Just finished my presentation at the Internet @ Schools East conference and a number of people asked me to put the slides up for viewing so here they are. Be warned that it’s a 4MB file, so it may take some time to load up.

All in all I think it went pretty well. I’m guessing there were about a 100 people in the room, about three had their own sites, and it seemed like most understood both blogs and RSS well enough at the end. It is, however, a lot to throw at people in just an hour. (If you were in the audience and want to leave a comment, just click here to join the site and then come back and click comment under this post. All feedback welcomed!)

I got a chance to meet with David Carter-Tod who was a real help to me when I first started poking around with blogs and such, and I’m hoping to meet up with him and some other bloggers later tonight. That’s always the best part of these conferences anyway. And I’m about to take in a series of Weblog and RSS presentations including Jenny‘s dedicated to RSS alone. Should be pretty interesting.

Just one story: I was sitting in the lobby after my presentation listening (ok…eavesdropping) to a conversation one of the other conference speakers was having about a panel he was on, and he started mentioning RSS. I guess at one point, his panel had been talking about RSS for about 20 minutes when someone in the audience asked “Can someone please tell me just what that is?” A number of people applauded. This still must seem like Greek to most…

Note: Comments to this post are being displayed here. I’m working on it…

Came across a couple more examples of teachers blogging with their students that look pretty interesting. First is this e-book of a Tapped-in presentation by Barbara Dieu who is a teacher in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I like how she introduces her project on her own site:

So as many of you are about to embark on the adventure of creating a web page or using a blog…here are some questions for you to consider: Does the architecture of the environement online (blog, web page, wiki, message board) affect your stds’ motivation and the way they learn, communicate, interact? Will a page with text only make students read more and pay more attention to the text ? What kind of balance should there be between design/layout and content online?

Good stuff. One quick thing I realized in going through her workshop site was that Blogger now has a notification piece built in. Did it always have that? Seems like a lifetime ago…

Also got an e-mail from Scott Rogers who is blogging with his Freshman Composition students at Weber State in Michigan. The posts on his own site relating to his teaching are great, including this set of questions he’s looking at in his use of Weblogs:

Can technology solve some problem in a better or more meaningful way than another, non-techie way?

In this case, I’m concerned with the following issues:

1) We spend most of our time in the classroom off in the ether of rhetorical analysis or argument structure or whatever, and there are no real outlets for them to discuss the connections between what we’re reading and what they see going on in the “real world.”

2) I want students to evaluate sources from day one–and not wait until the major research essay at the end of the semester.

3) I want to give students a little more room to roam around in their responses to the texts.

4) I want students to see themselves as taking part in a larger set of discussions, and really, in the end, to see the way that technology like Blogger goes a long way toward democratizing the publishing of what Scott Russell Sanders calls “the individual mind at work and play.”

I think it’s so cool to see more and more educators pushing their thinking and sharing the struggle. It always makes me push my own thinking on what I’m doing.
—–

From Dave:

The tentative date for the next BloggerCon is April 10, 2004 in Cambridge on the campus of Harvard Law School. The cost to attend is $0, but we will solicit contributions and sponsorships. It’s a one-day conference, following the pattern of Day 2 of the first Con, several concurrent tracks, 1.5 hour discussions led by an expert, lots of interesting people, and conversation, networking opportunities. Focus on what we’ve learned from the first half of the 2004 Presidential campaign (presumably the Democratic nominee will be chosen by then). How has journalism changed? What blogging projects are you starting? Who would you like to work with?

—–

I think it’s very cool that the New York Times is starting to embrace the Weblog concept. See ombudsman Daniel Okrent’s space and the pretty tame “On the Trail” political blog they’ve started. To get the thinking behind it, this interview with NYT Web editor Len Apcar is pretty insightful. I sat next to him at BloggerCon at one point, and I asked him when the Times was going to start blogging. He said something along the lines of “I don’t know, but this is all very interesting.” He was obviously surveying the landscape. In that interview, he says:

…to be quite candid about this, I’ve looked at this kind of page as a possible template for other areas of common interest. In other words, you could take this page and build a page for Opera buffs. You could do it for theater. You could do it for any number of special interests. I wanted to learn how to do this first with political reporting. I thought it made a lot of sense. It played to The Times strengths. We have just scores, dozens, of reporters covering the campaigns. I was hoping we’d have a good lively debate, which we’ve got. So I want to learn by doing this first, with politics. And then from there I’ll step back and say, what do we think? what kind of tool is this? How do we learn from this?

Now to me, that’s a pretty provocative statement, and it says that at least he grasps the concept. He’s sticking to basically factual reporting and using the Weblog as a place where reporters can add context to the stories they write, not opinion like most blogging is. But it still takes a small step toward doing what blogs do best, and that’s getting behind a story and, hopefully, engaging readers in the conversation.

Add to that the extremely educational personal travel blog of former president Jimmy Carter who recounts his visit to Africa. Again, I know this isn’t a true “blog” in the strictest sense (more edited journal.) But the personal publishing meme is no doubt expanding.
—–

(via Kairosnews) Ok…it’s official. I’m quitting my high school job and gonna snag some part-time professorship at a local community college where I can do this: give everyone on campus a Weblog and just sit back and watch my aggregator get filled up with all sorts of wild writing from students who write cool stuff without having administrative and board fears (I was going to say paranoia but changed it…hmmmm…) make me sweat over how things will be monitored and approved so as not to tick anyone off. I want so badly to put

We do not take responsibility for any of the writing on this site.

on my homepage and let all heck break loose. (Pitiful isn’t it?)

Joe Moxley, the professor who is doing this, is also into Wikis and all sorts of other cool things dealing with writing with tech. He says the site “Writing Blog is intended to be a creative community for people who write and for writing instructors.” Word has it he’s requiring first year composition students at the University of South Florida to have a blog. Could be an interesting development. Still, Terry asks “Still…where’s the proof (other than anecdotal) that blogging actually helps students write better than in a ‘traditional’ non-blogging class?” Good question. Terry’s starting to dive into this question, and I’m waiting to get a link to his research site so I can follow along.

An article from the University of California probing the use of Weblogs in education. Not much new here, but it is interesting how many of these there seem to be lately…

In education, weblogs are being used in a variety of ways, including providing students an avenue for expressing themselves and for reflecting on what they have learned. They are also used to create collaborative communities for students and instructors as they progress through a course or work on shared projects. They act as a kind of knowledge management system that keeps track of who’s doing what as well as tasks yet to be accomplished. In addition, several faculty publish weblogs to provide commentary and links to resources in their areas of expertise. The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is using weblogs extensively, not only to facilitate courses and provide students a publishing medium, but also as a subject of scholarly inquiry.

—–

Another blog story link:

“Welcome to Weblogs at Harvard Law, an experimental community where more than 350 students, faculty and staff members, and alumni have signed up to publicly express their thoughts about everything from social issues to software, from literature to love. Based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the initiative is free and available to anyone with a Harvard.edu e-mail address. And except for a few private blogs limited to specific classes, all Harvard-hosted blogs can be read by anybody on the Web.”

And from the education corner:

“Some educators use blogs as teaching tools. John Palfrey, a lecturer at both HLS and the Extension School, posts syllabi, reading materials, and lectures on class blogs; he encourages, but doesn’t require, students to use them. He views the technology as a way to extend the classroom experience, and to provide a new forum for people who might be too shy to speak up in person. “This helps us explore how people express themselves,” says Palfrey, who also maintains an HLS blog on legal issues.”

—–

Kathy Schrock, who was one of the first classroom teachers to really mine the potential of the Internet and who has now teamed with the Discovery Channel to keep one of the most extensive education sites on the Net, has started blogging with a moTime site about handhelds in the classroom. If high profile educators like Kathy get on board with blogging, there could be a real groundswell of interest. Here’s hoping her efforts continue to be successful.

“Commons-blog is an American Library Association-sponsored site collecting news, discussion, and commentary related to the information commons in theory and practice.” At first blush, this looks like a great resource for media literacy and information type issues. This post on the revisionist history of the White House Website is definitely a jumping off point for a discussion of the impermanence of information on the Internet. Lots of other good links to libraries that I’m going to be checking out as I build my school’s library site, too. Add another to my Bloglines account…
—–

Ran across this site and it’s offshoots from my referer logs, and there looks to be some very nice uses of Web logs in classrooms popping up all over the place. Crawford Kilian who teaches at Capilano College in Vancouver (and has written over 20 books) is reflecting on his efforts with blogs in his Legal Techand Outdoor Rec classes. He says:

As the fall semester winds up, I’m feeling a little more encouraged about education blogging. The two course blogs seem to have been useful to the students even though they didn’t often post to them…

He keeps a number of Web logs on different subjects, all of which look pretty interesting.

He’s also got a link to a Brit Lit Web log by Beth Fullerton. She says:

It is my hope that I will be assigning students to write three articles a nine weeks to be published on this site. I will let them write over topics that we are studying in class. I will also use this site to publish discussion questions over our class work. Students will be required to check the site and comment on the questions. I also will link from this site to the blogs of my students that they will be required to keep for the class. If a student doesn’t have internet access, I will allow them to use this site to post their own blog. I hope this site will stimulate discussion and writing in my classes. Communication should also improve. Parents, students, principals, and the community will be welcome to visit and comment on our site.

And a couple of more finds…Ben Harris’s “American Literature and its Discontents” looks to be a blog on the study of Gatsby. The post about F. Scott & Paris Hilton; Living The American Dream? is especially interesting. I met Ben at NECC this year and he’s another one of those “I wish he’d do more blogging” types (a la Terry.)

Also, here’s the Western Nebraska Community College site that’s using a Web log…

More and more and more interesting examples of classroom sites every day…

Now this is pretty cool. Michael S. Matassa Jr. is a math teacher using Web logs.

Get ready to join your classmates in a fun and exciting way to write in math class. Are you a little hesitant to write in math? Would you rather not write in math? Well, don’t worry, I have just the thing that will let you enjoy writing about math. All you need is blogs! That’s right blogs.

I love it! It seems to be a Webquest from Boulder Valley School Discrict, and I’m going to be really interested to see how this works out.

—–

It’s getting to the point where I’m finding just about one new site a day from my referer logs, and today’s winner is the Madison County High School (Va.) Athletics site. I got there from this K-12 Web log workshop page which covers a two-hour training for teachers. It’s great to see more and more of these as well.

One thing struck me as I looked at the workshop schedule, and it’s an element that’s missing from my own workshop materials. That’s a portion dedicated to blogging the verb. Terry‘s back on that important subject, and I’m starting to think that I need to do a lot more to encourage teachers to blog (v) before using a blog (n). I spend a lot of time writing and talking to people about how the tool can help facilitate the teaching process, but not as much about the learning process. I think that’s primarily because teachers have no understanding of using Web logs to learn and reflect simply because they haven’t done it. It goes back to “Teach blogs? Blog!” It’s essential to understand the power of this.

Next time I teach Web logs to teachers, I’m going to ask them to post a week’s worth of reflections to it before giving them their CEUs. That means I get to spend time talking about blogging the verb, which is turning out to be one of my more favorite subjects…

Ok, it’s not the most elegant solution, but it’ll have to do. I don’t have the metadata savvy that Seb lent me last year, so the update process is probably more cumbersome than it has to be. But you can pretty much figure out that we start with a separate story page for each story and then start the linkfest. I like it ’cause it’s pretty clean and because I can link my kids blogs to the page. We’re going to link this site to our school homepage later in the week. Now the big issue is finding time to sit down with the newspaper staff to teach them how to do this. It took me about 1.5 hours to transfer everything over, which means that I could probably do it in around an hour next time, which probably means two kids, once they learn it, could easily do it in under an hour. Murphy willing, of course…

Meanwhile, I’m tweaking a new theme that Bryan helped with. Don’t look too hard as it’s filled with pretty much junk at this point. The plan is to keep the top nav bar as the consistent element on every page on the site and then offer up a couple of other variations in color on this theme. Red, black, gray and white aren’t the easiest to make pretty, but I think Bryan did a nice job, as usual.

From my referer logs come Jacki Alshaibani from the Wayne, MI school district who has a Web log reference page for her teachers, and Linda Brandon in Shrub Oak, NY who has put together a Web log reference page and her own site for teachers. And for those of you in the market, here’s a “Blogging Permission Slip” from Nancy Peralta (I think.) Finally, here’s another page from Rick Barter at the Connors Emerson School (from yesterday.) It’s pretty cool to see more and more teachers taking the plunge.

Straight from Bar Harbor, Maine comes this Manila school homepage. Nice, simple, full of good content.
—–