Some classes have already started blogging in full force and others
will follow. Roberto Gauvin,
the principal (and school webmaster), is behind this like you wouldn't
believe. He has turned the home
page for the school into a weblog. He's jazzing up the teachers,
evangelizing, fiddling with templates. He's pushing out post after post
explaining what's happening inside (and sometimes outside) his school.
It's nice to build something and
see it get used like this!
One of the things I find slick about this deployment is that by providing
per-class OPML files, we have been able to practically effortlessly build a
public bird's eye view of what's happening in the space using
the Bloglines aggregator. I think it might function as a gateway
drug to the RSS way of life for some of the teachers and parents.
Anybody know of good French language feeds that could be of interest to them?
(I'm thinking along the lines of French equivalents of BBC news
feeds, Word of the Day, etc.)
(Technical caveat if you want to replicate this: Bloglines apparently won't import an OPML
file if you just give it a URL. You have to save the files to your drive then send them over.)
So NB doesn't have to envy Quebec anymore, it's got its blogging school
too now! And with the energy they're putting into it I wouldn't be too
surprised to see other schools dive in.
Don't know why I didn't get the good news out earlier. The symposium
proposal that seven co-conspirators (across three continents no less)
andI prepared was accepted for the ED-MEDIA conference.
One interesting meta-note about the development of the proposal: it was built in a collaborative manner over a few pages in my personal wiki. The proposal document went through dozens of updates. (See the revision history.) The process went quite smoothly, undoubtedly more easily than it would have gone if we had been passing revisions around by email.
Many thanks to Sebastian for leading the preparation of this proposal! Here's Seb's post -
I am very pleased to announce that an international collaborative proposal for a symposium at EdMedia 2004, Lugano, Switzerland, was accepted yesterday.
The symposium with the title "Introducing disruptive technologies for learning: Personal Webpublishing and Weblogs" will include the following contributions:
Paper 1: Personal Webpublishing practices and conversational learning
Sebastian Fiedler Media Pedagogy, University of Augsburg Germany
Gabi Reinmann Media Pedagogy, University of Augsburg Germany
Paper 2: COLLABOR: Cooperative Learning and publishing
Hans Mittendorfer Department of Data Processing in Social Sciences, Economics and Business, University of Linz Austria
Paper 3: Integrating Webpublishing tools in higher education
Priya Sharma Instructional Systems, Penn State University USA
Paper 4: Observational Learning in Personal Webpublishing Networks
Sébastien Paquet E-Learning, National Research Council Canada, Canada
Paper 5: What can be learnt by reading weblogs?
Lilia Efimova Telematica Instituut The Netherlands
Paper 6: Weblogs and learning culture
Oliver Wrede Design, Aachen University of Applied Sciences Germany
Paper 7: Blogging and reflective learning
Adrian Miles Media Studies, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Australia
Maciej plays naturalist at PC Forum. " I was in the state that Zen masters call " beginner's mind ", and that employers outside of academia call "gross negligence". "
Sebastian Fiedler 
Gabi Reinmann
Priya Sharma
Sébastien Paquet
Lilia Efimova
Oliver Wrede
Adrian Miles
