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 Monday, June 10, 2002
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Stephen Downes on the recent Wired News article about edublogs:
' The article also contains some discussion of the use of blogs in classrooms along with the completely unsubstantiated assertion that "efforts to get students to participate in classroom blogs have, for the most part, fallen flat". My explorations today through the world of school weblogs shows, if anything, the opposite.' My sentiments exactly!
6/10/02; 9:52:42 PM
- General Weblog News.
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| Friday, May 24, 2002
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'Outsiders complain about the teaching profession being resisitant to new developments. However, I think teachers are just ' numb' to change. They are so used to hearing the latest 'theory' or the latest decree prescribed from the educational establishment, that they are automatically sceptical of even the best new ideas. Consequently, teachers will not be convinced by words alone when it comes to the potential of weblogging in education.'
5/24/02; 11:59:44 AM
- General Weblog News.
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Here's my take on the 'Who's got the best edublogging software?' debate that is currently being contested in the edublogging world ;-)
5/24/02; 10:27:45 AM
- General Weblog News.
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| Friday, May 17, 2002
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Well one month soon turned into three but the 'sabbatical' from SchoolBlogs has been both releasing and refreshing. I've been free to implement, refine, review and develop weblogs in my own classroom as well as within the whole school environment.
Children as young as 8 years old are now running their own personal blogs at the BSA. My class have completed a round of projects set as weblogs, as well as their own personal weblogs. We have also recorded much of our work on topic or subject blogs. The year below us are now collaborating on group weblogs. Not all has run perfectly but that is what makes it so interesting. There is at least some concrete stuff out there to evaluate. My school has recently been inspected and it was good to get an objective 'outside' view of how blogging has positively affected the teaching and learning.
I've also been busy exploring the potential of Radio. We've set up the British School of Amsterdam Digital News Project. It mixes the 'tried and tested best' of Manila with the enormous potential of Radio and provides my 10 year old students with a taste of real life digital newspaper production. The recent shooting of Pim Fortuyn in The Netherlands, and the ensuing variation in news coverage both in weblogspace and beyond, has for me, catapulted the importance of students being empowered to handle real news effectively to the top of my list of priorities. Radio will play a major role in our school next year.
My class have also been experimenting with BlogChat, crossing continents and country borders cybermagically to gather source material for historical research. It is also proving invaluable for our news team interviews and for SAT surgeries.
The urge to write about these things is slowly returning J.
5/17/02; 7:28:55 AM
- General Weblog News.
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| Thursday, February 21, 2002
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David Carter-Tod: 'Personally, I like to look at the horizon occasionally. It's too easy to spend your day looking at life in the 0 to 200 yards in front of you, but spend a minute looking at the horizon and things feel different' The last year has been exciting but crazy. I'm going to spend a month away from SchoolBlogs to look at the horizon. It will give me a chance to really concentrate on my students' weblogging, to press on where it really matters. If you're interested - catch me somewhere around my class blog at http://class6f.bsablogs.com. Take it easy!
2/21/02; 10:22:38 PM
- General News.
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| Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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Christina: 'Did you ever stop to look at the sky the rain? The sun? Well actually I think it is pretty strange. Every spactacular day of our lives their is a diffrent kind of weather sky, and feeling to the world. You don't know if their is a god who makes these wonders in life happen, like rainbows, or eclipses in the sky it just does! Mostley durring my 11 years I have had on this earth so far, I start to think (when I have the time) Questions like," Why are we on this earth?" "Where do you go when you die?", "What higher powers are there in life, and what should we do with our lives?" ' Whenever one of my original class of 2000-2001 webloggers blog it reminds me why I got on this roller coaster in the first place :-) Christina reflects intensely on the very personal nature of life and death. I'm going to post this to my class blog as well.
2/20/02; 11:49:04 PM
- Student Weblogs.
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Pat Delaney: 'Maybe that's what this should be: A very focused account of one school trying very hard to ennable good student work using a cms. The blahditty-blah-blah over at SchoolBlogs main page doesn't intrigue me at all. It's too removed. I keep going back to the Newbies page where absolutely nothing is happening. (Last post three weeks old.) This blog, the Radio experiment, the long list of regularly checked weblogs - it's all feeling hollow.' Although it feels most unpleasant to have the work on which I have spent hundreds of hours pulling together, refered to as 'blahditty-blah-blah', the essence of what Pat says is true. The buzz of blogs comes from working together with my students and colleagues. It is that British School community of Newbies that matters the most to me. There may be three weeks since the last Newbies post at this site but a day doesn't go by at my school without hearing, seeing or taking part in the BSA Newbie collaboration. The beauty is that we are all Newbies there ;-) This means that we will put up with the 'blahditty-blah-blah' so we can push the boundaries even further - beyond the blog even. This is intriguing for me. We like it on the 'cutting edge roller coaster'.It's fun!
2/20/02; 11:34:55 PM
- General Weblog News.
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| Tuesday, February 19, 2002
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Chris Ashley on Lloyd Nebres: 'I could add lots more to this list, you know, get all explicity pedagogical. But look it over. Many teachers aspire to the kind of interaction, active modeling, and making learning clear in that list, not to mention the technology integration. In the world of weblogs Lloyd has done and continues to do this. That makes him a pioneer, in my opinion.'
I couldn't agree more.
2/19/02; 10:17:57 PM
- General Weblog News.
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I had a good start to this week. Firstly I found precisely the resources I needed for my lesson on Tudor Exploration. The links had been posted by students on our Class Tudor weblog . I have heard about children informing their own learning but the blog helps them to inform their own teaching as well. Cool to see the kids' faces when they realised that I had used their resources :-)
I've also had no time to create a list of the project weblogs in one place. Now I don't need to because one of my students has done it already!
2/19/02; 8:23:33 PM
- Student Weblogs.
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Sarah Lohnes: 'On the individual student blogs, the students are the managing editors, and make their own decisions about who to appoint as contributing editors, etc. Also, the students are responsible for the school's main website (also a Manila site) and each of the individual class websites. Rather than posing a problem for the teachers and kids, I think that the editorial functions in Manila have enabled this type of interaction between teachers/students and students/students.'
2/19/02; 8:08:08 PM
- General Weblog News.
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Marcus Mauller: 'What about a portable setup - Radio's world is contained within it's folder - no bits and pieces stashed elsewhere on the system...........So as an interim solution, they could have a Radio disk in their backpack.'
I was chatting to my headmaster about this possibility today.....
2/19/02; 8:03:13 PM
- General News.
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Adam Curry: 'The way I see it, Radio8 is pretty much everything you get in Frontier, yes I know the envvironments are different, but at the core its all there. The Verbs are identical. if anything, radio8 is more sophisticated than Frontier.
2/19/02; 8:02:07 PM
- General News.
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Terry Elliot: 'We have drilled down to it. The question that consciously or unconsciously started schoolblogs. I have some ideas that I am trying to develop more fully elsewhere, but I have one wish on the top of my wish heap. I want to have publishing and research to be seemlessly joined in any ed. app. to be developed.'
2/19/02; 7:59:34 PM
- General News.
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Adam Curry about Radio: 'As a developer wannabee, I'd love to get a functionality list going. Something we can start working from.
Whatever we do in this ideation stage, you have to remove the current Radio capabilities for blogging from your view. Instead think: I have the power of a full fledged server here on my dektop pc. If I could push all the buttons, what would I want it to do?
Blogging should not be the first thing that comes to mind :)
2/19/02; 7:57:55 PM
- General News.
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I'm enjoying the news and blogging tools of Radio at school. The students are nagging me to have a go as well :-)
2/19/02; 7:56:27 PM
- General News.
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| Saturday, February 16, 2002
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Bill Kearney: 'Just a word to the wise. Radio8 will not work in most school environments.'
2/16/02; 9:40:21 AM
- General Weblog News.
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Bill Kearney: 'The idea of something like Radio and Frontier has tremendous potential in a school environment.
Frontier with it's included Manila interface is a great place to start. But along the way you're likely to run into a few stumbling blocks. I evaluated it for use in a K-12 school environment and had a few problems.'
2/16/02; 9:39:33 AM
- General Weblog News.
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Clark Venable: 'What if the administration used RSS to disseminate information to the masses? At my institution, I receive at least one e-mail per day from someone in the administration, addressed to all faculty, which is never less than 1 MB is size. What if they just posted it on an RSS channel and let me subscribe to it? Think of all the mail server space that would be wasted.
2/16/02; 9:38:58 AM
- General Weblog News.
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Clark Venable: 'I'm working on something the last paragraph refers to, decentralization. I'm an anesthesiologist in an academic insitution with a residency program. I'm doing what I call the "laptop Reference" project, in which I'm trying to use Radio to allow residents to have a standard reference set on their local hard disk and use Radio to update it over time. We use a new tool called 'Downstreamer' (written for me by Seth Dillingham) to use the directory.opml file for synchronizing cloud content vs. with local content. It's early, but it's looking good.'
2/16/02; 9:38:19 AM
- General Weblog News.
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Tim Merritt: 'A concern regarding Radio in school settings is security: won't desktop Radio servers be just as vulnerable to hackers as any other server? I ask from ignorance -- despite reading a lot of the blogging folks' buzz about Radio, nowhere have I seen anyone address the security issue.'
2/16/02; 9:37:45 AM
- General Weblog News.
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Chris Ashley: 'I do want to add one thing in response to what Peter has to say. He talks about Radio and it's potential for easing the burden on centralized servers. Obviously the desktop is important; it carries a heavy load, and is a primary workspace. And the ease of publishing between the desktop and a weblog is very important.
However, I think the beauty of something like Manila is that in it's simplest form it is a portable place to write. This is important because the student is a mobile person. Currently, in many, probably most cases, he or she does not necessarily use the same computer at school everyday. So using a weblog the student can write from any machine anywhere as long as it is networked and has a browser.
Schools can't move as fast as the industry. I'm worried that schools, who don't have a machine for every person, and for whom a weblog as a portable writing space is ideal, will be left behind. Again. Because not every student, or even every teacher, yet, has their own desktop.
Now, in the coming days when every student has their own desktop in the form of a cheap wireless PDA with a small keyboard, maybe the definition of mobility in education will be closer to the definition of mobility in the industry.'
2/16/02; 9:37:08 AM
- Class Weblogs.
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David Carter-Tod: 'As a sometime server administrator (it's actually something I enjoy sometimes), I have less trouble with centralized servers and see great value in them. While I want to give my faculty, staff and students the benefits of template-driven, easy content management with system-wide integration, I don't want the headaches that go with client-side support. I want people to be able to edit anywhere (from home or office), but I still want control over look and feel.'
2/16/02; 9:36:21 AM
- General Weblog News.
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A great response to yesterday's post about the future of edu-blogging. I'm posting the main thoughts in the hope that they may stimulate further discussion.
The challenge for the educators is to articulate clearly what their needs are in terms of the next generation educational tools. Only then will the hackers start fulfilling dreams;-) I know there are wide ranging discussions about Content Management Systems all over the web. However, I've never seen an agreed list of say ten educational features that would be instant winners in
the classroom. Put simply - what do teachers want ?
2/16/02; 9:35:56 AM
- General Weblog News.
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| Friday, February 15, 2002
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I have been writing here about the potential of weblogs in education for just over a year now so it seems a fitting time to evaluate the progress so far and to assess the future.
The profile of weblogs in the educational setting is gradually increasing and the discussion of edublogging matters is gathering pace as well. It is great to see how many educators have taken the opportunity to try out weblogs for themselves, not only at SchoolBlogs but also with other software on other servers as well.
However, the most important factor for me is the fact that my students have benefited from their exposure to weblogs. They are accomplishing educational goals far beyond what is expected of children their age. This has always been the driving force in my involvement with SchoolBlogs in particular, and weblogs in general. If students are not directly impacted in a positive way then weblogs are mere pretty ornaments in an already cluttered classroom. However, my experience is that weblogs have not only benefited my students but the whole climate of expectation within my school. Ask any parent, teacher, school governor or student and they will have a positive weblog story to tell.
However, the downside of the 'success' of SchoolBlogs can be measured in the strain on our servers. We are committed to this community, having just undergone a migration to brand new servers, but it has highlighted again for us the the problems of hosting on the net. Even if your server is 98% reliable then it will still be down for 15 hours every month. If one of those 15 hours is my time with my class to blog something and it does not work, it is tres frustrating. This is not peculiar to just us, or weblogs in general. It is the law of the internet that 'shit will go down!'
This fact has been troubling both Adam and myself over the last few weeks. How can the benefits of weblogging and other technologies be enjoyed without the seemingly unavoidable frustration of being reliant on overburdened centralised servers?
Decentralisation is the answer. Radio Userland, for example, has shown that you can 'have your cake and eat it'. Powerful publishing to the web and much more besides, direct from your desktop server, without overburdening a centralised server. I think this is the next generation educational tool - decentralised, user friendly and powerful. I think the 'much more besides' section of radio is what we want to explore in the future to produce a tool for educators that will blog for sure, but will be much more of a total solution for their technological needs. That's the dream anyway. Last year's came to pass. Lets see what happens ...........
2/15/02; 11:51:49 AM
- General Weblog News.
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| Thursday, February 14, 2002
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Ali is a nine year old student at my school. He has created his own weblog off his own back to have a piece of the 'action'. Nine year olds at my school do not currently have their own weblogs but if the quality of Ali's blogging is anything to go by, it won't be long before they do. He is encouraging his friends to blog as well. He would be a great candidate to try out Radio. Looking at the National Curriculum ICT document - this guy should not be exposed to this stuff until he is 13 or 14 years old. God only knows what he will be accomplishing by the time he is that age.
2/14/02; 1:38:34 PM
- Student Weblogs.
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Here's the code for the 'A Year Ago Today' macro. Thanks Adam! Unfortunately, I didn't post nearly regularly enough in the early days so more often than not it returns empty. However, for the Lloyds and Chris Ashleys of this world, who update like clockwork, it would be great.
2/14/02; 1:13:17 PM
- Weblogging Techniques.
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The 13th February 2001 was my first post to this weblog. Full of youthful exuberance and enthusiasm in those days ;-)) Seems much longer than a year ago. Happy Blogday to me! Now I can start using the 'A Year Ago Today' macro. Anyone know where I can find it?
2/14/02; 11:57:02 AM
- General Weblog News.
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| Wednesday, February 13, 2002
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Sarah Lohnes: 'Having been an undergraduate not too long ago, and from my experience working with tech in education since then, I can say that students are not often enabled to work with technology from a creative standpoint, which is a shame. It would be more interesting to make the same tools available to students as are available to faculty, and see what directions they go in!'
2/13/02; 11:37:16 PM
- General Weblog News.
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Hector Vila: 'As we continue our Vermont edublogging experiments, I have to point out the work at Shoreham Elementary. This site was built and is currently maintained by 6th Grade Students: they've made all the selections, do the images, regularly query respective teachers and place relevant information on the site.This is a real case where the students are vital contributors to a learning community--and gaining valuable insights into how institutions works.' Sixth graders can't do this sort of thing - can they ? ;-)))
2/13/02; 11:29:10 PM
- General Weblog News.
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An interesting interview with Clifford Stoll, astronomer and internet pioneer from UC Berkeley. He argues that instead of spending time in front of computers, youngsters need interaction with their peers and with their teachers. Of course he is right. Technology out of the context of good teaching is not helpful.
Good technology should enhance good teaching - not replace it.
He also argues that computing offers instant gratification instead of solving the real problems in American education which require interaction with teachers and improved discipline.
Both assertions are probably true but I don't think they are mutally exclusive. Perish the thought that our students should have 'fun'. It seems as though computers are burdened with the responsibility of creating or curing the ills of our education systems. Surely that responsibilty lies with society at large, the politicians, educators and parents. I suppose it is easier to pull the plug in the classroom than accept our own responsibility. Yeah down with computers. I'll throw my class computers out as soon as my holiday is over ;-)
2/13/02; 9:42:04 AM
- General News.
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One Year Ago Today
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