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My Weblogs
Weblog Resources
RSS Resources
Journalism and Weblogs
Manila Related
Assignments with Weblogs
Weblog Research
Wikis

Ok, so today I had one of those breakthrough moments (or at the very least a nice feel good moment) when one of my librarians stopped me as I was coming into the media center and said “I just want you to know, I love Weblogs!” Hallelujah. Seems she had gotten a late request for some help with a Social Studies unit that one of our teachers was running, and she was thrilled at the fact that despite having only about 20 minutes, she was able to get something useful online for the class to use. “I really get it now,” she said.

Yep…that’s it. Easy publishing. Easy linking. Archived. Accessible. It’s really nice to watch this little cadre of bloggers growing…
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(via Seb) No real details on the specifics of this new release, but just the fact that there is one coming is really, really good news. Userland’s CEO Scott Young says:

Yes, we are getting ready for our first release in a while. Look for the beta to be available early next week. Its Manila 9.0.1 and its easier to install, quicker to set-up, and prettier to look at then ever before. We’ve fixed bugs, improved the user interface, and added some features that make community hosting easier and more flexible. We have also updated the theme set, included more documentation, and made installation much easier.

We still have RSS, Edit This Page, and powerful browser-based website configuration. Manila 9.0.1 also includes new website hosting options that can be configured on a per-site basis. Very Cool.

I REALLY hope that they have added some public/private posting options…really.

I got an e-mail from a teacher yesterday asking for some tips on where to find appropriate RSS feeds for K-12 teachers to use in their classes, and he said he’d had little luck finding a site that collated them all together. I hadn’t really poked around very much on this, but I think between the feeds from Moreover, (which actually has a feed on “firearms industry news“), coupled with the even more refined Moreover feeds you can find at Syndic8, and those listed at Weblogs compendium, there’s certainly enough to get started. But even in these three there are a lot of newspaper feeds that aren’t listed. My big question is whether or not there’s an “Ultimate Feed List” that’s collecting all of these into one place…

Just a bit of an update on the Website project. It’s still a slow go, and I’ve pretty much taken over responsibility for the content that is posted until we get a better handle on the type of work flow we’re talking about. Right now, with about a dozen sites up for business, the flow is pretty light, maybe a post a day (not including the daily announcement type stuff.) And to be honest, I have a feeling in the end when we get all 50-60 sites up, it probably won’t be any more than five or six a day. I’d love it to be more, (so I can crank up the RSS end of things,) but as I said, it’s taking a while for people to get used to it. On a positive note, I have had more and more people nibbling. And I think inevitably we’ll get a pretty good participation rate. But in reality, these baby steps are letting me work all of the kinks out and get everything clear in terms of templates, access, etc. I’m still loving the design, as are most others, and I’ve created the Communications Dept. site as a model for other department supervisors to look at. That’s the next big task, the creation and conversion of all of the academic content. We’ll see what happens after that.
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Alan writes about a “breakthrough” at his community college consortium that combines e-portfolios and RSS feeds. As Alan says:

This is just out of the chute, and there are some more features coming iin the next few weeks. But consider what a tool RSS can provide to teachers, advisors, etc to be able to use a RSS reader to check on the status of a group of students’ portfolios.

Now I’ve been thinking for a long time about using Weblogs as e-portfolios, and I know that Manila can spit out an RSS feed for news items when they are posted, but this seems like another step toward what Tom’s been referring to as a “Webloggy Website for Schools.” As this article out of Berkeley articulates, the potentials for e-ports on student learning are pretty extensive:

The ePortfolio has, in turn, come to be seen as a major tool in the pedagogy of student-centered learning and student-directed development; and, as a way for students to piece the fragmented nature of their varied activities and courses into a trajectory of their educational and professional development.

The RSS feed is a key, though, because this new type of e-portfolio would be able to seamlessly update any number of people when new artifacts have been posted, and in doing so could facilitate feedback and participation from a variety of mentors or guides. Makes me want once again to offer up a program by which students can gain credit by maintaining a reflective Weblog that archives artifacts from across the curriculum and asks them to select a number of them at the end of the year and do some real metacognitive posting about their learning as a whole, all along interacting with key responders that would help guide the student to that more global (as opposed to fragmented) understanding. That would just be too cool.

UPDATE: A related link for future thinking.

A couple of pretty interesting reads on just why it is people do this stuff. The first, titled “‘I’m Blogging This’ A Closer Look at Why People Blog” (via Lilia) is a comprehensive look at what blogs are, who uses them and, of course, why. Much of it resonates, and much of it has implications for Weblog use in the classroom. For instance:

For bloggers who think by writing, blogging provides two vital advantages: an audience to help shape the writing and an archive of posts, some of which may be valuable in the future. Personal webpages often perform in a similar way, but the audience is far less defined. In our study, bloggers had “regulars” who they knew were reading their posts. The writing could be directed at them, solving one of the key problems of any writing, i.e., knowing who to write for. The fact of having an audience would keep the writing moving along, as the author knew that people were anticipating new posts.

And,

Most bloggers are acutely aware of audience, even in flagrantly confessional blogs, calibrating what they will and will not reveal. Many bloggers explained that they have a kind of personal code of ethics that dictates what goes into their blogs, such as never criticizing friends or expressing political opinions that are openly inflammatory. Not that bloggers eschew controversy-quite the opposite-but they typically express themselves in light of their audience.

In one example, an instructor was able to create a community of learners:

Rob required students to conduct field studies on topics related to the use of computer-mediated communication within communities and to write weekly blog postings on assigned topics, as well as to read and comment on other students’ blogs. He hoped these assignments would “facilitate the building of the learning community by getting [students] in conversation with each other electronically.” And that is what happened. The students found that maintaining blogs and reading their classmates’ blogs created a sense of community that would have not been generated within a conventional classroom setting.

But another instructor was not:

Although the blog had many visitors, even some from the local press who wrote a story about the site, few commented on the posts. The blog functioned primarily as a website. Colleen noted that students did not feel moved, on their own, to comment, and without a course requirement calling for them to do so, they chose not to. As with other electronic media, blogs in themselves are not sufficient to build community.

And something to show my creative writing teachers:

The most authentic, grass-roots blogging community we studied was that of the poetry bloggers.

The second read is at Crooked Timber and it’s a collection of responses to the following questions:

If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven’t done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?

Some really interesting responses, and quite a few references to the issues of privacy and anonymity. I found this one to be especially relevant, but there are many others:

The newest twist for me is that I’ve begun to incorporate blogging into my pedagogy, and have students keeping weblogs. In discussions with students about why so many (at least on our campus) are so uncomfortable with blogging and resistant, we had some provocative conversations about accountability – not everyone wants their words published online where anyone can see and you are held accountable for what you say. After that, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and allowed the interactive editor at our local newspaper to link my blog, with my real name, on his page of “local bloggers.”

“I appear to be writing an RSS reader.”
–Tom Hoffman

Tom‘s decided to jump into the RSS aggregator movement by trying to create something that will almost mimic Bloglines but within the blog. How cool would that be? While Tom likes the chronological postings of the Manila aggregator, I’ve just always liked grouping posts by author rather than time, so he’s doing me a real favor by attempting this. (But I forgot to ask if it will work IN Manila…) This would be a great asset to students or teachers with sites on our server.

The greedy person that I am, I still want to see a day where parents or community members can come to the school Website and somehow subscribe to and read school feeds all in one fell swoop. I’m not sure if Tom’s thinking along those lines, and maybe that’s stretching things a bit. But it would be cool if at some point down the road we could create a password protected page for parents on our server that would collect school news, student work, intra school communications, all that stuff in one place. Now that would be a disruptive technology.

Pull quote looks great! As I said, I’m not even doing these things — but I will.

Great presenation Will.
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“Turn to Press for the official record, Blog for social context and Wiki for the public record.”

Every now and then I still get blown away by how people are using these technologies, and this is one of those times. Ross Mayfield posts about the difference between the media, blogs and wikis when it comes to covering world events, and he uses the recent Spain bombings as an example. Certainly, there were hundreds if not thousands of media reports on the bombings, and no doubt Weblogs had their share of coverage and insights. But when I took a look at the Wikipedia page that had been created for the event…well…see for yourself.

I’ve always had difficulty in understanding the usefulness of wikis, but I think I’m starting to get it. Funny thing is, I’ve always thought that it was too easy for people to just come in and muck things up. (My wife asked the same question when I showed her the Wikipedia post.) And sure enough, when I accessed the list of updates, someone had done just that, blown up the whole post. But about four minutes later, someone came in and restored it. Pretty cool.

Hard to imagine that you could get a more balanced view of what is happening when you have dozens if not hundreds of people editing and updating and fact checking along the way. There’s much more to think about here, obviously, but this is a great example of the power of collaborative media.
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Kaye offers up some tips on making the most of blog posts:

Use a pull quote

Adam Polselli’s unique blockquote style for showing code labels it as such (scroll down to see)

Adrian Holovaty’s blockquote style for showing code highlights it & changes the font

Put quote marks around your blockquote content

Use a different font in your blockquote

Jay McCarthy puts a dotted line around his blockquotes

According to these suggestions, I’m doing a fairly good job. But the pull quote thing is very cool, something I’m going to have to experiment with.

UPDATE: Well, that was pretty easy…
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A couple of other links to composition related blogging that add to the Weblogs for composition discussion. First, Charlie Lowe at Kairosnews has put up a presentation he’s doing at 4Cs next week titled “Weblogs as a Personal Knowledge Publishing Tool for Scholars and Practitioners.” Under the writing part, he lists:

Easy self-publishing tool available to anyone with Internet access.

Enables publishing of snippets, less developed ideas, or drafts of works
in progress.

A narrative of the development of a writer’s ideas and memes which can make the invention process more visible.

Informal writing. Can be playful or conversational in tone.

Foregrounds the intertextuality of writing.

Invites/encourages peer response through comment postings on site and the posts of others on their weblogs.

Favors a collaborative, social constructionist epistemology in which writing is less of a solitary act.

As a journal which can receive feedback and response, can make keeping a
journal more engaging and encourages daily writing.

Does not have to be conceived of as additional work. Invites the writer to share texts that they are or should be writing already.

Allows expression of the personal alongside academic interests.

Can be used to provide an example of the teacher-as-writer to students.

The last is something that I think is extremely important but also one that I’ve struggled to have happen with teachers who implement Weblogs. And, it makes me wonder if I should have pointed my students to my own writing here (or elsewhere) a bit more. All in all, the presentation is a great resource and is among the best I’ve seen in terms of articulating the benefits of blogging.

The second comes via Peter Ford who is participating in a research project called Web Journals in Language Education which looks to be a two and a half year study into the effects of Weblogs in the classroom. Very cool. The expected outcomes:

To popularise web logs as a medium for collaborative language writing.

To produce a publication discussing the theoretical rationale of the project, its realisation and outcomes, and cite examples of good collaborative writing practice.

To publish an open-source language-independent content-management platform which is reusable and easily installed and configured even by someone with minimal technical expertise.

To publish a corpus of writings created by students during the course of the project using the collaborative publishing platform.

The whole project looks really interesting and well put together. I just don’t know if I can wait until 2007 for the results!

Got a chance to give two one-hour presentations about Weblogs at the New Jersey Writing Alliance Conference which, unfortunately, was lightly attended due to the freak snowstorm we had. It was the first

“Blogging allows students to write about real topics that they have a real interest in.
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time that I had talked about the idea of blogging as genre, and I think for the most part those in attendance understood the potential and were interested in using Weblogs themselves. The highlights: