Ok, don’t get me wrong, this is cool and all. And thank you Jake sincerely for continuing to crank out upgrades to Manila. But I once again just want to gently urge the consideration of these features that were originally to be released in June…

A few more Hunterdon Central Web logs were born yesterday including one for the Chorus and one for the Jr. ROTC. (And Ms. Higgins has really gone to town.) I had eight teachers in my workshop, and more than one of them at some point blurted out something about how easy or how cool or how useful this whole business is. I’ve gotten to the point where I really want to suspend the 45-minute intro on what Web logs are and how their used and the great ways people are already using them. It’d almost be more fun to just let them roll up their sleeves and start creating. On the other hand, by showing some of those sites I think it makes them want to do it on their own even more. Web logs class is becoming very fun. We’re at 135 sites and counting…

I spent about an hour with one of our librarians today talking about some possibilities. And the VP in charge of all activities wants one as well. I really need to get my design issues resolved, and it looks like I’m going to have to delve into the theme creation piece of it a bit more deeply. I know this; what ever comes out of this will be created from a Bryan Bell original. Why mess with success.
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One of my teachers and I have been trying to work through the issue of students answering questions online by basically rephrasing the posts of students before theirs. He likes the idea of having responses published for others to see, and he is encouraging his students to build upon the responses of others. And he is teaching his kids what the expectations are regarding responses. But there is a real difference between Web log posting and written, paper responses. I know that kids can share answers and copy no matter what form the responses take. But let’s face it, it’s a lot easier for kids to take ideas when they are easily accessible online. And a larger issue is what happens when students in other sections of those courses use this online content for their own class?

I know that much of this can be avoided by how the assignment is constructed. With process writing where students are working through drafts, Web logs work well in showing the evolution of a piece. Same with research and problem solving to a certain extent. But these kind of short, one-draft answers that are meant to extend conversation past the classroom may not be a best use. Not unless all students post at the same time and we used discussion of those original ideas to extend the conversation.

And we can revisit the question of how much student work should be published online. Greg and I and others discussed this a while back. But I’m going to be interested to see how long it will take before our students start taking other students’ work when posted online.

Two thoughts…there had been some discussion a while back of putting an option into Manila for private or public publishing. I wonder where that is in terms of development. And, I need to dig further into the search functions of Manila for the entire server. I’m sure there is a way to Google search our whole domain which we’re going to need to do from time to time.

Ok, now having just said that looks don’t matter for the average Web log, looks obviously do matter a lot for the average school Website. And since I’ve been pushing my knowledge of CSS for just that purpose, sites like Listamatic are worth keeping track of. It has a bunch of predesigned lists complete with code and styles to play with. After watching the way Bryan Bell uses CSS to create Manila templates, I’m going to keep at this ’til I get it… (via Dan Gillmor)
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(via Lockergnome) A pretty interesting discussion on the effects of RSS on the reading of Web logs. True, I don’t get that personal feeling in my aggregator that I can when I actually visit a Web log site. But let’s face it…few sites have much personalization to them to begin with, and I think the ability to read so many more interesting authors via their feeds outweighs missing the personal touches. I can always click through a post in Bloglines to the Web log if I wanted to. But to me, this is more about content than design. And this is especially true from a classroom standpoint, obviously. If you are going to create Web logs for your students, I don’t know how you could not use a feed reader of some type to keep track of it. (Now if only I could get my RSS feed of comments working…anyone have the standard Manila extension for that one?)
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Forget all that stuff I said about moving too fast. I’ve decided I’m going to create one Web log a day as a surprise “gift” to various clubs and teams and teachers. Today’s winner is the Student Council. I’ll let the advisers know it’s there and have them let me know if they want to see how it all works. Next, let’s see…how about the Girls Soccer Team? And then, maybe Ed the math teacher for his Let’s Make a Deal idea. We’ve already got over 100 sites working, mostly personal student sites. But two days ago, Chinese Honor Society started up, and I keep hoping that as people see what’s up, they’ll want their own. Now I really have to make a couple more templates…
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(via eBn) When I was selling one of the Math teachers on Web logs the other day he started talking about some “Let’s Make a Deal” game that he does with his students that he said would be a perfect fit for a Web log. This puzzleblog site is another great example of how we could using Web logs as a way to build community here. I really want people to provide some fun too. I may be naive, but wouldn’t it be cool if the Website became a place where people went for some interesting diversion too? I remember when we started a BBS here about 50 years ago and people would call in just to do Word Nerd. This could be so much cooler. (I know, I know, wake up. The Hurricane knocked me senseless.) We could have a whole bunch of puzzlemasters doing their own thing in their own Web logs getting people’s answers. Hey, a guy can dream…
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This looks like an incredibly useful resource for journalism teachers exploring Web logs and participatory journalism in their classrooms. Full title: “We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information” by Shayned Bowman and Chris Willis of Hypergene MediaBlog.

There are three ways to look at how society is informed. The first is that people are gullible and will read, listen to, or watch just about anything. The second is that most people require an informed intermediary to tell them what is good, important or meaningful. The third is that people are pretty smart; given the means, they can sort things out for themselves; find their own version of the truth. The means have arrived. The truth is out there.

Chapter 3 on “How Participatory Journalism is Taking Form” is especially relevant as it talks about how Web logs are supported by other technologies such as Trackback, meta-sites like Daypop that track Web log topics, and, of course, RSS. If the other chapters are as quality as that one, this might be a seminal work on the topic. More when I finish it…
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One of the things I’ve noticed this week as I’ve been going around to some of the key stakeholders here is that my explanation or pitch concerning this idea is getting more and more focused. It almost feels like a politician on the stump, trying out phrases, seeing what works, taking a refined version to the next audience. Most of the time I just kind of hit on a word or a phrase that seems to click, and one that has really worked is this idea that we’re moving to a “distributed creation of content model”. Used to be that all content for our Website was approved by the public information officer who sent it to the Webmaster who put it online. (Which, of course, is why so little content was every created.) In this new model, the pipe to posting information is open for those that have relevant content and are positions to take responsibility for it.

It’s a whole different approach that has been facilitated by Web logs, obviously. And I can see that this is going to necessitate a huge change in the thinking of most schools out there if they’re even to consider this model themselves. This approach does pose some potential problems. The more open the system, the higher the likelihood of misuse. If teachers or advisers or coaches aren’t vigilant about logins and passwords and such, and if they don’t monitor student sites under their supervision, unacceptable content is inevitably going to find it’s way online. (BTW, I think this is one area where RSS is so important, simply because it wouldn’t be difficult to create redundant levels of review without making it awfully time consuming.)

I’ve said it before, but I am fortunate to work at a school where I can experiment and push the boundaries before I have the hard data that most changes of this type would require. And all of the people who I have shown this idea to think the model makes sense and is a positive step. But ultimately, there is going to have to be evidence that the rewards of Web logs are worth the risk. Seb noted the other day a paper that had been presented on Manila as CMS, but there really is little if any empirical data that suggests what we’re doing is actually changing things for the better, enhancing student learning. It’s all gut, still. But it’s a model that I think appeals to most people now that the tool is available for it to work. Content creation is no longer the purview of a few “geeks” who can code and design and make pretty pages. We can all get in the game now. How well we play it remains to be seen.

Ok…I think we’re over the edge. I can’t keep up with them all any more, and so now I’m going to have to shift into finding and tracking the best of the edublogs out there. Albert is finding teachers all over the place, and just fifteen minutes of link surfing has turned up at least a dozen or so new sites. Amazing. Most are still not in the K-12 realm, but there are some.

One to highlight: John Palfrey at Harvard has student blogs for his Cyberlaw and the Global Economy class.

Part of the idea of this course, from a pedagogical perspective, is to seek to extend the conversation outside the traditional classroom environment and onto the Net by experimenting with new technologies (students are forewarned of this experimentation early and often!). Weblogs and H2O participation earn students class participation credit. I’m interested, too, in whether people who are not enrolled in the class may pick up on the out-of-class discussion, particularly via weblog postings (made either anonymously or by attribution) by students in the class.

It’s cool that he can even entertain the inclusion of unvetted outside voices…a few too many concerns to do that with a high school class. BTW, if you haven’t checked it out lately, the Manila experiment at Harvard is growing quickly.

Ok, who else? Eszter Hargittai from Princeton (who is asking some good questions about privacy here), Henry Farrell (who gives some ideas for classroom use of Web logs here) from the University of Toronto who is collaborating with a number of other university types at Crooked Timber, and John Holbo’s Nietzsche Blog from the National Univeristy of Singapore. Then there’s Mindy McAdams, who I’ve followed for a long time, and her journalism Blog Planning exercises at the University of Florida. (Seriously, this is an amazing resource for having students start their own sites.) Kaye Trammell who is on the panel with Pat at BloggerCon, Courtney Jacob, a third grade teacher in Michigan, Ms. Frizzle from the Bronx, Jeff who is student teaching and in grad school in Oregon, and Lawd knows how many others…

How amazing are the next couple of years going to be as more and more teachers get religion?

I took my Web logs as Website show to the Director of Curriculum and, later, the principal, today to make sure they had a clear sense of where this is all heading. Now that the RSS piece is usable (though still in production), I can at least articulate and show how the grand vision for this works and looks. A couple of observations…

I have a feeling that once this starts rolling it’s going to be hard to stop, save a technical disaster. The DoC and I were joined by another teacher who had at least two great ideas for Web logs in mind by the time he left. And the RSS stuff really blew him away. The DoC compared it to that old hair coloring commercial where “She’ll tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on…” And he was really processing the content management piece of this. At one point he said “So if all of the committees and departments I’m overseeing kept a Web log, I could just crank up my news reader in the morning and see whatever it is they’ve been up to.” Yup. “And I can even search that content for any key ideas I want to track.” Yup.

With the principal, I made her a Web log before I sat down with her. She loved it. Her secretary immediately signed up and started thinking about what type of content they could generate. And again, the whole subscription aspect just amazed them. They’re going to get me some parents to try the whole thing out on. (I’m probably going to present to the School-Family Council at some point.)

So, what I’m working through now is the speed of implementation. I don’t want to slow down any enthusiasm that might be building for this, but I also don’t want to get too far ahead of things in terms of design and navigation and such. I always expected parts of the new site to go live on the old site before the final transition was finished in the spring, but I think I really need to start thinking about the best way to bring these online.
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Just another example of a journalism oriented Web log that, while left-leaning, is covering some pretty important media topics. From the introduction:

I call this blog PressThink because that’s the kind of work I do. The title points to forms of thought that identify “journalism” to itself— but also to the habit of not thinking about certain things. The subatomic force that holds the pack of reporters together as they swarm around a story, there’s an example of pressthink. Without it there could be no pack; the pieces would come flying apart. There is a strange energy there, holding smart people to dumb practices.

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Here’s a bit of what blogthevote2004.org will hopefully build as content. Real questions, real representatives, real answers for everyone to read. I love watching the walls of these classrooms come tumbling down…
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Add this to the list of school newspapers that are starting to get it. If anyone can tell me why this can’t translate to a high school newspaper, please do. I can’t imagine that it would be too difficult to find some articulate, responsible students who would appreciate not only the forum but the opportunity to be a guide or “expert” as a blogumnist. The key, of course, is getting a readership base, and then maintaining that motivation (and hooking others) by promoting the site and building up the hits log. But it’s not that hard, as many Web loggers have already found out, if you provide meaningful, thoughtful comment and put it in a readable form. I can’t wait to see “Movie Boy” arrive at my school! (via Kara Kerwin)
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I’ve always thought that the most intriguing thing about Web logs were the opportunities they create for collaboration, and now that Pat has moved to a high school setting we’ve been thinking about how we could connect our students. We started out talking about a small collaboration between our school newspapers that would take an issue of importance to high schoolers each month and develop comparison stories that would, with any luck, bring some perspective to our two very diverse populations. But as we talked more and more about it, the idea grew into BlogtheVote2004. I’ve been inspired by the use of Web logs in Howard Dean’s campaign, and now that more and more politicians are getting the blog bug, this seemed like a pretty natural extension. We’re hoping this will grow into a model for these types of collaborations, and we’re hoping to involve high school students from around the country as the elections move closer. But we want to start small. There will be more details coming.

As always, comments and suggestions welcomed.
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