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March 2004

Monthly Archive

Blogging & General 31 Mar 2004 01:44 pm

“Could it be that students who don’t read, even though they can, are people who, on one important level, don’t and can’t write?
”
–Ken Smith

Tom’s comment on an earlier post that blogging is a reading activity as much if not more than it is a writing activity has spawned a pretty interesting thread that Ken continues on his site. It’s another great post that has a lot of levels to it, the kind you need to read over a few times with focus to get all the nuance to it. (Time to turn off Air America.) The kind you need to respond to after you’ve let it settle for a while. Actually, the kind of blog post that begets the kind of blog posts that make blogging a worthwhile act.

Blogging starts with reading. It’s easy (at least for me) to forget that sometimes. I know that I’ve articulated the blogging process in that way many times before, but it still does seem very writing centered to me. But as Ken accurately points out, “blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others.” And maybe that explains the disconnect I’ve been feeling between the act and the tool of late. The tool requires writing. (There is no blog without writing.) The act requires reading. (There is no blogging without reading.) Without reading, you’re just writing, not blogging, and that’s a pretty heady distinction (at least in this head.) And that really does change the expectations we have of our students, I think. They can use a Weblog to write, but in a different way they can also use it to blog, and in doing so they can develop an important skill that is not as easily taught with pen and paper or even the Internet and a word processor.

Writing stops, blogging continues. Writing is inside, blogging is outside. Writing is monologue, blogging is conversation. Writing is thesis, blogging is synthesis…none of which minimizes the importance of writing. But it’s becoming more clear just what the importance of blogging might be.

Some of the good stuff from Ken’s post:

If you are a reader and if you are reading, you start to be able to find something you want to say beyond shallow commonplaces, and you start to know how to say it, and maybe even who to say it to.

And:

And maybe that means that links are vital for new bloggers for a completely non-constructive reason. Instead of assigning students to go write, we should assign them to go read and then link to what interests them and write about why it does and what it means, not in order to make a connection or build social capital but because it is through quality linking (not the flaccid A-list stuff I spoofed above) that one first comes in contact with the essential acts of blogging: close reading and interpretation. Blogging, at base, is writing down what you think when you read others. If you keep at it, others will eventually write down what they think when they read you, and you’ll enter a new realm of blogging, a new realm of human connection.

Read the whole post…

General & Weblog Best Practices 31 Mar 2004 11:37 am

Blog Projects in Action

A couple of updates on blog projects here. First, the Monkey Bridge Weblog which featured responses to student questions by the author of the book has been pretty successful. I’ve been enouraging the teachers to get their students to talk about some of the information the author related in the answers, like this one:

Monkey Bridge was written when my own mother was sick. I had always wanted to write a book about Vietnam, where I was born, especially when I realized how many books about Vietnam have been written, but none by a Vietnamese American. However, my first version of the book, written in the late 1980s, was not to my liking because I found that it was too much about the politics of the war. It was too eager to make a point (my point) about the war, and not enough about human interactions, the intricacies, nuances, ambiguities that characterize much of human interaction on a daily level. I then set that draft aside and basically let go of it. In 1992, my mother fell ill, making me think a lot about my relationship with her � hence I wrote Monkey Bridge � which is primarily for me about mothers/daughters. This one just happen to be set within the context of an immigrant story and the context of the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. But it is for me a story about a mother�s relationship with her daughter.

That is some good stuff, and I would hope students could explore their own relationships with their mothers in the context of current issues. We’ll see.

And, the Chinese class has been using Weblogs to post advertisements they have made along with voiceovers. Unfortunately, they didn’t think too much about background noise while they were recording, but the process was really easy and the teacher is thrilled. Here are a few of the better ones. Very cool to see these ideas branching out.
—–

General & RSS 30 Mar 2004 03:37 pm

RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators

In my spare time (yuck, yuck) I’ve been trying to compile some of the ideas brought up here into some hopefully usable guide for teachers who might be thinking of diving into this crazy world. I’ve got a couple others in progress, but I thought I’d throw this first one on using RSS in the classroom up there for the taking and for feedback. It’s pretty basic stuff that might be a useful training piece for the uninitiated. But it does go into the whole area of search feeds with some depth. I’m thinking maybe I should wiki it (is that a verb?) so that others can add to it. But for now, it’s just a Word document that anyone can use if he or she feels so inclined. Let me know if you feel it’s useful and if you have any additions or corrections to share. And if anyone has any suggestions for future such “guides,” pass them along.

UPDATE: D’Arcy Norman was kind enough to post this as a .pdf in case anyone is document challenged. Thanks!

General 30 Mar 2004 03:21 pm

RSS

RSS: A Quick
Start Guide for Educators<o:p></o:p>

Will <st1:City><st1:place>Richardson</st1:place></st1:City>, www.weblogg-ed.com<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

What�s Covered:<o:p></o:p>

Setting Up an RSS Feed Reader<o:p></o:p>
Finding and Adding Feeds<o:p></o:p>
Using RSS Feeds in the Classroom<o:p></o:p>

RSS Feeds with Student Weblogs<o:p></o:p>
RSS Feeds without Student Weblogs<o:p></o:p>
RSS Search Feeds <o:p></o:p>

RSS Feeds for News Searches<o:p></o:p>
RSS Feeds for Weblog Searches<o:p></o:p>
RSS Feeds for Website Searches<o:p></o:p>
RSS Feeds for News Group Searches<o:p></o:p>

RSS Feeds for Other News Outlets<o:p></o:p>
RSS Feeds for Bookmarks<o:p></o:p>

RSS Resources<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Introduction*<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

S<o:p></o:p>

o just what is RSS and how can it be
used in education? Depending on who you talk to, RSS stands for Rich Site
Summary or Real Simple Syndication. Either way, RSS is a real important
technology that information specialists and educators would be well advised to
harness sooner rather than later.<o:p></o:p>

In simple
terms, Weblogs (and an ever-growing number of other sites) generate a
behind-the-scenes code in a language similar to HTML called XML. This code,
usually referred to as a "feed" (as in "news feed"), makes
it possible for readers to "subscribe" to the content that is created
on a particular Weblog so they no longer have to visit the blog itself to get
it. As is true with traditional syndication, the content comes to you instead
of you going to get it, hence �Real Simple Syndication.�<o:p></o:p>

For
instance, say you’ve found 20 or 30 (or, like me, 120) Weblog sites on the
Internet that interest you. Finding the time to click through to those sites and
keep abreast of any new information on a regular basis would be nearly
impossible. But what if you only had to go to one place to read all of the new
content on all of those sites? Wouldn’t be so difficult, would it? Well, that’s
exactly what RSS allows you to do by using what’s called an
"aggregator" or news-feed collector. The aggregator checks the sites
you subscribe to, usually every hour, and it collects all the new content into
a folder that is just waiting for you to come and read it. Big deal, you say? Very big, indeed, for a variety of reasons. <o:p></o:p>

Take this
general scenario, for instance: You currently get the headlines from The New
York Times via an e-mail message that arrives each morning. But more and more,
your e-mail box is being clogged up by spammers selling everything from
pornography to mortgages. There are new virus warnings every day. That New York
Times content is getting lost in the morass that e-mail has become. Not so with
RSS. The feed your aggregator checks is virus free,
and you know that everything in your aggregator is something you want to read
because you subscribed to it. No ads, no spam, just
new content from the sources you read. You can scan the headlines, read the
entire post, click through to the actual Web site, and file the information
away for later retrieval.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Setting
Up an RSS Feed Reader<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Ready to start? First, you
need to set up a newsreader (feedreader, aggregator) to collect your RSS feeds.
I would suggest the Web-based service from Bloglines.com. Why? While there are
a number of great downloadable newsreader packages out there that can do wonderful
things, the main advantage to Bloglines is that you can access it from anywhere
you have an Internet connection. In other words, you don�t have to be on your
own computer(s) with special software installed to read your news. (Of course,
if you do only use one machine, there are many aggregators with more features
than Bloglines that you may want to consider.)<o:p></o:p>

�Registering for a
Bloglines account is easy. When you get to the site, click on �Register� in the
upper right hand corner of the homepage and follow the procedures. You�ll get a
confirmation e-mail to which you�ll need to respond, and then you should be
ready to go. <o:p></o:p>

Bloglines has a few ways to subscribe to feeds. First, you can
look at their listing of most popular subscriptions by clicking on the �Top
Blogs� link at the upper right hand side of the Bloglines homepage. It will
take you to a page of the 100 most subscribed to feeds among their users. You
can preview the content, and then you can subscribe to any on that list by just
checking the box and then clicking on the �Subscribe� button at the very bottom
of the page. Then, when you�re logged in to Bloglines and you click on the �My
Blogs� link, you�ll see the feeds you subscribed to with the number of messages
waiting to be read in parenthesis next to the name. Any time you come back, the
feed name will be bold when new messages are waiting.<o:p></o:p>

The other way to subscribe to feeds is to manually add them to
your list by using the �Subscribe by Entering URL� input form the bottom of
your subscription list. To use this, you�ll need to paste in the address of the
feed you want. (More about finding feeds in a second.) Once you paste in a
feed, Bloglines will ask you if you want to make a folder and whether or not
you want other people to see your feed. (You have the option of letting others
view your subscriptions. My public feeds are at <a
href=”http://bloglines.com/public/willrich”>http://bloglines.com/public/wrichard.)
And, when you have some feeds to work with, Bloglines lets you rename them
(among other things) by clicking on the �Manage my Feeds� link just above the
subscription box. It�s pretty intuitive, and if you start getting quite a few
feeds in your list, you might want to take the time to get organized.<o:p></o:p>

Finally, throw a link to Bloglines on your toolbar or in your
Favorites folder. Better yet, add the Bloglines notifier (<a
href=”http://www.bloglines.com/about/notifier”>http://www.bloglines.com/about/notifier)
to the bottom of your screen which will let you know when new content has been
posted to any of the feeds you are subscribed to. Either way, remember to check
back often. Collecting feeds only works if you read the new stuff regularly!
(For even more info, read the Bloglines FAQ at <a
href=”http://www.bloglines.com/help/faq#updates”>http://www.bloglines.com/help/faq#updates
.)<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Finding
and Adding Feeds<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Once you have your aggregator set up, it�s time to find some
relevant feeds to stock it with. Luckily, more and more news outlets and
standard Websites are adding feeds for their content, so there will be more and
more to choose from, but for now let�s just deal with blogs. First, understand
that most Weblogs have a link to their feeds on their homepages. On many, it�s
a text link in one of the side columns that says �<a
href=”http://krause.emich.edu/blog/index.rdf”>Syndicate this site (XML).�
Or it might be a link that says �RSS 1.0 (or 2.0).� But most often, it�s a
pretty orange icon that looks like this: <a
href=”http://www.weblogg-ed.com/xml/rss.xml”
title=”This is a link to this site’s RSS channel: Weblogg-ed News”><!–[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype
id=”_x0000_t75″ coordsize=”21600,21600″ o:spt=”75″ o:preferrelative=”t”
path=”m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe” filled=”f” stroked=”f”>
<v:stroke joinstyle=”miter”/>
<v:formulas>
<v:f eqn=”if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0″/>
<v:f eqn=”sum @0 1 0″/>
<v:f eqn=”sum 0 0 @1″/>
<v:f eqn=”prod @2 1 2″/>
<v:f eqn=”prod @3 21600 pixelWidth”/>
<v:f eqn=”prod @3 21600 pixelHeight”/>
<v:f eqn=”sum @0 0 1″/>
<v:f eqn=”prod @6 1 2″/>
<v:f eqn=”prod @7 21600 pixelWidth”/>
<v:f eqn=”sum @8 21600 0″/>
<v:f eqn=”prod @7 21600 pixelHeight”/>
<v:f eqn=”sum @10 21600 0″/>
</v:formulas>
<v:path o:extrusionok=”f” gradientshapeok=”t” o:connecttype=”rect”/>
<o:lock v:ext=”edit” aspectratio=”t”/>
</v:shapetype><v:shape id=”_x0000_i1025″ type=”#_x0000_t75″ alt=”XML icon”
title=”"This is a link to this site’s RSS channel: Weblogg-ed News"”
style=’width:27pt;height:10.5pt’ o:button=”t”>
<v:imagedata src=”RSS%20FAQ_files/image001.gif” o:href=”http://www.weblogg-ed.com/mainResponderResources/userlandIcons/xml”/>
</v:shape><![endif]–><![if !vml]><![endif]>��No matter which type it is, you�ll need to click on it in order
to get the address of that site�s feed. Don�t worry if the page that comes up
is a scary looking mass of code that you can�t make heads or tails of. All you
really need is the Internet address of that page (the URL.) Just copy the
address, go into Bloglines, paste it into your subscribe line at the bottom of
the left hand window on the �My Blogs� page, and subscribe. Next time you visit
your �My Blogs� page, the feed for that site should show up.<o:p></o:p>

If you�re not sure what Weblogs to subscribe to, you can always
use one of the blog search engines to find sites that might be relevant to your
interests. Some of the better Weblog search sites include Technorati.com,
Feedster.com, and Daypop.com, but there are many more listed at Weblogs
Compendium at this page: http://www.lights.com/weblogs/searching.html.
And once you find a few, Bloglines will also recommend some other feeds that
you might be interested in based on what you�re already reading. (Isn�t that
nice of them?) Just click on �My Recommendations� in the section below where all
of your subscriptions show up in the left hand pane.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Using RSS
Feeds in the Classroom<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

So, you�ve got your favorite Weblog feeds in your aggregator,
and you�re starting to get the hang of this �getting the good stuff when I want
it� concept. How can you start using this in your school and in your classroom?
Well, there are a number of different ways that RSS feeds can add to your
knowledge base, help you communicate, and make your teaching better.<o:p></o:p>

�<o:p></o:p>

<![if !supportLists]>·
<![endif]>RSS Feeds with Student
Weblogs<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

If you already use Weblogs with your students, the uses of RSS
should be pretty apparent. Instead of checking out all 25 (or 30, or more)
student Weblogs every day, you could just collect their work in your aggregator
using their RSS feeds. That way, you can scan through all of the class content
in one place, make sure it�s all appropriate, and click through to a particular
post if you want to comment on it. My use of student feeds in this way has
drastically reduced my reading time and allowed me to make all of my classes
paperless. In addition, you can provide individual student Weblog feeds to
parents or counselors or whoever else might be interested in that student�s
work and be savvy enough to know about RSS. (Don�t worry, pretty soon most
people will know.)<o:p></o:p>

With some Weblog packages, you can even subscribe to feeds that
show new comments on the various sites, or even to just certain topics. In
other words, you can track just about everything going on in your student blogs
using RSS.<o:p></o:p>

In addition, Weblog software like Moveable Type and <st1:City><st1:place>Manila</st1:place></st1:City> allow you to import RSS feeds into pages you create for your
or your students� sites. While it takes a little bit of code to make it work,
the benefits of bringing topic specific feeds right into student (or teacher)
work spaces is something that you might want to explore.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Even if your students don�t have Weblogs, you may want to have them
set up their own Bloglines account. With more and more news sources producing
feeds for aggregation, the breadth of current events and even topic-specific
research that students could collect could go a long way to assisting them with
research or further study. (It�s one reason why I think RSS could be a great
help for the lack of media and information literacy skills students have.) And,
if you use a Weblog, they can include your feed in their aggregator to stay
abreast of what is going on.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

The idea of aggregating research feeds is especially
interesting. Say you have a student that is doing a project or a paper on
global warming. That student could actually create an RSS feed that would bring
any news about global warming to his aggregator as soon as it was published. And
you can create a feed about any topic you want. Here�s how:<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

RSS Feeds for News Searches<o:p></o:p>

If you want to create a feed for what�s in the daily news about
a particular topic, the answer is the Google News RSS/RDF Feed Generator from XMLMania.com.
Here�s the address: http://www.xmlmania.com/development/googlenews/.
When you get there, just type in your search terms, click submit, and wait for
the result. The page that comes up will be that scary looking mass of code that
you can�t make heads or tails of. Copy the URL from that page, paste it into
your Bloglines aggregator, and you�ll start getting any news that�s in the
media about your topic right away. When you start getting results from your
feed, you may want to refine your search until you get a manageable number of
posts. And remember, you can create as many of these feeds as you like.<o:p></o:p>

Another way to get continually updated news about various
topics is to use the feeds provided by Moreover.com. It provides a huge list of
predefined topic searches at <a
href=”http://w.moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html”>http://w.moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html.
You can find even more of these types of Moreover feeds (including ones for
your favorite sports teams, the state you live in, and your favorite presidential
candidate) at this page on the Syndic8.com site: <a
href=”http://www.syndic8.com/feedcat.php?Scheme=Syndic8″>http://www.syndic8.com/feedcat.php?Scheme=Syndic8.
<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

RSS Feeds for Weblog Searches<o:p></o:p>

Searching the blogosphere is just as easy, but you need to
remember that the results aren�t always going to be as, shall we say,
appropriate. Obviously, the vast majority of Weblogs are not edited for content
by someone other than the author, and invariably there will be some questionable
posts that will land in your aggregator. Still, Weblogs offer up some really
great potential research, and you might want to experiment with searching them
on your own before bringing students into the fray. To do so, the easiest way
is to go to Feedster.com, type in your search terms, click �Search�, copy the
URL from the page that comes up with that scary looking mass of code that you
can�t make heads or tails of, paste it into your Bloglines account and start
reading. You can go through the same process at Blogdigger.com, Syndic8.com and
other Weblog search sites.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

RSS Feeds for Website Searches<o:p></o:p>

There�s more. You can even create an RSS feed from a search of
Google sites (not news, sites.) So, if there is new content about global
warming added to a site that�s already on the Internet, or if there is a whole
new site created about the topic, you�ll find out about it in your aggregator.
Here�s how. Go to Googlealerts.com and sign up for an account. It�s free. Once
your registered, you can create up to five searches that can bring back up to
150 results total. Just fill in the form with the search terms you want, click
�Run Searches Automatically,� and click �Update.� Then, click the link in the
left hand column where it says �Feed Settings.� All of your searches will come up,
and you can check the box that says �RSS Feed� next to each one of them, then click �Update� at the bottom. Then, take the feed
address that appears in each box and copy it into your Bloglines account. (No
page that comes up with that scary looking mass of code that you can�t make
heads or tails of this time.)<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

RSS Feeds for News Group Searches<o:p></o:p>

You can also search Internet news groups and get an RSS feed of
the results. (Where does it end?) To do this, go to Pubsub.com. (The specific
address is http://www.pubsub.com/nntp/.)
Put in your search terms, enter your e-mail address, and Pubsub will send you a
confirmation e-mail with a link to your subscription. When you click on the
link, you can either copy the RSS feed address, or you can click the cut little
�Quick Sub� link that will allow you to file it right into Bloglines (provided
you�re already logged into Bloglines, of course.) Pretty
cool. But beware that a search feed of newsgroups can bring back all
sorts of irrelevant content and you may want to spend some time refining your
search to match your interests.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Now as I said, a number of more traditional news outlets are
starting to provide RSS feeds of their content including the New York Times,
Washington Post, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, US World and News
Report, Rolling Stone and many others. Many of these can be found at the
Weblogs Compendium site at this address: <a
href=”http://www.lights.com/weblogs/rssfeeds.html”>http://www.lights.com/weblogs/rssfeeds.html.
If you want to find out if your favorite publication has an RSS feed, do a
Google search with the publication name and �RSS� and see what comes up.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

One of the more recent uses of RSS has been to syndicate the
Internet bookmarks you keep of your travels. You can do this using a site
called Furl.net. With a Furl account (which is free) you can save, annotate,
rate, organize and share the best links that you find on the Internet. And,
even better, you can create RSS feeds for the unique departments that you store
those links in. Let�s use our global warming example. Every time you come to a
site that has information on global warming, you can �Furl it� and save it into
your global warming folder. (Instructions on how to do this are on the Furl
site�it�s easy!) Now, anyone who may be subscribed to the feed that Furl.net
creates for that global warming folder will get automatically updated when you
add a new link to it. Take it one step further. Say you set up a classroom
Furl.net account, and you and all of your students added links to a variety of
topic specific folders as you found them. You could all keep track of those
links by subscribing to the feeds that were most relevant in your Bloglines
account. And Furl offers a whole bunch of other ways to share your bookmarks as
well.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

RSS
Resources<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

There are a slew of great resources for learning about RSS,
some of which are mentioned above. Here are a few others:<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

RSS Resource page from Lockergnome: <a
href=”http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/”>http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

For a great introduction to RSS, try Fagan Finder�s �Explanation
of RSS, How You Can Use it, and Finding RSS Feeds� at <a
href=”http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml”>http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Jenny Levine gave a great presentation at the Computers in
Libraries Conference, and it�s online at <a
href=”http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2004/cil-rss.pdf”>http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2004/cil-rss.pdf
<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

�RSS: The Next Killer App For Education�
by Mary Harrsch (<a
href=”http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=2010″>http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=2010)
is an article that has more scenarios of how RSS might be used by teachers and
students.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

*Portions
of the introduction excerpted from �Blogging and RSS � The
�What’s It?� and �How To� of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators� at <a
href=”http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml”>http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml<o:p></o:p>

—–

General & RSS 30 Mar 2004 04:47 am

Education Headlines via RSS

From the “Toe in the Water” Dept. comes this link to the Wake (NC) County Public Schools System Page that is trying out RSS feeds as a way of providing technology content to its teachers.

This is a beta test of an education news headline aggregator for WCPSS staff, and eventually, perhaps, the public. The idea is to make it easy for people to stay informed on what’s going on in the world of education. Headlines are updated every 6 hours.

There are feeds for ed tech, general news, librarians and miscellaneous. Cool to see some other K-12 districts catching on to this.
—–

General & On My Mind 30 Mar 2004 04:40 am

Stressed out Students

“Since the admissions process has gone totally insane, it’s worth reminding yourself that this is not a particularly important moment in your life.”
–David Brooks

I don’t often share the views of David Brooks, but if you’re a high school teacher, his op-ed piece in the Times today is worth a look. It’s about how truly crazed many students are at this time of year when their college acceptances are hanging in the balance. And, as Brooks points out, this moment in their lives that seems SO huge is really not nearly as important as it feels.

Ironically, I was having just such a conversation with one of my students yesterday who was really upset by the fact that she was wait-listed for a semester at one of her top choices. She wants to be a journalism major, and I suggested that she might use the opportunity to do something interesting for six months, like travel a bit, or join an non-profit organization and do some good, or volunteer for a political campaign or…you get the idea. Not an option, she said. I said well, what about going to a community college for a semester and getting some credits. Nope. It was the $40,000 a year college…that was it. Too bad.

The Brooks essay isn’t kind to public education. He describes students being forced into what he calls a “a prudential attitude toward learning” that sacrifices passion for consistency, and says that what they learn most is how to play the game to get to a first class school. He accuses the system of “trying to whittle you down into a bland, complaisant achievement machine.” In large measure, I think he’s right. Public education in general just seems so locked in to standards that all we seem to be producing are standardly good students. There’s a surprise. So few of my students have passion, originality, or the motivation to figure out what THEY want as opposed to what we expect them to want. I know it took me a while to find my passions as well, but wouldn’t it be great if we could create an environment that nurtured that exploration in kids instead of deadened them with conformity?

General & Weblog Theory 29 Mar 2004 11:32 am

Are Students Really Blogging?

I’m still muddling through this whole “can K-12 students REALLY blog?” question, and Ken Smith at Indiana University has some great posts this week about student blogging that get the crux of many of my issues and difficulties. His reflections on the 4Cs conference are well worth the read, but I want to note one comment that I find particularly relevant to what I’ve been experiencing:

I have a hunch that half the problem with student blogs is a problem with audience, but not the problem mentioned in conference papers. It’s just that there is, for all practical purposes, no audience for a new blog, and only a skilled writer knows how to write with no audience (and even skilled writers are sometimes defeated by that prospect for months or years). If you have no clear project, no clear audience, no clear purpose, what can you write about except how bad the dorm food is?

That audience piece of it is surely one of the biggest benefits of Weblogs, on one hand. But on the other, students don’t (can’t?) experience audience the way that we do when we blog. For them it’s more or less constructed, not earned. And my frustration these days is I don’t see a way to making it more real for them right now. In some part, that’s a problem with the software which won’t allow for public and private posting. Peter Nguyen, in a long comment (also well worth the read) to an earlier post, says:

The social climate that students experience in the real world transitions to the blog world so easily, especially to new bloggers. Getting the students to write, collaborate, and build a sense of community will take time and we must allow them to slowly define and build trust in that community. In doing so, students will eventually start to OWN their blog, have faith in the medium, and build that community and collaboration writers desperately need.

He suggests that choosing what to make public can build that trust more effectively, and I tend to agree. I sincerely hope that Manila 9.0.1 has that capability.

Ken’s post today is even more thought-provoking. He links to a post by Richard Long of 2River that asks a number of fundamental questions:

Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I’m not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They’re using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I’m not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts?

Ken talks about his own struggles, noting that his student sites were “not quite weblogs as you would see them in the wild, and not all the students could see the opportunities the genre offered them. Those that could see it wrote the most blog-like sites.” He has a pretty intriguing observation:

The more you recognize what you see on the web page from some other genre or some other place, the less the thing is a weblog. Or maybe: …the less the thing is taking advantage of being a weblog. And that is all the more true of wikis, I’d say. A next step would be to talk about what we take advantage of when we write blogs or wikis, then. We should be able to name what all the features of a blog or wiki really accomplish, then.

I think that’s where I have to go with this to clarify my own thinking. What exactly can Web logs provide my students, and what can’t they?

Classroom & General 29 Mar 2004 08:07 am

Journalism 2 Stories

My Journalism 2 kids have been working hard all quarter on stories that they are trying to sell to real magazines, and as the quarter is coming to an end this week, I thought I’d post links here and ask for some feedback on their behalf. So, if you have a few moments, and one of the topics below piques your interest, I’m sure they’d appreciate a constructive comment or two via their blogs. When you get there, just scroll down to the bottom of their Weblogs and “Join Now” and then click ‘discuss’ below the post.

Meredith on why teenagers don’t care about the news.

Matt on teenaged video game entrepreneurs.

Devin on the importance (or lack thereof) of the SATs.

Erica on the latest pre-teen fitness craze.

Kristen on cheerleading as a sport.

Claire on the changes that legalized gay marriage may mean to schools.

Jenna on the struggles of mom and pop record stores.

Amelia on selling homemade jewelry.

Dana on teenaged shop-a-holics.

Whitney on spoiled kids.

General & Weblog Tech 29 Mar 2004 06:00 am

How Blogs Work in 7 Easy Pieces

Much linked post by Roland Tanglao on the RSS way vs. the “old” way of reading Weblogs. I love piece #7 which states that “Joe Surfer (who is not related to Joe Blogger) still can access blogs the old fashioned, slow and less efficient way using his web browser and search engines.” Amen to that…
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Classroom & General 28 Mar 2004 01:08 pm

Microsoft’s New Blog Search

From Yahoo News:

MSN Blogbot will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Web logs and index that content based on which Web logs are most popular and credible, Redetzki said. The service should go into beta soon, and Microsoft plans to introduce MSN Blogbot worldwide, she said.

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General & On My Mind 28 Mar 2004 01:02 pm

The Blooming of Blogs

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Weblogs and RSS were definitely the hot topics at the Computers in Libraries Conference, and now it seems blogs were again happenin at the 4Cs conference just conculded in San Antonio. Dennis Jerz posts about a series of papers that were delivered at the conference:

Sarah Jane Sloane, “Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom.”

Cynthia Cox, “Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom”

Bonne Smith, “All Along the Blogwatch Tower”

Lisa Langstraat, respondent: “In Blog We Trust”

His description of the audience reaction is pretty interesting:

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up — instructors who don’t actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don’t make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are “really” bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

There is a ton to write about that little snippet as I think it captures the main issues that most of us struggle with. How do we transfer the excitement we feel for this to our students and teachers?

Some other 4C links to “Whose Voices Get Heard? Gender Politics in the Blogosphere,” an interesting piece of research about blogs from Clancy Ratliff, and Joe Moxley who says:

Interesting to see how popular blogs were this year at College Composition and Communication Presentation. Wikis are next. I mean, come back in 3 years. Still, we gotta SharePoint next.

SharePoint? Ugh.
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General & Weblog Tech 27 Mar 2004 04:30 am

Feed Problems

Well, I figured it wasn’t going to be as easy as it seemed to be to switch things over here. It seems my feeds are buggy, and they don’t seem to be updating on Bloglines as well as not validating due to various punctuation issues. This happened once before with a Manila theme, but I seemed to get it straightened out. But that was a long time ago. Now, once again, I have to make sure that every post uses just text characters for apostrophes and quotation marks and stuff otherwise it breaks. Can anyone give me some ideas as to why changing the Manila theme would do this?

I hate this stuff. Nothing was broken before and now with a new theme, it gets all screwed up. If you’re getting this in your aggregator, could you just leave a post on my site that it’s working? Thanks.

General & On My Mind 27 Mar 2004 04:09 am

Still Finding Our Way

“There aren’t any teachers until there are learners, and there aren’t any learners until something is disturbed in the student’s world.”
–Jay Rosen

Another thing I love about Weblogs and RSS and Bloglines and Furl and Wikis and so forth is that most of it is not even into the toddler stage of development yet, and that although there are more and more people starting to use these technologies, we’re still all of us more or less flailing away at what it all means. And that’s especially true in education. There are a lot of us that think we have some vision of what the future holds, and that think we’re moving toward something pretty interesting. But there’s a lot of healthy pushing aginst those ideas as well, and that means a lot of learning happening.

Jay Rosen, in a memorial speech he gave recently for Neil Postman, said that “There aren’t any teachers until there are learners, and there aren’t any learners until something is disturbed in the student’s world.” (BTW, I can’t wait to sit in on Jay’s session at BloggerCon.) I think that has a lot of relevance to this whole discussion about “disruptive technologies” and how they are forcing us to look differently at our pedagogy. My world has certainly been disturbed in a good way by all of this, and as I read other edbloggers who are experiencing the same type of disruption, I learn even more. It’s one of the coolest parts about this that people are willing to put those struggles on line for others to share.

Which is why I’m especially happy that Seb has cranked up his blogging again. He’s been one of my teachers about “personal webpublishing” as he likes to call it since early on, and his posts always seem to push my thinking. This one is no exception:

“…I find it really interesting how differently people construe personal Webpublishing. Some strive for visitors, others for readers, some want to broadcast, other hope for being cited, some like to distribute their comments all over the Web, other bring everything home to their own place. All this fosters my opinion that we are far too much focused on the surface similarities and that we need to engage into more ethnographic and interpretive research on personal Webpublishing and how it is construed.”

That’s what disruption does, it sends people into all different directions depending on their needs and wants. And that in itself leads to all sorts of interesting applications, kind of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks stuff. It’s pretty messy, and there is a lot of civil disagreement on what the purposes and potentials are since the big questions have no clear answers. But you don’t have to look too far to see that there is a lot of learning in that mess. And how much more fun is that than having all the answers waiting in a manual? That is what keeps this interesting to me, that feeling of being constantly discomforted by the fact that I really have no idea what I’m doing, and that despite that fact, someone I don’t know may still be willing to read about it.

General & On My Mind 26 Mar 2004 11:21 am

New Look

I’ve been toying with a redesign for quite some time and I finally carved out a couple of hours to get it going today. If you’re reading this in your aggregator, you won’t see it, obviously. But if you’re here, I mean really here, and you feel like giving me some feedback, please do.

The major change, obviously, is that I moved the blogrolls inside. For some reason I was just getting tired of all the stuff that was on the page. I really just wanted to simplify without losing too much in terms of navigation and such. It feels a lot lighter to me, less overwhelming. But if the links get lost in the shuffle, I may have to rethink things. At any rate, welcome to new design #3 (for those of you who are really here, of course.)

General 26 Mar 2004 10:52 am

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