(via Innovation Weblog) I thought this pull quote from the article in Business 2.0 would be more interesting if you substitute the word “education” for the word business:

Blogs will soon become a staple in the information diet of every serious business [education] person, not because it’s cool to read them, but because those who don’t read them will fail. In short, blogs offer an accelerated and efficient approach to acquiring and understanding the kind of information all of us need to make business [education] decisions.

That’ll be the day, huh? But when you think about it, there is a lot of truth here. I really wish I had more time to explore the use of RSS and Weblogs as a research and information tool for pedagogical purposes. I know it’s neither difficult or especially time consuming to set up say an English Department page that aggregates search feeds on English type stuff. Even better, what if it was course specific?

Take our Modern American Literature class, for instance. There could be a feed for “teaching literature,” and one for “Secret Life of Bees.” It might look like this. It took me 10 minutes, and look at these pretty interesting nuggets that I found that could inform my teaching in that class: Student sculpture uses tiles to represent key themes and Palimpsest. (I also did something similar to this for the Holocaust class a couple of weeks ago.)

Now I know the results need to be tweaked, but wouldn’t it be cool to offer this to teachers?
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I met with our Public Information Officer today and I think we have an alternative review process that will hopefully meet with everyone’s approval. Teachers who create the posts will publish them to the Website, and notifications will be sent to superivsors and the PIO for review. If they see a problem, they’ll pursue the fix. At least this way, the PIO doesn’t have to push the publish button every time.

So it appears that for now at least, we’re moving toward a primarily informational site that allows for more people to publish with two people at minimum responsible for reading each post. In my eyes, this is fine for this early stage of implementation. There is a certain comfort level that we’re going to have to work toward before we can start trying to build community with the site, and that is going to take some time. Actually, it’s probably a good thing because my impatience is usually what gets me in to trouble in the first place. And the other good thing is that the PIO is on board with the concept of using the site to not only publish information but to exchange ideas. It’s that creative part through commenting and real “blogging” that I think will be amazing if we can get there.
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Got a chance to do some “recruiting” last night with a presentation at NJ Techspo, the annual gathering of school administrators, tech types and teachers in Atlantic City. I presented with Kevin Jarrett who is a K-8 tech facilitator who has been using Weblogs in his school with some success. We had about 50 people in the room, and I seriously only saw a handful nodding off from time to time. Most attendees seemed pretty interested in the concept and I could see some wheels really turning in some people’s minds. It was a lot of fun, and I left feeling like we’d “made the sale” so to speak. (If you’re interested in our presentation, you can see it here.)

But the other thought I had as I was driving home was not as optimistic. Weblogs are a lot like those really cool looking model airplane kits I used to buy as a kid. In the store, the picture on the box always seemed so awesome…the P-51 Mustang swooping down through the enemy sky with guns blazing. But when I got it home and opened up the box, my, there were a lot of pieces. I probably finished one for every five models I bought (or my mother bought, much to her chagrin.) I saw that look on a lot of people’s faces last night. “What a cool toy! I want one.” But I wonder how many will actually have the time and patience to learn what a lot of us have spent months and years figuring out. And it seems like we still have such a long way to go…

Anyway…on! On!

(via Kairosnews) Ok…it’s official. I’m quitting my high school job and gonna snag some part-time professorship at a local community college where I can do this: give everyone on campus a Weblog and just sit back and watch my aggregator get filled up with all sorts of wild writing from students who write cool stuff without having administrative and board fears (I was going to say paranoia but changed it…hmmmm…) make me sweat over how things will be monitored and approved so as not to tick anyone off. I want so badly to put

We do not take responsibility for any of the writing on this site.

on my homepage and let all heck break loose. (Pitiful isn’t it?)

Joe Moxley, the professor who is doing this, is also into Wikis and all sorts of other cool things dealing with writing with tech. He says the site “Writing Blog is intended to be a creative community for people who write and for writing instructors.” Word has it he’s requiring first year composition students at the University of South Florida to have a blog. Could be an interesting development. Still, Terry asks “Still…where’s the proof (other than anecdotal) that blogging actually helps students write better than in a ‘traditional’ non-blogging class?” Good question. Terry’s starting to dive into this question, and I’m waiting to get a link to his research site so I can follow along.

Posting has slowed down here of late due to a real sense of overload and burn out, and due to my blogging brain more interested in topics unrelated to Weblogs in education. I’ve got a few other spaces out there that I go to when I need to dump about world and family and anything else that wouldn’t seem appropriate to put here. (Seems like I have to try every free new blog software that comes down the pike…) And to be honest, being the political junkie that I am, this year is probably going to find me writing more about the state of politics in my more private spaces than the state of blogs in schools. Just seems like this election is so very important to the future of my children that I’m going to feel really guilty if I don’t become more of an active participant in the process.

That doesn’t mean the Weblog work here has slowed down. In fact, my “struggle,” if you want to call it that, with what thoughts should go in what Weblog in some ways sheds light on the difficulties the administration here is having in knowing how best to work all of this. My superintendent and board is rightly concerned about the content on the Website and the room for error or misinterpretation when all of a sudden dozens of people are contributing posts. I’ve spent the last couple of days writing a “Process for Posting” that is going through some review, and I’ll post it here once it’s finished. It took some real work to try to meet the concerns of the school while staying true to the more open publishing philosophy behind our move to Weblogs. I’m not sure I’m there yet.

Still, there’s no doubt that my hope for a “trust the teacher/professional for the content” workflow just ain’t gonna happen. That may be as it should, but it certainly brings to earth many of my hopes for what we can build here, at least in the near future. I don’t yet know to what extent the school’s concerns will impact all of this, but I think it might go to the extent of not wanting to have book or movie reviews written by students or teachers on the site because parents may disagree with the review or find issues with the work being reviewed. Not too many people are going to want to contribute in the creative ways that I was hoping if they feel what they write have to jump through all sorts of real and perceived hoops of “correctness” both grammatical and political. I haven’t lost all hope, mind you, but I really wanted our use of Weblogs to be more than just a tool for making announcements.

But I think I’m going to have to finish this soon to be rant in a different place…

(via JD) Interesting AP article on the use of Weblogs in the campaigns.

Web journals like Joshua Marshall’s have become indispensable this campaign season: They mobilize supporters, question traditional media coverage and feed the insatiable appetites of political junkies. A powerful new networking tool for the politically plugged-in and hangers-on, the constant online chatter broadens campaign discourse and accelerates the news cycle. Such journals, known as blogs, may not be doing much to sway undecided voters, but analysts say they strongly impact the media, campaign consultants and activists.

I’ve been reading Dean’s Blog for America from the early days, and as the race has evolved, I’be been looking at the Edwards and Kerry Weblogs which have really been picking up steam lately. There’s no doubt that they are changing the landscape, though after Dean’s misstep last weekend, the blog bubble has deflated a bit. I think it becomes really difficult for those of us who are immersed in this technology to find some perspecive. Reality is really skewed when you have over 100 Weblogs in your aggregator…
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In what is probably a major development in the RSS field, Yahoo has launched an RSS tool for it’s myYahoo pages. Pretty cool. It offers a couple of viewing options such as headline only or short summary, which Manila doesn’t seem to be able to offer. I know there has been some discussion lately about the pros and cons of full posts in and aggregator vs. just a short snippet, and I’m still not sure what side of that fence I’m on. I know that I rarely if ever visit someone’s site if I can read their full posts in the aggregator. In fact, about the only site that I do visit regularly, Josh Marshall, I do so because I don’t get his full feeds. Now there is really no reason for me to visit the site since the only thing that changes aside from the posts are the ads. (Maybe that’s why I only get the snippets…)

Anyway, at the very least this will give RSS a boost. The Yahoo FAQ on RSS is worth checking out too.
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Been doing some more thinking about and playing with the search feeds that I noted before. I dropped a couple of viewRssBox macros into a page on my library site, one a Google search and the other a Google news search on the word “Holocaust.” I showed the page to my Social Studies Supervisor, and he was impressed. I orginally had a Feedster search feed there too, but he was concerned about the appropriateness of what might show up in that one.

Now comes along PubSub which is another service that will generate an RSS feed for search results done on Weblogs in their database. And they do some other neat stuff like do real-time tracking of how many times the presidential candidates are mentioned on the blogs they follow. (Nice chart!) Check out their quick sub list of election feeds. (I swear the way this race is shaping up, it’s going to be a very intense year for me. And it’s going to get harder and harder not to blog about politics…)

Anyway, I’m going to try to work up some easy cut and paste templates for teachers who might want to create a couple of these boxes for their students or themselves. They could potentially build a pretty interesting automatically updated class specific newspaper for whatever they are studying. (Makes me wish I was still teaching my Media Literacy class.) And I’m thinking the library might want to just create them at the request of teachers as resource sites for certain timely topics.
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…into Manila, the more I find things I want it to do but can’t. I’m not saying this is just a problem with Manila, mind you, but since that’s the boat I’m sailing right now, it gets frustrating.

Here’s the scenario: The adviser to the National Honor Society wants her students to be able to create posts for her to review and approve for publication. She also wants all of her members on the e-mail notification list for when something is posted. Here’s the problem: she wants to get an automatic e-mail from Manila when something is put into the queue for her to review. But if I’ve added all the members to the notification list, they’ll all get that e-mail as well, and in doing so they read the post before it gets officially published. The most obvious solution is to have the students e-mail or tell her when they create content for her to approve. And if it was just her, that would be ok. But now that my district wants two levels of review, that means that the teacher will have to send an e-mail to the public info person so she knows there is something there to look at as well. AARRGHH! Too much work.

An e-mail from the co-ordinator of our training center:

“I currently have 22 people enrolled in your spring course and I have closed the class. Please let me know if this # is a problem.”

Sheesh. I think word is getting around. This will only be a problem if I can’t dig out from under the absolute ton of stuff I have on my list right now. I have just been so crunched with research and teaching and supporting that blogging has taken a back seat for the first time in a long time. I’ve also spent way too much time reading about the bubble bursting for Weblogs and politics ;0). Man, big media sure has a sore spot about the potential of the “movement.” Somehow I don’t think we’re done yet…

Met with the senior administrative team this morning to give them an update on where we are with our new school Website that we’re building around Manila sites. Everyone liked the look (thanks, Bryan), and everyone likes the concept of having more people creating content on the site. That’s the good part. Now comes the piece that I knew I would have to tackle at some point: how do we make sure that all of this distributed content is appropriate and correct and representative of the Star School that is Hunterdon Central? The easy answer is that we put the onus of appropriate, correct and representative content on those who are creating it. But as past practice has shown, while most of what is generated for public consumption from our school is of high quality, there are moments when what we create does not reflect the highest standard. I think that’s probably true in most schools and organizations. At the moment, the senior team is very sensitive to these kinds of issues, and so the subject turned to Weblog as Website process.

First off, we decided that until we get more comfortable with this, we’re going to turn off the comments. Since we haven’t found a way to review comments before posting, this wasn’t going to happen anyway. Maybe a year or so down the road we can start experimenting with reader feedback. My superintendent wants two levels of review for posts that are made by advisers or departmental folk or whoever might be posting. Ultimately, the district public information officer would push the final “publish” button. I don’t think this is unreasonable as once we get all the sites running my guess is we’re talking about maybe a dozen posts a day (which would make me very happy.) With the notification feature in Manila, everyone in the loop could be notified automatically when a new post is queued for approval. So, in general, I can see it working. But there are all those little in between steps that I have to figure out. Who approves what? How, when, where do I train all of them? What flak will I get from adding the review process to a lot of people’s plates? Who is gonna win Iowa?

I’m almost glad I’ve gotten to this step. It really has been the last kind of murky piece in the picture. I’ve got a pretty detailed process to write of how we get from idea to publish. Hopefully, when I’m done, we’ll really be ready to see if this works.

I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with the developer of one of the newer Weblog hosting services about what educators want that they don’t seem to be getting from the current offerings. I’ve told him that aside from the access and hosting issues, privacy and safety concerns are pretty paramount. I know I’ve been moaning about the need for different levels of access for posts and for being able to screen out inappropriate comments before they are published. (I just had ManilaFixer and CommentIt installed on my server to play with so maybe there are some answers there…) But the other aspect of the current set up that has been bothering me for a while is the kind of disconnectedness of all of my student spaces, the lack of community. I know that mere software tweaks won’t necessarily solve that, but at this point, the fact that my students’ sites are simply linked to one another and to my class portal site just seems inadequate.

Anyway, this developer has what I think is a pretty cool idea. As usual, this may not be anything really and truly new to anyone but me. But as we’ve communicated, it’s evolved into what I’ll call an Intrablog or kind of Intranet Weblog community that paints an interesting picture in my mind. This is probably along the lines of Blackboard, but since I have very limited experience with it I’m not sure. It’s a portal through which only members of the community enter (in this case my students). Inside resides not only the individual student sites but message boards, discussion groups, chat, aggregated posts, etc. It’s kind of an Intranet for my class. Individual student sites are still open for viewing, at least the content that has been deemed “publishable.” I keep seeing it as a place where everyone can communicate with each other about whatever interests them. It’s still pretty murky, but I think I see the outlines…

Best part is this developer is hoping to create something like this that’ll work with whatever software you are using. How he’ll do that, I have no clue. But if you’re interested, I’d love to hear your ideas…and stay tuned.

There is going to be a EdBlogging Panel at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas in March, and I’ve been asked to see if I can drum up some blogging teachers who might want to be a part of the panel. The expected audience is 40 or so middle school teachers who will be hoping to get ideas about classroom use of Weblogs. If you are attending SXSW, live around Austin, or want to submit a case study that could be presented in your absence, just add a comment to this message.

(via my Feedster search feed) NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin has seen the light about Weblogs as an alternative news medium.

Blogs are, as I now appreciate, as legitimate a method of communicating information and opinion as traditional media…Political life in the United States is changing and so, it seems, should be how and where political journalism chooses its information.

I love it…
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Just an update on my ongoing experiments with using RSS as a continuous research tool for teachers or students. Frankly, I’m still amazed at the concept that we can pretty much automate our research into a particular topic that we want to follow on a regular basis. (I know I still haven’t understood all of the implications of this as another idea on how to use this just occurred to me now.) Anyway, for the past few months I’ve been running searches on Google, Feedster, and Bloglines and then aggregating the RSS results feeds into my Bloglines account. It’s become pretty clear that the last two are more effective than the Google search, which in some ways surprised me. I guess I originally thought that since Google searches such a huge number of Websites, it would generate more results. But the fact is that the bloggers included in the Feedster and Bloglines searches are better at sifting through all those pages and culling what is most relevant to what I’m looking for. I’d say about 75% of the links that come back lead to something potentially interesting. Not so with Google.

Anyway, with Manila’s viewRssBox macro, it’s not a great leap to set up pages dedicated to certain search terms that might be relevant in class and just have the most recent results just show up when you access the page. Put a few of these feeds on the same page and you can start building a pretty comprehensive resource for a particular unit or theme. Or use it on a departmental home page. Or…well, you get the idea. Not rocket science, I know, but more than enough to keep me interested.
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