My kids got all their Web logs set up yesterday, and this morning I aggregated them all into one space using the web-based news reader at server.com. I had to go that route because for now, at least, I need to be able to access that aggregation page from a number of different computers. If and when I get a laptop that I can plug into the network here and use at home, I’ll probably switch to Radio to do it. (If anyone has any ideas about a better way to do this, let me know!) I still haven’t gotten a clear answer as to whether this is possible in Manila, and whether or not that comment back feature could be included as well.

Good news is now I don’t have to click through 22 different sites to see what they are up to. Also, their sites are linked right from the post, so if I do want to comment on their work, it’s only one click away. And, it doesn’t seem to mind the character stuff that sometimes messes up the xml feed. Still not sure about how often the feeds are updated, whether or not links will come through (though I would assume so), whether or not pics will work, and other minor points like that. I have a feeling that this won’t be the ultimate solution, but for now I’m psyched to have taken another small step.

…and maybe last classes, at least for a while. (And just when this was getting really fun!) Yesterday, I told my new journalism students that the class was paperless, that we were going to use just digital paper, and that all of their work for the quarter would be compiled in their Web logs. (One student actually claimed to a) know what a Web log was, and b) have her own up and running, though she couldn’t remember where it was…sigh.) I started them through the setup process, creating a site, filling in names and passwords and e-mail addresses, and I was feeling good now with, what, 75 or so Manila Web logs under my belt, and I said “Ok, just click submit and create your site!” and they all clicked and sat there giddy with anticipation watching the little IE flag waving in the corner waiting for their carefully chosen templates to appear, waiting, waiting, waiting…

Unbeknownst to me our little Frontier server decided not to even try to process the creation of 22 sites at the exact same moment and instead opted to stop all forms of digital communication to anywhere in protest. I’m pacing behind my kids, looking at screens, and from the deepest recesses of my brain comes floating up this vague, uncomfortable deja-vu type feeling like I’ve been here and done that, the energy of the moment just draining out through my toes. I call Ed the tech guy and he checks the server. “Didn’t this happen last fall?” he says…

Good news is about 10 of my kids actually created their sites from home last night. Today we get back on the train, slowly, a few at a time, to start another most excellent Web log adventure…stay tuned.

(via Sarah) This is one of the better running class Web logs that’s out there I think, one that I would like to emulate in many ways. Kara Kerwin has done some real interesting thinking about how to make a course Web site not only interesting to look at but easy to navigate and genuinely informative, too. The whole site is worth a look. But the Web log does some particularly interesting things in terms of asing questions for credit with cut off dates for responses. (For some reason, I like to read the responses in chronological order, however.) She keys her questions to readings or news so as to provide relevancy to the class. I’m interested to in the way she is working through assessing student work in the Web log. (At some point, that may be an interesting strand to start on the Edublogger Board.) I’ve found so far that I assess Web log discussion responses first by whether or not they are there, and second by the depth of the response. A 1-5 scale seems logical. But as with anything new, I struggle with how much to make it worth.
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Terry throws out the idea of a Wiki for Edublogging which on it’s surface sounds like a pretty interesting idea as opposed to the traditional book format, digital or otherwise. It goes back to that old idea of a collaborative site for all of us, whether it’s a discussion board or a Web log. Dunno if anyone else “sees” this with me, but I keep thinking an Edublogging portal designed as a resource for teachers interested in learning about what this stuff is and how to do it. A site where they can benefit from our shared experiences and contribute ideas, ask questions, get support etc. The core group could start it and maintain/edit it, but it could build into more…I guess like an online edblogging magazine? Something like this maybe?
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…I don’t want to see the ending. Last night, our president said:

“During the last two years, we have seen what can be accomplished when we work together. To lift the standards of our public schools, we achieved historic education reform which must now be carried out in every school, and in every classroom, so that every child in America can read, and learn and succeed in life. To protect our country, we reorganized our government and created the Department of Homeland Security which is mobilizing against the threats of a new era. To bring our economy out of recession, we delivered the largest tax relief in a generation. To insist on integrity in American business, we passed tough reforms, and we are holding corporate criminals to account.

Some might call this a good record. I call it a good start.”

How about this “start”:

Well…looks like I got the job. More later.
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I’m going to pull a Karen…Resonate (Pronunciation Key) v. “To evoke a feeling of shared emotion or belief”

I’ve loved Negroponte ever since Being Digital. Does any of this “resonate?”

Innovation is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. And innovative people are a pain in the ass…

So what makes innovation happen, and just where do new ideas come from? The basic answers-providing a good educational system, encouraging different viewpoints, and fostering collaboration-may not be surprising…

Our biggest challenge in stimulating a creative culture is finding ways to encourage multiple points of views…

Two additional ingredients are needed to cultivate new ideas. Both have to do with maximizing serendipity. First, we need to encourage risk… The second ingredient is encouragement for openness and idea sharing-another banality nearly impossible to achieve. …

A key to ensuring a stream of big ideas is accepting these messy truths about the origin of ideas and continuing to reward innovation and celebrate emerging technologies.

(via Stephen)

This is what I find so cool and so motivating about this process, being a pain in the ass, collaborating with people from different realities, and the openness of our work. Or, as Pat so eloquently put it…”We’re humble enough to recognize that we don’t have any idea yet what this technology means for teaching and learning, and professionally committed and generous enough to try to puzzle it out in public, temporarily putting to the side some of our more personal digital goals and creativity.” On…on!
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Pat is laying the groundwork for a more formal EduBlogger network. He says

“I’m wondering what a sub-community of educators, edBloggers, might look like in a digitally enhanced professional network of any kind, and of the WP kind in particular. More later.”

I’m really interested in what the “more later” will entail because I too have been wondering where this excellent adventure might be taking us. Seems that we’ve got the geography covered (East: Joe, Sarah and the Middleburyites, and me, Midwest: Karen, Terry and Pam, South: Tim, Anne, and Terry F., Southwest: Sam, West: Pat, Karen and various disciples. Must be some folks up in Redmond I’m missing…) And I’m sure there are more… And talk of Blogvention is heating up which all leads to defining the core community that up ’til now is the sum of it’s disparate parts. Throw in a pinch of rebellion and…

That and as I’ve speculated before, I think we’re on the verge of a little breakout (Tech Learning piece should be out next week…) and if we can put some models together and compile a universal slide show of sites and possibilities, it might make introductions easier. If Pat’s wanting to formalize our collective, then we should probably set about answering some of the questions I posed last week. And what about ressurecting the EduBlogging book idea, in digital paper form, with personal experiences, models and ideas?

As Pam rightly says, this is energizing, and important work. I think we’ve all been searching for a bit more collective focus, and perhaps our sensei correctly senses the time might be ripe. Lead on, Patrick, and how ’bout more sooner than later?

Kind of ironic that Pat is talking themes today because I need some help. My new and possibly last section of journalism starts Wednesday and I want to make sure I’m able to take my Web log use one step further. To do so, however, I need some answers regarding template creation.

If I create a student template, what exactly can I “save” in it? Can I predefine departments? Can I also precreate links to sort those departments in Prefs/advanced/navigation? If I use include macros, can I call a story from someplace other than in that template? (For instance, say I want each student’s Web log to have a list of relevant links that I update…is there a way that I can call the content from a story I have saved in THIS template? In other words, I want to be able to update the links on all their sites by just updating one post.) I think David said there was a way to do this…

Also, I’m thinking about how best to aggregate all of their Web logs into one place. I linked to this page a couple of days ago that talks about not only being able to aggregate but to post back as well. That’s a major time saver as well. Is that only a Radio feature or can I do it in Manila as well?

If I could do those things, create a template that has much of the relevant stuff already set up, and read and respond to all student Web logs from one place, I would a) have taken the next step, and b) simplified my life by a great deal.

Anyone help me here? Chat time???

I really admire Terry’s passion and vision:

I have tried to convince them that weblogs are the most protean tool for learning ever made. Like a furnace and anvil, a weblog can make most of its own learning tools. It is self-contained yet all-connected. It is portable yet it is rooted. It is an imaginative journal with a lock and key yet it is fearlessly open to modification and criticism. It is self-governing yet is subject to social control. I am almost afraid of what it will do to certain of my students. Tools transform us whether we will or no. What will this do to them? And more to the point, will it, on balance, do more for them?

I think most of us have the same feeling about Web logs but I know I couldn’t articulate it as well. Considering the limitations he and Pat and Joe work under, they are doing amazing work and deserve the support of their schools. In some ways, it really puts the onus on teachers in my position to prove the tool so that others can say look at this! Look what we could be doing. Fingers crossed that on Wednesday I can report an even greater capability to do just that…

Without warning I got pulled into an articulation meeting to do a talk on “our” Web log use to the middle school teachers and had some heads spinning with ideas when I left. (My very supportive department chair also had Tom present his stuff more formally later.) Showed them the Bees sites. Everyone LOVES the potential when I talk about it. They want to collaborate. They want to know how many kids can share space. They want to know what they need to set things up. This is not a hard sell…until we get to the tool. (I’m sureSam is screaming.) Gonna have to think about some training for the middle school teachers this summer…
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Peter checks in to report that he’s training 50 parents in Manila, and he’s getting his kids to help in the process. What a cool idea. Let me put that on the agenda…
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Interesting piece by JD Lasica (who has a Manila Web log) via Dan Gillmor (Who switched his Web log from Manila to MT…hmm…) From a journalism teacher standpoint, and from a edublogger, RSS changes so much. The Christian Science Monitor puts it’s entire paper on RSS, and there are many more newspapers starting to follow their lead. And then, take a look at what RSS 2.0 can do. Jenny is getting a grant to dive into the implications for library use, and I just see this as a critical aspect of any classroom use down the road. On Wednesday when my new semester begins, I’m going to start aggregating all of my j students Manila Web logs instead of clicking through 25 of them. Is it weird that this excites me???
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Joe points to New Feinstein H.S. in Providence as an example of community building a la Web log, or is it Wiki (ZWiki?) since they’re running their site using Plone which, as far as I can tell, runs on top of Zope. And then I was looking at Bloxsom, which says it can be up and running on just about any OS in under 15 minutes (or your money back…it’s free.) And if you haven’t done so lately, check out the latest list of tools. I swear, my head is spinning. Can I make a request that at Edublogvention we do some talking about CMSs and CMFs and Wiki’s and all that stuff? Somewhere out there, I just get this feeling a better app awaits, but at this rate, I can’t imagine me being the one to find it.
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(Via Jenny) From the American Press Institute, more on the RSS movement:

It’s emergent. RSS feeds and news aggregators are today what Web browsers were in 1996. It’s a new publishing platform, and it’s already the de-facto format used by the Web’s early adopters.

It’s effortless. Any database-publishing system that can output Web pages can output RSS feeds. No staff time beyond creating a basic template equals very little expense.

It’s migrating. RSS feeds now find their way onto Web pages and news aggregators. Apple’s new calendar application, iCal, allows users to syndicate events-ranging from personal get-togethers to DVD release dates and sporting events. Headlines are not far behind.

It’s multi-platform. News aggregators are a much better fit for low-bandwidth browsers on mobile phones, PDAs and tablets.

It’s the Classifieds, stupid. Most of the RSS community is focused on content. That’s great; so was the early Web. But feeding classified ads to aggregators is the next obvious step, and will prove to be hugely profitable for newspapers-or whoever decides to do it first.

Fear Factor. Let’s face it: Fear is why most newspapers first went online-afraid Microsoft, AOL or Joe Blow was going to steal market share. Not having your content available in a medium that is growing in popularity rather than waning may not have immediate ROI, but the long-term prognosis for such ignorance is death.

I’ve been thinking more and more about this and my brain just explodes with the potential. I am seriously starting to wonder if there is any reason to use paper any longer. We can read on screen, we can write on screen, we can take notes on screen, we can share and transmit information on screen…think about the potential to include MANY other audiences into the educational process using RSS. Parents, guidance counselors, mentors, friends, siblings and distant relatives, anyone with a nurturing interest in a student and his or her education could easily participate in some structured way, whether as audience or as collaborator in some form. I’m not saying we set loose the hounds here, but with some thoughtful planning…whew.
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