(via edblog) Now you can export your Furled sites by department in MLA or APA format, among others.

The export page just got updated to include two new features. First, you can now export items from a specific topic (in any of the available formats). And second, you can now export items in various bibliographic citation formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE). The citations only contain the data that we collect (i.e. title, view date, URL), but we will increase the amount of meta-data (i.e. author, publication, etc.) in the near future.

I love this. I have just got to grab someone by the lapels, drag them into my office, show them how to Furl, and make them promise to start using it with their students. Better yet…we need a Furl Club!

I’ve got three weeks to finish the foundation and put the finishing touches on our new Manila Website and I think I’ve actually got my brain wrapped around how this is going to work. Thank goodness. Not that I haven’t had the big picture all along, but it’s only when you start getting into the details that the complete puzzle starts falling into place. Even though there’s a lot to do, I’m very psyched about the unveiling on September 8. (No Labor Day weekend for me, however.) Today we worked out the departmental “template” which will (hopefully) satisfy the need for consistency and yet give the departments some flexibility in what they post. We decided to push pictures heavily (despite all the consent hoops that go along with that) and to set up a second Weblog for each department to use as a news site. Lots of work up front, but if it works it should be very cool. I keep thinking about collecting all of those RSS feeds from all over the place and pushing them out all over the place. Scary thing is I really think I could do this full time…really. It’s way too much fun.

So anyway, feedback or ideas are always welcomed.
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Seems the blogs as writing tools thread is spreading. Charlie Lowe offers up this perspective on what happens when students use Weblogs to publish:

I was in a workshop today at Purdue where we talked briefly about the idea of students writing publicly in blogs. One of the concerns expressed was that students could be at risk by writing on the web. However, the first goal of public writing is to put the writing at risk, not the writer. Students can post under pseudonyms or anonymously while the writing remains vulnerable to public readers, to criticism on the web. Or maybe a better way to put this is at that the writer is still at risk, as the one who has done the writing, but the person behind the writing can still achieve the degree of safety that we might want to give our students, the room for them to make mistakes, rather than having those mistakes show up in a search engine query of their names.

I love that “putting the writing at risk” part, because that’s what we need to do with our student work. We need to make it risky, within reason, especially on the K-12 level. But at the same time, we need to make it safe. That’s the fine line that we’re trying to walk down here, and while I’m not sure using a pseudonyms the best answer, it’s one way to get kids published to a wider audience.

Ken has a great idea, with an especially loud “Amen!” to the last line:

I’m thinking of asking students to contribute an article to Wikipedia this semester — has anyone tried this with a class? We’d want to study the site and describe the traits of an excellent piece there, then work through some drafts. All in keeping with my new goal of making something of use to others in every class. Stop assigning things meant to be thrown away at the end of the semester, I tell myself, or at least cut back on that practice.

Barbara has another great post today exploring the dynamics of audience and blogging and how they work in the classroom. I think the reason much of what she says resonates so much with me is my 20-odd years teaching writing in various guises. I think we both (as well as other writing teachers) feel on some deeper level the potential that blogging can have on students, simply because blogging is an answer to a question that has long plagued us, or me at least: how do I find real audiences for my students’ writing? And having been fortunate to have found a real audience for my own writing has made me even more interested in how Weblogs can serve the kids we teach.

I know that I have said this before, but one of the most important concepts in teaching writing that I tried to stress with my students came from Donald Murray who framed writing as a coversation with a reader. Writers anticipate reader reactions and questions. Good writers put themselves in the readers’ shoes and get inside their brains, even though they’re not in the room. They read themselves as their audience would. It’s a crucial skill. And it’s also incredibly difficult to teach when the teacher and a few pressed-into-service classmates are the audience for a students’ work.

Now of course, just creating a Weblog for student work does not guarantee a wider, more interested audience. But it does guarantee the potential of one. And when you get a teacher who puts some time into finding and bringing people into the conversation (like Barbara,) then all of a sudden audience becomes a much different beast. With students who have very rarely if ever had readers outside of their classrooms, even one or two sets of new eyes can make a big difference.

My disconnect these days comes when I forget that despite how powerful the pull of an audience can be, most of the teachers at my school have never experienced it. I wonder how many of our English teachers have been published to audiences outside the school? Very, very few. But if they did write (blog) for an audience on a regular basis, wouldn’t they feel the potential as well?

As Barbara says:

And if I write for a sometimes phantom audience outside myself, well, the potential of having a readership beyond myself forces me to write to my best, to commit to what it is I’m putting down here, even in this informal, draft-like meditation. Above all, for me, it all comes back to my teaching–it’s about modeling and experimenting and experiencing–if I ask my students to blog and moblog and voblog and mess around big time with media, then, well I had better be doing it myself to feel the fulll effects of what I’m asking of them.

I really think that writing instruction in general would be measurably improved if we gave writing teachers the time and support to write for an audience. Give them a blog block a couple of times a week. Give them time to collaborate with other teachers and classes and reflect on their experiences.

I know, I know…wake up.

Here’s another great excerpt:

…I am, after all, trying to teach my students to see writing as a process, and as an act of communication, a kind of call-and-response with what we read and hear and know. Within our class community, the foundations of which are laid from the first time we meet on the blog and in the classroom, we see the value of blogging as connective tissue, as a way to create Lévy’s knowledge space, his sense of collective intelligence–collaborative blogging does that beautifully.

There’s a lot of learning going on at Barbara’s and the growing number of ed blogs out there. And it’s fun to find more and more teachers taking advantage of it. We just need to keep blogvangelizing…
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(via Jerz’s Literacy Blog) This is a pretty interesting post explaining the way that one college professor used and plans to use blogs with his students.

My goal last year (or really in late 2002, when we did the technical work) was to create an approach to blog courseware that assumed students were full members of blogging communities. Here’s a breakdown of the approach.

I swear, every time I read something like this I get wistful at the freedom post high school types have to experiment and play with these technologies. Not to say that K-12 teachers can’t find really useful ways to employ blogs, but it just seems like there’s so much more to think about on this level…

(via Stephen) A pretty good breakdown of Weblog software use and some good links at the end to various other Weblog related services. I’m surprised by the ranking of Word Press and Expression Engine, neither of which I’ve seen around all that much. Interesting wrap up to the post:

As more businesses find valuable uses for weblog technology, there will be increasing demand for professionally-oriented tools, hosted services, and professional support services. Six Apart and pMachine serve this market now with their Movable Type and Expression Engine applications, but they have barely made a dent given what the opportunity is. Expect a whole new wave of products, services, and companies to be created over the next 12 to 18 months to cater specifically to the business market.

Ok…can’t resist…what about “As more schools find valuable uses for weblog technology…?”

I can’t believe Barbara Ganley only has 8 subscribers on Bloglines. She’s a constant source of good thinking about education in general and in specific the use of these technologies with kids:

It’s what we’re talking about with blogs in the classroom–how their very mutability and the fact that they are socially based allow them to adapt to whatever learning situation we are in–bending to personalities, tasks, disciplines and goals–and move students to think in terms of community instead of in terms of self. The blog is a catalyst for emergent behavior in the classroom, and even though we rarely arrive at where we thought we were going, isn’t that the point when communities convene to discuss the pressures of development, say, or students explore contemporary Irish literature, or fifth graders engage with a local issue?

Today’s theme is obviously “local.” (Check out this “Hyperlocal Citizen’s Media” study from Northwestern as well.) It’s another part of the direction this all takes…more local…more collaborative…more participatory.
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I’m looking for a tool to measure the technology skills of our teachers and students, one that would cover basic hardware operation stuff as well as ability to manage files, do basic functions in Office type software, and use the Internet. Preferably it would be something we could offer online.

Anyone using or know of a tool like this that they would recommend?

Kevin Jarrett has converted his site to Blog CMS and he says it has some edu-features (new word!) worth checking out. The big news is that you can approve comments before they are posted. It runs on PostNuke and requires PHP and mySQL. Anyone else out there using this as a school solution???

They may not look that excited, and there were more than are seen here, but I think the group that came to our first “Boro Bloggers Meet-up” last night left with their brains buzzing and some real energy for our project. Shoot, just the fact that we got 25 interested people to show up was enough for me, but the questions they asked and the comments they made were more than enough proof that they were thinking hard about the potentials here.

Jeff’s natural enthusiasm didn’t hurt, of course.

There were three community bloggers in the room, and all but one or two of the rest said they at least understood the concept of blogs. There were questions about promoting businesses, about libel, about access…it was all good stuff that really showed their interest. We had representatives from Kiwanis, the Women’s Club, the Computer Club, and assorted other groups. Really a nice mix.

But I also realized, once again, that there is a long road to hoe for people just coming to this technology. I want Flemington to turn in to blogwikirssfurlville and be the most information literate, Internet savvy community in the country that becomes proof positive to the potential of these technologies. But, as in my previous post, that’s going to take a while.

Still, there’s a neat feel to community blogvangelism. September 15 is our next Meet-up, and we’re hoping to have some bloggers up and running at nj.com by then. Stay tuned…

(More pics here, here and here.)

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