Whew…we made it! It took most of the day yesterday for the import over from Manila to build. I have to say it was kind of interesting watching old posts from 2, 3, even 4 years ago scroll by. A weird time machine effect.

Anyway, looks like the site is about 90% rebuilt, but there is still some work to do. James Farmer has been just incredible with his time and effort on my behalf, and he’s even offered to do some tweaks while I’m taking my break. I’ll get to the rest of it when I return. The main thing is that the feed appears to be working. If you’re reading this in your aggregator, it would be great if a few of you could leave a comment just to confirm it.

Anyway, now I’m really on vacation, with one big thing off my plate. (Though I’m itching to really dig into WP.) Thanks again, James.

This isn’t quite as earth shattering as Chapter 2, but the personal reinvention continues with the end, finally, of my Manila blog and the beginning of my new space served up by James Farmer at Edublogs. I have mostly good things to say about my three-plus years with Manila, but I’ve just had Word Press envy for too long, and James was kind enough to shoulder all of the migration load for me. So, with any luck, in the next couple of days, all 4,955 pieces of content that have been created here since 2003 will be ported over. The RSS feed will stay the same, and I’m hoping there won’t be too much of a disruption. Fingers crossed.

And actually, this move offers up the perfect opportunity for me to take a little break from blogging. Unless something major happens, I’m going to turn off the computer for a couple of weeks and recharge my batteries. We’re off to Sweden for 10 days on Friday, and I’ve got two articles that I need to get working on as well as some other projects. As I’ve mentioned before, I have not felt like a very good blogger of late. It feels a bit stale for some reason, and while the conversations are still important, they’re feeling a bit redundant as well. I think I’m feeling a bit of Clarence’s angst when he writes about “seeing other people.” I too am finding the need to move beyond the “echo chamber” a bit, to keep learning about new things instead of revisiting the common themes. We need to extend this conversation, I think, ’cause I’m just becoming more convinced that schools and education aren’t going to change before society changes. To be honest, I’m looking forward to not checking the feeds for a while.

And the other thing is that I feel like this space is becoming way too much about me. (Ironic, huh?) I mean I know that I’ve been getting around more what with speaking and the book, but the offshoot of that is that I have less time to read deeply and blog thoughtfully. Doing a conference wrap is an easy substitute. I really want to stop writing about what I’m doing and focus more on what I find classroom teachers and students are doing. Stop trying to paint in broad strokes and focus more on the details. It may take until quitting day (May 15) for that to happen, but it’s a goal.

And finally, it was nice to get a faint signal from Steven Downes this week. I looked at the pictures from his isolated cabin up north and felt pangs of jealousy. That tells me something. And, as is typical, he wrote something that just resonated in perfect pitch:

I’m trying to find that place, you know, where I can have a meaningful life, where I can be completely engaged and committed and passionate, where I can matter and be important. These pictures will always be special to me, because they will always remind me that I can and sometimes do dare to hope and dream of being something more, and that there are, absolutely, some things worth dreaming about.

Amen to that.

So, Murphy willing, the blog reinvention will be in place shortly. My own reinvention, however, continues at a much more unpredictable pace. Back in a couple of weeks.
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Education Week is running a story titled “Educators Experiment With Student-Written ‘Wikis’: Malleable, Open-ended Web Sites Seen as Aids to Collaborative Learning” that highlights some of the work being done by the likes of Tim Lauer, Paul Allison and others. Here’s a snip that I thought was pretty interesting:

“You can�t do the cookie-cutter essay anymore, because it won�t make sense,” Mr. Allison said.

Many students have taken to using his collaborative-writing wiki, which can be used for expository writing as well more-creative compositions. For instance, on the �discussion� page of the school�s wiki on “Macbeth,” students wrote 20 adaptations of the play’s opening scene, in which three witches in a forest conspire on a coming battle.

In Shakespeare’s version, the first witch says, “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” The second witch replies: “When the hurlyburly’s done/When the battle’s lost and won.”

One student rewrote that exchange this way: “Yo, where we gonna meet at?/In the [sic] Japan, Tokyo, or Mega world?” The second character replies: “When the grasshopper is finished/And the battle is lost or won.”

So many interesting ideas…
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The Higher Ed BloggerCon seemed like a pretty cool idea when it was first announced and it’s absolutely fulfilling my expectations, through Day 3 at least. It’s a month long event that features two screencasted presentations a day, and it kicked off this week with the teaching strand. I’ve learned something from everything that’s been posted thus far and I’m really looking forward to what Ewan and James have on tap for Friday. Some pointers so far:

So this 7th grade “Exploring Our Dynamic Earth” blog (with the very appropriate tag line of “Using blogs to learn”) is an interesting example of how RSS can be woven into the work. The front matter is all done by placing feeds from a host of class blogs and a few science news feeds (including a latest earthquake feed) for pretty easy viewing. Click on one of the headline links and it will take you to a specific blog where teachers are posting some pretty thought-provoking assignments and students are engaging in some pretty impressive conversation through the comments.

For example, we’ve got 58 responses to the question “What’s the most dangerous place on Earth?” and if you read through them, you’ll see some real give and take going on. And the writing is pretty audience-centric, as in this snip:

Imagine this: it�s a perfectly normal day, nothing particularly unusual has happened. Everything is going fine until� BAM! OH DEAR LORD, A VOLCANO IS ERUPTING!! EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!! This is what could happen if you lived in Chile…

Or this gentle push back:

johanna, I know 143,000 people died in that Yokohama earthquake. But that�s not because the earthquake was more dangerous. It�s because the CIRCUMSTANCES were different. Maybe there just happened to be a lot of people in Yokohama walking around, underneath buildings! Maybe they didn�t have very much advance notice. THAT DOESN�T MEAN THE EARTHQUAKE WAS MORE DANGEROUS. A 9.5 EARTHQUAKE IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN A 8.3 EARTHQUAKE. Also, earthquakes in Japan do occur pretty often� but they�re usually of small magnitude, and so not a lot happens. I�ve done research, and it turns out that BIG earthquakes only occur in Japan every 70 years. The other earthquakes aren�t very dangerous at all. So I would have to disagree with you.

Oh, by the way, the blog is courtesy of teachers and students at the Shanghai American School, Jeff Utecht’s hangout…
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Just when we started figuring out exactly what the heck MySpace really is, now it’s destined for the trash heap. At least that’s according to some of Jeff Utecht’s students:

�It became something you HAD to do, people were going crazy, and you had to write something or people would say �Yeah, you haven�t written anything all week.� it just got to be a hassle.�

From the conversations, I get the feeling the students ran into blogger burnout. They got to a point were they were forced to write do to peer pressure rather then having something to say. The blog postings become so diluted that they were boring to read. Having to write something just for the sake of writing something so you are cool, is not cool.

That’s a pretty sit up and take notice point, I think, and it goes to the discussion we’ve been having of late as to the motivations of blogging in general. Jeff, as always, makes some interesting observations about how important purpose is to the writing, and how quickly things can change.

MySpace and Xanga aren’t going away any time soon, but I would be surprised if they keep adding over 250,000 users a day, as MySpace did a couple of weeks ago. What I’m wondering, as is Jeff, is what’s going to take their place.
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How much fun is it to say that?

If you’re here because of today’s series of stories in the Washington Post on educators blogging, let me take this opportunity to welcome you to the “edublogosphere” and to a really great conversation about how blogs and wikis and podcasts and other Web publishing tools are changing what we do in our classrooms and impacting student (and teacher) learning. (If you’re not here because of the Post articles, go read them!) Personally, I think it’s great that this conversation has finally gotten some coverage from the maninstream media. I’m really hoping it encourages more educators to dip their toes in the water, so to speak, and start considering the power and potential of the “Read/Write Web,” the one where it’s just as easy to create content and share it with wide audiences as it is to consume what’s already there.

Although the article states that “blogs can be personal journals for everyone to see,” please know that even more, they can be spaces to share ideas, to push each other’s thinking, to reflect on the practice and profession, and to make strong and powerful connections with people and ideas. I’m a blog snob in that I believe there is an intellectual component to this that can make it a pretty amazing learning tool, not just a place to capture the day’s events (though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.)

So, if you are new to all of this, here are some more links to start you on your journey. First, here is a wide ranging list of ed bloggers to add to those already linked in the article. (Just click on the + sign next to the “Weblogs in Ed” link in the left hand pane.) If you want to click through some links to classroom uses of blogs, try this list. If you want to learn more about how to get started with all of these tools (like you want to know what it means when The Post says you can “tag” the stories,) this might help. (I have no shame.) Or, if you just want to ask some questions, feel free to e-mail me.

Finally, let me just say that I’ve learned more, found more interesting teachers, and been much more intellectually engaged in my five years of blogging than at any other time in my life. This is an amazing community of educators, and I feel very fortunate to have become a part of it. May it be as transformative for you as it has for me…

I love Bloglines, but this article in TechCrunch has me looking at the alternatives. One that I really want to like is Rojo, which has all sorts of social Web goodness built into it. I LOVE the fact that I can tag individual posts…kind of like a built in del.icio.us. Of course, every tag has it’s own rss feed, which creates all sorts of possibilities. And the recommendation feature a la digg is also very cool. But for some reason, Rojo doesn’t seem to update as consistently as Bloglines. And I have to remember to mark all of the posts read manually instead of just marking stuff I want to keep as with Bloglines. And finally, I guess I just really like the framed Bloglines page which doesn’t require a refresh every time I click on something. This is one of those “wish I had the best of both worlds” moments.

The other one I’ve been playing with is Gritwire which is AJAXalicious and therefore fun to play with. It has a wiki function built in as well as podcast support through the Grit Wire Media player (which is a pretty nifty little app.) But even with all of that, it’s just not as simple as Bloglines, somehow. Maybe it’s just old habits.

So, can anyone give me a reason to switch from Bloglines? Anyone using FeedLounge or Google Reader (which got the highest ratings in the TechCrunch article)?