Tag: blogs

YABP (yet another blogging presentation)

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/adeta_blogtalk.ppt

The above points to the powerpoint slides for an online presentation I just gave to the Alberta Distance Education and Training Association (ADETA). Likely nothing new there for the old hands, but I promised James I would post it once it was done. Like everything else on this site it is posted under a Creative Commons license, so reuse as desired.

I tried to build on the work I did a few years back on the ‘Matrix of Uses’ for blogs in education – truth be told I haven’t spent a lot of time since then focusing on the issue, so don’t know if my thinking has progressed that far.

In a nutshell, my messages were
– focus on ‘blogging’ as process and not ‘blog’ as noun
– blogging is important in representing a number of significant ‘firsts’ (easy XML publishing tool, easy personal publishing, networked writing, easy way to create identity online)
– yet important to learn the lessons these ‘firsts’ teach irregardless of the specific manifestations (I know I’ll catch flak for that one)
– represent a move towards bringing our educational life online and are online lives together (for better or worse, you decide)

It’s hard when you don’t know your audience/can’t even see your audience. I ended up with too much background and not enough time for the meat. Maybe someday there will be enough awareness of blogs as a phenomenom that all of us can forsake all the introductory comments, but it still feels fringe enough to me when I talk to educators ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, that I feel compelled to include it in these kinds of talks. – SWL

Bloglines Problems – Seriously Concerned

http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/comments/223/

I am a huge fan of Bloglines and use it ever day (some people even claim I have an RSS ‘habit’ and need help). So I have been increasingly concerned with the weird behaviour I have seen over the past weeks in Bloglines. Specifically, I’ve noticed feed counts getting updated but the feed contents not displaying when you go to read them unless you specifically force it to display the last x days. The other problem I’ve reported is that the Bloglines search facility is demonstrably not working on a regular basis.

I’ve emailed Bloglines and got a response on both problems that they were ‘looking into the problem.’ O.k., great; it’s a free service and they replied in under a day, which is pretty impressive.

But then quite by chance today I went back to Michael Feldstein’s e-literate site because in the back of my mind I wondered why I hadn’t seen anything from his blog of late. And there I found the above post which indicates that Bloglines hasn’t been updating his feed for quite some time. I unsubscribed and resubscribed and he’s right – sometime back in October the feed stopped being updated and you can’t get anymore through Bloglines.

I don’t know about you, but if you are a Bloglines user I would suggest this is VERY unsettling news. Anyone else experiencing weirdness like this? (I’ve turned off comments recently as my ISP helpfully broke my MT-blacklist comment spam filter with a PERL upgrade, but please email me or post on your own blog if you are experiencing similar difficulties. The irony being of course that if you read this feed through Bloglines, who knows if you will or won’t see this post). And as Will Richardson recently reminded folks, back up your OPML files. – SWL

New EdTech blog – Tim Wang’s Education Blog

http://blog.loaz.com/timwang/index.php

A warm welcome to the blogosphere for a new Ed Tech blogger from B.C. Tim Wang is a Flash developer with the Arts Computing group at U.B.C. For those of you not familar with their work, these are the folks behind a set of Flash-based learning tools they call ‘Learning Object Template Tools,’ including the flash-based Timeline Tool that made the rounds a few months back.

I am really looking forward to reading Tim’s blog, both for the ideas he brings to the field but also the connections he brings. In addition to being a great Flash developer, Tim also speaks Chinese and has of late been making more and more connections with educational technologists in China. I often find backlinks to EdTechPost from Chinese blogs only to find I can’t make heads or tails, so it will be great to have a guide to new happenings over there. – SWL

MT 3.121, Blacklist v2.01b and Comment Spam Blocking Bliss

I’m probably the last Moveable Type user to realize this, but boy does your blogging life get a whole lot easier by upgrading to MT 3 and using the newly updated MT Blacklist 2.01b release. The new Blacklist plugin very handily throws comments with too many URLs or ones on really old posts into your list of comments needing moderation without posting them to your site (in addition to blocking ones it knows outright to be spam), and the ability to batch delete pending comments in MT means that maybe 1 out 1000 comment spam attempts in the last week or so got through to my site, and dealing with them is now under a 1 minute process in the morning. And my ISP is happy because I no longer bring their servers to a halt trying to despam my blog. If you haven’t already done it, a highly recommended set of upgrades for MT users. And extremely painless too. I can feel my blood pressure going down already. – SWL

Conflicted about the Edublog Weblog Awards

http://incsub.org/awards/index.php

James Farmer has taken up the challenge and created a site to vote for the Inaugural Edublogs Awards. I fell pretty conflicted about this:

– on the one hand, it’s great to recognize excellence and all of the hard work some folks have put in.

– on the other hand, this feels somewhat antithetical to the sense of collaborative community that some feel is emerging through the blogosphere. I placed a few votes, but as I did so I kept feeling I was highlighting one piece of good work at the expense of another. Also, this feels like it is tapping into a part of the blogosphere I’m really less interested in – people reinforcing their meatspace connections, status and networks through their blogs. Clearly, that’s inevitable, but it rubs me the wrong way, and it feels against the original spirit of ‘meritocracy’ on which the internet was built.

I think I’ve placed all the votes I’m going to place, and have now decided to mostly ignore this. The potential for harm is greater than the potential for good in this sort of thing. There are plenty other ways to indicate what you like in the blogosphere, indeed the ‘blogosphere’ is in some ways simply an emergent conversation that displays an interconnection of p/references. – SWL

UThink’s Blog Directory Page

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ (then follow the ‘Blog Directory’ link – for whatever reason, MT is gawking on the actual URL)

You’ve likely seen the UThink site before, the University of Minnesota’s MoveableType-based blogging site. But I wanted to point out the ‘Blog Directory’ sub-page on that site for the little things it does right to direct new readers to existing blogs.

Like almost every ‘directory’ it has an alphabetical list of all the blogs on that site, but really, is that helpful? Sure, if you want to troll through hundreds of pages looking for interesting titles, but typically not. What is helpful, though, is how they highlight “Recent Posts,” “Blogs with the most comments” and “Blogs with most Posts” – yes I know this reinforces so-called ‘power laws,’ and that ‘more’ doesn’t always mean ‘better,’ but as someone coming in from the outside to this server, these provided great starting points to explore this sub-universe within the blogopshere.

This seems to me to be part of the trick in rolling out blogs in academic settings – they have their uses if they are only being read by the instructor and the rest of their class, but blogs have stood out precisely because the network the create and participate in is not formally bounded (as say a CMS-based threaded discussion is.) So you need to (or at least are able to) grow the readership/network; one way to do this individually is to use all of the tricks that existing bloggers do (post on other people’s comments, post links to other people’s posts, blogrolls). But pages like this directory page also serve as an institutional means to grow the community, and are aimed at (but not restricted to) the next grouping ‘up’ from the course level, the institution-wide audience. – SWL

Technorati tip

pingConfigurations – Technorati Developers Site

Do you ever check out the technorati site to see who is linking to you and vice versa? Ever notice ‘gaps’ in the coverage, sites you know that have linked to you or you have linked to that don’t appear in the list. Here’s one small tip you might be interested in – simple instructions on how to add manually add Technorati’s XML-RPC interface to your list of automatically pinged sites in your blogging tool, so that when you post, your blog will get placed in their high priority queue for faster indexing. – SWL

Raymond Yee’s notes from Canadian Elearning Workshop 2004

http://raymondyee.net/wiki/
CanadianElearningWorkshop2004

Well, I can’t be there myself, but reading Raymond’s notes in his wiki is the next best thing. He is involved in the hugely intriguing Scholars Box project, part of the Interactive Univeristy Project at UC Berkeley, and brings his own great context to these notes. Thanks for sharing these, Raymond! – SWL

A few ‘new’ edublogs

Last week Alan was lamenting the seeming dissappearance of a number of formerly prolific edubloggers. I too had wondered where many people had disappeared to, though I seem to recall from my days ‘inside’ the institution that November and December can be particularly hectic times.

In the spirit of widening the circle, here’s a few other educational bloggers I have stumbled on to recently, and that I haven’t seen mentioned widely yet:

In particular I would highlight the first two, Brian Alger’s and Gord McKenzie’s, as so far containing lots of thought provoking material.

And as has been pointed out a number of times, one of the beauties of RSS is the ability to be notified of activity on a blog that has otherwise been inactive simply by keeping a subscription to their feed in your aggregator. The way I manage that in bloglines is to create a folder titled ‘Dormant’ so that I can keep track of blogs that do not seem to be posting regularly anymore. – SWL