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Thursday, March 27, 2003 |
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Manila Adventures. Well, it looks like Dave Winer is serious. Note the following from the Yahoo Manila Developers Group that he just started:
I want all sites to be news item oriented, unless the user specifically opts for a non NIO site. Unfortunately most of the themes we have go the wrong way. I want them to be news item oriented because: 1. All the other blogging tools, Radio, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc are NIO. 2. The nice editing tools and the blogging APIs are also NIO. 3. A lot of the complexity of Manila melts away with NI orientation.I'm thinking some serious development of templates that would lessen some of the configs I currently have to make. And then there's this:
So, after I get the theme done, I'm not totally done yet. I've budgeted about a week for a new page for managing your weblog posts, that works much like the "desktop website home page" in Radio, or the main editing interface of Blogger. I don't like the way Moveable Type does it, while they have lovely graphics, there are too many steps in creating a weblog post, their interface is klunky. I like simplicity, transparency.Now we're getting somewhere...no more News--Create News Item--Post to Home Page stuff? And did he say the "S" word. Hallelujah! Question now is should we all pony up with our Wish List for Manila for educators? I mean he IS doing this all for Harvard...we should at least be in on the potential trickle down. And on another note, he gives props out to Bryan Bell and his truly magnificent Kern site. (This is what I'm going to shoot for here.) But here is the really scary part...Bryan says:
This completes the transition to Manilaú we started 2 years ago. The homepage was last on the list, because we decided to do it back to front. We converted every department in the organizations and nearly all of our client schools. I must have trained 300 people on how to manage their Manilaú site.Ahem...I've got some work to do... 6:21:02 AM 
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Weblogs: Facts Are in, Spin Is Out. (via JD) Title refers to a section on the third page of this NY Times story titled "Reporting Reflects Anxiety." Quote:
But media experts say the rapid evolution of the form over the last week underscores a popular thirst for information that at least appears unfiltered by the anchors and editors of the traditional media. Bloggers are casting a wide net for information, drawing from radio, television, newspapers and even other bloggers from around the world.I don't think I've mentioned how absolutely cool it's been to be able to introduce Web logs to my students as a quickly becoming legitimate tool of news gathering and reporting. It may sound corny, but I think Web logs may do a better job of serving the gatekeeper function that the First Amendment gives the press if for no other reason that there is something less "produced" about the content. I know opinions abound, and that contradicts good journalism. But in this age of the message being owned by huge media conglomerates, we've been seduced into accepting mainstream news coverage as fact, when in fact it's all spun through the filter of corporate politics.
If you don't believe it, witness the recent censoring of Kevin Sites by CNN, Josh Kucera by Time, and the news that Clear Channel has been behind the Pro-Bush/War rallies that have been cropping up lately. I'm more prone to believe the unfiltered, unpampered reporting that independent journalists are now able to accomplish. And the best part is that even though they may not have editors per se, there are hundreds of Web loggers cum editors out there just waiting to fact check and poke and burn their butts if they happen to be wrong. That's what should be happening in "Real" journalism. |
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Adding to the List (Con't). One of the things I really hate about referrer logs is when something new pops up I can't help but start digging around and following links. I came in really early this morning to respond to my journalism class stories, but here I sit for half an hour looking new finds about Web logs and education. Sigh... Not 100% sure what this is, but the site name, bloggingcourse.com is intruiging enough. (No contact information that I could find through Internic either.) Looks like a class site, but not sure where or why. It did lead me here, however, to a site out of Australia that looks like it's carrying on a relevant discussion of e-learning at least with some mention and reference to Web logs. The author of this site is also an author of this 104-page .pdf titled "Blogs: Personal e-learning spaces." It's a little bit dated in terms of Internet time, but it highlights some of our usual suspects. Toward the end, page 99, the paper discusses their choice of blogging software used here, a site "dedicated to using reflective learning journals in a range of learning contexts" but that hasn't been updated for about a year.
And so now I'm gonna have to explain to my students why half their stories didn't get read...and I haven't even checked my aggregator yet. Not enough hours. |
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AAARRRRGGHHH!. This is what scares me most about Manila...Three times now my kids have been shut out of their sites because of this malfunction, and while I know how to get around it to access 98% of what they have, there's always some content lost. I've posted all over the place, but no one seems to know the answer. Really, really frustrating. Does MT have ANY issues like this? 6:20:59 AM
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RSS Feeds and Tweaks. (via "Jenny") The Feed Room has a list of a variety of RSS feeds on a number of topics, and I'm thinking that someone who starts putting together even more comprehensive directories of RSS feeds might get a lot of traffic. I just downloaded and installed "David"'s RSS plug-in that allows me to create separate feeds for all of my departments, a tweak that really opens up the landscape even further in terms of how to incorporate this into my classes and the Web site. Now, if I could just find a way to get the aggregator to show more than 24 hours worth of stuff AND to organize it by site...c'mon Userland...you're getting so close! BTW, does Radio aggregate differently from Manila??? 6:20:58 AM
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Changing the Tool?. "Sarah" weighs in with some good arguments for Manila, and "David" adds that the bottom line is making it easier. So let me ask this: If both of the front-running tools have their issues, then should I be choosing one based on my assessment of what the future may hold for it? From all accounts, MT seems to be getting more attention than Manila in development terms. But there is Kern, who is basically doing what I propose and who happens to have two of the major Manila players around working for them. And, that whole Harvard initiative that Dave is undertaking gives me a great deal of hope. He's using Manila. He's trying to implement schoolwide. I can't imagine that the Crimson-ites won't express the same concerns that we have(even though they are so much smahtah...) I would think that would bode well for development of the tool. On the other hand, the issues we have deal most with ease of use and intuitiveness, the basic building blocks of the whole system. Doubtful that that will become easier. This is a MAJOR decision for me now. I've gotten the superintendent's go ahead; I'm presenting to a board committee in early May. The planning time for this is enormous. Our current site runs on a UNIX box, but we're going to build the new site on NT. We have 3000 pages on our Web site, and I'm basically saying we start all over. We want to build an Intranet along with it. Gulp. Anyone have a quarter?
Right now, I need to get some questions answered. Things like will MT Pro allow people to create their own sites? Like how do you get an RSS feed into a Manila page? Like, again, what can and cannot be templatized in Manila and MT? (I swear, the thought of having to go in and configure a dozen settings in Manila for each Web log makes me crazy.) More to come, I'm sure. |
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Back to the Tool. George Siemens aptly boils it all down to this:
...most people seem to have a 10 second rule: If you can't explain it to me in a few sentences, I don't have time for it...question: do we adjust the tools? Or try and change the people?It is the question that I'm wrestling with right now, especially if we get the go ahead to build our Web site around Web logs (which the more I think about it the more practical it seems.) I think all of us Manila users have been encouraged by the recent smattering of development coming out of the Userland camp. And as I've said here before, I've gotten to the point where I feel very comfortable with Manila and feel like I can teach it fairly easily. (I'll find out again tomorrow when I start a workshop for eight teachers.) But "Joe" is right when he says:
Lots of teachers won't take the time to learn it in anything close to its current form. Simply put, it's more than most teachers need and the learning curve for a teacher not fascinated by technology is too steep. (It seems a bit like trying to kill mouse with a shotgun.) It's too easy to disparage a teacher's grumbling about its complexity as laziness and fear of something new.Sure, you can get to the point where posting with Manila is pretty easy (i.e my journalism students), but beyond that it takes a whole bunch of time to figure out how this thing works. And getting back to George's question, will trying to change the people make it any easier or more effective? The tool would be a heckuva lot easier to change. Here's how my thinking goes:
Either way, I have to make this decision fairly soon. |
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Selling Web Log as Web Site. I'm glad that "Tim" and "Pam" are sharing their most excellent adventures in the creation and marketing of the Web Log as Web Site idea. I hope to be following in their footsteps. Here is a good examples of a basic teacher portal, and Tim's got his principal generating some really relevant content for parents. The fact that they've taken it on the road to the PTA is the part that is most interesting to me at this point because I've been thinking a lot about the marketing piece of this. It'll be one thing to get the idea approved, it will be another to get teachers and administrators and parents to start contributing.
Also pretty cool is that Tim's got them using RSS to feed content to parts of the pages. This is my week to figure that out with Manila. That's really the coolest part of this when I think about how it might play out. |
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Open Source godless commies. Slashdot of all places provides some much needed comic relief. Just a taste from Evolutionism Propaganda: The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.This appears to be real. Is The Onion hiring? [Posted from my heathen iMac] 6:20:31 AM
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Meanwhile over at the eBN Guest Bar.... Terry writes: The state of affairs in my senior English class is mirrored perfectly in the tie I wore today. I looked down at mine at the end of the day to find that it had completely twisted around, fat end and skinny end alike in some oddly appropriate protest against the status quo. So goes my new work centered around the weblog. How or why would you do lesson plans when the work you do is project-centered? How do you keep them in the building when your work takes you everywhere? Why would you do research alone when you must do I-searches in order to get problems solved? Some students have even taken to "doing lunch" in the room in order to talk over their projects. This is not business as usual, but the dance of improvisation within form. It's exciting in the same way that being onstage for the first time was.
As usual, good stuff from Terry. |
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Thought on MT, Manila, and killing mice with a shotgun. Good to see Tim's comments on reasons to use Moveable Type; Mainly cost, (none) and extensibility. which are echoed by the Stanford Blog Project. In preparation for the NYC Writing Project weblog workshop this week, I've been tinkering with my eBN site (content coming soon). Manila is a very powerful tool but it's not for everyone. Lots of teachers won't take the time to learn it in anything close to its current form. Simply put, it's more than most teachers need and the learning curve for a teacher not fascinated by technology is too steep. (It seems a bit like trying to kill mouse with a shotgun.) It's too easy to disparage a teacher's grumbling about its complexity as laziness and fear of something new. While this may be true for some teachers it certainly isn't for all. Tim Lauer's work points to some interesting possibilities with MT and MT Pro may soon make it an even more attractive option. It's telling to me that to publish something in MT you click "New Entry" while in Manila it's not quite that simple.
The fact that we have to focus so much on the right tool and how we make it work leads me to believe we're still a long way from widespread acceptance. Folks are really pushing the envelope and doing some superior work right now and it IS fun ride to be riding the early wave. |
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Looking out the front door....  A noticeable increase in security around the city today. Cops on the subway, in the stations, and checking cars and trucks crossing the Manhattan Bridge a few steps from my school. I suppose it makes us all feel safer but it's a grim reminder of the weeks following 9/11.6:20:29 AM
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New Palm Zire?. A new Zire?. Rumor that Palm is planning a new version of its budget Zire handheld that will run Palm OS 5 and have a color screen and a built-in digital camera. 6:19:08 AM
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| Enhancing Education Through Technology RFP (IT-03-010) | Information and Technology - Mr. James Boardman | 03/24/2003 | Informational | Superintendents,Co-op Directors,Secondary Principals,Elementary Principals,Middle School Principals,High School Principals [ADE Directors Memos] 6:19:07 AM
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Sunday, March 23, 2003 |
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Palm Wi-Fi. More new Palm Rumor info. According to rumors posted in Brighthand's Discussion Forum, the Palm SG is developing a model that looks like the Tungsten W but includes built-in Wi-Fi wireless networking. It is also supposed to have 64 MB of RAM and Palm OS 5. Like the Tungsten W, it [palm - Feedster Search Summary] 6:27:43 AM
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New Palm Wi-Fi Model?. A WiFi Palm?. Some more speculation that Palm will introduce a version of its Tungsten W handheld that has built-in WiFi instead of a GSM/GPRS cellphone. [Gizmodo] Recently, rumors and speculation have been rampant about the Palm Solution Group's plans to release new handhelds. The hardware part of Palm Inc. had been expected to announce new models earlier this month, in time for the giant CeBIT tradeshow, but clearly this didn't happen. Yesterday, a company executive said that the Palm SG will announce at least one new model in the next few months. In a conference call yesterday, Judy Bruner, Palm's CFO, said, "We are planning a Spring product launch. Remember we launch products in the Fall and the Spring, but the launch will be in the second half of the quarter." Palm's current financial quarter starter March 1 and ends May 31, so new products can be expected between April 15 and the end of May. Ms. Bruner made this comment while discussing when new revenue might start coming in so, of course, she said nothing about the nature of this handheld. 6:27:43 AM
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Iraq. As War Tops News, Parents Unsure About What to Discuss. With the yearlong buildup to war in Iraq finally over, parents and educators are figuring out the best way to help children grappling with global issues. By Lisa W. Foderaro. [New York Times: Education] 6:27:41 AM
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Palms and doctors. US Testing Bioterror Alerts on PDAs [Palminfocenter] The US Government is testing a system to notify doctors and healthcare providers utilizing PDAs for transmitting urgent information about biological agents. The three-month pilot test is designed to gauge the best ways for federal officials to communicate with front-line clinicians in the event of a bioterrorist attack. The project will evaluate the use of a system created by ePocrates, the nation's largest physicians' handheld network, for sending an urgent "Doc Alert" message to more than 700,000 front-line clinicians, including more than 250,000 physicians?more than 40 percent of the practicing physicians in the United States. The test message will contain a special memo on the highest threat (category A) biological diseases/agents, which include anthrax, botulism, plague, smallpox, tularemia and viral hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola. The message will also include Web links for clinicians to go to for additional information about diagnosing and treating the conditions caused by the biological agents. Clinicians will be able to save this information to their PDAs for future reference. The pilot project will be managed by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and is designed to complement the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's existing Health Alert Network, which was created in 1998 and is used by the Department to communicate directly with more than 25,000 public health officials in the 50 states, eight U.S. territories and seven large cities. 6:27:40 AM
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Palm OS Blackberry type machine. Palm-powered BlackBerry clone.
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Saturday, March 22, 2003 |
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Web Logs from "Embedded" Journalists. Not a great deal of Web logs, but one cruise through some of these sites and it is apparent how much the Internet is changing journalism. What I am most struck by is the interactivity that journalists are practicing with their readers. Readers are getting their questions answered right from the ground. That's pretty amazing, I'd say. Once again, the Christian Science Monitor is leading the way. But I'm happy to report that New Jersey.com actually has a Web log running for breaking news. (This sets me up for the use of the Newswire site, which I'm planning to crank up again this week.)
Unfortunately, CNN pulled the plug on Kevin Sites War blog. And there is much discussion among fellow Web loggers about it. J.D. Lasica, who runs a great online journalism related Web log, has a pretty good rundown of the debate. Personally, from what I can tell, Sites may not have been as clear as he could have been to CNN about what he was doing. But regardless, there is no doubt that what he and other reporters are starting will change the way major events like wars and disasters and more are covered. 9/11 started it, but that was pure reaction. This time, people have thought it out. And there is no better coverage of this war than what you can find on the Web. |
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Aggregator Tweaks. With the slight hope that there might be someone listening, here's a little wish list for the Manila aggregator:
Anyone else? |
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includeHttp, viewRssBox, eTc. If I'm going to create a Web log as Web site that has things feeding from and to every which place, I think it's time to roll up my sleeves and start learning some more Manila. Trying to figure out how "Pat" funnels "Terry"'s column at the "eBN" site. I get that it's the RSS feed of a separate Web log that he has set up for Terry to post. And I'm also guessing that he uses the includeHttp macro to do it, though I may be wrong about this. Bryan Bell talks about using it for the Kern site, and I know there are some limitations. He uses it in conjunction with the printFriendlyLink macro, and I can get it to work on the Prefs-Advanced page here, but not on the home page. I think there is a CSS element that Pat is using too because I can get it to work but the text is all screwed up. Tried the viewRssBox thing too, and that worked better. It actually may be what Pat is using. The only problem is I couldn't seem to reduce the column width...hmmm. If anyone wants to take a look at my play space and send some help, have at it.
So much to learn, and when I have the time to play, I make some baby step progress. I still wish I could find the manual. |
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The New Journalism. BBC reporters throughout the Middle East are posting to this collective Web log. There's something really fascinating in the way this has been put together, and it just adds another chapter to the Web log as J discussion. 6:44:10 AM
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Yeeeee Haaawww. How cool is this:
Two new server-level preferences were released today for Manila's News Aggregator feature. The first is used to allow managing editors of Manila sites to subscribe to any feed they want by URL, without having to ask the server manager to subscribe the server to the feed. The second allows server managers to automatically subscribe to all Manila sites on the server, making them available for subscription by Manila site managing editors. Now I know I have no life, but I cannot wait to get into class tomorrow and turn them loose on this. News4Sites has a whole bunch of aggregated feeds that lend themselves perfectly for my kids' beat work. Just that fact that Jake is back at work with all of this makes me very happy, especially since my idea for Web log Web site seems to be moving forward. Thanks for the pointer to Greg, who I know won't mind when I quote his e-mail observation that this is:
Sounding more and more like a classroom dream...The Web based aggregator I've been wanting built right into Manila? Very neat. Now if they can just tweak the read out a little bit... 6:44:10 AM
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Historical Perspective on casualties: Battle of the Somme. Quote: "With the winter weather deteriorating Haig now brought an end to the Somme offensive. Since the 1st July, the British has suffered 420,000 casualties. The French lost nearly 200,000 and it is estimated that German casualties were in the region of 500,000. Allied forces gained some land but it reached only 12km at its deepest points." Comment: Off topic and I haven't really commented on the war to this point, but I'm struck by how few casualties there have been to U.S. and British forces. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British had about 20,000 men killed. 6:41:15 AM
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Blackboard 2003 User's Conference Handouts. The handouts/presentations are now available. Search for sessions you're interested in, then click into them if they have "Handouts available online", for example. Cruddy interface because they use POST requests (instead of GET) and so particular kinds of lists aren't linkable. The full program list is here. 6:41:12 AM
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Thursday, March 20, 2003 |
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Groupsense phone. New Palm smartphone from GroupSense.
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Bluetooth access point. Bluetooth access point.
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Virus exploits war psyche. E-mail virus exploits war interest. An e-mail worm is taking advantage of interest in the war against Iraq to spread over the internet. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition] 7:56:37 AM
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An insane society.... Bob Herbert in today's NY Times: It's an insane society that can contemplate devastating and then rebuilding Iraq, but can't bring itself to provide schooling for all of its young people here at home. Echoes of a more eloquent and broader treatment of these same ideas at The War We Have Chosen to Lose a speech by Arthur Levine. 7:55:45 AM
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Wednesday, March 19, 2003 |
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Looking out the front door.... A noticeable increase in security around the city today. Cops on the subway, in the stations, and checking cars and trucks crossing the Manhattan Bridge a few steps from my school. I suppose it makes us all feel safer but it's a grim reminder of the weeks following 9/11.10:55:47 PM
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CNN is saying Saddam Hussein will be appearing on Iraq TV shortly. 9:28:24 PM
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Text of Bush speech to nation. BUSH: My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. More than 35 countries are giving crucial support, from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honor of serving in our common defense. To all of the men and women of the United States armed forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you. That trust is well placed. The enemies you confront will come to know your skill and bravery. The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military. In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality. Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military; a final atrocity against his people. I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm. A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment. We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people. I know that the families of our military are praying that all those who serve will return safely and soon. 9:28:23 PM
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Tony Blair to talk at 10:30 EST 9:28:23 PM
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WASHINGTON - The United States launched war against Iraq (news - web sites) on Wednesday. "The opening stages of the disarmament of the Iraqi regime have begun," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) said. 9:28:23 PM
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Ed. Leaders using Palms in Michigan. Michigan Is on Mission to Make Technology an Integral Part of School Leadership. More than 1,000 Michigan school administrators are well on their way to making handheld technology an integral part of their school leadership. Palm, Inc. today announced that 1,500 Palm handheld computers and keyboards have been purchased for school administrators participating in Leading the Future, an innovative program dedicated to professional development in which technology is transparently integrated as a natural part of leadership. [Educational Technology] 9:28:22 PM
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Quotes. Pablo Picasso. "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." [Quotes of the Day] 9:28:21 PM
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Palm on Phones. PalmSource phones add BREW to mix. The Palm unit allies with Qualcomm to use the chipmaker's BREW download software to deliver games and other applications to cell phones. [CNET News.com] 9:28:21 PM
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Real Player for Palm OS 5 is out. The RealOne Mobile Player for Palm runs on newer Palm-branded OS 5 devices with ARM processors such as the Tungsten T. It supports the local playback of MP3 and RealAudio content from inserted SD memory cards. A plug-in for the RealOne Player for PC allows easy and seamless transfer of songs to the device 9:28:20 PM
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Sunday, March 16, 2003 |
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Knowledge Management in Schools. Jim McGee raises some interesting points about knowledge management that I think relate to schools very appropriately.
Craft workers exist to share the fruits of their creating. A true knowledge craft product embodies something of the soul and personality of its creator. You share it with others not so they can copy it but so that they can find inspiration in using it in their own craft. Weblogs hold so much promise in the organizational realm precisely because they amplify this connection between craft and creator. Your record is there to be seen and to be shared.It's an interesting line of thought, one that makes me see some very interesting potentials in schools. In the grand vision, the Web log becomes the school portfolio. It's informative, and its main goal is to share knowledge about the school, but it's also a collection of selected best practices of craft and thinking. It could be a place where teachers and community members and parents and others have a collective space to share and develop ideas. And in a community like ours in which most have access, the whole idea of using syndication to push content and in turn increase involvement just increases the possibilities.
The big question of course is whether or not schools really want community. Do we really want to share what we do inside the classroom with the outside world? Like our student writers, that's a scary proposition. It's potentially more hassle and means greater accountability. And more work. As always, a lot to think about. |
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Middlebury Musings. I'm glad that Barbara Ganley has been popping in here lately because it reminds me to spend some time checking out the goings on at Middlebury. And as usual, there is much going on to learn from. Barbara and I tried to set up a collaboration earlier this year, but it just didn't gel for some reason. Now she has some students in her Intro to Creative Writing class working with local fifth graders in their Web logs, and as usual, she's doing some very cool things. (Here's a link to her student Web logs as well.) Meanwhile Hector Vila is modeling another great use of Web logs as workshop, namely the Computer Training of Trainers Workshop. He's bringing together "students" from 12 Eurasian countries in a Web log setting to prepare them for a visit later this month. It's a great use of the technology. And Hector and Barbara also points to Digital Storytelling using Manila. Wild stuff, and very creative. Many, many ideas growing from this project.
Add that to the great work that "Sarah" continues to do at CET with Bryan (who is a contributor to some of the coolest Web logs out there), there is a lot of groundbreaking stuff going on up north. |
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Assessing Web Logs. Yesterday I had midterm grading conferences with my journalists. (Just for the record, I abhor grades, for a list of reasons too long to post here.) It was interesting to me how Web logs have changed the whole process, and it has me thinking more seriously about the assessment issues that come along with this technology. Most teachers using Web logs on the 9-12 level aren't using them as online portfolios/filing cabinets for all classwork. As with anything else, there are advantages and disadvantages to doing so. Since I haven't changed the content of my curriculum much from my pre-Web log days, the way I assess the individual pieces hasn't changed much. But with such a drastic change in the process, a whole new list of issues has come up.
The biggest advantage I have found is...(more) |
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RSS Redux. I want to introduce my journalism students to the concept of RSS and see what they do with it. The potential impact of RSS on reporting and news gathering is pretty huge, I think, especially for special interest journalists. Since I have my students keeping track of an individual beat, the addition of RSS feeds about their topics would greatly increase their exposure to and consumption of news in their areas. I think RSS has the potential to develop a lot of experts at an early age. Now the difficulty is that Manila has no built in aggregator yet, and most all of the other aggregators out there require a download of some type. That's not an easy task with student machines here. I can't put Radio on every machine in my room. The only web based aggregator I've found doesn't really suit my needs. If I could get NewsMonster on every machine...now that would truly be interesting. Kids could get content even from sites without RSS feeds. (It requires a new version of Netscape, too.) But what happens when classes change and I have new journalists sitting at those machines? It may be nothing more than changing the feeds, but it's more thinking than I want to have to do.
Anyone know of any web-based aggregators that do a bit more than just update content into a long feed once a day? |
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Adding to the List (Again). Seems like I'm doing this more and more these days...hmmm. James Farmer hits the ground running:
Having spent so much time thinking about & arguing for the use of blogs in eduction... figured it was about time I got myself one and started playing with the idea a bit more.It's interesting to watch someone else have all those eye-opening thoughts and "A Ha" moments that come with the newness of this...I'm sure it's happening a lot more than we know. 6:39:00 AM
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Web Log Idea #257. One of the best things about this technology is the possibilities it brings in terms of ways to bring different audiences together. "Anne" and I are starting our collaboration tomorrow. (Note: That page is a work in progress.) And as I've been getting e-mails from other teachers from all over the place, I'm thinking even bigger. Our school has won all sorts of awards for Electric Soup which is a long time electronic magazine featuring creative writers from all over the world. The staff gets hundreds of submissions a year and then they publish the edition using some very high level design and graphics packages. It's very impressive. But it's excellence doesn't foster collaboration among a diverse student population. You need skills to produce that stuff. (I know I couldn't design some of those pages!) It's a beautiful application of Internet technology, but in some ways it represents many of the issues that "Pat" brings up when he's talking about the "Digital Paper" that Web logs give everyone access to. So, what about this...a long distance Web log journalism magazine? One that focuses on a different topic relevant to school kids each month. Writers collaborating from around the country, moving through as writers, then Content Editors etc. Collaborative groups working on through production and design issues, giving feedback, writing and editing together. Each of them with equal access to all of the digital paper they need.
Nothing earth-shatteringly new here. But realistic. That's is THE BEST PART of what this tool offers...possibilities that were either too difficult or too cumbersome to pull off before just got a whole lot easier. I hate to sound overly dramatic about it, but this does change the landscape in so many ways, and now a lot of it is unexplored territory once again. Pretty cool. |
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Relative Paths in Manila. Thanks to "Karen" who via the "eBN" site explains the use of relative paths for stories created in Manila. Even though I understood the concept, I didn't really connect it to the need until I read her explanation. I know that Barbara Ganley does the same thing with her students at Middlebury, and I guess I've had some vauge idea of how to use it with my own students bouncing around in my head. But now I have to think about it more.
There is so much potential here, and I find my problem is that I want to do it all. "Terry" mentions a multi-author Web log with one managing editor, and my mind races with the idea of what editorial responsibility could teach my students and how to work it in and set it up. "Tim" is photoblogging and "Pam" is audioblogging and everyone is moblogging. The more I know, the more I want to try. I find my thinking comes in sporadic bits that either coalesce in writing here or on bits of real paper while I'm driving or in meetings or wherever. Hard to focus...I really need to get a life, I think. |
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Now Here's a Rec. The members of educational Bloggers Network ("eBN") are working to instill several generations of young people with the values and concepts of narrating the work, sharing their knowledge, and thinking out loud. By the time these young people enter the workforce such ideas will no longer seem foreign, outlandish, or wasteful. Rather, they will be seen as ways to do more, learn more, and earn more. We won't have to spend 90 percent of our effort just convincing people to share. The change won't happen immediately, and it won't happen soon enough to help some of us at all. But it will happen. And because it will happen we need to support efforts like eBN in whatever ways we can. These people are on to something that matters. We should help.This is definitely the kind of thinking that will bring all of this to more and more teachers and educators. Well said! 6:38:59 AM
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Adding to the List (Con't). Laura Rebecca at Garden City High School on Long Island has a Web log started for her Film classes. I think it's pretty interesting that many of us if not most of us took the same route that she is, starting with Blogger. On the "eBN" site, (which is looking mighty fine) "Terry" recounts the same route. It really is a very painless intro to the concept, and it really helped develop my understanding and thinking of the whole concept. I might have given up had I started with Manila! I'm wondering what, if anything, Google will be doing with Blogger in the future. 6:38:59 AM
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Tech Support HELP. In the last week I've lost two sites to the error message that says "Sorry! There was an error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "department" hasn't been defined." I can get to the sites by typing in the URL of a subpage, but the homepages all come up with the error. And all of the departments when clicked, produce the same error. Ken experienced the same message but was unable to get a fix. I'm going to post to Newbies, but if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. 6:38:58 AM
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Terry's world - a little context. Terry provides some context for what's happening with his growing project. My seniors are doing this in the midst of war fever (I have two guys who are subject to National Guard call up), non-existent tech support at the local level (but fabulous help at the eBN level), a first year principal who wants above all to keep his job next year and who is therefore damned edgy about any element of chaos in his tight little ship, and (take a deep breath) a near-mania for teaching to the test.A good reminder that teaching teaching and learning don't occur in a vaccuum and the importance of support networks like eBN. Terry also adds that Some days you are too busy bailing the boat. So far, the boat is still floating. 6:37:37 AM
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89,020 new teachers? How about a war instead?. See how much the cost of an invasion of Iraq could buy in your state from the National Priorities Project Database. Taxpayers in New York will pay $6,780.00 million for a potential invasion of Iraq . For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided : 89,020 Elementary School Teachers or 800,474 Head Start Places for Children 6:37:36 AM
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Elementary school ESL bloggers. Tim Lauer is working with some new elementary school ESL bloggers in Portland. 6:37:35 AM
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Free and Open Source Movements. Though cited elsewhere, I'll add another pointer to George Siemens' excellent articles on Free and Open Source Movements. Part 1 is History and Philosophies and Part 2 is Developing, sharing, expanding resources. Quote: The essential concept presented: we need open access and sharing of educational materials to provide an alternative to increasing pressures of proprietary content providers. Amen. Lots to think about here. 6:37:35 AM
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Tim's SF Report. Tim's ASCD notes are on his site along with a photo of the SF skyline and some familiar names with faces. 6:37:34 AM
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Riding the crushing wave of info.. Thoughtful, reflective post from Terry (as usual) over at the eBN guestbar: In a post last week I asked four questions to be considered this weekend. One of them weighs heavily on me: how do I manage the flow, nay, the flood, of information that will burst from the weblogs. Each news item, story, picture, gem is a discrete blob of information to be weighed by me. I have to decide where to focus my attention on what could become a crushing wave of info.
Good to see Terry bringing up these issues. I've been thinking about some of these questions as the year has progressed. |
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Playing with Nukes. Al Delgado is giving phpnuke a run-through (along with everything else he can download). Lots of great open source resources from "Al", as usual.
I managed to get PostNuke installed and running thanks to some tech support from Charlie Lowe of Kairosnews who kindly lent me a theme he developed for instructional use. |
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Saturday, March 15, 2003 |
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Seblogging: Weblogs as knowledge management tools. Quote: "If you want to apply Weblogging and personal Webpublishing as a tool for "organizational change" you might want to choose "groups" or "communities" as your unit of analysis. Like Lilia I tend to focus on the (networked) individual, but then my background is psychology and education... so what else would you expect? ;-) Here are my initial comments on Denham's points of critique" 6:23:43 AM
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Open Source Courseware and the LCMS marketplace. Quote: "I have spent most of this weekend wrestling my course materials into the proprietary courseware framework that our university has invested in. The system, called Prometheus, boasts what may be the all-time worst user interface I've had the displeasure of working with in many years." Comment: Compare this discussion arising out of frustration with Prometheus with this Learning Circuits discussion about the state of the LCMS marketplace. They're appear to be talking about different worlds, but should they be? Personally, I find the Learning Circuits kinds of discussions to be soul-destroying. There's little there that gets me excited. 6:23:42 AM
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The Subtle Knife: Blog*Diss: Blogs and Academics. Quote: "Blogs have emerged in academics as both an object of study and a tool for the classroom or personal reflections on teaching. These links sample both these kinds of blogs in an attempt to give a snapshot of blogs and academics" 6:23:41 AM
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A Comparison of "Clear" High Stakes States and non-high-stakes states on the NAEP. Quote: "This analysis showed that the clear HS states outperformed the comparison states on each of the three NAEP tests for the last four-year period. If my analytic approach makes sense, and if these results are confirmed by others, then I hope we can begin to study what these results mean" Comment: Interesting analysis. 6:23:41 AM
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The Chronicle: CSU PeopleSoft Costs. Quote: "In a scathing report released on Tuesday, California auditors denounced a controversial nine-year project to overhaul administrative computing throughout the California State University System at a cost of more than $440-million." Comment: We went live on PeopleSoft about two weeks ago. Now we're there, we're glad that we are, but getting there has been quite painful. I have no idea how much it has cost us. 6:23:40 AM
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ScienceDirect - Computers & Education : Sage, guide or ghost? The effect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Quote: "On average, frequent posting by instructors did not lead to more student postings, and the more the instructors posted, the shorter were the lengths of the discussions overall. On the other hand, while most students rated their educational experience highly, instructors who posted frequently were judged on average to be more enthusiastic and expert than those who did not. Clearly the number of student postings and the rate at which instructors participate are not simple indicators of the quality of forum discussions. We need to find more subtle measures of the effectiveness of asynchronous discussion forums for learning and teaching." Comment: Unfortunately, only an abstract. 6:23:39 AM
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Estrada: Content Management for Education. Quote: "Estrada is a dynamic content management and Web development solution. It facilitates the creation, production and distribution of large quantities of information over the Web by providing a secure way for individuals throughout an organization, regardless of skill level, to build, post and update their Web content." Comment: Another product really, but their specifications seems pretty good. I like the mention of 508. 6:23:37 AM
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CETIS-The one standard, LOM and the semantic web.. Quote: "In a lengthy and characteristically thought provoking presentation, Stephen Downes challenges both the need and the demand for just one Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard. That done, the very existence of such beasts as learning objects is called into question. We examine the argument." Comment: For some reason, my CETIS rss isn't showing as updated in Amphetadesk, so I'm just catching up on some stuff. Make sure you read Stephen's Response and a related post about the same meeting that focuses on learning communities. 6:23:36 AM
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TIGERS Bb 6 Training & Support Materials. Quote: "This site provides Blackboard System Administrators and trainers within the CSU system the means to create standardized training materials on Blackboard Version 6. The materials cover three main areas: Tutorials, What's New, and FAQ's and are provided in both .html and .doc format (cross-platform). Please feel free to download and modify these files as needed." Comment: Click Index - it's not immediately obvious. 6:23:34 AM
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D'Arcy Norman's Learning Commons Weblog: CAREO RSS Prototype goes live. Quote: "I just hacked together a quick and dirty RSS theme in CAREO. Doesn't do a heck of a lot yet, but it's been a real eye-opener on what else will be required in the theming engine."
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RSS for syndicating information about learning objects. Alan Levine posts to TLT-SWG and his message therefore becomes the property of Steve Gilbert's group? I've long had a problem with their copyright policy. The archives aren't even accessible to subscribers. Anyway, regardless of that, it's getting the idea out there and that's a good thing: ------------------------------------------------------
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Improving Learning and Reducing Costs - Pew Grant Report. Quote: "What follows is an analysis of the results of the Round I projects, with a focus on the most important quality improvement and cost reduction techniques used in the redesigns, the implementation issues they encountered, and the projected sustainability of the course redesigns. The Center will produce a similar analysis for Rounds II and III when they have been completed." 6:23:23 AM
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UA Website Redesign Project, 2002, UA Web Resources at The University of Arizona. Quote: "The UA Website Redesign was a project of the UAWeb Redesign Team, with guidance from the UAWeb Council, and input from the campus community. The Redesign project began in January of 2001 and went live in July of 2002" Comment: Lots of interesting documentation and links on a university redesign project. 6:23:23 AM
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Collaborative development of open content. Quote: "What I have attempted to present here is a model to enable small institutions with limited resources to collaborate and contribute to the knowledge commons, from which they can also draw content resources. The model includes assumptions and hypotheses that will become testable as more organizations become involved in open content development, so this model could act as a guide for future research on open content." Comment: via "OLDaily". We are in a situation where collaborative content development should make all the sense in the world, but has never really taken off. There have been some cross-institutional initiatives, but they don't seem to have taken off. I suspect that the tools have never really been in place, but perhaps people just don't want to share? 6:23:22 AM
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A litany of electronic journal trials and tribulations. Quote: "Electronic journal registering and access provision is an area where practitioners need never be bored by monotony. When one problem is resolved another appears to take its place. The resolution frequently proves only temporary however hopeful one may be at the time. The apparently resolved problem goes to the back of the queue and re-appears in due course, it seems." 6:23:21 AM
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Online Resources for Learning Japanese. I often think that the advice for Japanese beginners is mis-directed. Too often the focus is on writing and that starts with hiragana. While it's an immensely difficult language to read and write, it's drop dead easy to learn to speak (ignoring politeness subtleties). It's such a regular language. Also, for the beginner or visitor to Japan, katakana is much more useful than hiragana, because that's what menus tend to be written in. 6:23:21 AM
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Stanford ITSS: Blog Project Page. Quote: "As multidisciplinary work becomes more and more important to the sustained success of Stanford University, the tools available from ITSS must be better able to support such work. Weblogs are an excellent tool for supporting multidisciplinary teams, which is one of the reasons why we're considering creating a Blog service for all Stanford faculty, staff and students." 6:23:20 AM
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The Effect of Computers on Student Writing: A Meta-analysis. Quote: "Meta-analyses were performed including 26 studies conducted between 1992--2002 focused on the comparison between K--12 students writing with computers vs. paper-and-pencil. Significant mean effect sizes in favor of computers were found for quantity of writing (d=.50, n=14) and quality of writing (d= .41, n=15). Studies focused on revision behaviors between these two writing conditions (n=6) revealed mixed results. Others studies collected for the meta-analysis which did not meet the statistical criteria were also reviewed briefly. These articles (n=35) indicate that the writing process is more collaborative, iterative, and social in computer classrooms as compared with paper-and-pencil environments. For educational leaders questioning whether computers should be used to help students develop writing skills, the results of the meta-analyses suggest that on average students who use computers when learning to write are not only more engaged and motivated in their writing, but they produce written work that is of greater length and higher quality." Comment: My bs-detectors kick in with any comparative study. General common sense and history say that it's just not a very good question to ask. This article seems a little more rigorous than others though. 6:23:19 AM
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New Department: Blackboard. Having done a search for all I've written about Blackboard, it seemed appropriate to actually create a Blackboard category (maybe it should be LCMS?). In general, my categories aren't very useful, but this one might be. 6:23:18 AM
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2003 Blackboard Users Conference - Workshops and Vendors. One issue with the conference was the set up of the workshops and how crowded the sessions were. I'm pretty savvy and I missed that you had to sign up for the workshops in advance online. While the general schedule said that you had to sign up for them, the schedule didn't have anywhere to do that (for example). Apparently you were meant to read special instructions in the registration acknowledgement e-mail (you know, the one every registration process sends you and you just file away). When I got to the conference I found out that all the workshops were full and, like a good number of people, was a little upset about that. I did manage to get into an extra workshop that was added and got a reasonable look at the Blackboard Portal elements. It was at the end of the day and everyone there was tired and a little punchy, so as soon as we were given some degree of system admin access people started playing around, adding and changing funky system settings. I'll confess to changing the system colors to white on white (or was it bright yellow). Actually it was fun, informative and Kate Bishop did a good job. The vendors area was consistently busy throughout the conference and there were some interesting displays. Not many really stand out in my mind however. The publishers were there and I realize that they do differ in terms of whether they charge students for access to their course cartridges (hmm... we need a list that defines these features). We have had such an abysmal experience with student keys and course cartridges that I rarely encourage faculty to use them. If publishers are willing to deliver them as .zip files and with no separate charge to the student, I know I'm more inclined to make use of them. Integration is a very tricky topic, especially when it covers everything from a frame-based link to more advanced building block components. There were some tools worth looking at: Cyracle - an FAQ/knowledge base tool. Factiva - I actually had an interesting discussion with the guy at this booth, partly about Shibboleth, but also about how to make it easy to link to more permanent urls. In general terms I think our faculty (and I'd probably include myself) don't make as much use of our electronic library resources as they might. Why is this? I suspect that it's partly a usability issue - Google's one search box versus the weirdnesses foisted on us by an assortment of database vendors. The other part is that it's just another thing to do and not integrated with other web experiences. One company - Brownstone - was selling a more sophisticated quiz/question tool. I was quite impressed by the technology, but some of the improvements in version 6 (better data reporting, equation editor, etc.) will put pressure on them. ...man, I need a coffee... There were the usual hardware and software vendors: Dell, Compaq/HP, Sun, Microsoft, and apparently HP had a wireless network they were giving people access to, but the range wasn't very good I understand. For such a conference, the connectivity was pretty good, but there was always a queue at the cybercafe. Marriott's working on improving the situation, albeit at ridiculous prices (scroll down). I was chatting with the Dell guy about their image server (this?) and he remarked that we were installing it next week. :-) One of the building blocks demos was for an online student journalling tool - fairly limited, private between instructor and student, and course-specific, but interesting nevertheless (see the first item here). Another was from an outfit from the Netherlands (of whom there were many in attendance), who put a problem-solving interface into Blackboard. The conference overall was organized on a "track" basis. However, my impression was that there were mostly system administrators there (of course those were the sessions I attended) and that teachers and frontline users could benefit from a conference focused on their needs. I also felt that that the whole Transaction element was of limited interest, but took up a good chunk of space in the program. I would have welcomed more detail on building blocks and hands-on experience with actually creating them and talking with developers. Mind you, that would be a conference that suited just me. I missed the Blackboard 6 session arranged via the ASU list, which sounded like it went very well. I'm sorry about that. I still don't know when and where will the conference presentations be online? Perhaps it will be on the ASU List. Oh, another technical note I forgot to mention. While they currently have a separate multi-lingual version of the product (currently at 5.6 I think), they're going to move to unicode over the medium/long term. That should fix lots of niggling character issues that I'm constantly having to help faculty with. In that vein, I wonder if they'll do something with HTML-code validation as well? That's about it. I probably need to write up a more "official" report too, but I think this report is very "weblogg-ish" as it's more off the cuff, but hopefully gives a good sense of the conference. 6:23:17 AM
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1 GB SD Cards... Wow.. SanDisk has announced that it will release a 1 gigabyte SD card later this year. It will also release a 4 GB Compact Flash card and a 128 MB MMC card. 1 GB SD CardWith a gigabyte of space, consumers will be able to store up to 30 hours of digitally compressed music, more than 320 minutes of MPEG-4 compressed video, or more than 1000 high-resolution digital images. It uses one gigabit NAND flash memory chips, based on patented multi-level cell (MLC) technology pioneered by SanDisk. MLC allows two bits of data to be stored in one memory cell, doubling memory capacity. The 1 GB card will have a suggested retail price of $330 when it's available in the third quarter of this year. SanDisk also announced a 512 MB SD card that is expected to be available in the second quarter for $170. Panasonic is expected to release a 1 GB SD card in the fourth quarter. No one is currently offering an SD card of this size. 6:22:59 AM
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Educational technology investments. Report: America's $40+ Billion Investment in K-12 Education Technology Potentially At Risk - Benton Foundation. The Benton Foundation and the Education Development Center's Center for Children and Technology (CCT) released their latest report, The Sustainability Challenge: Taking Edtech to the Next Level, over the Internet today. In the last 10 years, the United States has invested over $40 billion placing computers in schools and connecting classrooms to the Internet; the report cautions that this massive investment in educational technology, or edtech, may be at risk. [Educational Technology] Worth noting.... I will have classes read this. 6:22:58 AM
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MiniSD Cards. miniSD.
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EDMD 6883 Handheld Instructional Technology. Reference link for class 3.13.03 6:22:55 AM
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Samsung SGH-i500. Samsung has announced the SGH-i500, a smartphone that runs Palm OS 5.2 and includes an integrated digital camera. This device contains several features not seen on any Palm OS model before, smartphone or not.
This is the first device to be announced that will run the latest version of the Palm OS, which includes the new Graffiti 2 text-entry system. It will have 32 MB of RAM and 32 MB of ROM. The only other Palm OS device announced so far with more than 16 MB of RAM is the Garmin iQue 3600, which isn't available yet. The SGH-i500 will run an Intel PXA262 processor at 300 MHz, the fastest processor yet seen on a Palm OS model. This smartphone will include an integrated 330 thousand pixel camera capable of taking 640 by 480 pixel images. It also has a built-in flash. This model has a clamshell shape, with the phone keypad and buttons on one side and the screen on the other. There is a second small screen on the outside.
This device appears to make use of virtual Graffiti, as it doesn't have a dedicated Graffiti area. The SGH-i500 has an SD slot for extra storage. This is SDIO compatible, so it can use non-memory peripherals that plug into the SD slot. As a mobile phone, it runs on GSM/GPRS (900/1800,1900) wireless networks, which means it can be used worldwide. It offers both voice and data capabilities. Its battery is replaceable. The standard 1100 mAh battery will offer 200 minutes of talk time or 100 hours on stand-by. A 1700 mAh battery will also be available. This device is 3.5 by 2.2 by 1.0 inches and weighs 5.3 ounces. The SGH-i500 will be available in the third quarter of this year and pricing will be up to the mobile carrier. 6:22:54 AM
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Its main screen is a 320-by-353 pixel TFT LCD that can display 16-bit color. The extra height is for some icons displaying phone status. The outer screen is a 256 color, 96-by-64 pixel, OLED screen. |
Search engines. Roogle :: RSS Search Engine. Roogle :: RSS Search Engine Cool- another RSS search engine- type in "library" for a mix of library folks, programmers talking about libraries, and other folks talking about their library fines. 3/10/2003 [Library Techlog] 6:22:52 AM
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So, now that I got bluetooth working.... Does anyone have any good bluetooth applications to recommend? 6:22:52 AM
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I got the browser to work on my Tungsten with Bluetooth!. I finally got the browser to work with Bluetooth and my Tungsten. Palm officially says that it cannot be done (they don't support it). However... the following worked for me. I am blogging this so hopefully someone else will be helped. Also, I will have a spot to keep up with it. http://discussion.brighthand.com/palmhandhelds/showthread.php?s=&;threadid=26583&highlight=dlink+bluetooth+dbt120 6:22:51 AM
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Docs to Go. I recieved an email from Jerry Zurek @ Cabrini College in Pennsylvania. "Our college's English & communication dept. will have 60 freshman students and 10 instructors using Palms in the fall in three courses. The teachers use a mix of Mac OS Xs and Windows XP. Beaming Word documents is essential. However, you can't beam between DocumentsToGo 5 Premium-Macintosh, which the faculty have (upgraded when we upgraded to Mac OS X) and DocsToGo 4, which would come free with students' Palm M130s. The students will primarily be Windows. The faculty must stay with Mac OS X which requires DocsToGo 5." I told Jerry that there were two options that I could see immediately. (1) was to go to a word processor called FreeWrite. Freewrite is a WP program that people at the University of Michigan put together with an NSF grant. http://palm.hice-dev.org/download.htm is the URL for the download. It is cross platform (Windows and Mac) features a 109,000 word spellchecker, WriteAnywhere technology, IR Beaming capability, and support for over 25 pages of letter-size page text. (2) was a bit simpler alternative. When students complete a file in Docs to Go, simply have them do file - save as - and select the check box that says save as doc. You should be able to read that saved file in any doc reader. Unless specifically told, Documents to go saves in a proprietary format which is not compatible with other word processors on the Palm. If you specifically tell the program to save as a doc file, then the file is more portable between machines. 6:22:46 AM
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New York Songs and New York Buildings. Information in Places: New York Songlines. If you have a PDA or telephone that can access the Web, you can find out about the history of the buildings around you as you walk the streets of New York via New York Songlines, historical walking tours of Manhattan streets, compiled by Jim Naureckas. Those of you with Palm Tungsten W's or 705s may want to check this out. Interesting idea. It would be fun to compile a site for other purposes as well. Other locations may be a good source. 6:22:44 AM
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Making it Work. "Pam"'s moving right along with her Web log takeover of Butterville Elementary. (Is that not a perfect name or what? Could Petticoat Junction be far off?) She has the advantage of a lot of energy and a small school to convert. But I'm sure it will spread. (Great story about the intrigue of computers on her post, by the way.) I met with the new systems administrator yesterday (my other half) and I was giving him a little Web log tour, laying out a little of my grand vision for him. I think he got the concept, and I think most others will too now that there are more and more good examples of what I'm thinking about. I put together a little guided tour for the Intel folk we met last weekend and found it was getting harder and harder to choose the sites to show. That's a good thing. It means it and we are growing. One of the sites I chose was Kern County, where the Bellerico Boys as "Pat" calls them have really done remarkable things. They are the pioneers in the district implementation of Web logs, no doubt. It's a beautiful site, great graphic design, easy navigation,all put together with Manila. It's what I'm going to show as a model for my ideas. At some point, I'd really like to make a visit out there to talk to them and see how they do it. Do they have a bunch of people responsible for content? Do they feed their content to partents through RSS?
I'm going to do some more experimenting next quarter. Bring some parents and administrators into the conversation using Manila and RSS and see what they think. Unlike Pam, I have to start slowly...this is a big place. But I'm getting there. |
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Real Learning.  I've always felt that the main reason I became a teacher was not so much because I loved kids (which I do) or that I wanted to "do good" (which I do) but more because I wanted to keep learning. And I've found, as I think most teachers have, that good teaching requires constant learning on our parts. To me, it's the best part of this job.Which makes it no surprise that I love this process of discovering Web logs. Every day there is something new to learn, something else to think about and struggle through. My collaboration with Anne is a perfect example. Not only are we both trying to figure out the most effective way to use this technology to bring our students together, we're also realizing the effects that publishing and mentoring and collaborating have on how kids feel about their work and themselves. I've posted an e-mail that I got from Anne yesterday after she met with her students. It's worth the read if for no other reason that it so clearly articulates the many levels at which we are both being pushed as teachers by this. Her students are facing a whole different set of challenges because of their use of Web logs. For some, it's scary to be "published" out there and have big kids reading what you write.
It is a scary time for them and they donât think they can do it. Typically elementary kids just barrel on through and do not have such concerns. They turn a deaf ear to the teacher saying the same thing over and over, to some extent. This is a different story though. They want to be able to do it. They want to deliver. They have an audience they really care about.This changes how Anne has to approach this lesson, and it changes my role as well. Today I can bet I'm going to be talking with my students about a lot more than journalism. I'll be asking them to have empathy, to think about their roles as mentors and teachers, and to plan their responses accordingly. (Refer back to what I said earlier about teaching equaling learning...) It will be an interesting day as we figure out how best to nurture what has become an exciting experience for Anne's kids. (And don't get me wrong...my kids are excited too. This particular effort is testament to that.) And the best part is that while Anne and I may in some form just be slinging this all against a wall to see what sticks, some of it definitely is. Anne says
After meeting with the students today, I met with their classroom teachers for a weblog workshop. They were really impressed with what was happening with their students. One of them has a student who is being considered for the gifted program and this student has to submit a piece of work that they are most proud of.. guess what, it was his weblog. The committee probably won't even know what he's talking about - :_). Each teacher stated emphatically that they had noticed much improvement in these kids' writing. Others made comments that reaffirmed what we have been saying about this process. One parent today told me that her son cannot wait until Thursdays, that it is the most important day of the week for him. NOTHING keeps him from getting to school on Thursdays.That is just too cool. 6:22:41 AM
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Been Thinking About.... ...a couple of Web log related issues that are cropping up now that we're making more and more of them here.
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Multimedia and Manila?. I've finally gotten around to doing some work under my new job title. I need to help train teachers to use a new Social Studies multimedia classroom. The idea is to work teachers through three levels of proficiency from using the tools to present, integrating the tools for basic production of multimedia projects (PPT, etc.) , and finally, production of higher end projects using multiple media.
Of course, as I'm prepping all of this, my brain keeps coming back to Web logs. (Go figure, right?) I'm wondering what kinds of multimedia capabilities Manila has. How can I (or even can I) use it to create a Web site that incorporates Flash, sound, and interactivity? Are there any examples out there of Web logs as multimedia project space? |
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Manila RSS. Well, my Manila aggregator seems good but not great. It's already clear that it's not the ultimate solution for what I have planned, but it will work okay for my classroom experiments. I'm hoping Jake and Dave continue to develop it, or I'm hoping that someone else will develop another Web based RSS aggregator that allows for some flexibility in design and use. What doesn't make it for me? There's a lack of organization, for one thing. As "Seb" says, "Just throwing everything on one long page in chronological order doesn't work for me." Amen. There's no way to separate feeds into folders so I can keep my students' feeds separate from my journalism feeds or my teacher Web logger feeds, etc. And I don't like of having to create one long menu /checklist that lumps student feeds in with all the others. Imagine if we ever do get 1,000 Web logs up and running here. How much fun will it be to a) add all of those sites to the list and b) find the ones that you want to subscribe to? Also, it's not working correctly with my student sites, and I'm not sure why? (Is there a limit to how much info can be aggregated? Why do some of the feeds show only the most recent posts and other show every post in the student's Web log?)
I'm a little bit frustrated by all of this because once again these tools aren't being built for educators. We don't stay at the same work station all day. We do a lot of our work at home, and if we're going to use Web logs with students, we're going to need to be able to pull those feeds together from lots of places. (I graded some work while I was in SF sitting in a Cyber Cafe for cryin' out loud.) Seems like there must be a pretty big population out there who isn't tied to a desk or a laptop but would still want to use RSS without having to duplicate the subscription process on every machine they use. Right? |
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So THAT'S What Web Logs Can Do. Did some evangelizing out in San Francisco about the wonders of Web logs, and I wish I had seen this post from two of my students before I left. This, to me, is what this technology is all about. I've written much about the collaborative potential and the ease with which Web logs facilitate people getting together in digital space. "Pat" has written much about digital paper, and if this isn't a great example of what can be done with it, I don't know what is. I can't remember the last time (if there was one) where I have been so sure that my students have learned, really internalized what it is that I am trying to teach them. What Meredith and Kristen did in breaking down the news story for the kids in Georgia is nothing short of inspirational. And the best part is that it was UNSOLICITED. I didn't ask them to do this. They just did it, and I suspect one of the reasons they did was the tool available to them. They did research. They used hypertext to refer the students to further information. They deconstructed the story using what they had been taught in class. They isolated different parts through using colors, making it easy for 4th and 5th graders to see and understand. They made it fun! Let me ask you, would this have happened with pen and paper, or even e-mail?
Publishing writing and thinking to a real audience...doing it easily...that is what this is all about. There are many more examples of this out there. But I'm really proud of this one. |
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Search Blogs I Read. (via "Jenny" in my aggregator!) This just keeps getting better and better. This little tool allows you to scan the RSS feeds of just the other Web logs that you read. How cool is that? As soon as the link from this site to the code works, I'm definitely getting this up and running. This is definitely a feature for the "eBN" site as we could scour just the edublogging universe for relevant content to whatever we may be discussing. 6:22:33 AM
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Tipping Point (con't). Links to a CNN piece, which will be joined in the next few days by a USA Today piece echoing the same sentiments that blogs are on the move. (I know this only because the USA Today reporter interviewed me for the article and will be participating in my collaboration with Anne. Unfortunately, I didn't make the final edit, though other edubloggers may have.) The quote I find most interesting is
"If you read these sites long enough, you see points of intersections where the opinion makers gather," Copilevitz said. "It's a phenomenon that's not on the mainstream radar quite yet, but it will be in six months."
About the time of eBNvenference... |
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Aggregation Nation. Well, it's a start. I'm building the aggegator into my Manila sites, and I'm liking it for the simple fact that I can access it and modify it from whatever Web connection I might be on at the time. It needs some tweaks though, like being able to limit the number of entries for each feed for one. I'm hoping that's in the works. It's also a bit bulky to subcribe since the admin person has to set all the feeds that people on the system can subscribe to. At some point it would be nice if MEs have the ability to subcribe to individual feeds as well. But for now, I'll be adding a whole bunch of newspaper sites and getting my kids to start aggregating as well. Should be interesting. Jake says that:
More features are planned including permalinks, comment-links, and posting stories from the aggregator page as new news items (for news items oriented Manila sites).Potential for some cool new fun!
(Now, does anyone know how to format the headline text in the aggregator? I know the Hahvahd site looks better than mine...) |
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Getting Closer to Manila Syndication. Looks like the folks at Userland are doing some real developing in Manila, and I'm anxious to see how well this works. One issue already is this:
At this time, there's no way for a managing editor to subscribe to an arbitrary news feed. The server manager must first make the feed available.Hmmm...looks like I'm going to have to make more work for Ed my server guy...and that's gonna cost me, I'm sure ;0). 6:22:30 AM
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Heading Home.  Another great gathering last night at the Pacific Cafe for great food and conversation after watching a perfect Pacific sunset on the beach. "Pat" is San Francisco's premier guide. Many thanks.
Heading home today with very much to think about and catch up on. (Top of the list is lots of hugs and tickles for the kids.) Too much on the schedule this week, and as usual, not nearly enough time to get to it all. But I'm hoping to get down most of the good thinking and planning that happened this weekend. There is very much to be excited about. |
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SF.  Went late into the night (at least the East Coast night) with "Pat" and "Tim" and Ilene from Intel showing and talking Web logs (which as Pat rightly notes really are just plain old Web sites in the form that we use them...that's a whole 'nother post.) Took a twilight walk up windy Bernal Hill for a 360 degree amazing view of the city, then to great dinner (just for the halibut) and later some online fun at Pat's. As I said yesterday, the really high energy of our discussions has me and I think the rest shaking our heads at the potential of eBNvenference (don't ask) in November. There's just so much to share and so much to learn about the people behind the places that I'm starting to think it could be a very serious launch to a very serious network. How cool could that be?
There is much to write about...technical stuff like ways to feed other sites into Manila using include macros, a new need to look at MT after "Tim" described it's uses more in depth, more ideas about RSS and how it might fit in the classroom and in schools, content for the "eBN" site, and more. Not sure any of that will get done until after the next few days of travel and recuperation. We're going to try to get together for dinner again toinight. |
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Blogging from Pat's. I met Ilene Aginsky who introduced me to the Intel Innovation In Education Website. There are several resources for educators...check it out and let me know what you think. (BTW, she's dictating this to me...) 6:22:26 AM
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Light Bulbs. "Tim" was gracious enough to call me up to talk about my Web logs during his presentation, and between the two of us talking about the potentials and RSS and all that other good stuff, I saw a lot of people "getting it." There were a bunch of questions during and after the presentation, and I just got the sense that we're on the verge of having enough stuff to make the concept accessible and usable. We'll see. Last night finally meeting "Pat" and "Tim" and other was great. During our conversations, someone said that even with the great opportunities that Web logs offer, there is still no substitute for face to face, synchoronous talk. I'm hoping we can extend the conversation tonight, that is if my jet lag doesn't make my head fall in my lap.
One other observation...as if I didn't know it from reading their work over the past couple of years, these are good, fun people, and I can't wait for eBNvention this fall. It will definitely be a time to do some good work and have some fun. Make your plans today! |
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Off to SF.  A pilgrim traveling to the Mecca of edublogging to meet "Pat" and "Tim" and Marion and others. And (oh, yeah) to attend the ASCD conference as well. From Pat's post yesterday, seems like the mood may not be the brightest. Here's hoping there's some way to stave off "elimination."
Will try to post later today, though our get together starts at 8 pm EST...with any luck I'll stay awake through dinner. Some Web logging presentations at the Moscone center that I'll try to blog over the weekend (assuming they have WiFi) just because no one else probably will. |
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Sunday, March 9, 2003 |
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Hey Oregon teachers, NYC is hiring. Life in NYC schools is looking better and better the more I read about what's happening in Oregon. The latest from the chairman of the Oregon Senate Education Committee: "I tell any parent who will listen to run -- not walk -- to remove their children from public schools," Sen. Charles Starr, R-Hillsboro, wrote in response to a constituent who had complained about his experience being home-schooled. [Link and discussion via MetaFilter.] We haven't heard that kind of degrading rhetoric here since Giuliani left office. 1:56:40 PM
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Blogging projects to watch. Terry's "Taking the Plunge" project is up and running at the eBN shipyard with the first posts today.
Will R. and Anne's new journalism collaboration Georgia - NJ Connection is also underway. |
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An insane society.... Bob Herbert in today's NY Times: It's an insane society that can contemplate devastating and then rebuilding Iraq, but can't bring itself to provide schooling for all of its young people here at home. Echoes of a more eloquent and broader treatment of these same ideas at The War We Have Chosen to Lose a speech by Arthur Levine. 1:56:38 PM
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Portland teachers to give 10 free days. Hmmm... Things are looking bleak out in the great Northwest. This from the Portland Oregonian: Portland teachers overwhelmingly ratified a contract Monday that will require them to work 10 days for free in order to restore the full school year, an unprecedented concession by teachers in Oregon.Hey Tim, what's going on out there? 1:56:37 PM
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Tuesday, March 4, 2003 |
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Photoblogging. Tim Lauer shows the way to an excellent photoblog tutorial for MT. Check out Tim's photoblog. 2:03:28 PM
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edblogger.net?. Did anyone else notice Al's new experiment with Text Pattern at edblogger.net? 2:03:28 PM
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New NYCWP Manila Weblog. Thanks to Karen and Pat for helping us get started on the new NWP hosted Manila site for the New York City Writing Project. We're hoping to give members who are new to blogging an introduction to weblogs and how they can be used in educational settings. Visit the new NYCWP Weblog. 2:03:28 PM
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eBN's First Bartender: Terry Elliot. Terry is pouring the drinks over at eBN's Guest Bar as the first guest blogger in the prestigious right hand column (it will be someday) and there's even a face to match the name. Keep an eye on Terry's Taking the Plunge - the first EBN hosted site. 2:03:27 PM
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Weblogs for ESL Students. Anne Davis posted a link to the first article I've seen about ESL students using weblogs in this article is written by an EFL instructor in Japan. From the abstract of Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes in The Internet TESL Journal: The purpose of this paper is to introduce three ways that weblogs can be used to support ESL classroom learning. After defining what a weblog is, I will proceed to show how weblogs can be put into immediate use in the ESL classroom by means of three distinct types: the tutor weblog, learner weblog, and class weblog.Using the author's framework, my own work with weblogs has been a combination of tutor and class weblogs along with learner weblogs. I don't see a clear distinction between the author's definitions of tutor and class weblogs. Much of what is described in the first category, the tutor weblog, such as online exchange of comments, resources for self-study, exploration of English language sites are all part of what should happen on a class weblog. The author also comments that Class blogs could also be used as a virtual space for an international classroom language exchange. In this scenario, learners from different countries would have joint access and publishing rights to the blog. The entire exchange would then be transparent to all readers and could be followed and commented on by other learners, tutors, parents and friends.
Content classes for English language learners in an urban classroom obviously differs from an ESL or EFL class dedicated to language instruction but this is something about weblogs that I find very powerful. My students' families generally don't speak English so family participation is unlikely. However, most of my students have indicated that they have shown their weblogs to others outside of school - even in some cases people who may not be able to read their words. In some cases this meant family members here in the U.S. and for others it meant friends in their native countries. Hopefully, in the next month or so, we will be working on another class weblog with an outside historical expert much like our Spanish-American War project. With eBN starting to pick up steam, I think we'll be seeing much more opportunities for k-U collaborative work in coming months. |
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Schools and communities. From a NY Times Book Review of a new book about the school voucher debate, All Else Equal, by Luis Benveniste, Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein: It turns out that what shapes a school's culture most powerfully is the community around it.We needed a book to figure that out? 2:03:27 PM
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Relative Paths in Manila. Thanks to "Karen" who via the "eBN" site explains the use of relative paths for stories created in Manila. Even though I understood the concept, I didn't really connect it to the need until I read her explanation. I know that Barbara Ganley does the same thing with her students at Middlebury, and I guess I've had some vauge idea of how to use it with my own students bouncing around in my head. But now I have to think about it more.
There is so much potential here, and I find my problem is that I want to do it all. "Terry" mentions a multi-author Web log with one managing editor, and my mind races with the idea of what editorial responsibility could teach my students and how to work it in and set it up. "Tim" is photoblogging and "Pam" is audioblogging and everyone is moblogging. The more I know, the more I want to try. I find my thinking comes in sporadic bits that either coalesce in writing here or on bits of real paper while I'm driving or in meetings or wherever. Hard to focus...I really need to get a life, I think. |
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Now Here's a Rec. The members of educational Bloggers Network ("eBN") are working to instill several generations of young people with the values and concepts of narrating the work, sharing their knowledge, and thinking out loud. By the time these young people enter the workforce such ideas will no longer seem foreign, outlandish, or wasteful. Rather, they will be seen as ways to do more, learn more, and earn more. We won't have to spend 90 percent of our effort just convincing people to share. The change won't happen immediately, and it won't happen soon enough to help some of us at all. But it will happen. And because it will happen we need to support efforts like eBN in whatever ways we can. These people are on to something that matters. We should help.This is definitely the kind of thinking that will bring all of this to more and more teachers and educators. Well said! 2:03:24 PM
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Adding to the List (Con't). Laura Rebecca at Garden City High School on Long Island has a Web log started for her Film classes. I think it's pretty interesting that many of us if not most of us took the same route that she is, starting with Blogger. On the "eBN" site, (which is looking mighty fine) "Terry" recounts the same route. It really is a very painless intro to the concept, and it really helped develop my understanding and thinking of the whole concept. I might have given up had I started with Manila! I'm wondering what, if anything, Google will be doing with Blogger in the future. 2:03:23 PM
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Tech Support HELP. In the last week I've lost two sites to the error message that says "Sorry! There was an error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "department" hasn't been defined." I can get to the sites by typing in the URL of a subpage, but the homepages all come up with the error. And all of the departments when clicked, produce the same error. Ken experienced the same message but was unable to get a fix. I'm going to post to Newbies, but if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. 2:03:23 PM
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Web Logs as Marketing. Short article in Newsweek on Dr. Pepper's attempts to launch a new drink by using Web logs as viral marketing tools. Sounds kinda bizarre to me, but it's just another indication of the mainstreaming of the technology. 2:03:23 PM
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We Want Web Logs!. Got an e-mail from a former colleague who is now the district tech supervisor for Asbury Park Schools. She writes that "the Asbury Park Schools are very interested in doing a web based online magazine and I would like to piggy back on your idea of blogging in English classes." Obviously a great and doable idea, and an opportunity to extend the use of collaboration through Web logs (even though she doesn't know it yet.) The kids in our two districts come from two very different places, and in fact, our two schools did a number of collaborations about 7-8 years ago that have since fizzled out. I'm hoping maybe we can do more modeling of how Web logs can bring different audiences and students together. 2:03:23 PM
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Adding to the List. Andrew Cline pointed me to this class Web log that he's using with his freshman English class at Park Univeristy in Missouri. Makes me wonder (again) how many other professors and teachers are out there using these things that we don't know about. (Note: On his personal page, Andrew has a list of other professors who blog.) 2:03:22 PM
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Friday, February 28, 2003 |
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BLKBRD-L: 2003 Blackboard Users Conference Notes. Most particularly, see the Word Document posted at the end. I forget if this archive is password protected. Is it? 2:56:04 PM
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SCORM Skin viewer (2002 Albert Ip). Quote: "The technique demonstrated here is part of a larger vision to enable practical re-use. It has been a problem in real re-use of SCO because a course assembled using SCOs from different courses may have vastly different look and feel. This technique demonstrates how the look and feel can be requested from a template." Comment:via edtechpost. Nice execution. I posited something like this in a discussion on CETIS about the SCORM Dynamic Appearance Model. Nice to see it happening. 2:56:04 PM
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Stephen's Web: MLX, RSS and learning object syndication. Quote: "But the day has arrived. In today's newsletter are links to two institutional RSS learning object feeds, one launched by Maricopa a couple of days ago and another set up at the University of Calgary today. These two, as I commented in an email to George Siemens (who, as usual, is right on top of this) are the tip of the iceberg." Comment: I posted the Maricopa link on 2/19, which is what I guess Stephen is referring to, although I think the resource has been around for much longer. Regardless, he brings together some issues related to RSS and learning objects. 2:56:03 PM
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Improved site search with Google and Manila. For quite a while, I've used Google as a search tool for this site - see the navigation bar on the right. I'm not using the SOAP service, but rather just customizing the parameters by restricting it to this site. Today, I've improved it somewhat. Because Manila has a number of different urls that represent the same message, e.g. mode=day, and mode=topic, I changed the code to eliminate the word mode in the url, using -inurl:mode The resultant search box code is (more or less): <FORM name=googleForm onsubmit="document.googleForm.q.value+=' site:instructionalTechnology.editThisPage.com -inurl:mode'" action=http://www.google.com/search method=get> Just as a quick comparison, compare these two searches for the word: "blackboard": BEFORE: blackboard site:instructionalTechnology.editThisPage.com AFTER: blackboard site:instructionalTechnology.editThisPage.com -inurl:mode This does remove a lot of duplication, I think. There are other url components, that I should also consider removing, e.g. viewDepartment or perhaps requiring, e.g. inurl:msgreader which would eliminate archive pages of the form /2001/02/02 and department pages which are compilations of existing posts. That will essentially enable each page to come back as an individualized result. Hmm... let's try it and see. I've also added inurl:msgreader and the results are pretty good I think. MORE AFTER: blackboard site:instructionalTechnology.editThisPage.com -inurl:mode inurl:msgreader 2:56:02 PM
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2003 Blackboard Users Conference - Day 1 and 2. Just a quick note (because none of the cybercafe computers have chairs and my feet are killing me), but the conference is going quite well. Many sessions have been overcrowded and people weren't able to get in. That was quite upsetting, but they've reconfigured some rooms today and it's improved (although not perfect). Free food (and drink!) is good, although trying to feed 1500 people in 30 minutes with a buffet is optimistic. I've had a pretty good look at version 6 now and they really have fixed major architectural issues and usability issues for faculty. The building blocks architecture really has traction and their standards support is promising. For example, "Big Ben" which is the next major release (I'd guess 6.2) will have WebDAV built-in, a spell-checker, better data reporting and they've put SOAP interfaces on the gradebook and some other areas (although only on Windows servers, I think right now). There are even apparently Shibboleth APIs in version 6 right now. Until I came to the conference I really didn't have a good idea what the Blackboard Transaction System was. It really has very little to do with the Learning System and Portal products and is basically a student ID/debit card system. Absolutely no use for us, but now I know, I can safely ignore it ;-) Eventually (not clear when), it looks like they're going to add CSS support and customizable layouts, but right now the version 6 features by themselves are attractive. The content management has roles, role-based security and content management delegation. There is also RSS support in the portal. The content can now be much more easily mixed and matched, e.g. embedding a test in a content page is much more intuitive. Also, content can be marked as a number of content types (including building block types), and automatically created as a gradable item. If I didn't know any better, I'd guess that the infusions of cash (Microsoft is an equity investor) have really allowed BB to pay attention to the content management marketplace and ideas there. They indicated that they are now profitable on an ongoing basis. Their support really seems to be improving, although our personal running joke is that the variously colored name badges indicate how many months you have to wait for a support request to be answered. While building blocks can be now written in .NET for Windows servers, I'd guess that most will continue to be written in Java for cross-platform compatibility. Matt Pittinsky and others have been contrite about the 6.0 migration process, which was meant to be a major improvement on 5.0, but didn't turn out that way. The major problems really only surfaced this spring when colleges finally got around to trying to upgrade. They're now basically saying that if you haven't migrated, wait for 6.1. They expect full resolution in time for Summer 2003 migrations. More 6.x improvements include losing those awful buttons and having the ability to rename them as text links. This basically makes the content areas much, much more flexible and Blackboard much more like a regular content management system. It will take a while for faculty to appreciate this, I think, but once they do, that left hand menu is going to start really changing across courses. Who knows when the frames will go away though...sigh. On the portal front, not all content is now hidden behind the login screen. You can have content in front of it. That's a big one I think, although not foregrounded here particularly. They're also adding an eCommerce component, so I think there may actually be some competition here for existing portal products (even if only in the minds of decision makers who like the marketing speak). They say they're 508-compatible now, although I have some trouble squaring that with their use of frames. There's an equation editor and a building block for a WYSIWYG editor (still not the best solution in my opinion, but okay - there aren't building block hooks [callbacks] for modifying existing elements as I understand it, so it's a content element by itself rather than integrated as a substitute for smart text). It looks like the underlying HTML is still the spaghetti from hell, but that's the purist in me talking. I'd guess that they don't get too many complaints about it, although in aggregate, the bandwidth consumption it causes is probably enormous. As I've stated before, I'm interested in Building Blocks although I'm not sure that I'm ever going to be able to build any - it's just the geek in me. There've been some good sessions and it's obvious that there's lots of interest. It seems that http://www.bb-opensource.org/ is still a little thin, but when you consider the price of entry for a test server ($1500 or something last time I looked), it's not surprising. Paul Foster (University of Cincinnati) and Sue Polyson-Evans (Virginia Commonwealth University) did a nice introductory presentation on building blocks, as did a group on a library linkmaker building block for connecting to proprietary databases (Claire Dygert from American University and Don Gourley from Washington Research Library Consortium). Although I mentioned Shibboleth above, one building block feature everyone seemed interested in is encrypted (Blowfish?) context passing from Blackboard to other systems. Getting some kind of single sign-on to college services seems to be the driving force. Building Block installation and development seems quite straightforward once you've been stepped through some simple examples. As I think about it, exposing the SOAP interfaces is almost more productive because you won't need permission and licenses to do interesting things and experiment with what you can do (although, I do recall that you need a digital certificate). They're already demo-ing MS Excel connecting directly to the Blackboard gradebook using SOAP - almost an archetypical application. They say that all the presentations from the user's conference are going to be online, so I'll point to that when I can, but I don't see them yet, nor really any obvious place to do it. Dennis Dormady did a great one on Linux performance tuning (mmm... website design isn't perhaps his strength :-). --- Personal/Social notes On the less practical and social side of things, Baltimore Inner Harbor is alright (what little I've seen of it). I've had two seafood meals, but haven't had much of an appetite. I (and my wife) were quite sickly at the weekend and I'm still getting back up to speed - all this good food going to waste - what a shame. My roommate snores at a decibel level beyond belief, so I'm not getting as much sleep as I'd like, but he's my boss, I like him and he's good company so I don't mind. Tonight is the Microsoft-sponsored bash at the Aquarium, which should be fun. That's it for now. More to follow...assuming we don't get snowed in and can't get home, which is looking a possibility right now. Meantime, I'm missing my 6-year-old daughter's birthday, but I called her this morning, so that was good. Okay, so that was a little longer than planned. Hope someone reads it! 2:56:01 PM
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Tipping Point (Con't, Again). Dear Mr. Richardson: Ok, I'm stunned. And happy. (And I hate the title.) And the best part...I think there's still more to come...soon. As an aside, Dave Winer in the latest Newsweek says
Weâre in a middle of an explosion right now. In the last few weeks, things have just gone crazy. Itâs unbelievable to see whatâs going on now...Itâs in the air. Maybe it is. When we look back, itâs going to be hard to tell which one of all the different things that are going on [had the most impact]. But thereâs just a lot more interest in Weblogs right now. From all corners.Time to watch, think, and plan carefully... 11:55:31 AM
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Move over Nicenet, time for phpBB. After working with Nicenet for a few days, I gave up and installed phpBB on my site. I'll be moving some class discussions over to a phpBB board and using it for a workshop we'll be doing for a group of history teachers in a few weeks. Very easy setup (thanks to Albert for quick tech support), attractive templates, great features. 9:51:12 AM
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The New Freshly Painted eBN. Pat announces the freshly painted edBlogNet site with kudos to Bryan Bell for the design work. Interesting addition of the guest blogger column a la Boing Boing. 9:51:11 AM
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Discovering Web Logs and eBN. I've gotten a smattering of e-mails in the last few days from teachers wanting to know more about Web logs and blogging. I think more and more people are starting to catch on to the potential, and I also think this is a great opportunity for "eBN" to establish itself as the support network it's intended to be. The new look Web site, the publicity of late, and all of our good thinking seems to be gelling together at the right time. "Anne" includes some excerpts of e-mails she's been exchanging with teachers across the country, and one strikes me:
Some say weblogs would certainly lead to some revolutions in publishing given the speed it grows. I'm not that worried. However, I do want to try some blogging. I'm wondering whether those who have tried can share their experience of implementing weblogs in teaching.That is exactly what "eBN" is about...I'm wondering if "Pat" or others have some ideas for beginning to gather that content, and whether we need to solicit some article ideas, set some deadlines, and just develop the content in general. Suggestions? 9:50:48 AM
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The Direction of Things. There is a convergance happening in my brain (a scary thought to begin with) with this whole RSS piece and the other nascent multimedia Web log work we've been engaging in lately. "Pam"'s been audioblogging, and today "Tim" includes a video clip into his post. in "Jenny"'s "Aggregating Your Life Into One Page" post yesterday, one of the comments she got was from Ryan Greene who said
Jenny - You forgot getting feeds from your favorite bands as to their new releases and remixes, new episodes of video and audio blogs, including the kid's school reports. I mean, why not teach your kids how to do multimedia blogging if the tech is there, and they have an interest in learning to use it? This morning, "George" is writing about meeting the needs of different types of learners, and he says
Text, interactive activities, video clips, Flash presentations, audio, discussion threads, chat sessions, synchronous presentations, reflective journals (or blogging), self-test activities, group presentations, etc...if these (and other components) are used throughout course development (within reason...and for a reason) and instruction - learners will learn.Then, Marc Canter, in an interview on the Corante site, says
5% of the populace (probably even less) can create. The others watch, listen, read, consume. I think one of the destinies of digital technology is to enable the other 95% to express their creativity somehow. That's the gestalt view. Digital cameras, story telling, assembling stuff from existing content, annotating, reviews, conversations, linking topics together - are all forms of creativity. That's what our tools are all about. There's plenty of image, audio and video editing software out there. Now is the time to integrate and aggregate media, communications and personal publishing.I always love when things just seem to connect like that, and one of the best things about Web logs is the ability to bring that connection into formal existence and to think more deeply about it in writing. (I need to ask my students to do more of this.)
I still haven't digested the implications of all of this, and I think someday it's going to be interesting (to me at least) to look back on these posts and watch the evolution of this still fuzzy picture into reality. How cool is that going to be? |
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eBN Getting Face Lifted. Lookin' good...time to start crankin' out some content for all those edublog newbies. (I just want to say, I'm disliking this lexicon more and more...maybe we should start by renaming all this stuff!) 9:50:45 AM
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Thursday, February 27, 2003 |
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test posting... 1:37:55 PM
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Last update: 3/27/03; 11:54:57 AM .
