I wish I could have kept track how many times I said the words “collaborate,” “construct” and “content” during my stay in Boston this week. It must have run into the hundreds without question. And there seemed to be a palpable excitement about blogging. It was pretty cool.

So today I read that Anne is collaborating to construct content. Go figure.

Now I’m thinking I can just set this up in weblogs. There will still be one student, one business partner but this gives a better way to open up the communication to the rest of the class, parents, and others. I pitched the idea to the principal. She liked it. Next up is to meet with the General Mills CEO.

I’m thinking that I could have two authors to a weblog to begin with with possibility of adding more. They could post pack and forth and students and educators could comment. I’m liking this more and more.

I thought one of the most interesting statements coming out of the conference was from a participant who wrote the following in the conference blog:

My first thought following the opening words of our keynote speaker was, “My God, classroom walls have become a hazard!” In the past, walls helped create an environment that promoted learning; now, walls are just one item in a long list of factors that inhibit learning. Walls in our classrooms, walls in our thinking.

It’s all about getting outside those walls. Everyone I talked to about blogs was thinking that way, talking about really “building communities” that extend far outside their own schools. I wish we could have had just one big brainstorming session at the end to really push each other’s thinking on it.

Despite some technical glitches, I think my presentation on Weblogs in Education here yesterday went pretty well. I really, really like blogvangelizing with a group of motivated and interested education types who are willing to overlook some computer issues and keep the conversation flowing. (Thanks especially to Kathy Schrock for talking us through my reboot.)

I’ve given this talk about a dozen or so times now, and it changes every time. More great examples. More interesting choices for blogware. A growing level of sophistication of the participants. There’s no doubt that the concept continues to grow.

What I’ve found especially interesting is how my own thinking about Weblogs keeps evolving. I still find it to be such an interesting tool, and when used well, there’s no doubt it can have a positive effect on what happens in the classroom. But I’ve been seeing blogs more and more as just a part of a pretty complex set of tools that are evoloving out of the read/write Web relationship. And it’s a set that probably won’t be around in its current form for very long. I know that Tom and others have written about how they think much of this will be integrated into something much more inter-connected. And that will turn even more readers into writers. So the challenge is to stay ahead of it and see the uses more than the tools themselves. That’s pretty motivating to me…

Steve is showing off wikis at the Building Learning Communities conference and he created one for us to play with (or vandalize.) It’s interesting to hear the reactions of teachers, and it’s generating some good thinking. Alan is talking about how this would be a great administrative tool for people to hash out problems and discussions before meetings. Some fear about what kids might do, but also some good ideas about how they might be used in the classroom. And now we’re looking at Wikipedia.

At dinner last night we were talking more about wikis and their potential. I know there has been some back and forth here as to the potential implementation and scale in a K-12 setting, but you can’t deny that there are some huge possibilities for implementation that are very, very cool. It’s constructivist to the core, and it’s collaborative in ways that most teachers haven’t even considered yet.

We’re blogging at the Building Learning Communities conference up in Boston. The big news is that any of the participants who want one will be able to setup a blog and keep it for a year. So, maybe we’ll have 200 or so more ed bloggers by the end of the week???

From the “Blogging for Life” Department: Kidzlog is a weblog software created just for younger kids, and now that I think about it, I’m surprised I haven’t seen something like this before. Might be something that I have to show Tess (who, sad to say, has been blogging pretty sporadically lately…) You need your own server and it has a nice little draw package that lets kids add artwork and pictures pretty easily.

KidzLog is an easy-to-use weblog publishing system for kids (and anybody else, for that matter). With KidzLog you can publish weblogs that contain both text and pictures. KidzLog weblogs are full-featured, with CSS controlling the look of the pages and RSS handling syndication (if you don’t know what the means, don’t worry, you don’t have to).

Thanks to Craig Nansen for the link.
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I’m heading to Boston this afternoon for the Building Learning Communities conference put on by Alan November. I’ll be presenting two workshops, one a intro to ed blogging type and the other about new Internet literacies (which I’ve been using discussions here of late to frame.) I’m going to be interested to see how the second one comes out as it’s kind of new territory. (Always fun to push the envelope a bit.)

I’m really looking forward to meeting some of the people who have influenced my own teaching, like Kathy Schrock, and it will be good to see Steve Burt of Clarity Innovations (who is also presenting on blogging) and Amy Pearl, formerly of Intel who I met at the NECC conference in Seattle last year. That’s always one of the best parts of going to these…meeting other bloggers and educators who are willing to talk about their ideas and visions.

I think Clarity is planning on blogging the conference in some way, and I’ll hopefully be posting some observations here as well. Looks like a great lineup of workshops to choose from.

(via a whole bunch of sources)

I would agree with most of those, but I would also add something along the lines of “Easy to collect info from a variety of sources.” (Not great, I know, but it’s early…) There’s no doubt that RSS has changed the way I consume information…I’m sure I’d be more inclined to just go to the usual sources without it.
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I’ve been doing a little more experimentation with bringing search feeds into my Bloglines account, and frankly I’m getting a bit frustrated. I have Feedster feeds for the following: “classroom weblogs,” “education weblogs,” “journalism weblogs” and “internet literacy.” Lately, these feeds have been returning tons of hits…problem is, most of them are repeated over and over, and, worse, they keep showing up day after day. I’ll get 30-40 links a day in each one of them, but maybe only one or two will be new. I finally just started looking at the date (duh) rather than scroll each one. And only a handful are really relevant to what I’m looking for (witness the very few that I clip to my Bloglines blog, which, by the way, has become my topics queue.)

Frankly, Google Alerts feeds don’t work a whole heck of a lot better it seems. In fact I haven’t had a hit for “teacher Weblogs” in a couple of weeks (and event then it was one I already knew about.)

And PubSub has been pretty much a bust though they seem to have changed their feed setup somewhat and I might have to tweak what I’ve been asking them for.

Right now, Blogdigger wins the award for most relevant stuff, and it seems to take out all the repeated entries. I’m going to expand my searches with it and see what happens.

Anyone else out there playing around with these and have any thoughts or results to share?

(via Jeremy) Is there anyone NOT talking about collaboration these days? This essay about Weblogs as e-portfolios reiterates a lot of the collaborative potential of Weblogs in schools.

Weblogs are a great reflective tool. A student can write something about their course,
perhaps categorise it in terms of subject or the piece of work concerned, and that
reflection can be accessed and searched by both date and context.

However, weblog functionality comes into its own when mixed with social networking,
as with LiveJournal: the student can then mark certain reflections as being for public
consumption, or viewable by certain groups of other users. They can then make
comments and perhaps add their thoughts in their own journals, with a link between the
two established via a trackback. Students then have use of not just their own reflections,
but those of their peers, and potentially teaching staff too: a much wider realm of thought,
which might produce conclusions a student may not have arrived at on their own.

A student could then, within a weblog post or portfolio page, provide a link to any object
in their digital repository. Perhaps a trackback link could be made from that object to all
the posts and pages mentioning it. This would allow a student or tutor to instantly see,
when looking at a piece of work, the personal reflections and inter-student discussions
relating to it.

Furthermore, it can also affect learning in the “real world”; through a social networking
enabled system, a student could find and communicate with a number of like-minded
individuals, who might then organise study or social groups. If an establishment’s
system was linked to other systems in other parts of the country (or the world), groups of
students doing similar courses could all compare notes and learn from each other.

Maybe it’s just that my radar is tuning into it more these days, but the idea of collaborative learning through Weblogs and social networking software seems to be just exploding. And when you really take a little time to think about the possibilities…
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Not directly Weblog related, but personal publishing related nonetheless:

The Bakersfield Californian has embarked on one of the most ambitious participatory journalism efforts to date in the United States, launching a community newspaper and Web site in which nearly all the articles and pictures are contributed for free by people in the community.

Since the first print edition of The Northwest Voice was launched May 13, more than 200 individuals have contributed articles, pictures and events, and revenue has grown 33 percent. In all, about 90 percent of the content on the Web site and in the newspaper is contributed by the community.

I just think this is very cool, and it’s hopefully what will happen here once we get our project set up.

And I love this quote as it relates to education as well…

“In a world in which a growing number of readers are becoming publishers, we ignore this trend at our own peril…”

If we don’t start tapping into the potential of the read/write Web for our students, I think we do them a great disservice. A lot of us have been writing about the literacy requirements of a Web infused culture that is changing at a very fast pace. How long will it be before students expect to be contributors of information and not just consumers of it? How long will it be before producing products for the teacher just won’t be enough? How long will it take before competitive jobs require an ability not only to read and write but to edit unedited texts, to collaborate with others to create content, to publish that content in ways that are accessible, and to manage all of the information out there in an efficient, organized, sensible way?

(via Peter Ford) An article in Teachers Magazine (UK) highlights the use of Weblogs with younger students in England.

The project has generated a lot of pride. “We’re the first junior school to do it,” I’m told by Stephen, aged 10, who is writing about wrestling. Stephen chose wrestling as his subject matter because he “knows loads about it”. His motivation for creating his weblog is the same as that of all the other pupils: he wants lots of people to read what he has written.

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H. L. Mencken is said to have guffawed and slapped his thigh in delight at times as he would write about a typical day at a presidential nominating convention. Those long-ago times are enviable for their unpredictability — eons removed from the scripted conventions that will soon be offered to the nation once more as lean cuisine for thought. All the more reason to hope, then, that this year’s one potentially risky innovation — accepting dozens of free-form online bloggers as accredited convention journalists — may lace the proceedings with fresh insight and even some Menckenian impertinence.

We can only hope…
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I’m going to miss teaching journalism this year, I know it. Especially considering the burgeoning list of reporters who are blogging. It’s too much fun to watch how blogs are changing things in the journalism world.
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Greg Ritter has an interesting post on the value of Furl and its function in the creation of what he calls a “Personal Web.”

However, the most important thing Furl does is allow you to carve out a sub-section of the web that you’re interested in and deal with that sub-section in a Google-like manner, meaning being able to search the full text of the web pages. John Battelle hit the line drive on this back in April, calling it the Personal Web. Bookmarks are a list of page titles. A Personal Web — like a Furl collection — is a repository of content. It’s the difference between being the card catalog and being the library.

It’s worth clicking the link inside that quote to get an even more interesting perspective on the significance of Furl.

But wait…there’s more. You can share your PersonalWeb with others. And Mike just added a recommendation engine, so you can see links the service thinks will be interesting to you, based on what you’ve already Furl’d. Now, let’s play this out. Imagine Furl on, oh, Yahoo, for example. Or Google. You now have a massively scaled application where millions of people are creating their own personal versions of the web, and then sharing them with each other, driving massively statistically significant recommendations, and…some pretty damn useful metadata that can be fed into search engine algorithms, resulting in…yup, far better search (and…far better SFO (Search Find Obtain) opportunities).

Now from a student research standpoint, Furl is a no-brainer. The ability to capture full text and search it with all of your other saved pages truly does create a first step toward a personal piece of the Web. To be honest, Greg opened my eyes a bit when he talks about the power of that search function.

Furl is more valuable than other bookmark managers, because it indexes the full text of every page I “furl.” Not just the page title, not just the metadata I add, but the full text of the page. I quickly did away with categorizing “furled” pages once I realized I can use Furl’s fairly decent, Google-like query syntax. That’s great because hierarchies are bitch to maintain and keep relevant (just ask Yahoo). Furl is like Lookout for bookmarks. Or, more to the point, it’s like Google for bookmarks.

I’ve got a slew of categories that are becoming a bit unwieldy. I use them primarily because I think I’m going to want to push that category’s links with the XML feed to various pages on my site. (Still working on that.) I’m going to need to get into the habit of furching more often…
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Two summers ago I kind of invited myself up to Middlebury College to talk to some of the really early thinkers in edublogging like Sarah Lohnes, Hector Vila and Barbara Ganley. I remember feeling really inspired by the way they talked about their use of Weblogs and their willingness to share their visions and ideas. It was a great few hours for me and really my first face to face connection with this community.

I didn’t realize until earlier today that Barbara had participated in the recent BlogTalk in Vienna and had done a presentation on her exploits using blogs in her writing classroom titled “Blogging as a dynamic, transformative medium in the writing classroom of an American Liberals Arts College”. Her post and pre-conference notes provide a wealth of insight into her use of blogs and her thinking behind it. It’s definitely worth the read, and I just want to excerpt a couple of passages that I find particularly noteworthy.

… blogging does make a difference, a significant difference in the quality of my students’ experience in the classroom and the measurable outcomes of that engagement. Blogging–more than anything else I’ve tried–facilitates connections in my classroom, connections that ultimately allow us to move far beyond mere classroom walls in our embrace of the learning experience. My students really think that anything they set their minds to is possible–they can have serious discussions with experts in the field; they can consult in slo-mo asynchronous exchanges with classmates about the perplexing questions confronting them; they can read one another’s work and learn from it as they remake it in their own responses through their own projects and papers. The writing grows–the thinking deepens, Hector, rather than becoming secondary to the delivery, to the surface flash of the visuals. My students demand more of themselves than ever before–they want to do it all. And they want to do it at a very high level of accomplishment indeed.

It goes without saying that Barbara puts a huge amount of time into planning and studying these interactions, but she has created, I think, an interesting model for the writing classroom, at least, that in some ways can transfer down to the K-12 level. This gets a bit theoretical, but the idea is important:

Students in a group-blogging course epitomize the writings of Lévy and Johnson through the formation of a strong, resilient learning collaborative in which multi-media work naturally blends into research, personal reflection deepens scholarly insights, and the students see themselves as crucial participants in their education. We will demonstrate how students became the course, using the interface as a way to “take over,” becoming their own teachers in a unique synthesis of online and f2f work; they narrated a different course than expected and, if as Roland Barthes notes that “narrative is a hierarchy of instances,” the students’ narratives in this course suggest that they are indeed evacuating—challenging—even these post-modern categories. Student bloggers, in this course, demonstrated how they created an “Other” of the teacher. Finally, we will examine the ramifications of this work for us as teachers—our use of class and planning time, our relationships to our students and colleagues, and our relationship to our pedagogical goals–and new directions this work will take us in the future.

I think the real genius of Barbara’s approach is the way she presents that technology to her students and then gets out of their way in slow, measured steps until it becomes their space, or as she calls it, the “Motherblog.” The Zen-like “become the course” which only a truly supportive, collaborative environment can facilitate. Throughout the post there are a number of linked examples that illustrate her thoughts. The result?

Through the Motherblog, the individual student is no longer privileged, nor is the primary classroom transaction flowing from teacher to group, and then student to teacher. Groups of individuals become committed communities of learners, education becomes group experiment, and the classroom becomes a wildly productive place student-centered, project-based inquiry. It is an exciting, unnerving place, indeed, promoting often astonishing outcomes for our students and fearless faculty.

Obviously, Barbara’s teaching has been greatly affected by her use of Weblogs. And it’s great that we can investigate these ideas ourselves through her publishing them in her own space. There is a lot to think about here, and it’s good, inspiring stuff.