It’s almost time to report out on my move to the MAC, but first, I have to say that Flock is quickly becoming my favorite tool of all. And I’m sure I’m not even scratching the surface. The ability to blog from any page, to blog right from my RSS reader (which, btw, is every bit as good if not better than Bloglines), the one-click to del.icio.us function, and now the geotagging extension for Flickr uploads through the browser have all made me totally forget about IE and are quickly leaving even Firefox as a fading memory.

Today’s 10-minute foray into my Flickr Maps page had my head spinning. I mean talk about a great opportunity for classrooms. I’m still not sure if I can automatically send geotagged photos directly to my map page or if I have to manually drop them onto the page. But still it was pretty cool to start looking at photos from around the world that people had already tagged.

There are some other tools that I’ve been playing with like Writely and Diigo that I’m finding pretty amazing…especially on my MAC. More about those at some point.

technorati tags:flickr, flock, weblogg-ed

I hate spammers. I really do. I flipped the switch on trackbacks just now because it was just getting ridiculous in terms of the texasholdem crud that was showing up. Too bad, ’cause the idea is a great one. But I’ve been tracking references to this site via RSS feeds and Technorati already, and I’d say 95% of what turns up here turns up there. Without the spam, of course.

More disconcerting is that when I went to Flickr the other day, an extremely naked woman appeared in my “Photos From My Contacts” stream. Turns out it was spam. Flickr spam. Not good.

I got an e-mail from a teacher who had just done a Weblog training using Blogger, and the issue of the “Next Blog” button in the top right corner came up, as in what if students click through to some inappropriate site? Oy. If you haven’t tried this of late, you need to. Start here at a test site I put up a couple of months ago and click through to the 10 random “Next Blog” sites that come up. Here’s what I got:

#1. A page full of the same candlemaking link intended only to raise the Google ranking of the link owner.
#2. Another one, this time related to child support.
#3. Another one for sun screen protection.
#4. A site filled with picture of nurse porn.
#5. A personal blog written in Portugese (I think.)
#6. A link site for debt consolidation.
#7. A student blog (believe it or not!)
#8. A blog on quantum algorithms.
#9. A link site for golden retreiver pictures (???)
#10. A political blog.

So, six of the ten sites were either spam or porn. I’m sure your mileage may vary, but the point is pretty clear. Just the chance that a student might click through to a pornography site is enough to scratch Blogger from the list of blogging options. So, what to do? Here are a few options:

Take out the nav bar on your Blogger site. It’s easy, but you lose your search function as well.

Find another free service, like James’s Incsub or David’s Blogmeister, or Alan’s November Learning site for instance.

Find a hosted site that doesn’t cost much like 21Publish.

I’m sure there are others.

The bigger point, however, is that we need to continue to try to convince schools to teach students how to deal with the crud that they are going to land on whether they hit it from a Blogger site or not.

So Manila 9.5 is out, and the good folks at Weblogger, my most excellent host, are installing it this weekend. From the release notes, here’s one reason I’m looking forward to it:

The Access Control feature adds new controls for what content can be seen and/or responded to within Manila by users. This feature allows editors to restrict access to areas of your Manila site based on membership and/or editorial level. Access can be limited based on membership, eritorial access, or for a specific period of time. The site structure paths which point to a message can also be restricted to members or editors. A new Access Control Prefs page is used to configure Access Control. New access control macros have also been created.

This has always been one of the weaknesses of Manila, and it sounds like they have addressed in in a big way. Hopefully, setting these controls will be easy.

It does not appear, however, that Userland has addressed the issue of approving comments before they are posted, something that is crucial to K-12 users. I really hope I’m wrong.

Paul Chenowith links to a new Perseus survey of the blogosphere with some numbers that seem strangely out of whack, at least to me. First, Perseus expects around 55 million blogs to have been created by year’s end, which is like six or seven times more than any other estimates I’ve seen. It says MSN Spaces has like 4.5 million sites, of which maybe I’ve seen three. And what the heck is Greatest Journal anyway?

Oy.

The report goes on to say that the first BloggerCon was the “inflection point” for the industry. Huh? And here’s a statistic near to my own heart: at the infamous Myspaces.com only a “somewhat greater” than 4.7% of their 12 million (12 million!?!) users have a blog. Are we still calling that a blog site? (Rhetorical question.)

And here I thought I had a pretty good pulse on the blogosphere…

Paul sums it up nicely, however.

All in all, however, I believe the escalating growth in the use of blogs by teens and young adults means that there are learning opportunities available. Ignoring the potential of blogs as an accepted/adopted learning tool among teens is rapidly fading option. Blogging is neither the end of the highway nor the finish line in the chase for technology, it is merely a barometer of things to come.

Go Blogs. Go!

I’m feeling like one of the last holdouts here with Manila, and I’ve got open source issues that I need to come to terms with, but this news from Userland CEO Scott Young has me hoping:

We are getting closer to the release of Manila into public beta. Its been a fairly long process, but the size and scope of the changes will be worth it. Significant additions have been made and as we have finally worked through all the change notes and have come to discover that what we have is Manila 9.5 !!

After adding versioning for content and templates, access controls, enclosure support, Atom support for Manila’s aggregator, greater flexibility in the new member signup process, easier navigation of stories and pictures pages, improved static rendering support, and a large number of other enhancements and bug fixes for users and developers alike – we’ve set the version number for the next release of Manila at 9.5. (We’ve even got a few more surprises in store.)

We’re excited!

Fingers crossed for a successful release…soon!

Another small step for Manila users…we can now include enclosure tags in our posts. So, I guess that means that if I ever create another Podcast I can just plunk it in my post without using the Feedburner feed I had set up for it. Nice.

As luck would have it, I was talking about just this capability with a teacher in my current Weblogs class here at my school. He wants to pilot Tablet PCs with his kids next year and is envisioning a paperless class where kids access work from his blog, complete it on their tablets, post to their own blog, and he fetches it via the RSS feed. Well, it appears, now he can. This obviously harkens back to a post a couple of weeks ago about using enclosures. Looks like I’m going to have to dig into it a bit more now.

But, not to be a spoiled sport, I wish Manila would also support easy comment previewing, easy off/on comments, easy public/private choice in posting, easy check box deleting of comments or content, more complex editorial permissions… Looks like Drupal is going for the ed market, and I’ve already talked about how much I like Word Press. Manila has so many good things going for it, but it just needs a few more tweaks and an overhaul in the intuitiveness department.

I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at Word Press and Moodle for some time now, and I finally had a chance to play with Word Press this morning. Oy. I really, really like what I see so far.

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of James Farmer at IncSub, you too can set up your own free Word Press site. And if you have any blogging experience at all, finding your way around should be pretty straightforward. Word Press is a very robust open source software that has all of the features I’ve been yearning for in Manila in terms of easy to understand user levels, review of posts and comments, flexibility in what’s private and public, and a real nice, easy to understand “dashboard” that puts everything at your fingertips. Very nice.

Now here’s the news…it’s not that I don’t love Manila…I still do. But I’ve actually started some conversations with one of the department supervisors about the idea of creating blogfolios for all of our students at the beginning of their freshman year where they post their work throughout their time in high school. And my brain is just swimming with the possibilities. And Word Press, if it can scale, seems like it has great potential in terms of running upwards of 3,000 sites since it has all of the good stuff that Manila is missing. Hmmm…

Five to nine inches of snow coming tonight…a day off tomorrow for Moodling around, perhaps?

I’ve been using Manila both personally and with my classes for three years, but somehow the Site Access Restrictions feature just slipped by me. I’m not sure it’s the most, shall we say “elegant” solution to the some parts public, some parts private issue, but it is a solution nonetheless. This way, students can limit access to certain pages in the site to say, just the teacher, putting only finished work out there for everyone to see. The idea is crucial, I think, though an easier solution would be to include those access choices where you create the content. This doesn’t seem to work with News Items, but it does work with Stories.

So Alan has been calling out the spammers,
daring them to mess with him. Hmmm….don’t know that I would be so
bold. The good news here is that since I turned off Radio Hosting and
went back to the “gotta be a member and login before you can comment”
mode, the spam has been totally cut off. And, I’m happy to report,
people are still leaving comments. This is a good thing.

As is this, I think. Manila now seems to have the ability to approve or reject comments, though I’m not exactly sure:

The built-in callbacks do things like block a comment before it’s
posted or setup custom actions after a comment has been posted.

I
wish my brain got to the server side of things more easily. I’ll have
to dig around to see what this all means. At any rate, right now we
have all of our comment-able sites set to login first mode. Doesn’t
mean individuals still can’t come it and muck around with things, but
at least the bots are stopped.

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You knew that sooner or later all of these fun little disparate tools would start coming together in one app, and it looks like Onfolio has taken a first step in that direction.

Fully integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office, Onfolio has tools for capturing a wide range of content including links, text snippets, images, web pages, and documents. Onfolio lets you organize and find captured content quickly and easily. And with Onfolio, you can easily share your research in documents, presentations, emails, and research reports.

It’s an RSS reader too, so here’s a blend of Furl, Webnote and Bloglines. The feature list is pretty impressive, and it has something that seems to be trying to quack like a blog too:

Website Publish* – Publish your research in a Website, with selected links, comments and content that you’ve captured. Automatically, include an RSS feed as part of the output.

Hmmm…verrry interesting. But, aye, here’s the rub: I don’t work on one machine. I have the desktop in my office, my laptop, the desktop at my wife’s office…you get the picture. How do I synch up all of this stuff, huh?

When we get to Onfolio Web, I’ll really sit up and take notice. But don’t fret…it won’t be long.
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Jon Udell goes into great depth about the potential for using del.icio.us
as a collaborative tool. My head hurts after reading it, but I actually
think I see some of the interesting ways that del.icio.us can connect
ideas and interests. Just one example; I didn’t realize that it not
only tells you who else posted the same bookmark, but it also tells you
how they tagged that bookmark so you can potentially easily subscribe
to that narrow topic via RSS feed. Not so with Furl, I don’t think.

He also suggests saving your own posts, which is something I had started to do with Furl
a while back. It didn’t last, however. The idea of going back and
tagging each post with keywords is daunting, but I can see the
reasoning behind it, I guess. It’s the index to the blog, more or less,
and I really like that concept. I do wish it was easier to retreive
certain ideas and posts that were written many moons ago now (I can’t
believe I’ve got almost three years worth of writing here…oy.)

But one obvious classroom use of either Furl or del.icio.us is having
students subscribe to to one of the teacher’s topic feeds. What a great
way to disctribute information. Phil Windley posted something similar a couple of days ago:

I’ve found Del.icio.us to be a great way to organize bookmarks and,
using the RSS feeds, have my students follow what I’m book marking.
When I want to bring something to their attention, I can just bookmark
it in Del.icio.us and they see it in their feedreader. Very easy to do.

I think this whole concept has some great applications,
but I’m not sure my feeble brain can sort through all the different
ways to make it happen. I’m feeling like that overload point is near
again…

Maybe I should do a Podcast.

I know this whole I-Pod/Podcasting thing kind of strays away from the main focus of this blog, but it’s just been so interesting to watch the ways in which this particular little piece of hardware has exploded. And, I just can’t resist when I see people finding ways to adopt any of these tools into the classroom.

Hence this link to an article in Campus Technology about the ways that some professors are bringing the I-Pod into their teaching.

Several members of GC&SU’s faculty quickly rose to the challenge. According to Hank Edmondson, professor of Government, “My first vision for the iPod was to integrate music into a couple of my classes, so I started with War, Politics, and Shakespeare, downloading songs about war—from patriotic to protest—and adding some Elizabethan music. We also used the iPod to record the students presenting speeches they had chosen from one of the plays we were studying. After each reading, all of the iPods were updated for the benefit of the entire class; all of the students were made responsible for the material recorded by their peers.”

“Next,” Edmondson continues, “I incorporated the iPod into my freshman Ethics and Society class where I cover, in an historical organization, the leading moral philosophies. A big challenge in such a class is to convince the students that the material is relevant. The iPod is a tremendous help because I can choose a lot of popular music and associate different songs with different philosophies, showing the students how their own music reflects the ideas we are studying. Jim Morrison and the Doors were, by their own admission, influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.”

Now I think that’s pretty cool, and it’s a good example of technology improving the delivery of the curriculum. Not a big leap to think about how this might work on the 8-12 level either.

Here’s where to go if you want some more detail on how it all works.
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(via Stephen Downes) This is why I love the Internet and Weblogs…well, one of the reasons, anyway. Something new comes along (Podcasting), a bunch of people start throwing stuff at the proverbial wall to see what sticks, the meme spreads like the disbelief around the world at the results of our election, and someone like Steve Sloan at San Jose State University cranks up Edupodder.com to filter it all for us.

I have been thinking a lot of the potential of the medium. I really think there is something here for education!

In my opinion Podcasting is a great tool:

for distance learning

to facilitate self-paced learning

for remediation of slower learners

to allow faculty to offer advanced and or highly motivated learners extra content

for helping students with reading and/or other learning disabilities

for multi-lingual education

to provide the ability for educators to feature guest speakers from remote locations

to allow guest speakers the ability to present once to many sections and classes

to allow educators to escape the tedium of lecturing

to offer a richer learning environment

Way too much fun…now, if he just had an RSS feed.
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Aaron Campbell has some pretty interesting ideas for implementing some of these tools in his classrooms. He’s an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher who’s doing some great thinking about how to make all of this work. With Podcasting, for instance:

I just listened to Dave Winer’s Nov. 1st podcast this morning as he rambled on about this and that and I realized that it would valuable to produce a short 10-15 min weekly broadcast designed specifically for my students; one in which I could speak naturally about extensions on the various themes and topics covered in class while introducing relevant phrases and recycling vocabulary, not to mention current events, music, and movies. Not only could I present a link to the Mp3 file on the web, but I could also email it to their cell phones if they so wished. Now, if I only had an iPod…

(Btw, if you want a pretty decent rundown of Podcasting and some ideas for using it, see this post at Contentious.)
Aaron’s got ideas for flickr and wikis that are worth checking out as well.
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