Liz Lawley thinks the new version of Moveable Type will be a lot more teacher friendly.

The announcement about new features in the upcoming MT3.1 release has gotten me excited about revising my courseware for this fall. In particular, the multi-blog option (“A plugin which allows you to include template content from one weblog in any other weblog in your Movable Type install”), the post scheduling, and the improved php/dynamic capability will all make it much easier to create a more robust courseware implementation that doesn’t require nearly so much by-hand duplication of content when creating multiple sections of a course, or new course instances from one quarter/semester to another.

Sounds somewhat like the modules that Bryan Bell has created for Manila in terms of including universal content across a lot of blogs. (Actually, I just had a bit of a lightbulb go off…I can use modules to push information to any sites that have them included in the template. Universal updates…cool! Now why didn’t I think of that before?)

Anyway, any movement toward making blogware easier for teachers is a good thing, and Liz is probably ahead of the pack in terms of her use of MT.
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Is it me or is the ‘new’ Technorati worse than the old one? Look, I really like being able to see who is linking to this site and finding new voices and authors. But Technorati has been getting buggier and buggier over the last few months. And now with the new site, I can’t do much of anything. It will let me login, but when I click something else, it just kicks me out again. Login, kick out. Login, kick out. What fun. The concept is great, but sheesh, Technorati doesn’t seem to me to be a service ready to get out of beta.

Alan notes that Feedster is going to start a similar service soon, and I claimed my blog in anticipation. But with the good news about tracking and linking stats comes this troubling development:

“Ad Revenue Sharing – If you publish your feed using Feedster, we will offer an opt-in mechanism by which we insert ads in your feed and share the revenue with you.”

Ok, who am I, with my toe in the advertising water, to complain about another potential revenue stream for bloggers. But ads on Weblogs are one thing. Since I rarely actually visit any of the sites on my blogroll these days, I have no problem. But not the feeds. Puhleese…not the feeds!

(via Seb) Userland has started offering a hosting package for Manila. Not sure exactly how many Weblogs you can run, but for $499 a year, they seem to be offering a solution for schools. Interesting…
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From the “Blogging for Life” Department: Kidzlog is a weblog software created just for younger kids, and now that I think about it, I’m surprised I haven’t seen something like this before. Might be something that I have to show Tess (who, sad to say, has been blogging pretty sporadically lately…) You need your own server and it has a nice little draw package that lets kids add artwork and pictures pretty easily.

KidzLog is an easy-to-use weblog publishing system for kids (and anybody else, for that matter). With KidzLog you can publish weblogs that contain both text and pictures. KidzLog weblogs are full-featured, with CSS controlling the look of the pages and RSS handling syndication (if you don’t know what the means, don’t worry, you don’t have to).

Thanks to Craig Nansen for the link.
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(via Jeremy) It’s fun to watch e-portfolio guru Helen Barrett discover the potential of Weblogs as portfolio tools in her own blog. Her observations from NECC:

I was impressed by the number of sessions that mentioned blogs. I even had a couple of teachers of the airport shuttle ask me what a blog was! And I was able to explain it! I don’t think they saw the application to schools, but it was interesting that they asked.

And from BlogTalk 2.0:

I keep thinking about how this phenomenon can be adapted to electronic portfolios. When the two presenters from Sweden showed some examples from their moblogging at a conference last winter, including an audio entry that sounded like it was added by a cell phone, many bells started to go off in my head. Now, I need to learn more about moblogs. Another new term I learned” “vogs” (personal publishing of video or audio).

She’s writing some great stuff about the value and use of e-portfolios, much of which is directly related to the value and use of blogs. For instance, substitute ‘Weblog’ for ‘portfolio’ in the following:

I believe the two approaches (positivist and constructivist) have more to do with how portfolios are viewed in relationship to assessment. Are portfolios assessment OF learning or assessment FOR learning? Summative or Formative assessment? There is a great deal of difference. One has a perspective of what a student has learned to date (past-to-present); the other has a perspective on what more the student needs to learn (present-to-future). One is more of an institutional focus on accountability; the other is of an individual focus on understanding. One is often treated almost as a “bean-counting” exercise (have all of the standards been covered?) whereas the other is approached as an exploration of new insights.

Definitely thoughts worth following.
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Nice article at passingnotes.com on Furl:

However, as a twist, Furl extends this capability to include all of your permission level access sites. This means everything that you are paying for from databases to subscription news sites to online receipts of purchase. Think about this for a minute. If you are bookmarking sites and terminating subscriptions, you are losing content. Furl removes this information access obstacle. You are filing away your own permanent copy when you Furl that screen, granting you digital access forever.

A couple of interesting twists on what you can do with Furl…definitely worth Furling.
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So it appears that Apple has once again taken the lead, this time in integrating both blogs and RSS into their products. Tom has a great post about the blog piece and the implications.

I guess my point here is that Apple seems to be doing just about the simplest thing that could possibly work, and I’m impressed by their judgment. And Blojsom jumps way up the list of weblogging apps to keep an eye on.

And Dan Gillmor gets to the RSS part and more:

Jobs spent a fair amount of time talking about the native inclusion of RSS into an upcoming version of the Safari browsers, and a “personal clipping” service. There’s a special search function just for RSS; I’m not clear on whether it’s searching via one of the main RSS search engines, whether Apple will write its own or whether it’s only searching your designated feeds. More on that later.

It’s great stuff…as someone posted, we are getting close to critical mass. Even more reason to keep focused on the pedagogy of blogging…
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Sigh…

A huge win for the educational market is the ability to manage comments in a comprehensive way, with a filter or by allowing a site manager to queue all comments for approval. Plus it has the ability to password protect individual pages.

I get really frustrated sometimes by a) my inability (time and skills) to play around with other blogging software packages and b) by how close Manila comes to being the no-brainer choice for education. Problem is, until it builds in some of the functionality Bryan refers to above, it won’t. I know UserLand isn’t in this just for the education market (however big or small that may be,) but whatever educators finally end up adopting HAS TO HAVE the security and preview functionality to appease an ever more skittish group of administrators and parents (at least at my school, which I’m starting to think is leading the way in that department.)

Problem (?) is I feel like I’m pretty much married to Manila for at least the next couple of years…

The big news in blog application ville is that Moveable Type has upped their pricing which seems to be freezing out a number of university blogging teachers who had set up multiple sites for their students. So I think it’s time to make another pitch for Manila.

Now I know it’s not an open source alternative which many are espousing, and I know that universities are more willing to go down that road. But from a public school perspective, it’s still just not an option for most. So, what about Manila? Educational license is $400 year for as many sites as your server will hold. We’re running a couple of hundred with no problem, and conceivably we could run as many as a couple of thousand. In the past year since we installed it, we’ve had only one or two instances where the server went down for more than just a few moments. (Frontier, the server software Manila runs on, has a cute little “keep it running” feature that automatically restarts it if something crashes.) In other words, it’s been very, very stable with regular maintenance.

The power and flexibility of the software is self-evident, it’s easy to use (at least as easy as MT,) Userland is showing some new energy in developing it, it has widespread implementation, and it’s got a great theme artist cranking out good stuff on a regular basis. It’s a great tool. And you can try it for free here.

No, it’s not perfect, and there is still a lot of work that Userland has ahead of it. But I think it’s still a great alternative to MT. Just my two cents…

Alan is working through a couple of presentations he’s giving on photoblogging, while Time magazine gives some ink to vblogs. Both of these uses for blogs should have a lot of pretty interesting applications for schools…it would be very cool if we could start putting our television station to use for the production of Internet content. And I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting a few students at the beginning of the school year next year to contribute to a “180 Days of Central” photoblog type project. I think that would be a really cool addition to our Website. (And just a note, the Serious Magic package referred to in the Time article is a pretty incredible piece of software and one that is affordable enough for schools wanting to make some tv-news type shows.)

Much linked post by Roland Tanglao on the RSS way vs. the “old” way of reading Weblogs. I love piece #7 which states that “Joe Surfer (who is not related to Joe Blogger) still can access blogs the old fashioned, slow and less efficient way using his web browser and search engines.” Amen to that…
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Well, I figured it wasn’t going to be as easy as it seemed to be to switch things over here. It seems my feeds are buggy, and they don’t seem to be updating on Bloglines as well as not validating due to various punctuation issues. This happened once before with a Manila theme, but I seemed to get it straightened out. But that was a long time ago. Now, once again, I have to make sure that every post uses just text characters for apostrophes and quotation marks and stuff otherwise it breaks. Can anyone give me some ideas as to why changing the Manila theme would do this?

I hate this stuff. Nothing was broken before and now with a new theme, it gets all screwed up. If you’re getting this in your aggregator, could you just leave a post on my site that it’s working? Thanks.

(via Seb) No real details on the specifics of this new release, but just the fact that there is one coming is really, really good news. Userland’s CEO Scott Young says:

Yes, we are getting ready for our first release in a while. Look for the beta to be available early next week. Its Manila 9.0.1 and its easier to install, quicker to set-up, and prettier to look at then ever before. We’ve fixed bugs, improved the user interface, and added some features that make community hosting easier and more flexible. We have also updated the theme set, included more documentation, and made installation much easier.

We still have RSS, Edit This Page, and powerful browser-based website configuration. Manila 9.0.1 also includes new website hosting options that can be configured on a per-site basis. Very Cool.

I REALLY hope that they have added some public/private posting options…really.

Kaye offers up some tips on making the most of blog posts:

Use a pull quote

Adam Polselli’s unique blockquote style for showing code labels it as such (scroll down to see)

Adrian Holovaty’s blockquote style for showing code highlights it & changes the font

Put quote marks around your blockquote content

Use a different font in your blockquote

Jay McCarthy puts a dotted line around his blockquotes

According to these suggestions, I’m doing a fairly good job. But the pull quote thing is very cool, something I’m going to have to experiment with.

UPDATE: Well, that was pretty easy…
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Tom pretty much breaks down my post from yesterday line by line in terms of how Plone might be able to support our needs. I really appreciate his efforts in creating and thinking about education specific CMS stuff, and I think he understands most of the limitations and requirements of such a system for schools. I’m not really familiar with Plone, but I did dig around on their site a bit this morning. What’s immediately scary is the thought of having to learn a whole new system, but with Tom’s responses in mind, it seems there may be some reason to dig deeper. Obvioulsy, it seems Plone has been pretty widely adopted, and that from the user interface standpoint it can be pretty much whatever we want it to be.

I’m thinking that maybe we could get together a BOF at BloggerCon to talk about all of this stuff. I truly believe there is a need, that as much as I like Manila and think it comes pretty close to being an answer, its lack of development makes me wonder as to whether it can be made even more effective for a K-12 installation. (It’s kind of ironic to me that they feature school sites on the Userland site, but the frustrating thing to me is that there has been absolutely no communication from the new management group as to their direction or timetables for anything. Have I mentioned that I think there’s a big potential market out there for this stuff? Ah…what do I know?)

Furl is getting some ink:

If every day you were to sift through dozens of newspapers and magazines, cut out the articles that interest you, attach a Post-It to each with thoughts about the topic, then organize the clips into folders that you’d tote with you wherever you go – well, good luck with that social life.

If, instead, you value time and space (and sanity), there’s a way to do all of those things and more without having to stuff a shoebox with yellowing newsprint.

Just “Furl” it.

I’m liking Furl more and more (though it seems to be down this morning.) Too bad the article didn’t have space to go into some of the advanced features. I’m thinking of how I can migrate my Blogroll onto Furl…

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Syllabus has an article titled “TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places” that’s helped me clarify its value in terms of building community. For the larger Weblog community, the author says:

The initial purpose of the TrackBack protocol was to provide a way of aggregating posts made by various bloggers about a particular topic. It addressed the problem that while a proliferation of blogs gives voice to many, it distributes the conversation such that it becomes next to impossible to follow the idea as expressed across these many blogs.

From a classroom standpoint, I keep trying to think of ways to use it other than as a way of allowing students to keep all their comments about their peers’ work on their own sites. That makes it easier for me to assess their efforts in giving feedback since I don’t have to go searching all around for it and they don’t have to take the extra step of copying it into their own space. Their peers get the benefit of the feedback, just not through the comment box. But inside the classroom, can trackback really help build community?

And to be honest, the following is a concept that really got me thinking:

The approach taken was to suggest that someone might start a dedicated TrackBack blog on a particular topic. This special blog would not be used by the owner of the blog to wax poetic on topics of his or her choice, but become a repository dedicated to a single topic. For example, imagine a site, which collects Weblog posts about the Civil War. Anyone interested in reading about the Civil War could look at this site to keep updated on what other Webloggers were saying about the Civil War, see photographs from that period in magazines, etc. This is accomplished when those who do write on their individual blogs about the civil war initiate a TrackBack ping to the designated collector site.

So that’s what that “URLs to Ping” thing is for. The article also says it’s possible to setup a trackback blog of all the posts you make to other Weblogs… Now I’m wondering how I set up a trackback blog in Manila.

Just one note about the article. Toward the beginning is this:

Since then blogging has become a standard tool for faculty, students, and just about anyone who wishes to publish their thoughts worldwide.

Um…I’m not sure we’re quite there yet.
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Check this out! (Note the right hand column.) I had my kids put the Manila viewRSS macro on their pages to feed search results right to their site. Mallory is writing about those in poverty in our primarily affluent area who fall through the cracks. So she’s aggregating Google news stories about poverty for background research. It’s coming to her instead of her finding and going to it. What a concept…

Now I have a lot more to write about this at some point, but my kids were primarily a) amazed and b) frustrated by the irrelevance of most of what was coming up. I’ll have some thoughts on that later. Another step…

For some odd reason, Nancy thought her Weblogs workshop was going to go smoothly. HA! Murphy is always lurking, especially for the first timers taking the blogvangelism plunge (and for the more experienced as well…) Her Biblical account of her workshop is truly a testament to faith, goodwill, and the support of understanding teachers (who unbeknownst to them are being led like sheep to the edge of the cliff…) Hang in there, Nancy…

There are some stirrings at UserLand which I’m hoping will translate into a productive year for Manila developers. For a limited time, they are offering a 14-day free trial which I would highly recommend to anyone considering using the package. I’ve posted the user’s manual that I give to my teachers at my school for anyone who wants to get up and running fairly quickly. Just remember it has some references and instructions unique to my school. At $299 a year for an educational license that can run thousands of sites, I still highly recommend Manila despite it’s lack of development of late. But like I said, things look to be changing…

Interestingly, the ‘new’ Manila site features a number of ed blogs as sample sites. Hopefully that means they’re considering implementing some of the changes they previewed last year. I made another plea on the dev group today for:

1. A way to make some posts public and keep some posts private to just members or editors.

2. A way to review comments before allowing them to be posted for everyone to see.

These are really the two issues that I’m most bumping into at this point. Fingers are crossed that they might be resolved in short order.
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Education World raves about 30-Minute Websites for Teachers which offers up some basic Website templates that educators can use. Cost: $2,750 annually for 50 teachers. I think I’d rather pay the $299 a year for 3,000 sites with more funtionality and personalization…
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I posted this on the Manila and Frontier sites with no replies, so maybe someone else out there can help. How can I limit the number of lines that the Manila aggregator displays when showing new posts? I don’t want full post aggregation, just the first four lines. Anyone have any ideas?

Tom Hoffman, who is doing some really cool things with open source CMS type programs up in Providence, has a far better understanding of all this technology than I do. He’s demonstrating COREBlog which is a Web log interface for Zope, which I don’t have any clue about. He may be right when he says “Regular weblog tools aren’t designed for the kind of enterprise integration and complex roles needed for large scale deployments in schools” (though I hope he’s wrong about Frontier…at least in the short term.) But it’s eventually all going to come down to the same issues: ease of use, ease of installation, tech support, time, etc. At least open source is reasonably priced, but as I’ve said before, I know there’s not going to be a lot of support for it here for quite a while simply because it’s too unknown and there is safety in what you know. I wish I had a developer like Tom at my school, but…

UPDATE: Read Dan Mitchell’s response.

iBlog is Apple’s entry into the Web logging world, and we know Microsoft isn’t far behind. They look pretty standard, more MT than anything else. I apologize that I can’t remember who it was, but someone was musing on the effect this will have on other blogging systems out there, specifically Radio. I don’t claim to be as up on MT or TypePad or some of the others as I should be (like I even have time for this space…) but wouldn’t it seem that most primarily single paged Web logging will be under the domains of the big companies out there within the next five years? I know there will always be open source alternatives, but I think for most of the billions of people out there who still don’t even know what a Web log is, Microsoft and Apple will be their first introduction. And you know what that means.

Personally, I’ve been feeling lately like UserLand is missing an opportunity. The more I get my elbows dirty with Manila, the more I like it despite its quirks. I’ve finally gotten to understand that the power of the software sets it apart from most other Web logging apps out there. Thing is, no one else at my school sees it, yet. It’s taken me two years to wrap my brain around just how extensive the effects of a CMS like this could be here. Showing that to others and convincing them of same is no doubt going to be like pulling a cement mixer up a steep hill. Molecules at a time. But we’re all moving in that direction, I think, and it seems like medium sized districts who are looking for a fairly inexpensive way to move operations online, facilitate distance learning, and communicate more effectively with their publics (among other things) would be chomping at the bit to get something like this working.

Problem solved, I think. Thanks. I used the MetaData plugin and created a field for Keywords, then put the search feature on the page and can now easily retrieve the objects. Now, to take this a step further, is there a way to auto display search results? I mean, is there a way to make a standing link that when clicked would automatically display the search results for that topic? TIA.