Ok, so I know that Weblogs can be about anything that their creators want them to be about. That's one of the beauties of the medium. And I know that many newspapers are starting to use blogs as a way of getting a more ground level look at local events and news. But I have to tell you, nj.com's "Beach Blog" about summer at the Jersey shore has a weird feel to it. Maybe it's just me, but it feels kind of, I don't know, strange to be reading stuff like this on a fairly well-respected newspaper site:

Unlike Dustin, with the taunting sunrise at the train station, I wasn't vertical until 10 AM and I didn't make it to work until this afternoon. So I thought that was brutal until I realized that Little Timmy, my Dublin-born coworker, rolled in about five minutes before I did, STILL DRUNK. We have given some thought to the numbers relating to our adventures. Our combined age = 48. Our combined blood alcohol level = probably around 0.48. Combined hours of straight drinking = 48. This could not be circumstance. It must have been fated.

Sprinkle some hidden camera shots of bikini clad girls walking the beach and, well, you get the picture...

Now nj.com has a bunch o' Weblogs that are maintained by local bloggers, and some of them are really pretty good (i.e. the Indy Music Blog.) But, and I'm not sure exactly why, this one just feels kinda creepy somehow.

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Posted by Will R. on 6/6/04; 10:15:55 AM from the On My Mind dept.

Wednesday night my daughter Tess decides to jump off the swing at a local park and see how far out she can get. Fun! She lands right arm first into the wood chips, all of her 55 pounds coming down on top of it and her elbow dislocates at an horrendously ugly angle. Not fun! We drive to the local emergency room where we get various opinions on how many bones are broken and what's not supposed to be where before an pediatric orthopedist comes in to try to put everything back together. After pretty much writhing in pain for three hours they give Tess some morphine and she immediately starts sticking her toungue out at me calling me a knucklehead. An hour later, "consciously sedated" (asleep with your eyes open,) I watch the doctor try to "manipulate" the elbow back into place. Every now and then, Tess moans. I do too. More sedation. More pushing and pressing. More doctor shaking head while looking at x-rays. Can't get it right. Finally, at 11 o'clock, she splints it, tells us to bring Tess in to her office on Thursday, sends us home. Thursday, doctor says the elbow still is not right. She'll need to admit Tess to the hospital for more manipulation but most likely surgery. I say "Now hold on thar, doc" or something like that, get on the phone and call my athletic trainer friend. She says, uh-uh. "Call CHOP!" (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.) I get a Friday morning appointment with a orthopedic doctor who specializes in club foot. But at least it's children's club foot. We fight rush hour traffic, get to the hospital, meet the doctor who takes one look at the new x-rays and says "the radial ulnal forearm osmosis..." or something like that, showing us a bone that's pointing in a direction about 15 degrees away from where it should be. "No worries," he says. "I have a specialist friend who loves kids elbows!" He e-mails the x-rays (gotta love this technology thing) to the elbow doctor who says "Surgery at 3 p.m." He'll try to "manipulate it" but may have to "make a small incision" to get things right. Worst case...hardware. (Hardware?) Oy. Tess, who I have now officially decided is one of the most incredible children to ever walk the Earth, gets prepped with a smile, then sits and watches Clifford while we meet about half a dozen nurses, anesthesiologist, co-surgeons, etc., all of whom understand the mental state of white knuckled parents watching their baby go into the operating room for the first time ever. Finally, we give Tess a kiss, and she walks hand in hand with a nurse through a big, push the button on the wall automatic door into the OR. Oy, yoy, yoy (as my Swedish grandfather used to say.) We go to the waiting room filled with other whiteknuckled parents, eat really bad fast food from the cafe, and wait for about 75 minutes until doctor comes out and flashes the the thumbs up. "We got it back without having to open it up." Yay! He shows us new x-rays and says "the radial ulnal forearm osmosis all better..." or something like that. Half hour later, Tess gets out of recovery with a pretty blue cast, has a really bad orange slurpy, calls us both knuckleheads. We go home, eat dry toast and apple juice, and fall exhausted in a heap. She's ok.

This parenting stuff is tough...

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Posted by Will R. on 6/5/04; 2:36:28 PM from the On My Mind dept.

(via Jenny Levine) It was a nice surprise to see that the library at Ohio U. has caught the blogging bug. They actually have four variations on the theme, an idea I'm in the process of stealing for another project. I'm really amazed by the number of libraries that are starting to do this, though it does seem like a pretty natural fit.

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Posted by Will R. on 6/3/04; 2:00:25 PM from the On My Mind dept.

A pretty good overview from the Times, but has anyone seen RSS spelled "R.S.S." anywhere else? They're so proper those Times techies...

R.S.S. may become an invaluable Web tool, but at the moment there are still a few kinks to work out. To add R.S.S. channels, for example, you have to look at Web sites for orange buttons labeled R.S.S. or XML. After you click on the button, you usually have to cut and paste the address of the feed into the reader software. Some reader programs can grab some feeds automatically, but it's hit or miss. Furthermore, finding new R.S.S. sources takes time.

(And don't forget, if you want to snag almost any New York Times story from the jaws of the paid archives, just go to the NYT Link Generator and create a permanently free URL for Times content.)

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Posted by Will R. on 6/3/04; 4:57:53 AM from the RSS dept.

"From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only. "
--Elizabeth Daley

I added a new "Literacy" department today as it seems like this concept is getting more an more of my attention. Part of it is due to Lawrence Lessig and his book Free Culture, which is literally keeping me awake at night thinking about its implications for education. I want to explore some of those ideas further here in a kind of brain dumpy, random way as there is much to get my brain wrapped around and I do, after all, have all of this digital paper to use up.

Early on in the book, Lessig includes a definition of media literacy from Dave Yanofsky of Just Think!:

Media literacy is the ability...to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the way it's constructed, the way it's delivered, and the way people access it.

Lessig emphasizes the importance of getting kids to learn how to "write" media, to understand its "grammar." This, obviously, is a messy process, one that I would suspect few teachers could accomplish well. "Few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is," he says, then adds later:

One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what has been created.

And he quotes Elizabeth Daley, dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television, who says:

From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.

As Lessig says, the crucial point right now is that the 21st Century could be both read and write, making the aim of this literacy to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express."

From my English teacher background, one of the most interesting parts of this is the expansion of the definition of literacy to go beyond the primarily passive relationship we currently have with the various texts in our lives. That's not to say that understanding text isn't important, but "reading" the text is no longer the only way that students can construct meaning. On some level, we've known that. We ask students to interpret with music or art or poetry or any other number of ways. But the major shift, as Lessig sees it, the NEW thing about all of this is what we've been talking about in this community since the beginning: publishing.

But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition—not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously.

He then goes into a long discussion of the potentials of Weblogs not just as a vehicle for publishing these constructions but as a way for people to engage in meaningful discourse that he believes could in some ways resuscitate our democracy.

Lessig's premise for Free Culture is that for creativity to flourish, we must be able to create derivatives of work that has come before us, to take old ideas and products and better them with our own innovation, and that current restrictions of copyright are drastically reducing the freedoms we have to do that work. In an educational sense, he quotes John Seely Brown of Xerox, who says:

Kids are "shifting to the ability to tinker in the abstract, and this tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you're doing in your garage. You are tinkering with a community platform...You are tinkering with other people's stuff. The more you tinker the more you improve." The more you improve, the more you learn. This same thing happens with content, too. And it happens in the same collaborative way when that content is part of the Web. As Brown puts it, "the Web [is] the first medium that truly honors multiple forms of intelligence."

Lessig says "tinkering with culture teaches as well as creates."

Now I know this constructivist sentiment is nothing really new here. In fact, to me, one of the most powerful potentials of this is the idea that kids can now contribute to the larger body of knowledge, that the meanings they construct can be shared beyond the classroom. It moves away from the old "what does the teacher want?" game to "what is the truth here, what is the importance of this content, and how can I construct my own meaning that contributes to a wider understanding of it?" Or something like that. And that's powerful stuff. For instance, look at Ken's response to my post yesterday.

Couldn't a good science teacher and a group of willing students make a dynamite wiki site teaching themselves and providing resources for others to learn these powerful incidents in the history of science? Wouldn't you learn pretty much everything you need to know to pass the test in the process of making the site? And couldn't you very nicely use a group weblog to support the question-asking and the stages of inquiry that lead up to the wiki presentation? Couldn't a decent educational researcher run up some test scores on pilot and control groups and see if the software, approached rightly, deserved a place on the list of best practices?

Why can't blogs and wikis raise test scores? They can certainly facilitate the teaching of the core content standards, and they can potentially make learning more meaningful. And yes, we need some research.

Enough for now. I haven't even gotten to my initial point which was something about how in concert with this new media literacy of active, constructive learning, there is an Internet literacy which deals with blogs and wikis and rss and the like. If we want to achieve the vision, we need to understand the tools. Maybe tomorrow...

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Posted by Will R. on 6/2/04; 4:24:13 AM from the Literacy dept.

Anne posts some great links from the burgeoning land of blogging research which seems to be expanding steadily every day. These latest are from an online journalism group at the University of Texas. There is some good stuff here for those into the journalism angle of blogs and wikis (like me) and more general classroom teacher. Add it to some other recent articles and we might actually be getting close to a body of knowledge in terms of classroom blogging.

Unfortunately, however, very little of this research applies to the K-12 level where the rules and restrictions are dramatically different from college. And, as a friend recently wrote in an e-mail "If there was substantial evidence to prove blogs raise those [test] scores...you'd have a mad rush and EVERYONE would be taking the time to learn how to use this new medium effectively in the classroom."

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Posted by Will R. on 6/1/04; 11:17:48 AM from the On My Mind dept.

(via Rick Barter) Samantha Blackmon at Purdue offers this reasoning behind her use of Weblogs with her students:

There are many reasons for blogs in the classroom. The one that stands out for me most as I use a blog in my summer gender and literature class is that students get the opportunity to write about the texts that we read and to see and respond to what others in the class are writing. They seem to find affirmation that they are puzzled by, frustrated with, amused by, or totally hating the same things about the texts.

She has a class blogging about Pride and Predjudice that gets to some of what she describes.

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Posted by Will R. on 6/1/04; 10:05:23 AM from the Classroom dept.

I feel really fortunate to have been asked to present at the Building Learning Communities conference hosted by Alan November in Boston July 20-22. The cool thing is that there are a number of K-12 educators who will also be presenting including Kathy Schrock, who was one of the first resources I relied on when bringing the Internet into my classrooms. And, Amy Pearl, who I met at NECC last year when she was with Intel, will also be presenting.

My two workshops are tentatively titled "Weblogs in the Classroom" and "New Internet Literacies." I have a feeling there may be a conference blog up and running as well.

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Posted by Will R. on 6/1/04; 5:16:45 AM from the On My Mind dept.

Here's the most comprehensive list of libraries using Weblogs that I've found yet, and the best part is that each section comes with its own RSS feed. Glad to see that Pat's library and mine made the list.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/30/04; 5:23:30 AM from the Weblog Links dept.

Every now and then my Google News search RSS feed for "school weblog" pops something semi-interesting into my aggregator, and today this is what showed up. It's less about students blogging for educational purposes as it is about bloggers who happen to be students, but there was one part I thought was kind of relevant:

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi recently reminded Malaysians of the importance of mastering a good command of English for better competitiveness on the international stage. Now, more than ever, improving English language skills is high on the agenda.

While English lessons might a be slog during school time, creative writing in the form of a blog can prove to be a promising and interesting way for students to hone their reading and writing skills.

Some bloggers do not actually feel that blogs contribute at all to the development of English skills. Going back to basics, the blogger of Chong Hwa Lifestyle (chonghwa.blogspot.com) points out that there is no teacher to correct grammar and spelling mistakes.

I think I'm going to have to meet with the World Language teachers and get them blogging with their students in French or German or Spanish...Seems like a great way for them to practice their skills.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/30/04; 5:05:40 AM from the On My Mind dept.

(Via JD Lasica) Since I'm immersed in the latest Lessig book "Free Culture," (which is free for download, by the way,) I thought this piece in the Boston Globe was especially interesting. It's a total shift to believe that giving your stuff away can actually increase sales of the traditional forms, but it certainly is the case with me. I bought Lessig's book. And I've purchased the CDs of at least a dozen artists who I first heard through some p2p vehicle. Kind of flies in the fact of common sense, but I think for right now, despite the generation of mix and burners that are coming up, books and CDs and the like are just easier. I don't particularly want to find all the songs, rip the CD, find the lyrics and liner notes, format them, print them, get the case...at some point it just gets easier to drive to my locally owned record shop to buy the darn thing. And even though I spend a large part of my life reading online, I still haven't been able to replace the feel of a book in my hands, one that can hold all my jottings and ideas. Someday, when it becomes easier to annotate with a computer, I may make the switch. But then what will I do with all those shelves?

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Posted by Will R. on 5/30/04; 4:37:28 AM from the On My Mind dept.

I just realized that there was a lesson plan to go along with today's article in the Times about Weblogs.

In this lesson, students critique three Web logs, each of which offers first-hand accounts, but reflect different points-of-view, on the war in Iraq. They then write a response to one of the entries and analyze what they learned about the war from the blogs.

And I like the follow up questions they ask:

--What makes a "bloggable moment" for you?
--Do you think constant blogging indicates signs of an unhealthy obsession or spirited pastime? Why?
--What makes another person's blog worth reading?
--By what "rules" do you think fellow bloggers should abide and why?
--Do you think most bloggers intend to have conversations with themselves, or intend to communicate their thoughts widely? Why might that matter to a blogger?

Looks like a great introduction for students and teachers to use in the classroom.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/27/04; 6:30:40 AM from the Blogging dept.

The New York Times takes an in depth look at the psychosis of blogging, and I'm afraid to say that it cuts a little to close to home.

Where some frequent bloggers might label themselves merely ardent, Mr. Pierce is more realistic. "I wouldn't call it dedicated, I would call it a problem," he said. "If this were beer, I'd be an alcoholic."

Well, maybe not that close to home. I mean I did manage to go for three whole days without posting when I was on my wet and rainy outdoor adventure last weekend. And I swear I was only shaking from the chill, not withdrawal. Really. I'm serious.

A couple of people have asked me recently how much time I spend doing this stuff and I sheepishly mumble something like "more than I should" or "too much." But I also take comfort in the fact that there ain't too much navel gazing going on here, and that every now and then someone lands in my in-box sharing their classroom blogging experiences or asking questions. I doubt that would happen if I was writing about the way it's taken two weeks to clear the Wild Rose and weeds off this pitched slope behind our house and how it took four truckloads of mulch to prep it for planting this ground cover stuff that looks like a bad haircut and...you get the idea. And frankly, I don't really get the blog as personal journal/daily travails thing anyway. I still like paper for that stuff.

But golly, you read the Times piece and you'd think that we're all a bunch of self-obsessed geeks who climb into our closets with our laptops for a regular fix at the expense of our families, colleagues and even countrymen.

I really take exception to the last one.

Note: This seems to be one of those flaky Manila posts where comments don't work. Click here to read Jeremy's response.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/27/04; 4:38:28 AM from the Weblog Theory dept.

Ken's getting requests for blog training. I'd say he's worried.

Will there be a special circle of hell for those who teach others how to blog? What would the punishment be? I'm guessing that one would sit in front of a screen every waking moment and only see entries like this one on every site one visited: If you only read one post about llamas this year, read this one.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/27/04; 4:05:54 AM from the Blogging dept.

(via Jeremy) I'm happy to see Helen Barrett has started a Weblog. She is one of the best resources for e-portfolios out there, and I'm hoping her interest in blogs might lead her to explore how the two might work together.

Welcome to my first entry into the world of blogging. I'm not sure I can get into the habit of posting to a web log on a regular basis, but I want to give it a try, since this looks like a technology that is being used in reflective portfolios.

I had a sabbatical leave a few years ago to study electronic student portfolios and she was very helpful in my research. I'm going to have to add her to my Bloglines list, which by the way, has been growing much too quickly lately...I'm up to 80 edubloggers. May need to do some paring down at some point...

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Posted by Will R. on 5/26/04; 2:33:36 PM from the Weblog Links dept.

So this is good news...right?

Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a "very interesting phenomenon." He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can "get the information you want when you want it."

Substitute "parents," "teachers," "students" etc. for "customers" and at least Weblogs as school communications tool looks promising.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/25/04; 1:32:45 PM from the Weblog Theory dept.

Tom has been reading the end of the year wrap ups from blogging teachers and the reports are obviously not good.

It is a little painful reading the trickle of end of semester recap posts coming the self-selected early adopters of classroom weblogging. It'll get very interesting when the trickle becomes a flood. Will the negative cases overwhelm the positive? Will we collectively learn or just get discouraged?

Will the trickle become a flood? Are we just barking up the wrong tree with all of this? Will we still be at it in two years? Five? Ten?

Last year I was thinking blogs in the classroom were at the tipping point. But Joe Luft, who was one of the early adopters of Weblogs, was a bit more even headed in suggesting this was going to be a long road, one that faced a number of hurdles; access, time, risk averse teachers and students...and more. Pat Delaney, one of the earliest adopters, has really reigned in his enthusiasm as well, saying "the bloom is off the blog" at one point. And my own results this year have been a mixture of some really great moments and a majority of fairly average experiences.

But the thing is there have been enough moments to keep me interested. And I have a handful of teachers who are interested too because their students are showing signs of learning more effectively with the use of Weblogs. They articulate argument in writing, they synthesize what they have read and discussed, and they research more effectively when they are asked to annotate sources and information. Not that any of that can't be done with a Weblog, and not that it's happening across the board. But the dynamic has changed enough to be significant, and they want to continue to experiment. None of them have given up. That's a good sign.

And then there's Anne, who sees successes every day with her younger kids. Is she wrong when she says "The building of a community through weblogs is exhilarating. It's truly the best way to learn." And that's the thing. For Anne, and for me, this has become one of our greatest learning experiences. And that in itself is motivation enough to keep looking at ways to make this work in the classroom. Will it work for enough teachers and students to make it worth continuing our collective efforts? I guess we'll see. But I do know that a) there is a great deal of untested potential left in these tools, b) it's still relatively early in the blogs in schools narrative, and c) I'm still learning.

Blogging is work. Despite its relative ease of use, it's still a challenge because of all of the reasons and shifts we talk about in this community almost every day. We don't have time. We don't all like the transparency that blogs create. Early adoption is a risk. And on and on. But there's nothing different here than with any other new technology or process. If Tom had comments, I'd ask him if he's going to give up on all those programs that he's struggling with, that he sees potential for but that rise up and kick him in the butt from time to time. It's messy by its very nature. But by blogging his failures he's making the chances of success greater since he's sharing what he has learned. Teachers are doing that too. And I think on some level our collective experience is translating into greater learning for our students.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/25/04; 4:10:23 AM from the On My Mind dept.

No, not me. I've learned to take it slowly at my school as that's what is required. But Gil Chapman of Galloway Township (NJ) Schools has some major Manila plans.

Judging by the response so far we should have about a thousand blogs up and running by mid-point of next year. This will really prove to be an interesting experiment.

Sounds like me last year. I wish him luck, and it will be interesting to see if the realities of public school implementation play out differently for him. I keep watching Pat too as he slowly builds his school sites. From what I know now, I think the adoption by request model combined with some gentle nudging has gotten better results.

For instance, I'm going to go around to our sending districts this summer and train all the Social Studies teachers how to use the articulation site we've been building. (It needs a little sprucing up, I know.) And our work on our Website continues which, when completed, will hopefully get even more teachers involved. It's a slower process than I would have liked, but it's moving forward, and that's what's important at this juncture.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/24/04; 2:16:54 PM from the Weblog Theory dept.

I'll be out of blog for the next few days as I join a bunch of my college buddies for a three-day, two night float down the Saco River in Maine. The weather is iffy, the mosquitoes are probably going to be nasty, and this morning it was 39 degrees...paradise awaits. (BTW, we do have a blog for this event, but I would surely lose every ounce of respect I may have by linking it here...) Back on Tuesday, with any luck.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/20/04; 7:35:43 AM from the On My Mind dept.

(via Ray Schroeder) In light of my weekend at I-Law, I'm not surprised at the news that 53 percent of kids admit to downloading music even though 88 percent of them know its protected by copyright. But what did surprise even me was this:

But only 18 percent of the students surveyed said they learned about copyright law from a teacher or other educator.

That's just amazing. And as I said the other day, it's indicative of the changes that we need to make in our classrooms when it comes to helping kids understand and manage everything that the Internet means, from research to news gathering to p2p to community. In my perfect school, it's a mandatory course on Information and Internet Literacy covering media and blogs and p2p and all that stuff. But that means that more and more teachers need to become literate in these areas too, and in turn, they need to model effective an appropriate use. This quote could have come out of my mouth, too:

"I believe students understand the concept of copyright, but have few models of appropriate behavior to follow," said Jim Hirsch, associate superintendent for technology at the Plano Independent School District in Texas. "Xeroxing of printed works, videotaping, 'TiVo'-ing, ripping CDs, scanning, et cetera, are all techniques used in the workplace and at home by adults--which provides the illusion of appropriate use."

Maybe it's a course kids could take WITH their parents...

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Posted by Will R. on 5/20/04; 7:19:19 AM from the Classroom dept.

Had a visit from Jeff Jarvis yesterday, blogger extraordinaire and Blogger Con alum, and we threw around some ideas about using my school's communications program and some local entities to create a framework for producing local news and feature content for the Web. It's a great idea, and if it works, it'll give me a chance to do some blogvangelism to my own physical community, which would be very cool. And, I've been talking about local blogging ideas with Warren Buckleitner who is the editor of the Children's Software Review and the founder of Mediatech, which is a local walk-in computer center above our public library. (He's got the coolest project running tomorrow and Saturday, by the way...a 33-hour flight sim to commemorate the 77th anniversary of Lindbergh's trip across the Atlantic "piloted" by a group of local students.)

There are so many possibilities for getting people involved in this that it's mind boggling. I would be too much fun to work with Jeff and Warren and others to create a real local blogging, videoblogging, moblogging, whateverelseblogging community out here in beautiful (and I mean that) western New Jersey. Now, if I could just find where they keep the "I can make it on three hours of sleep a night" formula...

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Posted by Will R. on 5/20/04; 6:37:19 AM from the On My Mind dept.

Time, ESPN, E-mail...what could be next to make it to the feed trough? Actually, that's probably something I don't want to think about too long...

Most interesting in all of this to me is the "Top Rated Time Covers" feed. Like, how often is that going to change???

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Posted by Will R. on 5/19/04; 2:32:34 PM from the RSS dept.

This piece by Charlie Lowe and Terra Williams articulates a host of reasons why writing teachers should seriously think about bringing Weblogs into their classrooms. It continues this great string of links lately that are starting to get to the heart of classroom use and providing the foundation for more widespread adoption. Very cool.

Just a couple of excerpts:

Student hypertext projects expand the concept of the public audience to include the entire web. Yet, weblogs as a social, public genre can have equal if not more appeal to a generation who enjoys seeing the private made public on Survivor and MTV's Real World, while also fulfilling the pedagogical goal of expanding audience outside of the classroom. When students hesitate to share their texts publicly--given the association of the word "journal" with the word "private"--an exploration of weblogging will clarify for them that a weblog is a public way of sharing ideas.

Using Delaney's "digital paper," we've found that blogging and reading blogs prepares students to write online. Weblogs can serve as an alternative to hypertext assignments, or even make hypertext assignments more effective. In our experience, students sometimes get carried away with the eye-candy of web site design--images, fancy layouts, Marcomedia Flash--at the expense of working on the alphanumeric part of their texts. Working with weblogs privileges writing: students are more invested in the writing that goes into end-of-the-semester hypertext projects when they've been writing for the web all semester. They learn rhetorical strategies for writing online before moving on to work with graphics. They also learn about how to make effective hyperlinks--a crucial part of website design and blogging. Thus, students spend more time developing their texts, rather than working mostly on graphics and choosing the "perfect" background. These texts likely end up being more rhetorically sensitive than without the intervention of the blog.

And too long to paste in here but well worth the read is the bulleted list of benefits their students got from blogging. Makes me want to get back in the classroom.

I'm definitely going to read and reread this and share portions of it with my English teachers. The sea is shifting here, slowly but surely. Maybe more on that tomorrow...

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Posted by Will R. on 5/18/04; 1:47:33 PM from the Blogging dept.

(via Micro Persuasion)

Whittemore said he thought a Web log will improve communication between ASG and the student body. Since appearing online, the ASG blog has received hundreds of hits its first three days -- with discussion ranging from an open invitation for a poker tournament to concerns about diversity in the student body. Students are invited to add questions, comments and criticism to ASG-related matters discussed on the site.

(Wistful sigh.) I just love this concept, but I know it would be a really tough sell here. Unless there was a way to screen the comments...which of course cheapens the whole process. Still, I wonder if a high school community would be served well by opening itself up in this way to the comments and concerns of its publics. To me, the long run answer is yes, yes, yes. The short term fears will probably prevent it from happening.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/18/04; 5:12:55 AM from the Weblog Best Practices dept.

From Userland CEO Scott Young's Weblog:

Don't worry. UserLand will continue to advance Manila. Manila 9.0.1 will be announced tomorrow. Yes, the future is assured.

Nice to know...

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Posted by Will R. on 5/18/04; 4:58:19 AM from the Blogging dept.

Ok, so I'll probably catch all sorts of crud about this, and I'm really not picking on Tom who is doing excellent work in figuring out how best for schools to employ some of this technology, but here are all the things I (or my tech people) don't understand about his latest posts on SUSE Linux becoming the leader in K-12 Linux deployments:

SUSE

Ximian

GNOME desktop

Mono project

Debian

Red Hat

Gentoo

YaST

KDE Desktop

Reiser FS

Fedora

Bit Torrent

Not to mention ZOPE and PLONE

Put all of that together in a narrative that highlights a series of installation crashes and burns and you'll see why I'm not ready to take that route.

First or all, who names all this stuff? At least I get Windows as a concept. And second, I know that most of these things aren't nearly as scary as they sound, and in Tom's world, they're second nature. And finally, I'm not saying that Linux and open source solutions aren't potentially better solutions for schools. But if you take my fairly high-tech, well supported (technology-wise) school as an example, it just ain't going to happen here any time soon. Call it dancing with the girl you brought to the prom (or whatever that silly metaphor is,) but Linux on it's surface just seems too "out there" when you've got something that works pretty well already, the resources to change are slim, and no one has any time to learn something new.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/18/04; 4:44:54 AM from the On My Mind dept.

If you have about five hours with nothing to do, head on over to Slashdot and check out this thread on the value of computers in the classroom. It stems from a review of Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind, which, from everything I've heard, deals a stinging blow to the whole technology in the classroom model. The stories of success and failure go back and forth, and the debate is as passionate as they come. But one theme that seems to run through most is that teachers are just not prepared to make good use of the technology they have. Now, that is not an indictment of teachers as much as it is one of the system that trains them. Personally, obviously, I think technology plays a crucial role in the classroom but only when the teachers using it have attained a fluency that allows them to be creative with its implementation.

And the great thing about Weblogs and wikis and the rest is that fluency is relatively easy. You don't need hours and hours of training to see the potential of this. I know we have a long way to go with multimedia and handhelds and the like, but provided they have the access, this is something we can do now. And I think if more people could engage their children and their teachers via the transparency that the technology provides, maybe people will be able to recognize the benefits more easily.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/17/04; 10:27:08 AM from the On My Mind dept.

I just realized I never got around to adding this often linked article at the Online Journalism Review which is really an interview with Dr. Kaye Trammel, Alex Halavais, Jill Walker and Cori Dauber.

Are Weblogs a passing fad or a revolutionary new form of communication and publishing? That's still an open question, but the presence of blogs in the academic environment makes it more likely that they'll survive and thrive in the long term. Educational types aren't just using blogs to teach or spread their research. They are turning their research lens on Weblogs themselves, whether the context is within schools of law, journalism, communication or library science.

Note: Kaye sent along this link to a wiki page for further discussion.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/17/04; 9:59:15 AM from the Weblog Theory dept.

Interesting, in light of our recent discussions, that Frontier, the server software that Manila runs on, will be released as open source. Dave Winer says:

And that's what I want to announce today. At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Not sure what license it'll use. There won't be any grand expectations of what kind of community will develop. Even if no bugs get fixed, if no features get added, if no new OSes are supported, it will be worth it, because its future will be assured. That's the point Ted makes, and that's my reasoning behind this.

Since I'm pretty clueless about the code, how about some help in terms of what this means for Manila users...especially the "future is assured" part.

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Posted by Will R. on 5/17/04; 9:43:57 AM from the On My Mind dept.

(Sorry for the repost...the link to the rest is now fixed.)

To say that I-Law was transformative for me would be an understatement. Put aside the opportunity to sit in some of the most revered classrooms in the land at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Put aside the star power of the faculty. Focus only on the ideas and the debates and the discussions that while not specifically focused on education certainly articulated revolutionary ideas for teaching and learning in the digital age and you'll understand how this weekend was one of the most profound learning experiences of my life.

It's hard to know where to start, but since it's so central to my concerns, let's start with Weblogs. There was a lot, and I mean a lot, of conversations about the potentials of blogs and wikis and other such tools that "democratize" the learning experience. (At one point it was noted that Jefferson would have loved blogs, but Madison would have discouraged them.) In fact, if there was one almost mantra that came out of the weekend it was "Just be a blogger." Read more...

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Posted by Will R. on 5/16/04; 1:19:37 PM from the On My Mind dept.