So it’s taken me until now to really start digging into Manila 9.5. I’m starting to set up sites for teachers and students for the news school year, and I’m just realizing how much more Manila can do in terms of determining who sees what and how. It’s going to take some time to play, and I’m already trying to enlist some teacher volunteers to push the envelope a bit for me here, but here are some pretty cool aspects right out of the box:

Tim has a post about the goodness of the “Long Tail,” but as I read it I was thinking about how it highlights the issues from yesterday’s post. He says:

So let’s bring this back to the world of educational technology. The most obvious point is that there are a lot of great thinkers out there blogging and working in the long tail. If you restrict your students to using a traditional textbook they will never find the gems out there in the tail where so many fresh perspectives and new ideas can be found. We don’t need to wait for information to show up in dead tree form anymore.

True, but it’s more complicated than that. Here’s the problem. If we are going to help teachers see blogs as “research safe,” we’re going to have to give them some tools by which to assess those blogs. Right now, I would teach teachers and students that they should

I think and write so much about the creation and contribution of content using blogs and wikis and the like that sometimes I think I neglect the other half of the equation, the consumption of blog and wiki and podcast content by students and teachers. And it’s becoming obvious that it’s a much needed and important dialogue that I have to start with teachers here, especially those in the English and Social Studies departments where the research loads are heaviest.

I was reminded of this by a conversation I had this morning with our school librarian who had seen a mention of Wikipedia on a technology in-service agenda we’ve been planning for next month. She wanted to know how we were going to position Wikipedia as a tool for research, and I said that although I felt it was probably as good a place as any to learn about the less controversial topics in the world, I could understand why she and others didn’t feel it should be offered up as a trusted source. But I added that it was important for teachers to understand what Wikipedia was all about, and that they and their students could use it as a tool for learning about information literacy and source validation. Which led to a more intense conversation about the use of blogs in research. I know there are teachers here who will not let students use Weblogs as sources for all the standard they-aren’t-edited reasons. And I said to the librarian and to the English chair, who had dropped in to listen to our conversation, that there are tens of thousands (if not more) blogs and bloggers creating more than valid research content and that we had to at least start some serious professional development efforts to teach them how to assess Weblogs for validity and accuracy. Which led to an even larger discussion about the state of copyright and plagiarism and… Suffice to say, it got pretty intense.

These are conversations that I know a lot of teachers and supervisors don’t really want to have. It’s a big shift. I know much of that hesitancy is based on not knowing how to find the potentially good sources, how to do the assessment, and how to successfully navigate a research process that is becoming less individualized and more and more social. To me, there’s no way we do it without first expanding our definition of “trusted sources” and without re-examining the process in that context. The disruption of self-publishing and open content and transparent negotiation of meaning and the rest require us to start making sure our teachers understand what’s happening so they can teach students effective practice. So I’ve set one of my goals for the first two months of school to create that Moodle site that I wrote about before, for teachers first and perhaps, if the comfort level is there, for parents next. I’m going to try to work on a syllabus this week…suggestions welcomed.

From the “Courses We’d Love to Teach Dept.” is the graduate course “Social Software Affordances” at Teachers College at Columbia. The very comprehensive syllabus says that:

Social software represents the promise of truly networked human communities extending across the online and offline dimensions of reality. But beyond the hype, a critical approach to social software is necessary in order to explore its impact and possibilities.

Students are asked to set up aggregators and blogs, and there will be a class wiki that will collect research and analysis that they gather during the semester. Among the questions they hope to answer are:

What is ‘social’ about social software?

What are the pedagogical implications of social software for education?

What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?

Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?

In some less formal ways, these are questions we should all be asking even on the K-12 level.

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I’ve pointed before to Wikipedia as a great source of information about disasters, natural or otherwise, and already that seems to be true with Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, this looks to be a pretty catastrophic event in the making, and as we’ve been watching the tv coverage of the event and trying to school our kids on hurricanes in general, Wikipedia has provided answers to a lot of their questions. What does Category 5 mean? How does this hurricane compare to others in history? What causes an eye to form? I’m seriously past the point of wondering whether or not the information I’m getting from the site is correct, and I’m also past Googling a lot of these questions which is what I used to do. I just added the latest information on the strength of the hurricane right after I heard it on CNN, and I’m already amazed by the information that’s been collected on this storm. Even now, before the storm hits, it’s getting 30-40 edits an hour. It will be interesting to watch it over the next few days. I’m sure there will be all sorts of photos and videos added soon.

And how else can we follow this storm? Well, Katrina hasn’t made Flickr’s tag cloud, yet. But I’m betting it will. Already, 1,044 photos are up. If your teaching hurricanes, time to add that feed to your aggregator. Oh, and don’t forget the NOAA Hurricane Center feed. And, of course the local press feeds that are coming from the area. And of course, you need to follow what the bloggers are saying.

Amazing the new ways in which we can gather information these days. TV is nice for the immediacy, but it can’t possibly match the range that we have at our disposal now.

Sending our good thoughts southward…
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So we had our last tablet PC pilot training group today, and I’m incredibly happy to say it was every bit as good as the one last week, if not better. The 15 teachers in the room were really doing serious brainwork, thinking about how the tablet can change their practice, and they shared all sorts of great ideas. And like last week, I learned a great deal and saw even more potential in the tool. Makes me really yearn for the classroom, I must say.

The cool thing was how the tablet once again prodded them to think much more deeply about the potential of digital content. The more I think about it, the more I’m coming to realize that I’ve been missing an important step in this whole rant about implementing Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom, and it’s the step that really gets teachers to get their brains around how different content is in bytes than in paper. I spent a good deal of time again today talking about the power of links, about how documents and presentation need not be flat and one dimensional but can be layered with other linked content of all different types. And once they got that, they really became receptive to the publishing part, because, obviously, to make those links meaningful, you have to share them.

For instance, the AP Environmental Studies teacher wanted his students to view “The Lorax” and then read an alternative view of the timber industry in a booklet put out by the, uh, timber industry called “The Truax”. Now the teacher had the really great idea of having students create “The Centralax” (our school name is Hunterdon Central) which would be a story about environmental issues in our area. Our discussion centered around first making the story hypertext, linking to pictures and research and other relevant content, things that could make the story richer and more interactive. Then, once we all saw the potential of doing that, it was a very small leap to sharing that story online with local middle school classes, or with inner city classes whose environmental issues would be much different from our own. And those steps could lead to really interesting online discussions with more links to pictures and graphs and experiments and…you get the idea. They got it. I think they really, finally, started to see why the ability to publish digital content to wider audiences can be truly powerful. (Or maybe it was just me…)

Point is, I’ve been wanting them to make the leap from regular paper to publishing digital content without giving them a true appreciation for digital paper. At least that what it felt like today. Bottom line, I saw a lot of head nodding and wheels turning when we dug into the potential. I know we’ve got a couple of podcast projects, a few blog ideas, and even some video creation happening with this group. And I really think because the tablet immerses them in digital content in ways no desktop can.

Two weeks until they start taking all they’ve learned into their classrooms…
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Jeff Jarvis has a great post that echoes a lot of what we’ve been saying about educational content. To me, here are the key lines:

There’s simply more good stuff out there than there could be before. And it can be created at incredibly low or no cost. There is no scarcity of good stuff. And when there is no scarcity, the value of owning a once-scarce commodity diminishes and then disappears.

Schools used to own the content they delivered, but no longer. There is better content, in most cases, to be found on the Web than in standard texts. There are richer databases of information, more knowledgable experts, and more diverse sources of uniquely pertinent material that we can draw upon now. And that renders the one-textbook-for-all approach basically irrelevant. While these resources may at first blush appear more unwieldly and complex than those comfortable, traditional texts, we do our students a disservice by not tapping into their diversity and timeliness.

We need to create our own texts, because we can. Our students need to help us, because they can. We need to ask relevant, diverse, living sources to participate, because they can. This is a totally changed world we’re entering, and we need to begin serious conversations at our schools as to what those changes mean and what strategies we can use to take advantage of them.
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I love when I can almost literally feel my brain cells reorienting to some new idea that springs from the Read/Write Web, and today it happened with Collin Brooke’s post about Works Citing. I mean it’s not a new concept; one of the basic principles of source testing these days is to see who is using the source and how. That’s what trackback and Technorati are all about. And even Amazon has been getting into that act by giving information on what books cite any particular book you might be interested in. Reversable bibliographies…because we can. (The power of links…)

The shift today came when Collin’s idea made me think about how Works Citing might be useful in our own practice when we teach research. Could that be a new part of the research paper, listing some of the works that are citing the works in the Works Cited? Sounds convoluted, I know, but it would be a great way to get kids to examine their sources more deeply, to start discussions about source validation on the Web, and to begin to make it a regular part of their practice. You could teach them to use Technorati, or to run a link search on Google or Alta Vista. And how cool would it be if some student work was being cited by others? Depending on who those others were, that could be a great tool for validating a student’s contribution.

Just a thought…

David’s post from a couple of days ago got me back into that “think of what this could look like” mode and started me speculating just what it was going to take to make it happen. There are days when I get into the flow of these technologies and think the sheer amazingness of what they can do should be enough to at least make educators want to sip the Kool-Aid. And when David laid out the ways that he could see teachers changing their routines with RSS and blogs and the like, I was mostly nodding my head in agreement. Mostly.

What gave me pause was the phrasing more than the ideas. The key word for me at least in his plan was “require,” that every teacher would be trained and expected to dive in and rid themselves of paper and begin working and teaching transparently for students and administrators and parents and community members to see. That administrators would begin to use aggregation as a way to keep track of what’s going on, and that sharing of plans and ideas would become standard practice. Again, all great ideas, don’t get me wrong. But as Stephen Downes noted, very little in schools is of magic wand creation.

At my school, we’ve implemented some huge, mandatory changes over the last few years. A new student information system. A new operating system. Perhaps now, a new classroom model. We’ve planned and met and discussed and tried very hard to build consensus and “buy in” around the ideas, and we’ve met with our share of resistance along the way. In each case, the need for the change was fairly easily communicated. We had 30 some odd different systems that didn’t talk to each other as our SIS. We couldn’t run certain programs any longer on Windows 95/98. The benefits were tangible.

As are the benefits of using RSS and blogs and wikis, I think. Tangible, to me, and perhaps you, but not so much to the vast majority of teachers who have literally no context or day to day experience with the technologies we’re talking about. I’ve shown over 50 teachers at my school the wonders of aggregation. They’ve started Bloglines accounts, created search feeds, etc. I’m guessing only a handful still check their accounts. The blog experience is a bit better, but not stellar by any means. Now why is that? It’s obviously not an easy answer, and there are many pieces in play, I think.

First, the fact that over 50% of high school teachers are planning to retire in the next five years is a big, big issue. 42% of all teachers are over 50, and it’s been my experience, stereotypical as it might be, that by and large, technology is not something older teachers come easily to. In fact, I did a training this morning where the frustration level among the older teachers was palpable, while the younger teachers were much more at ease.

Second, very few upper level administrators have the technology experience necessary to see the potential nor the vision necessary to see how it all works together. And the transparency of the tools scares them, frankly. Much of this relates to issue #1: I’m sure the expected retirements among administrators is even higher. If the paltry number of principals and superintendents who are communicating with these new technologies is any indication, there’s neither much understanding nor support for bringing these technologies mainstream.

Third, while Alan (and I, to a certain extent) loves the flexibility of small pieces loosely joined, I don’t think most classroom teachers find the mix-em-up approach as attractive. Time, habit, comfort level there are lots of reasons, obviously, but the bottom line is that cobbling together all of these tools might be a creative exercise for us and a daunting proposition for most. (I’ve started offering training one tool at a time for precisely this reason.) (And another thing, even my own limitations with writing scripts and code leave me pretty frustrated at times. I would love to have the time to learn how to use the Google Maps API or create sites with PHP but I just don’t.) I’m lucky enough to get e-mails from lots of educators, a large percentage of whom want to talk about how to deal with the nudity on Flickr or the monitoring of student blogs or the ways we keep kids safe. Even I will admit to a yearning for Moddle to add modules for blogs and pictures and bookmarks so that we can have it all in one, easily made safe space. But I know that in some ways undermines the power of the Read/Write Web, even for K-12 students.

And there is more. Lack of access for students and teachers. A lack of real intellectual curiosity among many educators. The pressure of high student test scores Frankly, schools in general these days are not very creative, risk-taking, forward thinking places, and that may be the biggest reason of all.

Somewhere in the last month, I forget where, someone said that these changes are going to take a generation. That it’s only when the kids in schools now come through our system with a much greater facility for the Web and understanding of its importance that things will really change. Looking at the landscape right now, more and more that’s starting to feel about right

I first posted a version of this about 18 months ago, but in light of recent conversations regarding how to really integrate these technologies into a teacher’s regular school day, I thought I’d post a somewhat updated version to see if it might contribute anything new. I’ll have more to say shortly on how I think this becomes a reality, but I will say that I think this vision is still fairly far into the future and that for it to come to fruition, I think the changes are going to have to happen from the ground up rather than being imposed or required. (See a typical reaction.) You can lead a horse…

More on that later…

–

English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It’s 6:50 a.m., and he’s got about 45 minutes before his sleepy Journalism students will begin filing into his classroom.

He logs in and opens up his personal Weblog on the school intranet. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times headlines that are displayed on his homepage and clicks on one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the “Post to Scuttle” button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and adds it to his journalism tagset at the ScuttleEDU intall on his school server. With this one step, he archives the page for future reference and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in.

Next, he clicks the link to open his Bloglines aggregator and he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to all the work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. Seeing one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student’s personal site and leaves a positive comment about her submission. (He notices that a couple of his students have already left some positive feedback to the author as well.) He also “Scuttles” that site, adding it to his “Best Practices” tagset which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he has created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It’s 7:00.

After taking a sip of his coffee, Tom takes a look at his research RSS feeds in Bloglines. He’s been asked to keep abreast of the latest news about technology and teaching writing, and this morning he sees his Google search feed has turned up a new version of “Write Outloud.” He clicks the link, reads about the new version on the site, and then clicks on a different “Post to Scuttle” button that uses an account set up for all of his department colleagues to share. When the form comes up, he writes a couple of lines of description about how it might benefit the department, and then tags it “Technology” which automatically archives it to the tech page of the English Department Weblog. Later that day, all the members of his department will see his link as well as any others his colleagues may have added as a part of their daily e-mail update from Scuttle. He also decides he wants to create another search feed for the words “journalism” and “weblogs.” With a click on the toolbar, a dialog box appears and he enters his terms, then clicks on the Feedster.com radio button (one among four choices.) He hits ok, and a new feed headline box is added to his portal.

At around 7:05, Tom uses his personal Weblog to upload an assignment on symbolism for his major American literature class. When he opens up the document online to check it, he adds that to a different Scuttle tagset under his English login and it gets sent to a separate Web page set up on the English site for American Literature Best Practices. The rest of the American Lit teachers will get an automatic e-mail later in the day notifying them of his published artifact that they can use in their own classes. Then, he creates a post for his Lit class portal that has a link to the assignment, and he publishes the post to the class homepage. Automatically, parents who have requested it get an e-mail that their son or daughter has homework to do that evening. E-mails also get sent to a couple of counselors who are tracking at risk students.

About 7:15 Tom decides to scan the latest school news feed which aggregates all the new posts from the school Weblogs he is subscribed to. He sees that the basketball team won the county tournament, the new edition of the school paper is online, and that the superintendent has posted important information about an upcoming safety drill. He clicks through to read the entire post, and then leaves a comment suggesting a way to alleviate crowding in the hallways during the drill. (He sees a parent also has a suggestion about the timing.) Back at his page, he decides that he doesn’t want to scan the soccer team news any longer, so he goes to his subscription page and unchecks the feed. He does notice, however, the “New Feeds” section lists a new “Tech Deals” feed that the tech supervisor has created. Since he’s looking for a new home computer, he clicks to subscribe to it.

At 25 after, he checks his audio library and sees that the MP3 interview that two of his students did with the principal has been downloaded to his player. He lifts it out of his cradle and puts it in his briefcase so he can play it on his car stereo during his ride home after school. If it’s good, he’ll upload it to the school podcast page where the 135-odd subscribers (mostly parents) will automatically receive it so they can hear it and hopefully get most of their questions about the new building project answered.

With just a few minutes left before his first class, Tom opens the personal journal part of his portal and types in a few notes about an idea he had for the lit project his students are completing next week. He files them into the “Literature” sub folder so that he can pull up relevant notes all at once if he needs to. Now that his volume of e-mail has been drastically reduced, he scans the few messages in his in box, takes a last gulp of coffee, and opens his classroom door to the sound of happy students.

Listen to this article

—–

Another positive blogs in schools piece, this time from August issue of the School Library Journal (free registration required.)

“Do you blog?”

That’s a question educators are hearing frequently these days, and more and more are responding with an enthusiastic “yes!” The reason? Teachers have discovered that technologies like weblogs—Web sites that are a snap to update—can be powerful teaching tools. And librarians are gearing up to help them.

The educational community’s infatuation with blogging isn’t an isolated phenomenon. It’s part of a quiet revolution in the way people relate to one another online. Around the world, millions of people are creating online communities among people of like interests. And they are doing it with a passion so intense that the term “blogomania” has been invented to describe it.

Well, not sure about “blogomania,” but we’re still on a bit of a blogs-are-good-things roll…
—–

(Via Jeff Jarvis) Probably not a new term, but new to me. Is this what we’re doing with all of these tools? Caching our lives:

LIFE CACHING is enabling GENERATION C to become a generation of true storytellers, helping them to visually and compellingly share their experiences with friends and family, which makes them stand out and feel special. In fact, sharing an experience may become as valuable if not more valuable than the actual experience itself.

There is something to be said for that storytelling part, isn’t there? When we decide to share content, be it text, photo, audio, whatever, we’re telling part of our story. Edtech storytellers…student storytellers…learner storytellers…
—–

Interesting to use a post on distributed conversations to show how distributed conversations work. But I think it’s informative. Alan started this process description, but for my own clarification, I’m going to deconstruct my own. It seems very chaotic as I look at it now, but in practice it’s pretty flow like. The key, seriously, is years of doing it, of learning how to “join loosley” with these ideas and be very much ok with the flimsy connections. Hopefully some others will find this somewhat informative:

1. I read Alan’s post in my Bloglines account Wednesday morning.
2. Through a link in that post, I went to David’s original post and read through it. (Even if I hadn’t found it this way, I would have gotten it my aggregator anyway.)
3. I come back here and write my response at various points in the day, composed much like this post…15 minutes here, 10 minutes there…hard to find extended writing time.
4. Today, in my Bloglines citations, I see that Brian Lamb has linked to my post, and I click through to read his most excellent addition to the conversation that’s been started. (Again, I would have found his post in my aggregator eventually as well.)
5. Brian’s post links me to a post by Stephen Downes (who has been duly added to the top 20 in the Feedster 500 list) that says I made an important point. This makes me happy, and I click through to read Stephen’s whole post (which, once again, I would have gotten in my aggregator eventually.)
6. Back to Bloglines Citations, I find that Ewan McIntosh has also chimed in on the topic. (Again…) He asks a great question:

How can you know if your blog has started a conversation if no-one is leaving comments on your blog?

Which is what gets my head thinking about this post I’m writing right now.
7. Back again to Bloglines Citations, where I find and follow a couple of other links that lead to foreign language blogs. (Wish I knew what they were saying…)
8. A little later, checking my e-mail, I find that Alan has commented here on the original post on my site. I take a few minutes to comment back to him.
9. Later, I go back to Alan’s original post which I’ve saved in Bloglines and see that there are 10, count ‘em, 10 references to his post. Most of these are just snips or links I’ve already tapped, but I click through one to find a post by Miguel Guhlin on listservs vs. blog that mentions my RSS guide (which desperately needs an update.) Yay! I spend a little time on Miguel’s blog and realize there is some good stuff here that I might want to track, and voila, he becomes the latest addition to my aggregator. Regarding blogging, he says:

Feeling good…that’s what THIS is about. It allows me to tap into–for a short time each day–that wonderful feeling of being lost in the words, distracted. And, the addiction is getting worse…it’s not a blogging addiction, just a writing one.

Which makes me start thinking about another post I want to blog…er, write…
10. I check out David’s post in Bloglines to find 18 references! I scroll through them quickly and see that I’ve found all of them but one, and that one doesn’t add that much to the conversation.

And this is how it goes, and somehow my brain is able to make sense of it. Actually, by doing this I would say my brain is more exercised by attempting to synthesize these ideas from the distributed conversation and make sense of it here. It’s a work out that I’ve repeated over and over, and I’m not kidding when I say I really think it’s gotten my brain in better shape. It’s active learning. And as Miguel says, it feels good too.
—–

Alan adds his thoughts to David’s “Four Reasons Why the Blogsphere Might Make a Better Professional Collaborative Environment than Discussion Forums” post, and some thoughts of my own have crept into my feeble little brain that, in the interest of furthering this particular distributed conversation, I thought I’d share. David’s original post is one of those seminal, brain starters that challenges us to get into the dirt with these technologies in schools, and Alan’s response exemplifies the power of the model that David sets up. We’re talking a new framework here, one that many of us have been practicing and trying to evangelize in a bunch of different ways, the complexities of which are still just beyond the reach of most of our constituents (and to some extent, ourselves.)

The whole idea that we can be involved in many different conversations in many different places instead of ones that are “neatly organized into one nicely structured cubby” as Alan puts it is what so many people seem to bump up against when dipping toes in these waters. And as he so correctly intimates, the basic issue here is that it’s only once you’re actively blogging and Flickring and Jotting and whatnoting that you realize how gluey and important that very passive (once you create it) RSS feed running in the background really is. Blogs capture the content, but RSS is where the conversation, the connection of the information is really made. I turn as much to other places (Technorati, Feedster) to find what people are saying back to me than the comments people leave here, precisely because of the distributed nature of the Read/Write Web. I could post this at David’s blog or Alan’s blog, but I post it here because a) I want to capture these thoughts in my own learning, experimenting space, and b) because I know they’ll find this piece of the conversation in their aggregator the next time they flip through it. Similarly, I no longer tell grandma and grandpa that there are new pictures of the kids online at Flickr because they’ve learned to collect them automatically. RSS makes them a part of that conversation.

Without a fundamental understanding of RSS glue, distributed conversations are fundamentally illogical. How can we call Alan and David’s separate posts on this topic a conversation? Conversations connect, and their ideas are in disparate spaces. To the un-rss-initiated, their ideas may potentially only come together on a hot-or-miss Google search a few hours after they’re posted. No doubt, discussion boards (idea blogs?) are much easier to wrap the more linear, pre Web 2.0 heads around. All these individual spaces would just appear to complicate matters. But instead, “the magic, the sheer utter magic” (Alan again) of RSS orchestrates it, and it does so in the ways that we empower it to do.

…the most important understanding that should take place is managing and using RSS– not at the technical level of XML and the various flavors, but the underlying principle at work.

Can I get a big “AMEN”? And David knows this too:

Merely, I am suggesting that in some instances (or more) we might consider a carefully designed RSS connected environment as a content-building, experience and skill sharing, professional community.

An “RSS connected environment.” Early on in this, a couple of years ago now, I thought about this with parents and community on a much smaller scale. When I happened upon that page of feeds the other day, I was simply awestruck by how much farther we had come in the ways that we could use RSS to connect conversations and share information. David’s post scrapes the surface of what we could do, and I’m once again wondering how to carve a few more hours out of each day to go further down the road that he and Alan have pointed to.

And maybe that’s the new strategy, get teachers and students rss-ing first. Give them a framework for understanding how disparate looking pieces of content really aren’t as disconnected as they seem, and that there are new ways to find and collect and archive ideas from any number of previously unknown places. That all this seemingly random creativity is really not so random at all, that it is “loosely joined” in ways that allow us to make it even more relevant and effective in our practice and in our learning. The old, rigid, preorganized structures (read: schools) are losing their hold on ideas and knowledge, and while they may seem chaotic, these new less organized but more flexible structures can be just as if not more effective.

Good, good stuff, and worth thinking much, much more about.

Is it just me, or is Blogger for Word a pretty big deal? Now would be bloggers don’t even have to open up a blog to post; they can do it all from within a very familiar, spell-checkable environment with just two clicks of a button. Not the most powerful little app, but I think it might just raise the comfort level quite a bit. No? Seems like another step toward the seamless integration of publishing tools into the “normal” work environment.