Uses of weblog technology in the educational world
Steve Burt has been busy. He’s posted three new editions of Ed Tech Coast to Coast in the last couple weeks. In particular, we recorded something from FETC a couple weeks ago and most recently a chat with a superintendent and school board member following their blogging panel discussion at the NSBA Conference. You’ll find links to the panelists’ own blogs at the NSBA blog entry on the session.
You can listen and subscribe to the feed at ODEO.
Here’s the latest in a recent string of articles highlighting how one’s online life can carry over into the very real world of work and school. From the NY Daily News, an account of how potential employers use Google as another method of checking up on job applicants. I continue to hear stories of college admissions departments visiting MySpace as an additional step in the application process.
I doubt this matters much to most kids. I maintain that shortsightedness is one of the distinguishing characteristics of adolescence. (And I’m not trying to be too harsh here. It just is.) Many high school students have trouble recognizing the near-term ramifications of their actions, let along what might happen to them several years from now.
At the very least, this Daily News story is a potential opening to a larger and more important conversation with students about appropriate online behavior.
The Mac faithful were tuned to MacRumors and their IRC chat today for the Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld. There were a number of surprises that will be blogged about everywhere. A couple things that caught my eye were the new version of GarageBand and a new product called iWeb. Many people had predicted that Apple would release an app that would make podcast creation and publishing easier, and now we have it. I will install the new iLife as soon as possible and give this new Garageband a whirl. iWeb appears to be a Apple’s attempt to create a basic blogging tool that can publish photos and all sorts of digital media. Apple is touting the RSS capabilities of everything including iPhoto and a new feature they’re calling “photocasting.”
Who knows how well these tools will actually work, but it sure looks cool so far.
Thanks to the StatTraq product for WordPress, it’s easy to look back and see what blog visitors are reading. Here are two top 5 lists from 2005:
Top 5 podcasts:
5. Michael Searson: Pre-service teacher education
4. STP #8: A chat with the gang
3. Scott McLeod: Data-driven Decision Making
2. Comic Life: A talk with Robert Grant and Cris Pearson
1. Martin Dougiamas: Moodle CMS
Top 5 posts (non-podcasts):
5. Jargon watch: The Long Tail
4. Getting Things Done with KGTD
3. Moodle update
2. Gillmore on grassroots journalism
1. Comics for learning
So if you missed any of those posts or podcasts, what are you waiting for? 
Not to be outdone by other bloggers and their six-year-old kids, I set up a blog for my son Jacob recently. We’ve posted some artwork, a bit of keyboarding practice, and two podcasts so far. He’s done all the work with a little help from me on some HTML markup and audio editing. Who knows, maybe he’ll want to install some Google AdSense ads to supplement his weekly “paycheck.”
I had the pleasure of presenting a full-day workshop on Saturday at the TIES Conference. The session, Introducing the Read-Write Web: Weblogs, Wikis, and RSS, has an accompanying wiki that we used to track questions and resources that were mentioned during the workshop. Feel free to check it out for any nuggets that may be useful.
I’ve created two wiki pages to collect input from folks who might (or might not) be interested in attending my sessions at the upcoming TIES Technology Conference. I could be wrong, but I think it’s pretty cool to be able to have this kind of input before a conference session. False advertising is my conference pet peeve, and, if nothing else, these pages should eliminate that possibility.
Wiki links:
I had the pleasure of hosting a second roundtable discussion this morning. The room was full and we had some good discussion of many of the issues that come up whenver there’s a discussion of blogs, wikis, and other interactive, Web-based tools.
I pointed everyone to James Farmer’s edublogs site where any educator can create a free blog. There was a good mix of bloggers and those interesting in blogging at the session, and I think almost everyone walked away with something new to think about. I passed a “blogroll” sheet around and found a couple bloggers willing to share their URLS. Check out Blogs in the Schools and The Geek’s Classroom.
I was exciting to learn about two sites that I hadn’t explored yet. Matt, of Blogs in the Schools fame, described how he’s using Blogmeister with his students. I’m not sure how I missed this tool that comes from David Walicks’s Landmark Project. Blogmeister puts the teacher in control of what gets published on each student blog and what comments appear via email notification and moderation. I will investigate this further for sure.
The other interesting suggestion was for Web Collaborator, a fusion of wiki and a discussion board. I’m trying to check it out, but I can’t get the site to load. I’ll keep checking.
We talked a bit about Wikipedia, of course, spending a fair bit of time discussing wiki reliability. I continue to contend that “the proof is in the pudding” and consistently find Wikipedia useful. Several other people in the room agreed. I pointed out how any Wikipedia user can mark an article “in dispute.” (See the article on Criticism of the Iraq War for an example as of today.) I just noticed a notice on the Iraq War article that I hadn’t seen before. It says: “This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. This article has been tagged since October 2005.” (There are 9,433 articles currently tagged for “cleanup” as of today.) Interesting.
I hope I’m remembering all of the links I was planning to make in this post. If anyone from the session reads this, please let me know if I forgot anything by posting a comment. (And thanks for coming out bright and early for the session.)
