We've had what I would call a very narrow pipe in terms of creating and posting content to our site. Everything funneled through one person who was ultimately responsible for all content. It's a system that really inhibits content production in any meaningful form. But in the grand vision I'm laying out, that changes as production and publication is distributed throughout the school community using Web logs. I've got 75% of it worked out in my brain including the build in of RSS and new templates for various audiences. (Attention: consultants stay tuned.) I've shown the superintendent and others the Kern site, Delano, Basehor-Linwood High School, and others.

Ironically, Bill McCoy of School Blog or Not fame is back with some new ideas (most of which are way over my head, but he's trying to help me get it.) While his new idea of using Outlook (or similar) e-mail messages and folders to feed content to a Web log (primarily for ease of use), I'm a bit more interested in his experience with building his school site with p-machine. He has some interesting observations on his site, including:

With 6 months of elementary school web site volunteering under my belt, I'm convinced that weblog software is fantastically useful in the school environment. Our school went from no web site (aka stale, dead web site) to a web site chock full of fresh content. BUT - and it's a big but - the vast majority of that content passed through yours truly or another "techie" volunteer en route to the site. Sure, we've got a couple of other parents publishing content directly and a couple of staff tiptoeing in. But 3 months post our site launch, our very tech-savvy principal is still emailing in content submissions to a volunteer to put onto her own "principal's corner" weblog. Why? I ask myself. I can't blame our pMachine system: no one has complained that it's hard to use or slow or whatever. Rick Ellis has built a gem of a system and I find the pMachine control panel web interface more usable than half the installed applications on my desktop. But, the reality is that busy people (unless they are CTOs with a penchant to learn new SW) simply don't want to mess around with learning new stuff. They've barely figured out Outlook - not because they're stupid, but because Outlook's just a means to an end. And, Outlook does happen to have a fair few features to learn (several of which I've stumbled on only in the last few days of research into this topic). So asking someone who's still learning the ins & outs of Outlook to pick up a whole new user interface is - I've reluctantly concluded - a very real barrier to adoption.

At any rate, the next few days should be interesting as I start to flesh out my "vision" for the decision-makers. I am truly psyched and overwhelmed at what may lie ahead. [weblogged News]

11:25:28 PM | # |  |

At C2T2 we're hoping to use uPortal as the portal software for a future version of BCcampus. We've wanted to get trained up in it and related technologies for quite some time, but couldn't necessarily justify the costs to fly to Boulder or one of the other cities where the training has been hosted recently.

So we tried to organize it ourselves. And luckily got connected with the good folks at UVic's library, who were both interested in the training and had the facilities to host it. They picked up the ball and ran with it, and now we get to attend some training right here in Victoria. Hooray! Why don't you join us? uPortal is a more and more viable solution, especially in the higher ed context, and I've also had a promise from the folks at Unicon, the new parent company to IBS who deliver the training and are key uPortal participants, that they will show a bit of their Academus CMS product, a course management system that runs within a uPortal shell. - SWL