Weblog Theory
We all want this:
<blockquote>Whereas Alfano said she is happy experimenting with blogging, History Prof. Joel Samoff said that the technology still is not capable of doing all the things that he wants it to do. Samoff said that blogging must perform three main functions if he is to use it in his classrooms.

“It has to be public so everybody can see what other people are publicly posting,” Samoff said. “However, it also has to allow users to be able to post things privately. Lastly, it has to be connected to people’s e-mail accounts so the professor can communicate with students easily.”</blockquote>
At some point, I’m going to have to roll up my sleeves and really dig into <a href=”http://www.baylys.com:8080/manila/plugins/manilafixer/”>David Bayly’s fix</a> on this. Anyone else using it to make posts public and private?

http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=13146&repository=0001_article

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Held Day 1 of another workshop on Tuesday with Day 2 later this afternoon and I have to say that this group of 10 seems to be seeing the potential more than others I’ve had. Sure, there are a couple who are struggling with the technology, but I had a lot of “oh wows” and “so, can I do this?” type responses. I’m looking forward to seeing what they did for “homework.”

Jeremy pointed to Anne‘s good and bad list of Weblogs, a post that it the craziness that was last week I seem to have missed. It’s great. Anne is a real observer, and when I met her out at NECC last year I just got this sense of calm focus from her that always shows up in her blogging. What she writes has this inherent wisdom to it somehow, and this post is no exception, and it’s one of the reasons I love Weblogs. Here’s an example:

Now the “ups” as relates to students are not going to happen unless we have educators willing to take the time to make sure that weblogs are used to make authentic and exciting connections to the “established curriculum in schools.”

That’s what I want my group of teachers to get. Right now, they understand Weblogs as portal, but what they don’t see is Weblogs as a tool for making those authentic and exciting connections that Anne talks about. That’s asking a lot from a two-day workshop, I know. But one of my biggest frustrations is getting teachers, even ones who have been using Weblogs already, to go beyond the portal/filing cabinet phase. My students are getting it, and from a journalism standpoint the fact that they are constantly writing for audience has had a huge impact on their work. That is, after all, what journalists do. But again, this stuff is a pretty easy sell for English.

But I’ll heed Anne’s words and hang in there:

And no, I don’t think blogging will save the world of education but I do see it as a way that education could be affected in oh so many good ways. All innovation comes from people willing to take risks, try new things, think outside the box. We also need to take the time to teach students wise and appropriate use of their voices. Talk to them about how they are representatives of their school and yes, even the world. Weblogs in education can be many different things to each of us but oh the possbilities we can explore. The potential is huge. Let’s hang in there!

I’ve been playing with Furl some more and having some minor epiphanies as I go. I’m almost at the point where I think there could be some broad implementation but I’m worried that since it’s in beta it might just go away some day. What I’m thinking of entails quite a bit of setup. When Mike Giles of Furl e-mailed posted this last week it got me thinking…

Glad to see you are finding Furl useful! If you want to give folks an email option, they can subscribe to your archive (and can subscribe to specific topics). That way, they will get a daily email with the new links from the day before. Click on the “Share” tab to read more about it. Also, folks can search your archive at any time (and it searches the full text of the articles/sites that you furled).

Ok, now this is pretty mind boggling to think about. On a small scale, here’s what I’m doing:
1. Set up my librarian with a Furl account. She’s going to play with her page of Art links.
2. Set up a couple of Furl departments that she can sort the sites she wants to add into.
3. Use the viewRssBox macro to display each of these department feeds under their respective categories on the Art Links page.
4. Let her go crazy.
Now this is a very cool solution for a number of reasons. First, it’s easy for her; she finds a page she likes, Furls it, and it shows up on the library links site with annotation. Second, we don’t have to worry about that quirky WYSIWYG Manila editor screwing things up. Third, well, it’s just cool.

But then I start thinking about this on a big scale. What if all the English teachers Furled as they worked into the same page with various departments. And then what if an e-mail went out to department members on a daily basis to keep them up with what’s new? (And just think too, they could just get e-mail about the Shakespeare department, or the composition department, or…) Better yet, what if we fed the stuff into a collective Bloglines account? The setup to do this is huge, and frankly I wonder if it’s worth it. But it sure is cool to think about. (I have no life, evidenced by the fact that I’m thinking about Furl instead of getting my wife a birthday present for tomorrow. Sad…)
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I’m doing a little informal classroom research that will attempt to apply the Anne method for building community through the class portal. For the next few days, I’m going to be focusing on pulling best practices from the kids’ sites into the class homepage, as I did today. I’m also going to start urging them to read and write more about each other’s experiences. Many of them have been doing a great job of recording their process and making notes, but it still seems pretty individualized. I want them to start feeling like more of a team. (Note: This may just be an aftereffect from seeing “Miracle” on Monday.) Anyway, I’m going to see if I can’t get them interacting online a bit more. (Another note: As I’ve said before, this would be a lot easier, I think, if they didn’t see each other every day. Still, I think there are some students in my class who would rather write about their frustrations than talk about them.)

On another note, the research via RSS experiment is working pretty well. Claire, who is doing a story on what effects the legalization of gay marriage might have on school sex ed curricula, is getting some great stories fed right to her from Google News. Others are reporting the same. It appears to make a difference when the reserach comes to you as opposed to having to find it. I’m thinking this will be a standard feature of my journalism student Weblogs from this point on. Now if I could just get some teachers interested in this feature…
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One of my teachers reminded me that NJ.com is employing Weblogs to offer homegrown journalists the opportunity to spin their own communities or interests, and from the looks of it, they’re growing pretty quickly. And I think this appeal to potential beach bloggers is pretty interesting:

What we are looking for are girls and guys to write about their time down the Jersey Shore this summer in NJ.com’s Beach Blog. The shy, the reclusive, the scared-of-what-mom-will-say, the utterly boring need not apply. We are looking for people who will write about the parties, the lame housemates, the sunburn, the shady hook-ups and everything else that makes up summer down the Shore. Bonus points go to applicants with digital cameras and an itch to share their pics.

Blogging as cool party (and bikini) archive…hmmm. (Now why does my superintendent have concerns about the potential problems with all of this?) Tacky beach blog aside, the rest are good examples of what plain old ordinary folk can do to contribute to the discussion. Unfortunately, there are no RSS feeds that I could find, and comments are off. Guess the editors at nj.com have some concerns too.
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Lately I’ve been doing some reflecting on my daily routine with all these “cutting edge” information gathering and personal publishing technologies that seem to have taken over much of my life. It’s hard to believe that I’m coming up on three years since I made my first tentative post to Metafilter and started down this most excellent and time consuming blogging ed-venture. It’s also hard to believe how different my process is when it comes to the news and information of the world. Used to be I’d buy the paper version of the New York Times and listen to CNN. Not anymore. I’m feeling the need to document that process a bit because I know three years from now it’s going to be vastly different again. So, for posterity, here’s my daily routine.

Got a nice surprise when I went to save a link in my Bloglines aggregator today. Instead of just dumping it into the long list of saved posts, a little window came up and gave the the ability to file the link into one of the folders I had created. Nice. I do have to admit, however, that the links I save in Bloglines are rarely ones that I revisit. Most of the time I put them there because I want to write about them later but never get back to them. Never enough time.

UPDATE: I just found something else that Bloglines is doing that’s pretty cool. Taking a page from share your OPML that Dave is doing, you can now find out who else with “public” profiles are subscribed to any particular feed, like this. Now I’ve got even more stuff to dig into…
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Syllabus has an article titled “TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places” that’s helped me clarify its value in terms of building community. For the larger Weblog community, the author says:

The initial purpose of the TrackBack protocol was to provide a way of aggregating posts made by various bloggers about a particular topic. It addressed the problem that while a proliferation of blogs gives voice to many, it distributes the conversation such that it becomes next to impossible to follow the idea as expressed across these many blogs.

From a classroom standpoint, I keep trying to think of ways to use it other than as a way of allowing students to keep all their comments about their peers’ work on their own sites. That makes it easier for me to assess their efforts in giving feedback since I don’t have to go searching all around for it and they don’t have to take the extra step of copying it into their own space. Their peers get the benefit of the feedback, just not through the comment box. But inside the classroom, can trackback really help build community?

And to be honest, the following is a concept that really got me thinking:

The approach taken was to suggest that someone might start a dedicated TrackBack blog on a particular topic. This special blog would not be used by the owner of the blog to wax poetic on topics of his or her choice, but become a repository dedicated to a single topic. For example, imagine a site, which collects Weblog posts about the Civil War. Anyone interested in reading about the Civil War could look at this site to keep updated on what other Webloggers were saying about the Civil War, see photographs from that period in magazines, etc. This is accomplished when those who do write on their individual blogs about the civil war initiate a TrackBack ping to the designated collector site.

So that’s what that “URLs to Ping” thing is for. The article also says it’s possible to setup a trackback blog of all the posts you make to other Weblogs… Now I’m wondering how I set up a trackback blog in Manila.

Just one note about the article. Toward the beginning is this:

Since then blogging has become a standard tool for faculty, students, and just about anyone who wishes to publish their thoughts worldwide.

Um…I’m not sure we’re quite there yet.
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I think it’s very cool that the New York Times is starting to embrace the Weblog concept. See ombudsman Daniel Okrent’s space and the pretty tame “On the Trail” political blog they’ve started. To get the thinking behind it, this interview with NYT Web editor Len Apcar is pretty insightful. I sat next to him at BloggerCon at one point, and I asked him when the Times was going to start blogging. He said something along the lines of “I don’t know, but this is all very interesting.” He was obviously surveying the landscape. In that interview, he says:

…to be quite candid about this, I’ve looked at this kind of page as a possible template for other areas of common interest. In other words, you could take this page and build a page for Opera buffs. You could do it for theater. You could do it for any number of special interests. I wanted to learn how to do this first with political reporting. I thought it made a lot of sense. It played to The Times strengths. We have just scores, dozens, of reporters covering the campaigns. I was hoping we’d have a good lively debate, which we’ve got. So I want to learn by doing this first, with politics. And then from there I’ll step back and say, what do we think? what kind of tool is this? How do we learn from this?

Now to me, that’s a pretty provocative statement, and it says that at least he grasps the concept. He’s sticking to basically factual reporting and using the Weblog as a place where reporters can add context to the stories they write, not opinion like most blogging is. But it still takes a small step toward doing what blogs do best, and that’s getting behind a story and, hopefully, engaging readers in the conversation.

Add to that the extremely educational personal travel blog of former president Jimmy Carter who recounts his visit to Africa. Again, I know this isn’t a true “blog” in the strictest sense (more edited journal.) But the personal publishing meme is no doubt expanding.
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I am enjoying following your blog and getting inspiration and great info from it that helps in our exploration of blogs and variations in our school.

We continue to grow our school website with Manila <http://www.emerson.u98.k12.me.us> with many of our teachers beginning to jump on board (classrooms link) and we too are beginning to dabble with student blogs <http://www.emerson.u98.k12.me.us/west/blogs> …. also with sites that invite feedback on student work <http://www.emerson.u98.k12.me.us/hurd> as well as other interesting things like poetry journals and teacher blogs.

I am beginning to keep my own blog to document some of our adventures <http://www.emerson.u98.k12.me.us/ricksblog>. It’s not always easy to find the time to keep this up, but it’s a start.

This is all very exciting …..

Rick
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Ok, I think I asked this before. But now I need to figure out how to make this work. I’ve subcribed to many of the sites I’ve been making using the Manila aggregator. Now, I want to push this aggregated list of stories to another page using the viewRSSBox macro. The idea is that on the homepage of the site we could keep a running list of all the headlines from all the Welogs that are being updated. So, I need to figure out how to get an XML feed for the stuff that’s being aggregated. Is that possible?

Another step on the road…did a presentation to a couple of board members last night on how things are going with the Website. (Found out one of them is the mother of a student in my class. Surprise!) I think it’s safe to say that everyone understands the process, everyone likes the concept and the design, and everyone is worried about how to review what gets posted. It is THE huge discussion I’m having right now, and it is THE last obstacle (I think) to full implementation of the site. (I’ve been struggling with this for about a month now.) I’m meeting with my Redesign Team next week to hopefully roll up our sleeves and talk through it. Since all we’re going to allow at this point is informational posting, 95% of what we’re talking about here is correctness and not appropriateness. So, I think I can make the case that if we define the type of content that we can post, clearly define the standards for that content, and clearly spell out the review process for each site, we should be good to move forward.

I hope.

I have been able to make the separation between Weblogs as Website and Weblogs as instructional tool, and that’s important. That last one is much messier, and I’ll tackle the particulars of that later.

Meanwhile, Pam has been hard at work on her own Weblogs as Website project, and I’m happy to say she’s got it up and running. Looks great, and it’s creating a nice feel for her school district. Quality. I hope when we get ours up and running we can say the same thing.
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So my little experiment with bringing research to my students through RSS is meeting with mixed results. Aside from some technical glitches, the biggest problem is tweaking the search feed to get the desired result, which I guess is pretty standard procedure anyway. Some of my students have had quite a bit of success. Others are struggling with it. I’m wondering how to make it better.

I’m also wondering what it might look like on a larger scale. A couple of people graciously sent me the link to the complete article I referenced yesterday, and I found a some more interesting nuggets:

“Students live on the Web today,” Mr. Trumble says. “They don’t look for a paper. They don’t go looking to find information. They want information brought to them.”

Brian Koranda, a Web designer and producer at Carleton, uses the RSS feed to send out notices to the institution’s alumni magazine and to provide students with a variety of information, including listings of campus events and movies at the local theater.

“It allows you to see a lot of updated information all at one time,” he says. “It’s only going to get bigger in the future.”

Yeah. But see, as I said yesterday, I want this here, and I want it now. I want teachers to be able to check a box and recieve news of the world and school and student assignments and whatever else right to their portals. I want students to be able to check a box and get homework assignments, sports scores, search feeds, movie listings and lunch menus right to their portals. I want parents to be able to get their children’s work, board of education news etc. right to their portals on our server.

Right now, I know how to generate/or find the content in feedable form. What I don’t know is how to make that content show up on an easily created (kind of just sign up, check a box, set it as your homepage,) portal-type page where you can find and check those boxes and have that content appear. Obviously it’s being done. Any and all guidance appreciated…

(via Dan Mitchell) From an article that I can’t get to in the Chronicle of Higher Learning comes this quote:

Jeremy Trumble, Web-services manager at RIT, says that students there are getting the benefits of RSS without even knowing they’re using it. Every student has the opportunity to create a Web portal that presents a personalized version of the university’s Web site, similar to a My Yahoo page. During the customization, students decide which information they would like to have regularly updated. That tells an RSS reader built into the software which feeds to collect. About half the institution’s students have created personalized versions of the Web site through which they get updates on campus news and events.

Ok, now I really want this. Really. This is kind of what I was playing with last year (pardon the formatting problems…) So how do I get it?

Here’s the thing. I’ve been following with interest and as much understanding as I can muster as Tom implements his new student information system for his school, and I’m guessing it’s not a very big leap for him to make something like the above happen at his school. The reason I’m interested is that we’re about to pick a new very closed source SIS that I’m wondering might not have some capability in this area too. It would be great to have the whole ball of wax so to speak. So someone tell me…how do I get it?

So I had them tell me why they wanted to work with a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist this quarter, and while many of them did a good job, this response is why I love the profession.