Yes, we are getting ready for our first release in a while. Look for the beta to be available early next week. Its Manila 9.0.1 and its easier to install, quicker to set-up, and prettier to look at then ever before. We’ve fixed bugs, improved the user interface, and added some features that make community hosting easier and more flexible. We have also updated the theme set, included more documentation, and made installation much easier. We still have RSS, Edit This Page, and powerful browser-based website configuration. Manila 9.0.1 also includes new website hosting options that can be configured on a per-site basis. Very Cool.

This is just out of the chute, and there are some more features coming iin the next few weeks. But consider what a tool RSS can provide to teachers, advisors, etc to be able to use a RSS reader to check on the status of a group of students' portfolios.

The ePortfolio has, in turn, come to be seen as a major tool in the pedagogy of student-centered learning and student-directed development; and, as a way for students to piece the fragmented nature of their varied activities and courses into a trajectory of their educational and professional development.

For bloggers who think by writing, blogging provides two vital advantages: an audience to help shape the writing and an archive of posts, some of which may be valuable in the future. Personal webpages often perform in a similar way, but the audience is far less defined. In our study, bloggers had "regulars" who they knew were reading their posts. The writing could be directed at them, solving one of the key problems of any writing, i.e., knowing who to write for. The fact of having an audience would keep the writing moving along, as the author knew that people were anticipating new posts.

Most bloggers are acutely aware of audience, even in flagrantly confessional blogs, calibrating what they will and will not reveal. Many bloggers explained that they have a kind of personal code of ethics that dictates what goes into their blogs, such as never criticizing friends or expressing political opinions that are openly inflammatory. Not that bloggers eschew controversy—quite the opposite—but they typically express themselves in light of their audience.

In one example, an instructor was able to create a community of learners:

Rob required students to conduct field studies on topics related to the use of computer-mediated communication within communities and to write weekly blog postings on assigned topics, as well as to read and comment on other students’ blogs. He hoped these assignments would “facilitate the building of the learning community by getting [students] in conversation with each other electronically.” And that is what happened. The students found that maintaining blogs and reading their classmates’ blogs created a sense of community that would have not been generated within a conventional classroom setting.

But another instructor was not:

Although the blog had many visitors, even some from the local press who wrote a story about the site, few commented on the posts. The blog functioned primarily as a website. Colleen noted that students did not feel moved, on their own, to comment, and without a course requirement calling for them to do so, they chose not to. As with other electronic media, blogs in themselves are not sufficient to build community.

The most authentic, grass-roots blogging community we studied was that of the poetry bloggers.

If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven’t done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?

The newest twist for me is that I’ve begun to incorporate blogging into my pedagogy, and have students keeping weblogs. In discussions with students about why so many (at least on our campus) are so uncomfortable with blogging and resistant, we had some provocative conversations about accountability - not everyone wants their words published online where anyone can see and you are held accountable for what you say. After that, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and allowed the interactive editor at our local newspaper to link my blog, with my real name, on his page of “local bloggers.”

“I appear to be writing an RSS reader.”
--Tom Hoffman

“Turn to Press for the official record, Blog for social context and Wiki for the public record.”

I've always had difficulty in understanding the usefulness of wikis, but I think I'm starting to get it. Funny thing is, I've always thought that it was too easy for people to just come in and muck things up. (My wife asked the same question when I showed her the Wikipedia post.) And sure enough, when I accessed the list of updates, someone had done just that, blown up the whole post. But about four minutes later, someone came in and restored it. Pretty cool.

Use a pull quote

Adam Polselli's unique blockquote style for showing code labels it as such (scroll down to see)

Adrian Holovaty's blockquote style for showing code highlights it & changes the font

Put quote marks around your blockquote content

Use a different font in your blockquote

Jay McCarthy puts a dotted line around his blockquotes

Easy self-publishing tool available to anyone with Internet access.

Enables publishing of snippets, less developed ideas, or drafts of works in progress.

A narrative of the development of a writer's ideas and memes which can make the invention process more visible.

Informal writing. Can be playful or conversational in tone.

Foregrounds the intertextuality of writing.

Invites/encourages peer response through comment postings on site and the posts of others on their weblogs.

Favors a collaborative, social constructionist epistemology in which writing is less of a solitary act.

As a journal which can receive feedback and response, can make keeping a journal more engaging and encourages daily writing.

Does not have to be conceived of as additional work. Invites the writer to share texts that they are or should be writing already.

Allows expression of the personal alongside academic interests.

Can be used to provide an example of the teacher-as-writer to students.

The second comes via Peter Ford who is participating in a research project called Web Journals in Language Education which looks to be a two and a half year study into the effects of Weblogs in the classroom. Very cool. The expected outcomes:

To popularise web logs as a medium for collaborative language writing.

To produce a publication discussing the theoretical rationale of the project, its realisation and outcomes, and cite examples of good collaborative writing practice.

To publish an open-source language-independent content-management platform which is reusable and easily installed and configured even by someone with minimal technical expertise.

To publish a corpus of writings created by students during the course of the project using the collaborative publishing platform.

“Blogging allows students to write about real topics that they have a real interest in. ”

When we looked at Edublogs in 2002, blogging technology was sufficiently advanced for common use, and general uptake was enthusiastic as people discovered this new, easy and inexpensive means of Web-based self-expression. However, many of these early adopters soon discovered that Weblogging, like any journal-keeping activity, can become a time-consuming chore - a good idea at the time, but soon outranked by other priorities; many bloggers said what they had to say, then moved on, abandoning their Weblogs to the cul-de-sacs of Cyberspace. On the other hand, while perceptions of the churn rate for blogs may vary , the figures seem to indicate an overall steady increase in the number of viable blogs of all sorts. In educational implementations in particular, adoption has been explosive as educators continue to seize upon the genre to support learning in many different ways.

Obviously, a couple of things are happening. First, RSS feeds (especially search feeds) are expanding my reading base, in fact I've added about 10 new feeds this week. Second, Furling and aggregating are making it easier to read, store and retrieve more good stuff. Third, there's more good stuff out there. I mean really, if you told me I absolutely had to pare my blog roll down to 25 educator sites, it would take a lot of agonizing over which ones to cut. Even the ones that have been more silent of late (most notably Joe and Pat and Pam and Seb and Sarah,) I still want to hang on to them in case the authors start cranking it up again. (I have to admit that I'm feeling some angst over the fact that so many of the regulars who I learned so much from early on have gone quiet. Not to say that there aren't some great new voices in the conversation, but it does give me pause...)

Even better, if there is one particular feed of mine that you want to subscribe to, just click the link and slap in your Bloglines account and you can follow along in my travels.

The idea is this: if students created a planning portfolio that contained their interests, plans and results of various activities they had done, couldn't we infer that they might be interested in a few very targeted online resources that related to those interests and plans? So I imagined that I'm in Grade 12 and I'm planning to take biology at Brown University next year. Would this custom feed interest me enough to want to keep coming back to check it occasionally?

Crawford Killian--My students, with a few exceptions, continue to avoid posting in their course blogs. My faculty colleagues are even more reticent. The blogs I left up last semester have been deserted by the students they were created for. So as a means of voluntary interaction, they leave a lot to be desired.

Aaron Campbell--We spent most of the time in class today discussing the difficulties of posting to our websites. Much of the recent inactivity on learner sites seemed to have stemmed from an uncertainty as to what was appropriate. One learner felt intimidated and confused about what to post. Another thought it was necessary to keep her posts academic and was spending 'three days editing' before posting. This led back to a discussion of what blogging was all about: process, not finished products and artifacts. The importance of engagement with the medium and what that entailed followed. It was postulated that consistent (meaning daily or every other day) reading, reflecting, posting, and commenting was important for generating the kind of cognitive momentum and conversational flow necessary for the greatest benefits to arise. The analogy of starting a fire by rubbing a wooden stick back and forth between the hands was used. If you operate in a stop and start mode, you'll never generate the friction needed to bring flames into being. This is similar to the practice of vicara (a Pali/Sanskrit word) for sharpening concentration. As with what we're trying to do, only by consistent and focused effort can one successfully incorporate blogging into our daily habits so that it becomes a part of the conscious mind and the benefits can follow. It only seems natural that in order for dialogue, conversation, online interaction, or 'wierd debate' (as James put it) to flourish, it needs consistent attention, energy, food. So it was recommended that these learners attempt to create a habit of posting daily or every other day, even if it be a just a sentence, an off-hand thought, or a link to another site. Eventually thoughts will flow and a greater level of comfort and ease with the new meduim should come about.

Another issue raised was that of public exposure. One learner stated that he was uncomfortable with how much to reveal about himself. The future consequences being 'too exposed' could be detrimental to his employement or releationships down the line. He found himself struggling with 'self-censorship', as he described it. This is really a dilemma, for what we think and say when we're twenty-one-years old might differ significantly from what we will be ten years later. Yet to worry too much about the image we are creating when we publish online, stiffles our creativity and voice. There are no answers, other than to be as honest and sincere as we can. Each person has to find her balance with that.

This makes me think about all the different blogging styles of our community. One of the reasons I started blogging was to improve my own writing. I've never really thought of myself as an especially good writer and it always takes me more time than I wish it would. I don't just get an idea and then have the ability to quickly write about it. I have to think about it, read more, reflect again, and then write. Then I reread and am never really sure if I got it down how I meant it. I figured if I wrote more, I'd get better and surely I would be able to do it faster. I'd like to think my writing has improved (although I think I'm still too wordy) and I don't think I am much quicker (and I would still love to have that skill!).

The hope is captured in the second chapter of Dan Gilmor's book (now up for review) where he says:

At the same time, services like Feedster and Technorati are helping us envision what amounts to a new architecture for tomorrow's news and information. They may enable "consumers" of journalism to sort through the opinionated conversations to assemble something resembling reality, or maybe even truth. We'll look at this architectural potential in more detail in Chapter 8.

All of this is especially acute to me right now in this election year since, in my humble opinion, reality seems to be sorely missing from the mainstream media. That's not to say it's 100% captured in alternative sources of information (Weblogs et.al.) either, which of course is where the sorting through comes in. But right now very few people have the skills or the mechanism (or the energy) to even collect enough information to have to think about it in any meaningful way. There's nothing to sort when all you watch is Fox News. But I'm a dreamer, and I think as people start to realize that they have some power and real choice over the news they consume, and as it becomes easier to do so, there will be a greater and greater need to know how to sort and process and find truth. And that can only be a good thing.

My editors and I are most interested in your immediate feedback on:

What's missing -- that is, a topic or perfect anecdote that absolutely has to be included.

More important, what's wrong. If there's a factual error I want to fix it before the book is published.

At any rate, here's the thesis for Dan's book, and I can't wait to read the rest:

September 11, 2001, followed a similarly grim pattern. We watched -- again and again -- the awful events. Consumers of news learned the "what" about the attacks, thanks to the television networks that showed the horror so graphically. Then we learned some of the "how" and "why" as print publications and thoughtful broadcasters worked to bring depth to events that defied mere words. Journalists did some of their finest work and made me proud to be one of their number. But this time, something profound was happening: news was being produced by regular people who had something to say, and not solely by the "official" news organizations who had traditionally decided how the first draft of history would look. The first draft of history was being written, in part, by the former audience. It was possible -- it was inevitable -- because of the Internet.

And Tom points to a post by a colleague who has started a new Drupal blog and is thinking about how all of this could work. More visioning:

This RSS stuff is quite cool. I've spent the last day sifting through blogs about technology, education, and educational technology and subscribing to their feeds for the "site cloud" and "news & resources" sections. I'm excited about the networking possibilities a tool like Drupal and RSS can provide for K-12 schools. I imagine a network of school websites, or portals, which are independently maintained but are interconnected using RSS feeds. Imagine a school district with a district site, and individual school sites. Info. from the district site RSS feeds to school sites, and vice versa. Top to bottom, bottom to top. Parents with PDA's or pocket pc's or laptops or desktops can get feeds from their school and stay up to date on happenings and news. (Is there an RSS aggregator available for PDA's, cell phones, or pocket PC's? Could be a cool new project to work on. The idea is exciting.

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...

Those of us who run school websites and keep personal weblogs are naturally interested in bringing the advantages of weblogs into our schools. Setting up a classroom with Blogger, or managing school news with Movable Type or Frontier have proven to be good starting points, but also have demonstrated to us that schools have unique needs that will require a special set of modifications to get the most out of the possibilites opened up by weblogging.

Yet the genius of the weblog was not in any technological leap, but in completing the last mile in the two-way highway the Web has become. The form favors individual voices and self-publishers, most of whom will have no media institution behind them, and no hope of profit. What they are after is free speech and the enhancement of public life. Or as Tim Dunlop puts it, "an environment where ordinary people can use argument to increase their knowledge."

On top of the Net was built the Web. On top of the Web sits the weblog and its mini public-sphere, (which Atrios and others call Blogistan) connected by links, public comment sections, search engines, online syndication (RSS), free and paid hosting hosting services, and indexes of popularity-- all the tools of the last mile. Now that it's up and running, the people formerly known as the audience, those we have long considered the consumers of media—the readers, viewers, listeners—can get up from their chairs, “flip” things around, grab the equipment, and become speakers and broadcasters in the public square.

The evanescence of weblogs, their tendency to disappear, is a major fact about the form; and some, like newspaper editor Tom Mangan, believe this is the critical thing limiting the weblog. It's hard to keep it going; it's more like a job than a hobby if your weblog is any good. This, he feels, tilts the field back to professionals, even though the means are there for amateurs to add a lot, and perhaps become professionals that way. I think we will begin to see that temporary weblogs can be effective-- event driven, for example. Also, that people try two, three, four weblogs before one "hits" and works. After a major crisis, like the next war, new weblogs will be born into prominence because they captured a mood or political moment. That most weblogs are abandoned is not an inherently bad thing. Most pitches in a baseball game never become hits; but we still have hits. For students, especially, the point is to try your hand at being an independent journalism provider. This in itself is a social and educational good.