understanding of what RSS can bring to teacher practice and student learning. I think I accomplished that. We’ll see if they keep using the tools, but I’ve already decided to send them an e-mail every day for a couple of weeks reminding them to get in there and poke around some more.

The most interest came from two English teachers whose students are doing research papers. They could see how the standing search feeds could have some usefulness, and they were interested in having me help them set them up for their kids. And I think they all thought the idea of Furling sources and letting their students get those sources via RSS was an intriguing idea. So at least conceptually…

One pleasant discovery was that Looksmart (who know owns Furl) has RSS feeds for the publications in their database and also for searches. (Check under the Articles tab.) Now I know that their archive usually runs about six months behind, so I’m not sure if the RSS feed will bring the new articles as they are posted, meaning it would probably update once a month. As to the search, I put a couple in my Bloglines account to see what happens.

(And, in case anyone is interested, we found out that AllRecipies.com, Bigoven.com, Asian Online Recipes and Real Cajun Recipes.com have feeds for foods…cool!)

A couple of new sites offering free Weblog and Wiki space for teachers have sprung up of late. Hopefully it’s the start of a bigger movement.

James Farmer has put up IncSub which is offering a whole slate of tools from WordPress to Drupal to Tiki and even phbbb for bulletin boards. I think this is a great offer and no doubt James would be happy to hear from teachers who are interested.

The other is a site I mentioned a couple of days ago, VisitMyClass. I met Jim Wenzloff at the Building Learning Communities conference earlier this year, and he’s taken it upon himself to offer this space to teachers and students in his area of Macomb County, Michigan. Also, he’s looking for some educators to provide feedback to students on their blogs:

I think one of the power of blogs is that it is a way for students to publish their work and to receive feedback on what they have written. The question is how do you attract visitors to your blog that will make appropriate comments? We don’t want to beat students into the ground on their first try.

I am proposing setting up a network of people who would be willing to comment on one or two pieces of student writing a month. The teacher would request feedback and give some guidelines to help the reader. The reader would look at one or more pieces of writing and make their comments. I am setting up a listserv for this purpose.

So I’ve been going back and forth a bit with Tony Chang who is the developer of WebNote and he’s actually added some functionality that I’ve asked him for. (That’s one of the great things about this burgeoning community. People like Mark Fletcher at Bloglines, Mike Giles at Furl, Greg Gershman at Blogdigger…they all have been very willing to seek out our ideas and suggestions. Very cool.) He’s created a “New Note” button that I can click on my toolbar to automatically save anything I’ve highlighted to my note page, and he’s also made it so it saves with the link, at least in Firefox. (He’s working on IE.) So, I’ve been adding notes to my page for the last few days, and I think I’m starting to see some potential for this. It’s nice to be able to grab snippets of information and store them to a Web page where I can get at them from my other computers.

Interestingly, I like the way this works in Firefox better than IE. I can drag the notes around very easily, making my page as wide as I want it. I know it’s somewhat of a pain to scroll around a page like that, but the filter function let’s me find notes that I want pretty quickly. Still more to figure out here, and if Tony’s willing, I’d like to be able to do a few more things…

By the way, if you want the New Note link, just start a page and press B; a box with the link will come up. Just drag the link to the toolbar and start saving.
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Adam Curry has been recording a daily 30-minute or so audio essay for people to download to their iPods…podcasting. (I’m actually listening to one now on my laptop.) Looks like fun. Obviously, it’s getting a huge amount of buzz. So I guess the next step is that people don’t even have to read blogs anymore; they can just listen. And, of course, there is an RSS feed for these that we can take and add to our all-in-one feed as discussed below.

Ok…now let’s take this into the classroom, huh? Foreign language students can now read their homework responses which automatically get sent via RSS feeds to their teachers who download them to their iPods or other player to listen to them. Or, the teacher creates a daily broadcast that his students download and listen to. Or, each day, one student does an oral reflection on the class that then gets sent around to kids who miss the class. Or…

Sheesh. So much to know. So little time. But so much fun.

Lucas Carlson has developed a blog-wiki combo tool called Web Collaborator that teachers looking for a collaborative writing tool might want to consider. It has a variety of editorial functions, and you can invite groups to participate or keep it open. I haven’t had time to dive into it very far, but it looks pretty intruiging. If you get a chance and have some opinions, leave some impressions here.

Been working non stop to get the new Weblog Website ready for it’s kickoff next week. Frankly, I’m getting pretty psyched, and it’s getting more and more buzz as we spruce up the department sites with pictures of new teachers and other newsy type stuff. Built the index today and am hoping to have a search engine in place next week. (I need to limit the search to only certain sites on the server.) And I started editing the top nav bar that Bryan built as a module so that every page on the site updates with just one edit. (I am really loving that…) I’ve had a half a dozen teachers come up and tell me they’re looking forward to building the pages for their departments, and a half a dozen others make appointments to build sites for their classes and students. I’m definitely hoping that the Website will showcase the technology in ways that will get even more teachers involved.

I’ve decided to enlist the help of some parents to run the parent portal, students to run the student “lounge”, and maybe even try to get some community members to advise on that part of the site. What I really can’t wait to do is have “RSS Night at Hunterdon Central” where I get 25 parents in here to learn about Bloglines and aggregation and how to subscribe to all the feeds coming out of our site. Hopefully in a couple of weeks.

So anyway, my brain is about 93% cooked and I am living for a week from Saturday when we’ll be through the worst of any of the first week of school problems. I can’t wait to get back to some more regular writing and reading…
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(via Stephen) A pretty good breakdown of Weblog software use and some good links at the end to various other Weblog related services. I’m surprised by the ranking of Word Press and Expression Engine, neither of which I’ve seen around all that much. Interesting wrap up to the post:

As more businesses find valuable uses for weblog technology, there will be increasing demand for professionally-oriented tools, hosted services, and professional support services. Six Apart and pMachine serve this market now with their Movable Type and Expression Engine applications, but they have barely made a dent given what the opportunity is. Expect a whole new wave of products, services, and companies to be created over the next 12 to 18 months to cater specifically to the business market.

Ok…can’t resist…what about “As more schools find valuable uses for weblog technology…?”

Kevin Jarrett has converted his site to Blog CMS and he says it has some edu-features (new word!) worth checking out. The big news is that you can approve comments before they are posted. It runs on PostNuke and requires PHP and mySQL. Anyone else out there using this as a school solution???

This is good news for educators who use Manila:

Managing editors can now easily delete comments and TrackBack pings from comment and TrackBack pop-up windows in Manila sites. To delete a comment or a ping, check the box below it, and then click the Delete Checked Comments button at the bottom of the comment pop-up window.

In addition, each comment and TrackBack ping now has its own permalink, displayed next to its post-time, which can be used to link to the individual item.

One thing that I’ve always worried about is a student’s inability to delete inappropriate comments from their sites without jumping through hoops to maintain the original post. Now they (and I) can.

Next step…how about a way to approve comments before they are posted???

Glad to see Manila continues to be developed.
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