This is kind of a skewed “Field of Dreams” scenario, but what with Dave asking for “A vision for the next generation of blogging tools” (and getting 133 responses), and with the expressed willingness at this site of Scott at Feedster, Mark at Bloglines, Mike at Furl, and Greg at Blogdigger to help the cause along, and Tom’s obvious interest in where this might all be going, I’m starting to think (hope?) that if we as educators come up with the concept, maybe someone will build it. (This feeling may also be caused by my general impatience and lack of sleep as well.) What say we throw some of our own educator type ideas down and see if someone might take pity on our poor souls and develop something? (And even if no one else wants to, I feel a real need to put some form to what’s in my brain.)
So, thinking from a teacher and student perspective:
Anything else?
Thank you for this Will. And can we *please* create templates that are designed for the novice; ones that can be easily edited and configured according to students’ desires without having to fool with the templates? Manila’s Prefs–Appearence page just doesn’t cut it. Customization needs to be far easier. We need someone to build a tool specifically for the needs of educators and learners.
Some good ideas. Note that Open Source is not equal to non-Windows, and tying a tool to any specific platform rather than making it web-based is needlessly limiting.
Yeah…that was pretty dumb, huh? Thanks, Chris. Just look at the time stamp on the post. ;0)
Why Windows? If you are running multiple sites, seems like you are talking a server application. Are schools really that picky on the server side? I definitely understand the need for a Windows desktop app.
Again, my bad. Obviously, we’re running Frontier right now which is a server app. What I meant was that it needs to run on a server OS like NT or Win 2000, not Linux. Not yet. (Does that sound right? Sheesh…my ignorance on the backend is really showing.)
After working with several teachers here of late….at this point…just give me the “delete news item” button next to the edit and I’d be really happy. Explaining that deleting has to be done through the discuss is confusing to people.