Paperbark looks to be a new Weblog about how blogs are being used in the classroom. Some pretty interesting initial links and posts from some West Australian educators. And check out Mrs. Dudiak’s blog where her kids went comment crazy. Interesting to see how many of the comments were really questions intended to get the students to focus on detail and specificity in their writing. Great example of classroom Weblogging.
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…my daughter Tess. She’s six, and she’s typing with a broken right arm. (Cast comes off tomorrow.) Give her a spelling break. (Her English teacher dad needs to chill out.)

I’m so proud…

My wife’s already telling her to get off the computer.

So it appears that Apple has once again taken the lead, this time in integrating both blogs and RSS into their products. Tom has a great post about the blog piece and the implications.

I guess my point here is that Apple seems to be doing just about the simplest thing that could possibly work, and I’m impressed by their judgment. And Blojsom jumps way up the list of weblogging apps to keep an eye on.

And Dan Gillmor gets to the RSS part and more:

Jobs spent a fair amount of time talking about the native inclusion of RSS into an upcoming version of the Safari browsers, and a “personal clipping” service. There’s a special search function just for RSS; I’m not clear on whether it’s searching via one of the main RSS search engines, whether Apple will write its own or whether it’s only searching your designated feeds. More on that later.

It’s great stuff…as someone posted, we are getting close to critical mass. Even more reason to keep focused on the pedagogy of blogging…
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(via Lilia) Mark Bernstein warns against the dangers of comments as evidenced in the most recent flame war involving Dave Winer:

Weblog comments incite duels. Duels are bad for society. We should all forego comments and return to carefully blogging responses — including responses we disagree with, but excluding responses we cannot tolerate.

Interestingly, the comments on Lilia’s post make for some good thinking, which is what my thinking on this is. I can’t imagine this site without comments, or not being able to comment on other’s sites. (There are a few people in this community who don’t allow comments and I find that frustrating at times.) I’ve only had one bad experience with comments in the past three years and that was from some very sensitive MAC user who took me to task for a pretty innocuous error. I got over it.

I think the value of comments far outweigh the potential for abuse. Now in a classroom setting, there obviously needs to be a watchful eye. But I love having other people’s opinions (when they feel like sharing them) right there with the original post.

While Trackback is nice, I haven’t found it to be especially accurate. But I have been thinking how good it would be for students to keep all of their own comments in their own spaces and then be notified of other’s feedback using Trackback. At least then all of their work, including their feedback to others, is in one space. I have found keeping track of that stuff to be pretty difficult.

But bottom line, to me, comments are what help make blogs such interesting tools to use in the classroom.
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From the Shameless Self Promotion Dept., Paul Chenoweth at Belmont University in Nashville was kind enough to take the Intel video and recreate it into a number of different formats: Flash 6, Windows Media, and a smaller version of Quick Time. He’s obviously a video wiz, and he’s got a nice Weblog as well.

Thanks to Paul and to everyone else who has commented on the video and the presentation last week. And I promise this will be the last time I link to it!

You know, used to buy the Times every day. Then I used to go to the Website every day. Now, I just click through the stories at Bloglines. There is a post here somewhere about my changed news consumption habits, and believe me, they have changed dramatically due to RSS and Bloglines. Not sure whether it’s a good change or not…

Anyway, the Times has new feeds (Yay!) but it’s lost some old feeds, particularly the education feed (Boo!) Add “Most E-mailed,” “Times on the Trail” and “Circuits” to my account…

One of the things I just didn’t get a chance to write about was Anne’s presentation at NECC which was well attended and well worth it despite some technical difficulties. She is our best cheerleader for blogs in the classroom, no doubt. Whenever she speaks about her experiences, her passion just floods through, and you can’t help but be inspired. And her blogging from NECC offered up some great links to her own resources, and those of some digital portfolios a la Weblogs by Julie Lindsay of the International School Dhaka, Bangladesh.

I’ve been Furling like crazy this week it seems. I almost can’t wait to get back home to get some semblance of routine again so I can keep track of all of this more effectively. I’ve had to punt on a lot of my Bloglines stuff just because I know I’ll never get to it. I hate that vague feeling that something really quality is slipping through…the curse of aggregation…
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A number of people have asked if the video that was shown at the Intel keynote is available online, so here are some links: Flash 6, Windows Media, and a smaller version of Quick Time.

Here’s the link to the original .mov file in case those others get taken down. Be advised it’s a .mov file that requires the latest version of QuickTime (free) and is a whopping 27 meg (though in these days of fast connections that may not be as whopping…) To me at least, it’s an amazing couple of minutes, and I really can’t articulate how lucky I feel to have been the subject of all of this. But it gives an absolutely great overview of what Weblogs have meant at our school. If you take the time, please let me know what you think.

(via Alec Couros) Amy Gahran goes as far into Furling as I’ve seen anyone yet and comes up with a great primer for the uninitiated. She also creates a new job title:

Discussion group support: Some online dicussions mention a lot of links – articles to check out, recommended sites or services, etc. Hunting through archives of postings can be exceptionally tedious, and often fruitless. If you designate a “furler” for your discussion group (someone who creates a Furl item for every link referenced in the discussion), finding those valuable nuggets can be much easier later on.

On first blush, one addition I would make to her list is to use Furl to push content to various pages similar to what I did with the “What’s Mr. R. Reading?” section of my journalism portal. But this is a great list of creative ways to use the tool, one definitely worth Furling.

Tom posts some interesting thoughts on some of the things we need to think about as implementation of Weblogs and wikis and such continue to evolve.

And the classroom is a demanding environment for wiki software, too. Most wikis are only edited by a couple people, at a fairly slow pace, so the fact that two people can’t edit the same page at the same time is generally not a problem. Wikis can’t handle having twenty five students trying to edit the same pages concurrently, or 90 kids all trying to add links to the homework page at 9:30 pm. Which is not to say that wikis won’t work, but the teacher will have to make sure they don’t end up with too many students trying to edit the same page at the same time.

While I was in Bernie Dodge’s great workshop about wikis and Weblogs as WebQuests I was thinking a lot about our idea to create a media literacy wiki for students to create the text. I really want to pursue the idea, but I also need to do lots more preparatory thinking on how to make it work.
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I’m in Atlanta for a few days before heading back home on Monday night to get back to my routine. I’ve got over 300 posts accumulating in my Bloglines account under the edblogger section, and more and more of it seems to be worthy of thinking and saving and writing about. It’s no doubt going to get harder and harder to stay abreast of all of it.

And I mean what does it say when Bloglines makes Time’s 50 Coolest Websites list? Cool indeed. Now we need them to recognize Furl, which, by the way, Greg Ritter has done a great overview of:

But now I’m hooked on Furl, a free service. You stick a “Furl It!” bookmark in your browser toolbar, and click that when you want to archive a page. It pops up a window that lets you add the link, an excerpt you’ve highlighted, comments, and keywords to your Furl account. Links can be categorized (in multiple categories). Plus, Furl caches a copy of the page and indexes it, so the page and metadata are searchable. You can import/export your links in various browser bookmark formats or raw XML.

If that’s not enough, you can rate the pages you save & they’ve just built in a recommendation engine to suggest new pages, based on your ratings — found a gazillion neat pages and tools through that today. Also, Furl links are share-able. See mine. And you can subscribe via RSS to someone’s public Furl bookmarks.

All these great tools in our arsenal to play with and learn from, getting more and more recognition. It’s part of what made NECC so heady and motivating. People are starting to get it. They’re starting to see what we’ve been seeing for a couple of years now, and that no doubt means that all of these technologies are going to be pushed even more by teachers and students which in turn means a lot more great ideas and discoveries and tools ahead. I still find it amazing that I have just as much enthusiasm today (if not more) as I did when I first started playing over three years ago. What a very fun ride…
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A number of people have asked if the video that was shown at the Intel keynote on Tuesday is available online, so I just wanted to throw the link up here for anyone interested. Be advised it’s a .mov file that requires the latest version of QuickTime (free) and is a whopping 27 meg (though in these days of fast connections that may not be as whopping…) To me at least, it’s an amazing couple of minutes, and I really can’t articulate how really lucky I feel to have been the subject of all of this. But it gives an absolutely great overview of what Weblogs have meant at our school. If you take the time, please let me know what you think.

(via Stephen Krause)

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.

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Charlie Lowe has been working hard to create a Weblog set up for writing classes using Drupal.

Drupal, at its base installation, is a blank slate, a content management system that can be used to create a large variety of different websites. Thus, DrupalEd is preconfigured for creating a community site suitable for the online writing classroom, a highly configurable platform that better facilitates community interaction and collaboration than is possible with proprietary course management systems. Educators will find that this distribution, once installed, eliminates 95% of the work involved in setting up a Drupal site for a writing class, as well as containing some documentation materials which will reduce the learning curve for site administration.

Here at NECC, there has been lots of talk about the “best” tool for classroom Weblog application, and frankly, there haven’t been a lot of good answers. One of the ironies is that as I walked around the exhibit hall yesterday, I must have seen over a dozen booths that were pitching various products that blogs can already do for a fraction of the cost (i.e online portfolio, course management software.) And then there were those few things that I found myself wishing were included in the current choices (i.e. calendaring.)

The killer app for edublogging isn’t anywhere out there right now, and the general consensus among those of us who actually spend time thinking about these things is that the tools are changing so fast anyway that in a couple of years whatever works now will probably be obsolete. That being said, we need to put together a comparison of current software from an educator’s perspective, i.e. how much, how hosted, security, preview posting, ease of setup, etc. I think Anne may have started on this, but is there any reason why we the community shouldn’t start wiki-ing this stuff into an edublogpedia?

At NECC, Presenters from Innovative Video in Education (IVIE) are showing some great examples of student produced videos that speak to a “millenium student’s” need to use various forms of multimedia to facilitate learning.

They describe students as digital natives vs. digital immigrants. Adults are DSL –digital as a second language. Students want to learn with technlogy, with one anohter, online, in their time, in their place, doing things that matter. And the process of video supports that: brainstorm, story board, write/revise script, tape, edit final draft, publish. Video involves every aspect of a student’s creativity.

We can use video to reach some of the standards that we couldn’t otherwise achieve. And video production is supported by a wide variety of learning theory including constructivist, multiple intelligences, transfer and more. It’s active learning that sticks, that makes connections in the brain. In many ways that I’ll try to get into later, it parallels to what we can do with Weblogs, especially in the area of constructivist thought.

Some really amazing examples of ways to use video to facilitate learning. The website has most of videos for viewing.

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