Karen is struggling a bit with her Web log use with her students, finding it more difficult to keep up the process when meeting with kids each day…

Quote: “I’m feeling almost like a edu-blog failure lately. I know that I’m not capitalizing as much as possible on my class blogs but find that using a blog with a face to face class is much different from using a blog with a class that meets electronically. My earlier intentions to write weekly reviews has fallen apart (at least three or four weeks ago) and what bothers me the most about this is that I’m missing an opportunity to make a visible, historical record of our experiences.” And later…”What I do mean to suggest is that communicating in person is fleeting, temporary, able to evaporate into the atmosphere with nothing more than a memory and if students don’t hear what I think I’m saying, or if I don’t say what I think I’m saying, or if I just don’t say it….there’s no record of what has passed between us. If, however, I say those things on the blog, students can revisit them for clarification, every student has access to the same information, and nobody has to rely upon their memories to conjure up what transpired between us.”

I too am finding that Web log use has varying degrees of effectiveness from class to class. I’ve been able to do it pretty well in Journalism , primarily because I teach it in a computer lab and I can teach WITH the site. And I can’t count how many times I have referred my students back to the Web log when they have questions about homework or handouts or whatever. While I don’t use it to save notes (although I have had the thought to have kids post daily summaries of class discussions as a record of what occurred…), it still serves as a teaching record. And the more interactive I can make it the better, obviously.

But I’ve aborted efforts to keep up a daily Web log in my media and literature classes which are taught in regular classrooms because it’s not as easy to interact with it. It seems like on a college level when you meet once or twice a week it would be a great way to keep communicating and thinking and teaching. When I see them every day, it’s a bit different. Still, I’m thinking of ways to use them as k-logs in Media (having groups keep Web logs to find and sort information on a particular topic) and as conversation extenders in my literature classes (reader response, etc.)

I’m not sure how much use my Journalism class homepage gets after class. (Actually, I just checked, and it got 50 hits since yesterday’s class…) Unless I conciously plan for students to use it outside of our time together, it pretty much just serves as a resource, which isn’t a bad thing…I guess I’m just wondering how to make that resource even more of a teaching tool…

This is one reason Manila/Frontier scares me:

Can’t figure out why my XML button can’t generate clean rss code, so I get some help from David who well-meaningly (is that word?) turns me on to a little tool called Tidy that is supposed to clean up the code and make it work ok. Takes about five e-mails back and forth before my slow on server issues brain figures out what to do with the files and my server guy puts them where they are supposed to be. Then? All of a sudden, I can’t edit posts. My students can’t even get to the edit box in their posts. Things seem to be breaking right and left, and since it’s the last week of class and my kids would be up it without a paddle if their Web logs went down, I decide to punt. Tell Ed the server guy to reload everything off the backup tapes from last night even though it means I’m gonna lose a couple hours of responses that I wrote to kids this morning. Thank goodness, it’s now fixed.

Both Ed the server guy and I walk on tippy toes when it comes to Frontier. The gems issue from a few months back really scared us…so much so that he backs up the whole shebang every night now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when it’s working, and it’s working 99% of the time, but it does make it difficult to try new things with it.

The kicker is that I just went in and edited the posts that were kicking out the rss feed and now it looks ok. And I even made it work with Amphetadesk, which I am playing around with in terms of setting up feeds from my kids Web logs. But does anyone know how to limit the number of posts Amphetadesk shows? Small steps.

Quote: “In sum, the Internet as we now know it — and its revolutionary promise — may soon pass into the history books. In the absence of public policy safeguards, the emerging pricing and control structures will fundamentally change the kinds of information — and way it’s delivered — on the Internet.”

Comment: Pat‘s right….ugh.x
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My two week experiment with the class newspaper is coming to an end, and I am very happy. Thanks again to Seb for all of the technical help to make it run quite smoothly. Now, has it been an educational success? Here’s what I saw:

Quote: “Cronkite said he fears Americans are learning less and less about what their government is doing, and worse, they do not seem to care. He cited recent presidential elections that have seen less than half of registered voters go to the polls. The result has been leaders who are chosen by about a quarter of the electorate. ‘That means we don’t have a democracy,’he said. ‘We’ve got an oligarchy here, not a democracy. Our democracy is in some danger if we don’t concentrate on educating the populace.’”

Comment: Just another reason whey we need to focus our efforts with our students. Give them the tools to change the script.

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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“The choices made on Election Day will determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate and the House of Representatives. The decisions made by those legislative bodies will profoundly affect the lives of Americans for years and decades to come.

If journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, the fixation on the sniping story badly needs quick revision. But even if such coverage disappeared, the general prognosis for healthy political discourse would still be bleak.”

Thank god they caught the snipers so we can get back to the really important stuff…like Martha Stewart, Rosie O’Donnell, and the kids who bludgeoned their father. The media in this country has lost any credibility it might have gained after 9/11. Still a bunch of wind bags and know it alls who just want to spew their own opinions and call it journalism. Hey, is C-Span still on the air???

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Paul Krugman: “That standard response may help you understand how Mr. Bush retains a public image as a plain-spoken man, when in fact he is as slippery and evasive as any politician in memory. Did you notice his recent declaration that allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power wouldn’t mean backing down on “regime change,” because if the Iraqi despot meets U.N. conditions, “that itself will signal that the regime has changed”?”

I still can’t believe this guy is president.
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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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Pat says: “It feels good to know that Joe is pissed. Good! And it feels great to get rip-roaring livid at this description in Will’s recent Disney-gram…”

That Disney post was dually motivated by a sincere interest in figuring out how best to use my riches and to get some type of de facto pardon for having those riches in the first place. You don’t think I knew that list would get people pissed? The discussion about class differences in education is much needed, so I thought I might as well make my edge of the canvas clear. Not meant to rub people’s noses in it by any stretch.

Pat again: “Will wonders about ‘the responsibilities that come with privilege.’ OK, response from urbEd to sub-urbEd: First off, watch the language. “Small victories?” Urban ed victories aren’t small.”

Noted, with apologies. Lately I’ve been more tuned into Joe‘s struggles than Pat’s successes. And Pat has had many, many successes made all the more impressive by the limitations he works under.

“Second, keep naming the disparity and share the wealth. Reference the privilege often. Hook up with organizations (few though they may be) that actually try to bridge the distance between suburban and urban teachers. Hell, take a sick day and go visit a school in New Brunswick or Newark. An interesting aspect of privilege is its proximity to despair. Afterall, Jersey is Jersey.”

Well advised, and as I get clearer on what I’m doing and what I can do, that’s on the schedule. Have made offers of server space to Terry and Joe, and will continue to do so.
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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:

I have:

There is an idea here: The primary reason I use Radio over Manila is the capability of multiple-category posting. The fact that each category can be served up as an HTML page (even to a different server via FTP) or an RSS feed is wonderful, but I am most excited about the potential of the tool. I want to be able to designate a category that sends the content of my post to an email address. It could be an individual or a distribution list of some sort. Once I figure out this capability, my weblog tool becomes a much more robust part of my communication interface. Manila allows categorization via “departments”, but only one at a time. Many of my uses for my weblogs demand the data be routed to multiple destinations. I’m hoping Manila inherits this capability from Radio soon… ”

Does that mean that I could get an Rss feed from just one department in Manila?
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There is an idea here: The primary reason I use Radio over Manila is the capability of multiple-category posting. The fact that each category can be served up as an HTML page (even to a different server via FTP) or an RSS feed is wonderful, but I am most excited about the potential of the tool. I want to be able to designate a category that sends the content of my post to an email address. It could be an individual or a distribution list of some sort. Once I figure out this capability, my weblog tool becomes a much more robust part of my communication interface. Manila allows categorization via “departments”, but only one at a time. Many of my uses for my weblogs demand the data be routed to multiple destinations. I’m hoping Manila inherits this capability from Radio soon… ”

Does that mean that I could get an Rss feed from just one department in Manila?
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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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