Montag, 10. Februar 2003

Is it Me. ...or does anyone else see the potential (or is it irony?) in Dave Winer leaving Userland to go to Harvard and introduce America's most prestigious educational institution to Web logs? (And BTW, can you believe he just wrote: "Now that I'm working with Manila again, I'm remembering all the things that infuriate me about Manila." Well, how about fixing it?) Listen to some of this: But now, thanks to John Palfrey & the Berkman Center, we have a bona fide initiative afoot to explore how weblogs can serve the aims of education. And it will be led by none other than Dave Winer, whom I recall linking to back when the word "weblog" was assaultingly fresh to my ears...It's time for some radical approaches to teaching and learning. I don't mean radical as in "cutting edge technology." I mean radical as in "to-the-root." Largely self-driven, apprentice-style. With everyone able to join the conversation, a built-in incentive to participate and (a few) natural filtering mechanisms. --Donna Wentworth (Emphasis mine.) Hmmm...is eBN "bona fide?" Anyone else hear "disruptive" in that? And how about this: We're convinced that blogging, evangelized by Dave and others here, can help spread the wealth of knowledge from school to school; from student to student; and from elsewhere into Harvard and vice-versa. The Web, e-mail and other basic Net-based apps generally have had this effect to some extent. But not in a wholly satisfying manner. I wouldn't bet again[st] blogs making the next big step forward. --John Palfrey (Emphasis mine.) Can I get an AMEN brothers and sisters? And more... Another sign of Web logs going mainstream came last month when one of the movement's champions, Dave Winer, quit his California start-up to take a fellowship at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Winer, creator of the popular Radio UserLand blogging software, said he plans to help the academic community share information online more efficiently. "I hope to get a lot of blogs going at Harvard," Winer added. --Leslie Walker, Washington Post (Emphaisis mine.) Add a few degrees to the tipping angle...[Will Richardson] Another voice on the Harvard and Winer topic... [Sebastian Fiedler] 11:38:28 PM

It's Saturday.... ...but my kids are posting away. I've seen about 20 messages come through today from my various class and student Web logs. How cool is that? Discussion stuff, not assigned. HOW COOL IS THAT? This post is what it's all about for me. Thinking in writing. Writing for audience. Publishing. Digital paper. Really, how cool is this? [Will Richardson] Sounds like Will has established a working model in his environment. Encouraging to see how his students are taking off on their own. [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:41 PM

The wave itself has moved on. Weblog popularity, Power laws & priorities [dive into mark] Quote: "The ridiculously low barrier to entry of starting your own weblog is invariably held up as a prime reason why personal publishing will lead us into an egalitarian utopia. But all it really means is that anyone can get in on the long tail of the power law distribution, where you (voluntarily) spend all your time linking to Glenn Reynolds or Dave Winer, and never get read by more than 3 people." Comment: I haven't checked my stats in a long while.  I'm sure they're not very impressive. Actually, I'm thinking a little more about links and the like.  Since I started using Amphetadesk, I've been paying more attention to my headlines, but that aside, it's pretty clear to me that what gets readers is original content, not links and quotation.  I fall into that trap often and wonder why I bother sometimes with my links. Anyway, weblogs and education are getting some pushes now.  The attention is on Dave Winer and Harvard, but I think it's fair to say that the action has been in San Francisco.  It would be disappointing to see all the kudos and attention going east when some really interesting things are happening elsewhere.  I feel that way sometimes about my own meagre efforts too.  I've been doing this weblog longer than most, but now that momentum has gathered, I feel like the foam on a wave that's been left behind as the wave itself has moved on.  I guess that relates back to this power law distribution.  When I knew all the educational webloggers, there really weren't very many of us.  Now that there are many more, I'm discomforted when credit isn't given to the pioneers or when I feel that credit is mistakenly given in some directions and not others.  It's a natural reaction (witness Dave Winer's repeated attempts to get the record set straight on various issues, including weblogs, but also XML-RPC and RSS).  While it's inevitable that history will get reinterpreted, our reaction to such interpretations is also inevitable. So I'm self-obsessed...what did you expect?  This is a weblog after all. ["David Carter-Tod"] David's sentiments are probably shared by a number of other people who have been exploring educational applications of Weblogs. What really suprises me is the fact that the folks who are now celebrating the Harvard initiative obviously never used "google" to take a look who is already out there. Is it so hard to string together a search request with a combination of "weblogs", "learning", "education", etc.? [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:40 PM

Userland, we need a roadmap. Now that I'm working with Manila again, I'm remembering all the things that infuriate me about Manila. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my new site to show me the Edit In Radio buttons so I can use the outliner to edit my templates. I refuse to edit the template in a web form. I will not do it! ;-> Anyway, I have gone to my own personal membership page and told the software that I have Radio and that it's running on port 5335. I've been to the prefs page for the site (I'm a managing editor) and made sure the pref is on there too. I look everywhere for the stinkin button, but it's nowhere to be found. I guess I'll have to resort to looking at the source code to figure out what I'm not doing that I need to do. [Scripting News] BAM! What happens when the big cheese doesn't work or play with his own product...... SebF,Will R, PatD and others have been asking for better features of Manila for tighter integration between Radio and Manila and just better and newer tools to help in collaboration. Userland, we need a roadmap, a sketch on where you are taking Manila. [Albert Delgado] Albert seems equally surprised (or even irritated?) by Dave Winer's recent comment. Yes, Sir! Where IS the road map? What's happening with Manila development? Anybody interested in some improvement ideas? [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:38 PM

Working with Manila. Now that I'm working with Manila again, I'm remembering all the things that infuriate me about Manila. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my new site to show me the Edit With Radio buttons so I can use the outliner to edit my templates. I refuse to edit the template in a web form. I will not do it! ;-> Anyway, I have gone to my own personal membership page and told the software that I have Radio and that it's running on port 5335. I've been to the prefs page for the site (I'm a managing editor) and made sure the pref is on there too. I look everywhere for the stinkin button, but it's nowhere to be found. I guess I'll have to resort to looking at the source code to figure out what I'm not doing that I need to do. Like all software, it's great when it fades into the background and you can forget about it. It's shitty when it's in your way. Postscript. Found the problem. I had to enable the XML-RPC interfaces at the server level. Once they were enabled, the buttons appeared. It's hard to imagine that a user who is not well-versed in the Manila at the source level would be able to figure this out without asking for support. On the other hand, it's probably right that the XML-RPC interfaces are disabled by default. [Dave Winer] Oh great! Now Dave Winer the turned-to-education Weblog preacher and chief tool-maker of Userland re-discovers his own application... So, Dave is getting Weblogs started at Harvard Uni? Well, how about listening to the people who are trying to apply these technologies for learning and education for quite some time now? I guess we could point Dave (or anybody else who cared to listen) to a good number of interface and functionality problems in Manila... [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:37 PM

Academic Publishing. One of the things I like best about blogging is the instant gratification: I think, I blog, I publish, I rethink, I blog, etc. In my "real" work, the rewards are so much slower. On Friday, I got a copy in the mail of a book, Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, ed. Lucinda Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, in which an article I'd written was published. From start to finish, this 20 page article (10 pages in the book because the print is so small) has taken almost 10 years to see its way into print. Here's the history... ["Deborah Gussmann"] 8:38:33 PM

About news aggregators. I've posted about news aggregators before, including NetNewsWire, the "lite" sibling of NetNewsWire Pro, currently in beta. While the "lite" version is primarilly a news reading front end for various Mac sites, NetNewsWire Pro from Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software is a full featured Mas OS X 10.2.3 news aggreator and web blog editor. Subscribing to an .rss based news feed couldn't be simpler; either you select them from the generous (and multilingual) collection included in the Sites Drawer, or you can copy the .rss URL from a site, click the Subscribe icon, and paste the URL into a simple dialog. Reading is simpler still, with easily understandable naviagation commends and menu options (though I think "Mark Others Read" would be a useful addition). NetNewsWIre Pro also lets you post to web logs, principally Blogger, Userland Radio, Bloxom, MoveableType and Manilla blogs, among others. The tools you'd want are all there—including autmatically generating a post from a news item, Post and Preview (the Live Preview is a nifty feature), and you needn't know HTML. There are simple tools for creating links and setting text style, and if you do know HTML, there's even a configurable pop-down menu for custom tags. Best of all though (at least to my way of thinking) is you can spell check your posts. There's even a convenient Notepad for copying bits of text to turn into a post, complete with basic but very functional outlining tools (the Notepad very cleverly saves automatically). It's still beta, but already I'm doing almost all my web blog reading in NetNewsWire Pro, and I'm going to keep trying it for posting as well. I've two blogs, this one built with Radio Userland, and this one built with Blogger. This post was made using NetNewsWire Pro, and it really is an elegant example of a good Mac OS X Cocoa-based tool. It makes excellent use of the underlying frameworks to provide niceties like spell check and interface elements, and Simmons has even made some of his code available to other developers. This is one of those applications that seems deceptively simple, but that actually does rather a lot. It has enormous potential for teaching; I hope I have an opportunity to use it with a class. ["Lisa Spangenberg"] Time to try an OS X installation in the coming months. Reading all the good reviews of NetNewsWire makes me want to play with it. [Sebastian Fiedler] 7:38:57 PM

"Greensboro Connects" meeting. I attended the last Greensboro Connects meeting--a group of individuals brought together to rally around and connect the community. Although they've been meeting for several months, you'd think it was their first.  They want to "gather data and distribute information so that people would have a better sense of community and stronger connections."  I along with my friends from Hyperbolic Communications suggested a website.  I thought they should initiate a web campaign--invite the community to have a place on the web and request content and input.  The organization would have launch date with the community fired up through their own involvement.   It would be a great celebration---everyone contributing in one place, hyped up about the connection--and enough non-for-profit cash to pull it off. The response was, "We don't have anything to put on the site.  We want  information for people to use.  No one is going to come to a site they don't even know about."  These people lack the vision needed to lead a 21st century community initiative.  A website can do all  they need--gather, distribute, organize and network--connect.  By making it a community project, they could have all the support in the world and a more complete inclusion of the people in our area.  When people come to Greensboro and want to know where to go, they go online!  When folks need a professional, they connect online!  Anything Greensboro could be found in an organized data warehouse.  Instead of sifting through guides, phone books, and surfing for information about this community, one could find it all in one place--connecting through the big green door. After rejecting our idea, they decided to start working the telephone to gather information.  I'm not surprised.  The website is the most simple, most logical step--Why would they want to do something simple or logical?  Greensboro Connects?  To what?  Telephone operators?  Where's the vision? ["Tara Sue Grubb"][via "Jason Lefkowitz"] Tara's story could have taken place in any educational institution, too. The availability of technologies is one issue... but breaking up old habits and patterns of work is usually the harder part of any change project. Which brings me back to the question: How do you introduce people to the "two-way-web" and its potential for learning and teaching? [Sebastian Fiedler] 6:38:35 PM

Badabing, badabang - go figure how I got into this. Dear colleague, Congratulations! We are pleased to notify that the poster proposal you submitted has been accepted for POSTER presentation at the 10th EARLI conference in Padova, Italy. Please inform all your co-authors. Details about the length and schedule of the sessions will appear later on the website:  http://earli2003.psy.unipd.it.  The final programme of the conference will be available on-line in June. With our warmest regards Pietro Boscolo Lucia Mason (on behalf of the local organising committee)       Lucia Mason, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology (Conference Management, Local Committee) [Pat Delaney] Congratulations, Pat. I hope we will be as lucky as you. Would be a nice to meet in Padua this summer. [Sebastian Fiedler] 6:38:34 PM

This must be a conspiracy of some sort. As soon as I closed shop at home to get on this trip to the US the output level has been considerably raised on a good number of my favorite Weblogs. How should I ever get back on track with that much going on? Come on people... slow down a little... ;-) Well, as a sort of compensation I had the pleasure to spend some time on the phone with "Will Richardson". And I hope I will finally get to talk to "Pat Delaney" in real time, too. Pat was kind enough to keep his chat channel wide open for me today... and I managed to miss him again. $%#@$^! The face-to-face conversations that I am having here with my friend and collaborator Priya convince me more than ever that we really need to create some opportunities for meetings... Ok, I am off to more conversational encounters. I hope I will get some time to blog tomorrow... ["Sebastian Fiedler"] 6:38:33 PM

Donnerstag, 6. Februar 2003

Weblogs and instruction - Brown Daily Herald. Quote: "Blogs -- the much−talked about Internet trend -- can serve as invaluable tools for their inventors, said Brian Weatherson, a Brown professor of philosophy and creator of a philosophy blog. " Comment: George Siemens is right.  A very brief piece.  The prediction at the end is way off however.  Who knows what we'll be doing in 5 years, let alone 20? ["David Carter-Tod"] 10:13:12 PM

Textbook was both outdated and expensive. A couple of weeks ago, David Geary brought to our notice a news release entitled Public Relations Students Prefer Internet Over Textbook, recounting his recent teaching experiences at the University of New Mexico - finding that the set textbook was both outdated and expensive, he discarded it and decided instead to make a judicious selection of Web-based resources, which were then arranged and woven into the framework of the course. These resources provided up-to-date materials presenting a diversity of viewpoints in a variety of genres and media; projects based on Internet explorations were assessed, replacing examinations. These innovations suited the students well, though they proved labour-intensive for the teacher; on the whole, the approach was judged to have much to offer to students and faculty alike... [via "David Carter-Tod"] I read this as another manifestation of the increasing problems with the traditional instructional design approaches. Knowledge domains develop fast and people simply cannot wait until course packages and textbooks are produced for their specialized needs and interests... ["Sebastian Fiedler"] 10:13:11 PM

Visiting Penn State. I have just arrived a State College, PA. The next 2 weeks will be dedicated to work on our pilot project here at Penn State. We are trying out some ideas on Weblog use in higher education. Some interesting days ahead... 10:13:10 PM

Weblogging Parents. I offered parents at our school a basic half-day weblogging course. Fifty have already signed up, an overwhelming but exciting response. Some of my Year Seven webloggers are going to assist on the course. This is how learning should be. Exciting enough for me to record it here for posterity :-) [Peter Ford] Though Peter Ford hasn't been feeding his Schoolblog's site for quite a while he still seems to be pretty active. [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:13:10 PM

Why Blog?. Why Blog? via Emergic Quote: "In general, though, the reason I have a weblog, and the reason I advocate to others that they ought to maintain weblogs themselves, is because I think it's important for people to have a place to express their opinions and thoughts, and to get feedback on those ideas." Comment: Yes! I would add one other point - I blog to learn...as I write, I self-evaluate, attempt to express nebulous thoughts...connect ideas, build on others' ideas...and grow in the process. [George Siemens] George Siemens comments on the power of personal Webpublishing for self-organized learning. To me the combination of self-driven content creation and human interaction is beating most of the polished packages the learning industry has on offer. [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:13:09 PM

Mooblogging in B-town. The blog I've been working on B-Villeblog has finally started getting some use. I got a Zonk board set up and I've got my students, tutors and parents actually accessing some of the information, now. Ok, ok...I offered a little incentive...posting school delays and closings before it's announced on the news stations...gotta get them to see this stuff anyway I can. But...It's working. The Dominoes are begin to fall...kids talking...parents looking...teachers paying attention and asking questions. Several kids have completed and emailed me practice writing responses to the activities. It's basic, it's not exactly where I originally planned to begin my blogging, but it's the entryway. Proficiency is on everyone's mind here...I'm giving them a place they can visit to ask questions, get answers and receive support. We're beginning...and in a rural area such as mine...that's a very big accomplishment! I've got them noticing and they like it...which means we can move forward and advance. Next on the agenda: I've got a third grade teacher ready to give blogging a shot and I've got the library information to begin to organize on the Library weblog. I also want to do a sorta cover blog to show my principal how her entry blog could be the portal for the entire school blogging infrastructure. Hmmmmmm....I've got big Mootown blogging Pie-in-the-Sky visions going on in my head here...hope I'm not being too much of a blog-brained dreamer. [Pam Pritchard] Quote from the B-Villeblog site: "Nothing fishy about it...our goals are to navigate the waters of good reading and writing, while also sailing smoothly into the world of technology. Try the waters out. There's an ocean of activities and information waiting inside." Take a look how Pam takes Weblogging from her private "fishtank" to the elementary school... [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:13:08 PM

Supervisor of Instructional Technology. Well...looks like I got the job. More later. ["Will Richardson"] Congratulations, Will! Nice to see that some of us get recognition for what they are trying to accomplish... ["Sebastian Fiedler"] 10:12:59 PM

Dienstag, 28. Januar 2003

Mapping thoughts. Joe has a string of very interesting posts on cognitive maps and topic maps. [Sebastien Paquet] Thanks for the link, Seb. This is right next on my agenda: How can mapping tools be used in combination with personal Webpublishing and Weblogs? [Sebastian Fiedler] 4:57:12 PM

Weblog comments and news aggregators. RSS 2.0 has a neat feature that allows an item to link to comments about that item. Content tools and aggregators can support this feature, allowing people to comment on an item directly from the news aggregator window. This document is a case study that shows how UserLand's weblog tool and aggregator both support comments. By illustrating this, I'm hoping that other tools and aggregators will also use this feature of RSS. Walkthrough Don Park is a friendly guy and I imagine he won't mind if I use his weblog as an example. Look at his RSS feed, and look at any , and you'll see a element. Its value is the URL of the comments page for the . Radio knows that it should include the comments element because Don has comments turned on. If the feature was turned off, the weblog tool would not generate the comments element. I subscribe to Don's feed. When I see one of his items, in the rightmost column, just below the POST icon is a picture of a pencil. When I click on the pencil, Radio opens a little window containing the comments for that item, and it's ready for me to enter my own comments. Here's a screen shot that shows what the aggregator window looks like. Summary If you make a weblog tool that supports comments, your RSS feed should also support . If you make a news aggregator or reader, you should make it easy for your users to comment on feeds that support the RSS feature. [Dave Winer] Like so many other times I am not quite sure if and how this will apply to Manila product development. Will the discuss links in Manila be encoded as in the near future? [Sebastian Fiedler] 4:57:12 PM

Blackboard and Weblogs. I was just fussing at an instructor because he was making all his announcements permanent on Blackboard, when I realized that this is pretty much what a weblog does.  It shouldn't be hard to add RSS and the metaweblog api to the announcements page of a Blackboard course via Building Blocks (this is my pet project of the moment, assuming that I get time and can learn enough Java - I'm off to the users conference in February, so I might learn something there). [David Carter-Tod] David keeps exploring how Weblogs could be combined with LMS... [Sebastian Fiedler] 4:57:11 PM

Editing Radio Weblogs. Like Albert, I've become a big fan of NetNewsWire. It's tremendously easier to wade through a long list of rss feeds with NetNewsWire than Radio's aggregator. Additionally, you the Weblog Editor makes it easier to format posts since you get no WISYWG editor on a Mac with Radio. Damned good piece of software. (I posted this using NetNewsWire). This page describes how to configure NetNewsWire and Radio UserLand so you can use NetNewsWire to edit your Radio weblog. (There will be similar pages for other weblog systems too, of course.) [Ranchero] [Joe Luft] I have been keeping an eye on NetnewsWire for a while. As soon as I get OS X on my machine I will try this piece of software. The Radio news aggregator sure has got some serious user-interface issues. Userland has certainly good ideas and creates powerful software... but they seem to lack a user-centered design approach for their product development. [Sebastian Fiedler] 2:38:12 AM

A pmachine School Home Page -- More Debate. Remember "School Blog or Not," that great site that was tracking the debate of one school district in terms of Web logging their site? Well, Bill is back, albeit briefly with some results. They ended up picking p-machine. But their debate doesn't seem to be over. Quote: "This weblog, which was just an experiment in the first place, may stay cold for a while until phase two - empowering of non-tech-savvy educators-begins. Or not, we'll see. There remains a real difference of opinion within the team who developed the site regarding the need to empower end users as well as re: the value of off-the-shelf CMS/weblog tools - truce was declared so that we could actually get a site launched (and hence the IMO completely gratuitous ColdFusion layer) but subsequent developments may merit more discussion." And then there's this site which talks about implementing Moveable Type with a college class. And Joe is playing with MT as well. The "Dream Tool Debate" is started at Albert's Disruptive Technology Site and I'll try to cross post my thoughts there eventually. All I know is at this point I'm getting the feeling that as they "get" the concept, more and more teachers are going to be willing to test drive something. But I'm still afraid they're going to leave it on the lot if it's Manila, for all the reasons I've already discussed. [Will Richardson] Though I share Will's opinion on some of the Manila user-interface problems, I believe that most of them can be solved by smart template and theme design. In fact, I have just created a Manila/Frontier based Webpublishing environment that basically hides most of the interface clutter and confusing preference options from the user. This is the way to go, I believe. Manila is a kind of multi-purpose tool box and needs to be tweaked and adabpted to a particular use context. This requires some initial effort but its flexibility for future redesigns and extensions is a great asset in the long run. I would say that most of the problems that Will has reported so far can be attributed to the lack of appropriate template and overall learning environment design. The free ready-to-go templates that are circulating for Manila were not designed for educational applications. In addition, an implementation approach cannot entirely be modeled in the templates or themes. There is more to a guided tour into blogland than presenting the "perfect tool" right from the start. BTW, this holds true to any Webpublishing tool you want to use in an educational context. [Sebastian Fiedler] 12:38:40 AM

Sonntag, 26. Januar 2003

I just got home from a trip down to Augsburg University where I presented some initial ideas for my dissertation project to my supervisor and a group of PhD students. In my project I want to bring together my long-term interest in self-organized learning and its (technologcial) support and my recent work on personal Webpublishing. I really enjoyed the rather informal atmosphere during the session. The folks of the chair of "media pedagogy" turned out to be pretty open and articulate. In fact, we had more of a conversation going than a typical presentation in broadcasting mode. It was interesting to observe how people reacted to the concept of personal Webpublishing and Weblogging. Some apparently struggled to draw the necessary distinctions between Weblogs and other forms of online communication and publication. One PhD student approached me during a break and said:"... you know what? I think I didn't get what you where talking about for quite some time because I looked at this always from the consumer site". Bingo. Welcome back to the two-way-Web! [Sebastian Fiedler] 1:40:09 AM

Donnerstag, 23. Januar 2003

Manila for school districts and Russian dreams. Pat Delaney shares A proposal for school district deployment of a CMS [via Sebastian Fiedler] Great example for those who want to start. It includes: Capabilities & benefits Examples CMS Selection & Pricing Security Training scenarios Infrastructure requirements Process for school participation I have to check if Manila supports Cyrillic (Radio doesn't :(. If so I have a great idea in mind: my monther is school principal in Russia... Yesterday I searched for blogs in .ru and found out that blogging is taking off in my own country, but more in the "personal diary format" rather than in "k-logging format". I really want to introduce blogging to Russian professionals and I have ideas for several projects in mind. Now it's a matter of time and finding tools that will work in Russian. [ "Lilia Efimova" ] Actually I am not sure if Frontier / Manila can handle foreign language characters. Does anybody know? [ "Sebastian Fiedler" ] 2:40:08 PM

seems like I need to start this from scratch. all my attempts to get the old Radio installation recovered did not work out. and I am getting tired of playing around with it. another prove of my preference for centrally hosted services.... 2:15:47 PM