James Farmer: Educational Weblogs: Whats & Whys
I realize that James’ four-page essay is a really bare bones kind of introduction to weblogs for getting The Currently Un-Bloggy Educator Types interested. Hence the list of all the things you can use a weblog for: a virtual learning environment, a professional publishing tool, a news ticker for you, a news ticker for your course, a knowledge management tool for your faculty, a filing cabinet, a course website, a project management tool, a coffee-maker. etc.
And all of it is (mostly) true…technically. The “news ticker” stuff applies to news aggregators, not weblogs. Radio Userland includes a news aggregator, but that doesn’t make the aggregator part of the weblog. Nit. Picked. Moving on. . .
While the rest is technically possible, it falls under the “everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything” mentality that continues to make me cranky.
Briefly, here’s why that mentality irks me: you can drive a nail with a saw, but you’ll get better results with a hammer.
There are already tools for virtual learning environments, course websites, professional publishing, knowledge management, file management, project managements, making coffee, etc.
Sure you can shoehorn a bootstrapped solution on the cheap with a weblog. (Two footwear metaphors in that sentence!) And the education field has a tendency to always want to bootstrap their own solution. I think part of the reason for that is the decentralized nature of academia — every professor wants to be (and, granted, sometimes has to be) the duke of their own little fiefdom.
My opinion is that the education field wastes a lot of time and effort bootstrapping half-assed solutions (driving nails with a saw) when resources could be better devoted to implementing a specific solution (use a hammer, ferpetesake!). I know, harnessing those resources in academia is never simple, but I wish people were less concerned with kludging together solutions with gum and chicken wire, and more concerned with fundamental change of the structures that lead them to the gum and baling wire in the first place.
Education, Weblogs
Sebastian Fiedler, in Seblogging: Paper Draft for BlogTalk 2003:
“We can observe almost in real-time how individuals use personal Webpublishing technologies to facilitate and feed their own change and learning processes. Watching this rich fabric of learning conversations unfold makes you wonder why people still believe that e-learning is all about content delivery and the production of polished instructional products. People in the personal Webpublishing realm successfully learn outside any institutionally organized system of instruction.”
Amen, brother.
I certainly don’t keep a weblog for your benefit, dear readers (although I hope at least a few of you enjoy it and get a wee bit of value from it). I keep a weblog because it provides an incentive for me to read and think about things that are of interest to me (like technology in education). It’s like a kick in the ass, except for my brain. :-)
However, I do revel in getting a comment or trackback or the unforeseen referrer in my logs. I recognize that feedback loop makes keeping a weblog more interesting than a keeping a journal that just sits on my desk (or my computer desktop). It keeps me motivated.
You may or may not know that I have an MFA in Creative Writing, although I don’t do much writing these days. I’ve often thought that I would like to experiment with writing fiction in public — not weblog-as-fiction a la Flight Risk, but just working on a novel out there in public, perhaps via a weblog. Why? To see if that feedback loop might jog my creative side as it does my intellectual side.
Harlan Ellison used to do this schtick (and may still) where he would set up a typewriter in a storefront window and crank out a short story while people stood around and watched. Fiction as a spectator sport! Except Harlan didn’t solicit feedback from the other side of the storefront window as he wrote; with the Web you could.
Sadly, though, my intellectual side is more courageous and secure than my creative side. ;-)
Books, Writing & Literature, Education, Personal, Weblogs
Jim McGee: Weblogs in learning settings and Weblogs and knowledge management are two good annotated compendiums of lots of recent links on these two topics.
(This post is an “outboard brain” moment, e.g. I’m really posting it for my benefit, not yours, dear reader, so that my soggy ol’ inboard brain doesn’t forget about these links.)
Education, Weblogs
You re-design the site’s style. But you still stress over the color scheme and wind up using your alma mater’s for no good reason other than orange is a good color and you realized blue and orange are the colors of that other school.
Personal
So sometimes you take a few days off work. And you don’t take your laptop with you and you don’t check email at an Internet cafe or anything. And then when you come back you’re really kinda relaxed. And you don’t surf the daily sites. You delete all the posts in your news aggregator without reading them. And you learn to sleep in past 6:00am because (a) you only live two metro stops from work and don’t really need to get up that early and (b) the stuff in the news aggregator isn’t that compelling. So you don’t post anything for awhile. Maybe you’ll get back into that habit soon, maybe it’ll be a while.
And then you begin to write in the second person. At which point you think, “Man, there’s really something different going on in my noggin this week.”
Personal
Dave Winer, Starting Weblogs at Universities: “Here’s how you get weblogs started at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth. First, know that universities thrive on having their experts visible outside the university. Not just publishing in academic journals, which most alumni don’t read, but being called in as experts on radio talk shows, esp NPR….So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course.”
I think the key phrase there is “at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth.” My gut feeling is this approach won’t work at a institution that’s not a “blue chip” university. This approach (as well as a load of other Ivy League approaches) isn’t going to translate to John Doe Community College or Southwest Backwater State University.
It’s odd that there’s so much going on with education and weblogs — more than I’ve seen at any point in the past — but Dave seems totally oblivious to it. He’s still thinking like a software company CEO and programmer, not like an educator. Or maybe he’s hanging out with too many lawyers!
Education, Weblogs
Dave Winer: “When I’m writing for the web, and I’m browsing my own site, every bit of text that I created has a button that says Edit this Page when I view it.”
Funny. That’s precisely why I don’t use Manila. If I’m going to edit via a textarea, I prefer to be able to see the output as my audience sees it, minus the edit controls.
Dave said he’s amazed that people think Movable Type is advanced and that he thinks Blogger is “totally not in the game.” I don’t know if any analysts actually look at the weblog “market,” but by my totally non-scientific research (e.g. what weblogs I read), I would guess that both Movable Type and Blogger have more users than Userland. In fact, LiveJournal might have more, as well, but LiveJournal users are a pretty insular community so it’s hard to tell. I don’t think I’ve ever linked to a LiveJournal user.
How would one go about determining weblog software market share?
Weblogs
The local NBC station is reporting that a disabled woman who uses her Segway as a mobility device was initially prevent from riding the Metro this morning. Eventually Metro let her on the train, but only with a police escort. As Arlington County, VA, is the only municipality in the DC area that does not have local regulations prohibiting Segways on the Metro, the woman could be subject to arrest if she rides Metro outside of Arlington County.
Metro allows electric wheelchairs, but since Segway is not classified as a mobility device, it is a disallowed electric vehicle.
Accessibility
Bonnie points out that Chandler, the open source alternative to Microsoft Outlook being built by the Open Source Application Foundation, actually contains a Chandler release, codenamed “Westwood,” that is geared to higher ed.
Neat.
Education
Stephen Downes, of Online Learning Daily writes an editorial for After 5 titled More than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs. For the most part it’s a really dead-on summary of weblogging development. However, this part doesn’t seem accurate:
“Blogs form an ideal medium for the distribution of professional development and other learning resources. Some initiatives have already started as places such as Maricopa College and the University of Calgary are experimenting with the use of RSS to distribute learning objects and learning object metadata.”
This seems like a leap. Weblogs don’t equal RSS, and neither of his examples, MLX nor CAREO, are weblogs. Nor are, for the most part, the MLX and CAREO objects being presented to students through weblogs. Curious. I suppose that technically one could syndicate their own learning objects from their weblog (or other kind of repository) and the RSS feed (e.g. the metadata) could be collected in a separate metadata repository. This is what DLORN does, as I understand it. Is that what he’s thinking?
As a bit of a sidenote, I have to admit that I’m getting really bored with the “everything is a weblog and weblogs are everything” mentality. Not accusing Downes of that here (although I think he’s teetering on the brink), but I think the hype surrounding weblogs as a panacea to … well, everything, is really beginning to miss the target. (Note to self: write more about that at some point.)
[Note: once again MT's draft feature bites me in the ass. The timestamp on this post has been updated to note when it was actually posted, not when it was drafted.]
Education, Weblogs