Liz Lawley thinks the new version of Moveable Type will be a lot more teacher friendly.

The announcement about new features in the upcoming MT3.1 release has gotten me excited about revising my courseware for this fall. In particular, the multi-blog option (“A plugin which allows you to include template content from one weblog in any other weblog in your Movable Type install”), the post scheduling, and the improved php/dynamic capability will all make it much easier to create a more robust courseware implementation that doesn’t require nearly so much by-hand duplication of content when creating multiple sections of a course, or new course instances from one quarter/semester to another.

Sounds somewhat like the modules that Bryan Bell has created for Manila in terms of including universal content across a lot of blogs. (Actually, I just had a bit of a lightbulb go off…I can use modules to push information to any sites that have them included in the template. Universal updates…cool! Now why didn’t I think of that before?)

Anyway, any movement toward making blogware easier for teachers is a good thing, and Liz is probably ahead of the pack in terms of her use of MT.
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Barbara points to this collaborative Weblog at ArtsJournal:

CRITICAL CONVERSATION: From July 28-August 7, ArtsJournal is hosting a special topic blog called Critical Conversation and featuring some of America’s best classical music critics. Our bloggers include: Alex Ross (The New Yorker), Kyle Gann (Village Voice), Justin Davidson (Newsday), Anne Midgette (The New York Times), Scott Cantrell (Dallas Morning News), Charles Ward (Houston Chronicle), Wynne Delacoma (Chicago Sun-Times), Andrew Druckenbrod (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Kyle MacMillan (Denver Post), John Rockwell (NYT), and John von Rhein (Chicago Tribune). Our topic: whether or not it is still possible for a Big Idea to animate classical music. We invite you to join in. The conversation will inform an August 7-8 Critical Conversations symposium at the Aspen Music Festival and School.

What a cool idea, getting together a group of experts for a short period to discuss a specific topic with reader interaction. That’s a model that could be pretty easily replicated in the K-12 classroom I think. What about a group of astronomers to discuss the stars with students? Or local businessmen to write about community development? Or authors, or musicians, or parents even. Kind of what we did with the online book club. Or…
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Here are some snippets from a widely linked interview on Slashdot with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Good stuff:

But the things our community is producing are different. There’s no cost to switching from an outdated old encyclopedia to Wikipedia — just click and learn, and there you go. You can switch before your friends switch, but the knowledge you learn will be perfectly compatible.

And the key word there is outdated. I’ve been consistently amazed at how quickly the community contributes entries on newsworthy events or people etc.

I think you’d be pretty hard pressed anymore to find topics that are in Britannica that we don’t cover at all. It’s still not that hard, if you look around a bit, to find rare articles in Britannica that are better than our article on the same topic. But it’s getting harder all the time.

And

It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.

This is still such a cool idea to me. I mean think about a time when a classroom of students comes to some new understanding or truth about a particular topic and can contribute that to a collective text of truths. It IS revolutionary.

Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they’re going to break. Because that is what works

Oy. This is a high school…

And by the way, you can download the whole 633MB Wikipedia database here. Just in case you need it offline…
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One appeal of blogging that rarely gets mentioned is the free psychoanalysis that comes along with being part of an online coterie, and lucky for me, Tom has offered up his breakdown of my “blogancholia.” (Oy.) He keeps picking at me (in his “loving way”) about my view that these are new literacies that we’re eventually going to have to teach in the classroom, and he says that my frustrations stem from the slow acceptance of what I see as this “revolution.”

Ok. I feel better.

Look, I know the ‘new’ Internet is still the ‘old’ Internet. But new or old, the ability to create content in this way fundamentally changes our relationship with the Web. It changes it from consume to construct. One way to two way. And that changes how we teach with the Web, or at least I think it should. Because it also changes the way we learn with the Web. And that’s the key. Tom sees Weblogs as a “repair in the collaborative fabric of the web.” But I see Weblogs and wikis and all these other tools not as a fix but as a transformation, primarily because of the richer, deeper more interactive learning that I have experienced over the last three years. Yeah, I know, I know. I’m probably an outlier in that regard. But I guess what keeps me blogvangelizing is that I really want teachers and students to be able to take this new Web and use it to transform their own learning. And to do that, there are some new fluencies and literacies that they need to know. How do you manage all of this content? How do you really collaborate in ways the extend beyond the classroom? How do you edit what you read, not just what you write? How do you publish effectively?

Having said that, I hope Tom continues to relentlessly needle me about all of this stuff. It’s part of what makes this process so valuable, and his normally wise observations push my own thinking on a regular basis.
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Elizabeth Fullerton is a pretty avid high school English teacher/blogger who has been using Weblogs in her classroom to teach British Lit and other subjects. But this fall, she may be bounced by the fact that the filter her school uses sees Typepad sites as “indecent.” Bizarre.

I had planned this year to have my students be guest bloggers on our class blog. That’s fine for the kids that internet access at home. But for the kids that don’t have it, well I guess they are just out of luck. I suppose I will have to try to go through the chain of command to get this problem fixed. I know how difficult it was just to get my classes into blogging. I’m very frustrated right now.

I can imagine. But yet, I’m not surprised. Most people still don’t know what to make of all this. I did the intro to our Weblogs in the classroom workshop this morning for about 15 of our teachers and, as always, there were quite a few that hadn’t seen a Weblog much less used one. And we blog it up pretty heavily here. But while doing the classroom portal thing seemed pretty palatable to all, I’d venture to guess that none of them will actually start blogging themselves like Elizabeth and Rebekah (who has been through a little skirmish herself.) And it’s too bad, for all of the reasons discussed here before. While I think Weblogs have been a positive influence on my students learning, I know blogging has been a postitive influence on my teaching and thinking. I wish other teachers here would embrace it too.

On a side note, one of the teachers shook her head when I told her that I read all of my students’ work online in their Weblogs. She said she just couldn’t do that, and I totally understand. But what I also understand is that our kids are going to be doing more and more of their reading and writing and responding online, no matter what we want. They are doing it right now in fact. I keep thinking about that principal a few months ago who talked about “preparing kids for their futures, not our past.” So true. And so difficult when we seem so unenthusiastic about doing what we need to keep up with the technology. Teachers, especially, need to be lifelong learners and be willing to adapt to changes that can make teaching better, no matter how uncomfortable they are. Otherwise we do a disservice to our kids.

I don’t want this to sound like a rant against teachers. It’s not. By and large, the people I work with are conscientious, creative, compassionate teachers who do well by their students. And the deck is stacked against them in many, many ways as we all know, even at my school which would be paradise for most. But maybe Alan hit a nerve the other day when he started me thinking about this stuff. I guess I’m pretty frustrated right now, too…

Is it me or is the ‘new’ Technorati worse than the old one? Look, I really like being able to see who is linking to this site and finding new voices and authors. But Technorati has been getting buggier and buggier over the last few months. And now with the new site, I can’t do much of anything. It will let me login, but when I click something else, it just kicks me out again. Login, kick out. Login, kick out. What fun. The concept is great, but sheesh, Technorati doesn’t seem to me to be a service ready to get out of beta.

Alan notes that Feedster is going to start a similar service soon, and I claimed my blog in anticipation. But with the good news about tracking and linking stats comes this troubling development:

“Ad Revenue Sharing - If you publish your feed using Feedster, we will offer an opt-in mechanism by which we insert ads in your feed and share the revenue with you.”

Ok, who am I, with my toe in the advertising water, to complain about another potential revenue stream for bloggers. But ads on Weblogs are one thing. Since I rarely actually visit any of the sites on my blogroll these days, I have no problem. But not the feeds. Puhleese…not the feeds!

Ok, so I’ve got a wiki space to play with. Yay! But I have no clue on how to edit the template. Boo! (Somehow “Wrichard, the free encyclopedia!” isn’t really cutting it.) So, if anyone knows how to get under the hood and start playing with the code, could they puhleeese point me in the right direction???

I’ve been contacted of late by a few teachers trying to work through the security and privacy issues that go along with the use of Weblogs in the classroom, so I thought I’d take a little time to go over how we handle it and to pose some of the other questions that we still struggle with.

First, let me say that these issues are ones that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing and debating. The last thing that we want, obviously, is to put our students at risk as they work more transparently and publish to a wider audience. Even though (knock wood) we’ve not had one problem in the hundreds of student Weblogs that we have created here, parents are legitimately concerned about the potential abuses.

So, we do a few things up front. Our Acceptable Use Policy asks parents to approve the publication of student work to the Internet. If for some reason that approval is missing, teachers send home another form, and to date we’ve not had any students who didn’t eventually get permission. We also encourage our teachers to communicate with parents about what Weblogs are and how and why they are using them. Usually when teachers tell parents that the Weblog can be used to keep them more in touch with what their children are doing and what’s happening in class, they like the idea.

When students use their Weblogs, we limit identification to first name only. Even though we need an e-mail address to set up the account, we either use bogus e-mails or rely on a feature in Manila (the software we use) to hide the address when it is legitimate. We talk to kids about what to do if they are contacted by “strangers,” that they should never give out personal information or start on line conversations with those not vetted by the teacher. In addition, teachers are asked to subscribe to the feeds of their student Weblogs which include any comments that might be left. While some are more vigilant than others, I do think most teachers are able to monitor activity on the sites to a satisfactory degree. Finally, both the teacher and I are “managing editors” of the student sites, so if things break or if there is abuse, we can deal with it in short order.

For some classes like Creative Writing, where students are writing about more personal issues, we close the entire site to the public. Manila has an “Editor’s Only” function that permits use of the site only by those students that the teacher allows. Or in other cases, where we want the content to be seen but the interactivity to be limited, we will have students become members of each other’s sites thus allowing them the ability to comment before closing the site to outside membership. (In one configuration of Manila, membership is a requirement for posting feedback.)

Still, it would be nice if we were able to “approve” comments before they were posted. (That would make me sleep much better at night, believe me.) And I would love it if Manila gave the option of having some posts only viewable by members of the site while having others that anyone can see. It would make the drafting process more effective, I think.

Bottom line is that there is a fair amount of setup and a lot of vigilance that has to go into this process. But once it’s set up, and once everyone understands the whys and hows, I think we do a pretty good job of finding a balance between transparency and privacy.

Now, having said that, I’m not as well versed on the capabilities of the other blogging packages out there. If you use Blogger or MT or something else and would be willing to post about your privacy process, I’m sure it would add much to this discussion.

(via Seb) Userland has started offering a hosting package for Manila. Not sure exactly how many Weblogs you can run, but for $499 a year, they seem to be offering a solution for schools. Interesting…
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Alan has been wondering if Weblogs “will fly with the speed and grace of a lead balloon.” Seems the adoption rate of Weblogs by teachers in his network of schools is slow, to be kind, and it’s got him a wonderin’.

“It just takes time or a miracle or some combination for things to take off. And in my position, where I am deeply immersed in this stuff almost 24-7, it is easy to forget that others are just peering over the precipice of new technology, and holding on to the safety rail of powerpoint, WebCT/Blackboard, etc.”

Alan thinks that those of us who can keep up the blogging pace have obsessive compulsive issues, and he might be right. Certainly there are other things in my life (my house and yard, for instance) that could use a bit of my attention. I’ve said before that my least favorite question goes something like “Golly, how much time do you spend on this stuff?” I seldom answer…truthfully, at least. And like Alan, there are plenty of times when I just can’t understand why other people don’t embrace these tools (toys) as fervently (manically) as I have. I mean, what’s not to like?

But even those that were among the trailblazers like Joe and Pam and Pat have either fallen silent or taken different directions in their writing. Why? Why? They may still be using Weblogs in their schools, but their voices are pretty much silent. It’s too bad, because I learned much from them.

I dunno. Those who get subjected to my blogvangelizing seem to be interested and willing and enthusiastic even. But it seems a very few actually take the plunge and start to play. Not even blog, per se, but use the tools. And like Alan, I too “fervently believe in the power of potential of weblogs, for students, teachers, and people in general, as a powerful, expressive platform.” But most people don’t…they haven’t drunk from the blog Kool Aid. And they’re settled in their practice, and they just don’t have a lot of time that they are willing to commit. And that right there probably is the biggest thing. For whatever reason, and there are many, I choose to make time for this. I find it challenging and fun and fresh and, hopefully, important.

So, I just keep throwing up examples, pick my spots, try not to be too obnoxious, and keep hoping that someday, maybe, more will see what I see.

If not, I hope the meds work…

MSNBC just launched “HardBlogging” which is a companion site to Chris Matthews “Hardball” show. Frankly, it’s a pretty weak attempt at catching the meme. I agree with Tom that just throwing up a blog and starting to collect all sorts of posts really isn’t what it’s about. Ron Reagan and Dee Dee Myers et. al. may have some interesting insights, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re still representing the corporate bosses. The best part about Winer and Marshall and Kos are that a) I’ve read them for a long time and I have this kind of weird relationship of trust built up with them, and b) as far as I can tell, they’re owned by their readers. Now, are they reporters? Nah. They’re columnists, and I’m sure their bias will come through. What I’m hoping from those three is that they wade through the party pablum and tell me what’s really going on on the convention floor. Are people REALLY jazzed about Kerry-Edwards? Are the delegates REALLY united behind the party platform? Everyone keeps saying that they’re just going to spin things for the left, but I have a pretty good feeling that these guys aren’t going to spew out press releases. And that’s what makes this so freakin’ interesting to me. It’s the first time there have been potentially independent voices with reach at a convention.
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The companion blog to Dan Gilmor’s most excellent We the Media book is up and running. When you think about it, it’s a very cool way of keeping the content current and interesting. Maybe we should make this required reading for our community bloggers…
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Ok, so I’m on a bit of a CCC (collaborative content creation) bender in my brain lately, and Tom links to a pretty interesting article that talks about reputation systems and their growing importance in understanding information literacy.

The process of filtering information to distill a smaller yet more refined set of usable, verified, trustworthy judgments is not easy. But it is doable. And it is both more feasible and more necessary now than ever before, due to information proliferation, technological advances, and pressing socio–economic problems.

It’s not something that I’ve written a lot about, but it’s amazing to me how much I have come to rely on these types of tools to frame my thinking about people, products and places that I read about on the Web.

A quick for instance: we’re quickly putting together a camping trip up to Acadia National Forest in Maine and, since we’re so late in planning, all the park campsites are reserved. So, I’m trying to find a public campground that’s woodsy enough for our tastes, and the first thing I want is an e-pinions for family campgrounds near Bar Harbor. I don’t want to have to go down the list of 30 or so, I just want previous campers to collectively tell me where I should try first, second, etc. I can’t tell you how often I go to epinions or read reader reviews at Amazon before making a purchase. And most often, I’ve been very happy.

In these cases, I don’t really care who the opinion makers are. It’s the collective response that I want. I figure truth about a product eventually rises from the biased opinions of many. And this is a similar description that I used time and again when talking about Wikipedia. Accuracy and truth float from the contributions and edits of many.

I like this description of the conversations that blogs create:

Just as with the time–honored traditions of books and academic articles which form a constructive discourse spanning generations, readers of a Web page or blog can easily feel in direct contact with other minds, and reshape their ideas into new messages which in turn affect others — even continents or centuries away.

I’m wondering where this all fits in our curriculum when it comes to teaching kids how to effectively use and participate in what is not doubt an important collaborative piece of the Internet. They already use reputation in many ways, music especially. It goes back a bit to the idea that teachers need to be able to model effective use of the collaborative and management sides of the Web, and right now I don’t think there are too many effective models out there. But I guess the bigger question is which of these tools are really important to model…
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Cool…my Flickr account seems to be working! This is a picture from the Spirit of Boston cruise that we took. See Seb’s post on the wonders of Internet communication when you need to make something work!

(via Jim Flowers) Microsoft has created an RSS feed for topics of interest to educators. Fifteen subscribers already at Bloglines…
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