Summary: Hate to not know what's going on when things go wrong. Hate to try to figure it out and not be able to. Looks I am not the only one. And both of us with Radio, too!!

Radio UserLand woes.

The Salon blog community servers (hosted by UserLand) have been down since sometime Friday, which is frustrating for the Salon bloggers who rely on the community server to host their blogs (and their comments) and to track updates and traffic figures. As far as we can tell, UserLand is down to two (no-doubt overworked) employees, and attempts to reach Lawrence Lee have thus far failed.

Scott Rosenberg, our local blogfather, is at BloggerCon, as is Radio's emeritus CEO, but neither of them are really in a position to help. Meanwhile the Salon blogger mailing list gives people space to vent their frustrations.

I don't rely on UserLand to host this blog, although this is a Salon blog with a local usernum (I do use the Radio community server for notification of updates and for tracking traffic), so this site is at least still reachable, unlike sites whose domain name start with blogs.salon.com, however I am having problems with the one part of network of sites that still relies directly on Radio for its engine, the Mediajunkie site.

For some reason, Radio has been unable to upstream any updates since last Monday, September 29. My page for tracking events shows a series up apparently successful upstreams, but clearly nothing's been updated on the publicly visible site. I do get a TCP/IP error when I start Radio and it tries to check for updates to Radio.root, but this could be an effect of the current UserLand server problems and possibly unrelated to my upstreaming problem.

I'm not sure how to even diagnose this problem. The usual mantra of quit and restart, shut down and reboot and try again, isn't working this time. This may force me to go to a different backend for Mediajunkie's aggregrated post listings, possibly a table full of MTrssfeed-driven headlines? It wouldn't be as dynamic and interlaced, but it would approximate what I'm trying for now and free me from relying on what can only be charitably described as flaky software.

UPDATE: Typically, as when you call a TV repairman only to find your television set behaving perfectly when scrutinized, it appears that my posting a public complain about the Radio software has coincided with it starting to work again properly. It appears to be upstreaming entries from October 1 this moment and should be caught up to the present day soon. Still no idea why it works when it does and doesn't when it doesn't.

[Radio Free Blogistan]

Patience! Perseverence! And an "Oh well!" {:<])

Summary: Have been reading and thinking about the ideas of interested participant-players in the edublogging arena. I summarize, link and respond. Topics: the psychological effect of edublogging, getting students started with edublogging, the nature of the set of educational paradigms after edublogging is fully established.

Reading two edublogging entries ( one here and the second here) from James Farmer started me off. Initially he cited blog entries of Seb Fiedler and Seb Paquet , [in response to Seb Fiedler] on equipping college and graduate students with weblogs as a major learning and self-development tool. Their entries are well worth your time.

To their thoughts I would add two. First, this is not simply a technology you are trying to hand over to these students. You are passing over the deuterolearning (aka meta-learning and learning-to-learn) torch.

Think of weblogging as a major self-teaching tool, a learning-to-learn tool. Even if the student learns only to use the weblog as a self-reflexive journal it has the potential of enhancing self-teaching. If we take that capacity and add to it the self-directed research and collaboration opportunities that are increasingly available on the web, we are talking about a major self-uplift machine. That said, it may now be more obvious why I believe that there are intrapersonal as well as technical issues of weblogging that you and the student must deal with in order that the student learn's to use the weblogging technology fruitfully. Ones which they may need help and encouragement with, with which they have had little direct training to this point in their education.[I thought I might mention this because those already deep into a) weblogging / journaling, or b)research and development, as two examples, are already deep into self-directed growth and may take their own skill for granted. This taking-for-granted sets up a certain blindness to the total set of attitudes and skills that go into high levels of active and self-directed learning. And this blindness, in turn, can render the teacher/developer incapable of isolating and teaching the subskills and attitudes that are involved.]

Dan Mitchell of Teachnology offers us an example that gets students busy with weblogging. He requires that weblogging be used in small groups to complete relatively simple tasks. Details below:

An experiment with student collaborative learning blogs

Several years ago I was teaching an online section of Intro to Music. A major issue in this online section was getting students to work ahead of deadlines and to communicate with me and with one another about course and content issues. I decided that a collaborative learning approach would be beneficial.

I assigned students to groups of about 5-6 students and assigned each group a shared weblog site. The class used as many as 10 of these site each term. One regular course assignment asked students to propose possible test questions that reflected important issues that they had studied. They proposed their individual questions to the other members of their group in the group's weblog discussion area. Then the group used the discussion to refine, combine and edit the questions to come up with a subset that they would post on the class web site for the rest of the class to answer as part of a study/review cycle. The basic idea is that the work progressed from individual study to individual questions to group consideration and selection and finally to the class using the materials that the groups created. Ultimately, the group members reviewed that answers that other class members posted for their questions, and then they commented on these answers and provided useful criticism.

One interesting aspect of this was the use of multiple weblogs to support multiple collaborative learning groups within a large class. Another was the progression from the group weblogs (where the initial work was done) to the class's main weblog where the work product became the basis for a class assignment. Additionally, it proved possible to conduct an online course almost entirely with the resources provided by the Manila weblog.

I would also note, in the same list as Dan's that, from my experience, direct instruction with weblogging (and other tools of distance education), and journaling do have pay-off in my distance education classes. The fact that there is NO fallback on old technologies --ie no face-to-face conferencing, no office consultations, no class time in which all breath the same air, also forces the use of the new distance learning tools.

---

Finally, from

elearnspace'sGeorge Siemens we receive the following translation from OLD to NEW learning technologies: Most of us belong to more than one learning community. These multiple communities form a personal learning network . If a learning community equates somewhat with a course, then our learning network is equivalent to a degree program. Each community is a node on the network.
He goes on to say

1. Learning networks seamlessly blend elearning, knowledge management, and just-in-time learning needs (EPS [^] electronic performance support). The various components of a community (as listed above [^] access to gurus, etc.) serve to update knowledge (KM) and provide access to information when needed. Structured exposure (tutorial) provides more formal learning. It[base ']s a cycle that updates and feeds itself.
2. We need a portfolio that allows the ability to track and manage our own learning network. This portfolio is the equivalent of what we know call a transcript. It needs to be learner owned/controlled. Workshops, seminars, projects, etc. [^] these learning experiences are not captured in existing processes of determining employee/student competency. When an employee leaves a company, he/she should be able to take the personal learning portfolio along as proof of past learning.
3. We need a portfolio that allows the ability to track and manage our own learning network. This portfolio is the equivalent of what we know call a transcript. It needs to be learner owned/controlled. Workshops, seminars, projects, etc. [^] these learning experiences are not a company, he/she should be able to take the personal learning portfolio along as proof of past learning.
4. We need a shift in thinking about what it means to be [base "]educated[per thou] or competent. Currently, most employment adds list education level as a main determinant of competency. A piece of paper proves a learner[base ']s worth. Yet, having attained a degree does not equate with knowledge/skill. Our personal learning network proves worth based on reputation and past work[Italics mine, Spike Hall, see quibble below].

I will end with a quibble [consistent with my entries on knowledge, truth, klogging, etc.]. If an employing agency wanted to employ a knowledgeable worker (as opposed to one less knowledgeable) I would say that a transcript with grade point has a slight advantage over the documentation of participation in a multiple of Communities of Practice. In the former, at least, there is some assurance that some form of assessment has taken place.

This is faint praise however. It would be like saying that toast is a more complete food than chalk. The simple fact of membership in one or seventeen networks specifies little about content of knowledge and nothing about degree of mastery. The usual college transcript says only a little more about type of knowledge dealt with and very little about degree of mastery. If I'm to employ or work with someone I want to know what s/he can do and under what conditions[what they know]. I want in short to know what she or he can do. A portfolio of projects completed (with attached descriptions, photographs) might help me directly sense what my prospective coworker knows. Best possibility: a conversation about skills mastered followed by field activities in which real tasks are attempted under relatively controlled conditions.