John Kruper writes a remarkably well-balanced entry, Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?, on his weblog, The Electric Lyceum:
The moral of the story? While blogs and other “lightweight” community publishing systems will surely find their way into the motivated educator’s hands, their impact will remain limited until they are married to the more mundane (and decidedly not pedagogically-valued) class management features that are the bread and butter of “traditional” course management systems.
The interesting question then becomes, from which end of the spectrum will this post-revolution revolution emerge? Will blogs grow class management wings? Or will commercial course management systems shove blogs inside the courses alongside their documents and folders? Of course, don’t count out the possibility that an entirely new species may emerge, one that is natively optimized along both dimensions!
I’ve always thought that the idea of replacing course management systems with weblogs just illustrated that the person making the suggestion didn’t understand the role of course management systems at the institutional level. Kruper hits the nail on the head, though.
FWIW, weblogs won’t take on course management functionality because weblog vendors aren’t going to be competitive in that vertical (and they know it). Course management system will eventually integrate with existing weblog tools or incorporate blog-like publishing, though.
Education, Weblogs
TypePad, the new hosted weblog service from Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, was launched at 11:59 PM on Monday, August 4.
To quote Matt Haughey for a second time this week:
You know what I call 11:59 PM on August 4th? Tuesday.
Unlike Blogger, the service which TypePad’s business model most closely resembles, TypePad isn’t free, although with the basic plan starting at $4.95 per month it is relatively cheap. I say relatively, because I only pay $5 per month to ICDsoft, my web hosting provider. ICDsoft doesn’t provide me with nifty weblog authoring software, so I had to install Movable Type myself, but for that five bucks I get a heck of a lot more space (333 MB) than TypePad is offering, plus a lot more flexibility.
But I’m a power user. Even more so than Blogger, TypePad is a service aimed at the Aunt Mabels of the world — the non-technical consumer who doesn’t place any importance on a webhost having MySQL and PHP support or whatever. They want a tool that has a good interface and accomplishes the desired task. And they’re probably willing to pay the price of a vente mocha frappucino for it each month.
I don’t think the competition for TypePad will come from Blogger or Userland. From what I’ve seen of TypePad, the interface outstrips both of those products. TypePad will eventually have to compete with AOL Journals and whatever weblogging tool MSN eventually releases (oh, c’mon, you know they will). Since the Aunt Mabels are already paying for AOL or MSN, Six Apart will either need to grab those users and make them good customers right now or have a convincing story to differentiate TypePad from the weblog tools that will be rolled into the consumer online services. Just having a better interface may not be enough to dislodge Aunt Mabel.
Weblogs
I’ve slightly revised the draft for this weblog’s editorial policy. I doubt there will be many more changes, but as before, any feedback is appreciated.
Read more…
Weblogs
Stephen Downes has written a tutorial on How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer.
Here’s a simpler tutorial:
1. Get a weblog tool that supports RSS.
2. Write.
3. Let the weblog tool do the RSS work.
Read more…
Syndication & Aggregation, Weblogs
the Technorati Top 100 looks significantly different than it did a few weeks ago. Although apparently it’s sort of old news, I missed that Technorati, the nifty service that lets you know which weblogs link to which other weblogs, started including LiveJournal users in its mix.
What’s amazing is the order of magnitude by which the hyperlinking between LiveJournal users totally outstrips the “mainstream” webloggers. Even mighty contenders like Slashdot, Boing Boing, and Instapundit are knocked from the top spots.
LiveJournal has a reputation of being populated by geeky teenage gamers, but they’ve clearly built a social network that’s as, if not more, robust than the non-LiveJournal blogosphere.
Prediction: this is just a shadow of what we’ll see when AOL Journals start to get traction.
Weblogs
I’ve watched the recent controversy over depublishing with great interest. I’ve participated, far more vigorously than I normally do, in discussion threads on several (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) weblogs over this issue.
Someone asked me why this was so important to me. Although my paycheck isn’t explicitly because of my writing skills these days, at times in the past 15 years I’ve been paid for writing or editing newspaper articles, magazine features, fiction, public relations materials, advertising copy, technical manuals, etc., as well as having taught writing at several universities. I consider myself a writer. I consider writing an important activity that has the potential for immense impact. Someone who engages in writing, particularly someone whose words reach a wide audience, should hold themselves accountable for what he or she writes. If not, I believe it is justifiable for her community to hold her accountable for their writing practice. In the end, isn’t that one of the roles of society — to hold accountable those individuals who refuse to hold themselves accountable?
With my own accountability in mind, I have put together a first version of an editorial policy for this weblog. Comments and feedback on this draft of the editorial policy are welcome.
Read more…
Weblogs
Rebecca Blood: Weblog Ethics, excerpted from her book The Weblog Handbook.
A summary:
1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
3. Publicly correct any misinformation.
4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
6. Note questionable and biased sources.
Bravo! Number four is particularly pertinent to the recent brouhaha. Number six as well. ;-)
Weblogs
Overnight, I thought about the post I made yesterday regarding de-publishing. I’m working up an editorial policy to make it clear to my readers (both of you!) what is subject to change, what is not, and to be able to represent that changes have take place through representation of posted vs. modified dates.
One of the few frustrations I have with Movable Type is that MTEntryDate is always the date of the creation of the entry (e.g. when you clicked on “New Entry”) and not the posting date. I frequently create a post and use Movable Type’s draft mode to save it while I work on it. Sometimes, I might not post it for a day or two. If I don’t remember to manually change the entry date, I wind up “posting to the past” because the date defaults to date of creation, not date of posting.
What I would like is, for each entry, to be able to automatically indicate the time and date of creation, the time and date of posting, and the time and date of the last update.
The LastModified MT plug-in gets me that last part. I haven’t been able to find the appropriate combination of MT tags or plug-ins that will allow me to automatically distinguish the “created on” date from the time of posting.
Thoughts? Solutions?
Movable Type, Weblogs
Mark Pilgrim has instituted an interesting site, called Winer Watcher. It uses Dave Winer’s RSS feed to track the frequent changes, additions, and deletions Winer makes to his Scripting News weblog. I noticed this recently, because there’s a particularly inflammatory post about Tim Bray in my Scripting News RSS feed that has been edited out of existence on the actual weblog.
Of course, this is nothing new. I’ve been irked with Winer’s “editorial policy” (or lack thereof) before and wrote extensively about it’s failures in this thread in Paolo Valdemarin’s weblog. The short version is: I believe ethics and accountability demand that if you make substantive changes or corrections to published comments, that those changes and corrections be publicly acknowledged.
Winer’s standard disclaimer is that he “edits in public” and his “publication time is 10pm.” I think that’s a cop out. On a weblog, when something is posted, it is public. Ergo, the time of posting is the time of publication; the words are present, distributed, and have impact. Winer frequently writes inflammatory posts, then removes the inflammatory parts or deletes the entire post. He attempts to make it appear as if the inflammatory words never existed. This isn’t editing; this is de-publishing. (In earlier posts I refered to this as “un-publishing,” but I’ll use “de-publishing” now. The term “unpublished” has the existing meaning of “not yet published”.)
De-publishing is a mechanism only available to online writers who control their own publication medium (e.g. bloggers). In print, radio, or TV, once you’ve made your content public, you can’t pull it back. Yesterday’s print edition of the Washington Post is out there; no way to de-publish it.
Even online, you can only de-publish your words, if you (the author) are also the publisher. E.g. a reporter for a newspaper that publishes articles online probably can’t pull their words offline without going through the editorial process. An editor is supposed to be a check against failure of journalist ethics (although from the recent New York Times debacle, we know that’s not a perfect system). Only an online author that is also their own online publisher can de-publish.
As Mark has made evident, though, RSS feeds frequently leave a virtual paper trail of the changes.So, bravo to Mark Pilgrim for exposing this practice for what it is. I only wish Mark had been doing it longer, so we had a more complete archive of Winer’s de-published comments.
Weblogs
Shelley Powers comments on AOL’s plan to launch a weblogging tool:
I remember AOL and Usenet and all those naive users dumped on to the Usenet groups, coming close to all but destroying some of them. Now we have potentially the same thing happening to weblogging and all people can see is marketing and business, new social software vistas, and, more importantly — more people weblogging.
You know what?
The Internet belongs to AOL subscribers, too.
Weblogs