Bonnie Borthwick of Lesley U. in Cambridge has started a Haavaahd Web log that is “exploring uses of blogs in the workplace,” which in her case means schools. As always, it’s interesting to watch as someone publicly thinks out loud about how blogs might fit his/her situation. And, should I be envious that having a Crimson blog means Dave will respond to your Manila musings? Bonnie wonders if she can audioblog in Manila, and Dave comments: “I’ve asked them to do a general audio blogging tool, and there’s some hope they’ll do that.” Must be nice.

So, um, hey Bonnie…can you wonder aloud if Manila’s going to get a trackback feature any time soon? ;0)

I have to say that it’s pretty eye-opening to watch the Manila Dev board at Yahoo as Dave demands and grumbles and Jake cranks out the requests. Watching that interaction has given me a lot of insight as to the issues with Manila and the problems with developing it. But the greatest thing to happen to Manila users is Dave’s commitment to Harvard. He’s panicked by the problems his new users are having, the same problems we’ve been having all along. And he seems pretty committed to making Manila a standard for wider adoption in schools, which means he’s gonna have to add all the bells and whistles we’ve been asking for.

Now, if only he would be so impassioned about hosting…
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It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with all of this. I’ve been utterly amazed at how fast all of this is moving in terms of Web logs and RSS and all sorts of other new relevant technologies like trackback and their potential uses in the classroom. I really wish I had the technical brain to understand it all without having to read stuff over and over again. My brain lists heavily to the right.

George and David and Seb and others are pushing my attention and thinking into other areas like learning objects and open source education which I find interesting but hard mental work. When David titles a post “Most Important Post of the Day” I read it. And then I read it again, and then I start to get it and I understand that if we were to start a repository of our own learning objects that we could feed those posts through RSS and that we could interconnect our commentary and use of them through Track back. (Concept here. If you haven’t checked out what Maricopa Community Colleges are doing, you should.) (BTW, I really wish UserLand would develop that for Manila…)

The concept of repositories is very cool to begin with. The concept of say an English teacher being fed new lessons as other English teachers post them is even cooler. The idea any discussions on implementation or modifications can be tracked with that lesson is yes, even cooler. But all of it is overwhelming.

The point to me in my mostly Web log world is that it really is much more than publishing and classroom management. It really is about knowledge management in ways that most people here have never even conceived or thought possible. The planning and implementation is huge, and it requires a seismic shift in the way we do things. Web log as Web site is step one in the process, I think. (BTW, I have the green light on this and will do a board presentation in early May…gulp, again.) If I can sell people on the concept of a more distributed model for creation of content that will be “held” on the Web site, it shouldn’t be much of a leap to get them to see the bigger picture of collaborative communication and collection that I think ultimately will be the place we end up.

This new site has been getting attention lately with good reason. A nice assortment of features and content. The background of the creators and the ideas they have in mind are both pretty impressive.

One quote in an interview with George Siemens caught my eye:

My most positive learning experience has been informal – through blogs. On a daily basis I’m able to catch a glimpse into the thoughts of a wide variety of people in fields like education, technology, sociology, knowledge management, legal, etc. No classroom could ever provide the diversity that a well-selected blog roll can.

Amen to that.

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I thought my idea of making all of my old student sites Editor’s Only in order to avoid kids trying to plagiarize from old assignments would work until I realized that our good friend Google not only points to pages, it also caches them.

I just know that this is going to be an issue at some point if it isn’t already. It’s not going to be that hard for one of my students to search for key words from an assignment and come across the answers posted by one of my students earlier in the year. Even though the site itself may not be accessible, Google will oblige by displaying the page as it was created, with all of the key search terms highlighted. Nice.

I don’t have many good options here, I think. I could change every assignment every time, but some assignments really can’t be changed in any appreciable way because of the content involved. I could do a Google search of one line from the answer to every assignment to see if there are any hits, but that would be far too time consuming. I could have kids hand in some assignments on paper and only do their reporting and beat work online, but that kind of defeats the purpose, at least in the way I envisioned this. I know I’m talking about maybe only 20% of what I do, but it’s still enough to get me thinking. (BTW, my original thoughts on this here.)

Publishing is a wonderful thing, but it also opens up many new doors for abuse. I’d love to say that it’s nothing to worry about, but it is. Right now, for many of the kind of read and answer questions types of assignments I give, I can’t be 100% sure that a student’s work is his own. Thoughts or ideas welcomed as always.

Ryan raises some really interesting ideas about the uses of RSS and trackback and how they might work in the classroom. The ultimate here from a teaching standpoint would obviously be an aggregated page of student work that was somehow sortable by either student or assignment or, preferably, both. Even more, it would be great to be able to comment back to student sites via the aggregator (which I think is something that Radio can do but not Manila(?)).

Even more, however, is the use of the aggregator by students to follow each other’s work. I alluded to this before when I was thinking about putting my students into smaller working groups, a plan I’m going to implement this week. The desired effect is to get students to learn from the process of others by tuning in more closely, and to give feedback in the collaborative group style. Not that they can’t just click through to the three or four sites in their group, but I’d like them to see how easy this new concept of information gathering is. I see them subscribed to the class homepage, 3/4 feeds of their workgroup, the NY Times and BBC newsfeeds, and a couple of feeds of sites that correspond to their beats. First stop every day will be the aggregator.

As always, I wish I knew more about the technology. When Ryan and Dale Pike and others say they want more control over the creation of the feed, my eyes start to glaze over. I probably should carve out some time to get half my brain around the whole RSS 2.0 thing since it sounds like it adds a lot of flexibility to the whole concept. Anyone read Ben Hammersley’s book yet?

(Via Anne) Barclay Barrios is just up the road at Rutgers Univeristy, and he’s basically doing his dissertation about technology and writing via a Web log (using Greymatter, btw.)

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Seb and others have really gotten into this RSS concept in a big way lately, and they’re talking about being able to do stuff that is way beyond my comprehension but that sounds pretty cool nonetheless. I’m not quite sure why I would have a need to create my own RSS feed if I have Manila or MT doing it for me, especially now with the capability of subscribing to separate department feeds. I haven’t even begun to think through that yet.

Anyway, today I was sitting in a meeting of well-meaning administrators who were discussing potential solutions to a perceived lack of communication between parents and the school, and all I could think about was RSS. I know I wrote about this before, but somewhere on this new site we’re (hopefully) creating, I want a page where parents can 1.) learn about the whole RSS concept in easy to understand terms, 2.) get a list of every departmental RSS feed that we have, and 3.) be able to check and subscribe to whatever they want. Heck, the implications for how we communicate with each other within the school are equally as HUGE (and to be honest, even more of a selling point.) If everyone managed their knowledge on a Web log, and all of those feeds were available to whomever wanted them, e-mail around this place would be cut in half, and we’d all be a heckuva lot more well-informed about what’s going on here. Accessible information easily made available to the consumers who need/want it. What a concept, huh? I know I have no life, but all of this really does blow me away.
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Now this is a pretty smooth use of Manila for a college newspaper at Southern Illinois University. A lot of layers, a lot of content. The page design could be better (and from the looks of the ongoing discussion at the Dev Group they’re gonna can most of the themes and start pretty much from scratch…Yay!) But this is a pretty good example of what you can do with just a basic understanding of how to create and link news and stories, and some knowledge of feeding content using the viewRssBox macro. It doesn’t have to be very complex.
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David Carraher of the Harvard neighborhood is thinking about the potentials of Web logs in education. He suggests a couple of current shortcomings that Web logs might overcome, namely students as passive learners and a lack of access to real life teaching by researchers and those in teacher ed programs. I’m not sure there is anything really new here that hasn’t been widely discussed in these circles, but as always it’s interesting to see the bulb start burning in other brains.
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Dan Gillmor is working on a new book about “Making the News” and he’s asking for reader input.

How can you join the project? Please tell me what you think of these ideas. More that that, please tell me about specific things you know about that would a) help illustrate the concepts; b) refute what I’m saying; and/or c) provide further nuance and context.

First of all, how cool is that? Second of all, the subtitle really nails it: “What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer.” I’ll say it again, the connection of Web logs and journalism is just too important to miss. It’s valid to argue what form of journalism Web logs take, but there is no denying any longer that it’s a form we’re all going to have to start taking seriously as a source of information. And that means teaching our students the good and bad about the genre as well. I have a number of new “sources” that I trust, and I’ve left behind many of the traditional media sources that I used to rely on. The more I read Web logs and the more I find intelligent, articulate filters and thinkers, the less I believe the stream of pre-packaged pablum that Big Media want me to consume. And that’s significant as I have been immersed in the study of media almost all of my professional life. If you would have told me just a couple of years ago that I would stop buying newspapers and not watch the evening news I would have laughed in your face. Seriously. But here I am.

I got a new class of journalists today, and they are about to find out what happens when readers become writers. In fact, I’m thinking about throwing out the whole curriculum and starting over, of letting them choose one passion and develop it through reading AND writing (with an audience) for the whole quarter. And it’s that topic, that passion that is key. When I look back at the last two years or so, the three things that jump out are: 1.) I have never written as much in my whole life, 2.) I have never known as much about any one thing as I know about this, and 3.) there is still an ocean of stuff left to learn, I know. For whatever reason, I am pulled to this topic again and again. And that’s what I like about all of the people who I’m aggregating…they have a passion. They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t find it valuable and interesting. And their consistency and thoughtfulness make them reputable, more reputable than more prominent sources with obvious agendas.

Anyway, that’s one Web log book I’m not going to miss.
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The success is mine, sort of. Two of the teachers in my Teacher Portfolio class actually did Manila sites for their portfolios. Nothing major here, and not very smooth, I know. But a baby step. And I’ve got a couple more teachers coming in to set things up next week, so we’re getting there.

Spent yesterday working in Photoshop and Manila to create a new look for this site and cleared one major hurdle just by making something work! Still some glitches, like for the life of me I can’t get the Discuss and Edit buttons at the end of News Items to not plow into the right-hand column, but…

And it’s interesting that Dave is having the same problems. Boy, I thought I was frustrated:

As someone who loves Manila, this embarasses the hell out of me. Why can’t we get rid of these glitches? Why, when we do, do they keep coming back??

and:

So does anyone have a clue which themes are worth preserving and which should be thrown on the scrap heap? Bryan has not really been much of a help here. I must do something about this. My users are actually using the damned things, the ones Bryan says they shouldn’t. What a goddam mess this is.

Yeah…um…welcome to our world.
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Understanding RSS is one thing, a very cool thing no doubt. But using it well is a more interesting issue. Tim is experimenting with feeds on his Buckman Elementary pages in a pretty creative way (pointer via Joe.) The mt-rssfeed I think parallels the Manila viewRssBox macro that I’ve been playing with, though it appears to be a bit more flexible. One tweak would be to just feed the titles of the posts instead of the whole thing. Even more, I want to figure out how you feed just the first paragraph and a picture like the Kern site. (BTW, that is one thing I like better about MT–the ability to easily include a short teaser that then links to the longer post like this.)

And just a brief note on the Manila aggregator. I like the convenience of it. It’s easy to access and to subscribe to feeds. I don’t like the limitation of the number of posts it will show. I have so many sites aggregated that if I don’t check it at least two or three times a day I miss stuff. Isn’t there any way to increase the number of posts it saves? And can’t there be an easier way to sort through them?
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Kinda dawned on me while I was reading this post by Shelley Powers about a third generation of Web loggers that one aspect of my student sites that’s been missing is the basic reflective Web log post (just like this one) where you read something, link to it, and comment. Yeah, they have been doing that with their beat assignments, but it’s just that, an assignment. I want to see if I can get them to do some reflecting on their own, and then get them to reflect about each other’s posts.

Maybe start smaller communities of four or five kids who cross post? An online collaborative work group where they read and comment on each other’s stuff in a supportive yet push-the-thinking type way. Maybe, just like in real Web log life, the “beat” topic could be the connector…say, music, or sports, or whatever. (It IS the topic that connects us, no?) What if the collaborative group followed a wider swath of one general topic and shared one site to do so? They could comment and discuss the posts among themselves, link to further reading and research, and develop a collaborative piece of writing about it. Perhaps this would build community that would then foster that same type of interaction in their own personal spaces(?)

This all flows into the interesting recent discussions about Trackback type applications and how they connect writers and ideas. If students could see that others are posting about their stuff…is there such a feature for Manila? Any developers?

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about some of the responses that my journalism kids have been giving, especially the ones about starting Web logs of their own. While most of them seemed to like the use of Web logs in our class and found them valuable tools for learning, almost none of my students feel like they’d like to do it on their own. Now I know this is partly personal taste, partly time, partly adolesence. But I feel like I’ve gotten so much out of keeping this space for the last two years now that I wonder how I can make the Web log experience more personal for them within the context of academic study.

Along those lines, Clay Shirky’s Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing makes some really interesting points. Pat‘s discussion of digital paper still defines the potential here. But I particularly liked this excerpt:

But the vast majority of weblogs are amateur and will stay amateur, because a medium where someone can publish globally for no cost is ideal for those who do it for the love of the thing. Rather than spawning a million micro-publishing empires, weblogs are becoming a vast and diffuse cocktail party, where most address not “the masses” but a small circle of readers, usually friends and colleagues. This is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward.

It’s that participation that I’m thinking about. What can I do to give them more ownership of the space? What’s going to makle them do it “for the love of the thing?” I know the answer lies in them identifying a passion and then connecting this concept of participation to an audience beyond the classroom. Once they develop their space, I’m going to really encourage them to find more of an audience for their Web logs. To read and subscribe and connect with other Web loggers, and to give them a bit more opportunity to develop thier own personal ideas and voice. It may mean creating some extra paper outside of their class Web logs. But what the heck…that’s the point.
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With all of the new options being served up by Userland, I’m starting to think about a redesign of this site to incorporate some of the new stuff and some of the old stuff that I’m just now starting to figure out. I really like the Blogroll concept that for the time being I have posted here. And I’ve been playing with the viewRssBox macro and have it working on a fool around site. The kinda cool thing is that I’m finally starting to feel comfortable with the many macros there are to play with, and it’s almost making me think that I can figure out most of how Kern gets those main stories to display on the homepage from different departments. (I’m assuming it’s rss feeds from different sites aggregated into an rssBox…watch it be manual updating…)

Anyway, this site is feelinging too heavy and cluttered, and my brain has many ideas. But a couple of pressing humps remain: 1) I need to figure out once and for all what can and cannot be saved in a template (and I think I need to hire a consultant for this one,) and 2) I need to learn how to create the page in GoLive (which I can pretty much do) and then figure out how and where to embed the macros to make it work in Manila. I think I can muddle my way through that, but if anyone has any pointers…
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