Today, it’s PHP code. Its the same experience, except that the bricks I have to build with are numberless — limited only by my imagination.

Testing things out has given me even more enjoyment, as I have taken some time to look at some of the things that Class Blogmeister teachers are doing. One, in particular, impressed me this morning — because it would never have occurred to me to do this. Carolyn Knight, in rural New Zealand, posted a Merry Christmas blog article at 3:42 AM Texas time. But about twenty minutes before that she posted an article entitled, Room With a View. Here she informed her students (who are now on summer break) that,

..We have moved next door to to a classroom with a different view. The first picture is now on the Room With A View part of our blog. It’s a picture of something else that is changing at our school at present.

Room With A View is a student blog that Knight set up so that she could write to (or for) her students from a different voice. In Room With A View, she posts pictures from around the school, most recently (3:32 AM) a picture of work that is being done outside the new classroom window, to enlarge the schools parking lot — what they so quaintly call the carpark. (You’ve got to love these global conversations.)

What impresses me is that I typically think of Class Blogmeister as a set of blogs. My imagination, with regard to its instructional function, has not strayed beyond the individual teacher or student blog. Yet Carolyn Knight has extended the function, extended her voice, and extended the potentials for learning experiences for her third and fourth graders.

This is why I build Class Blogmeister.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I’m sitting at the Shanghai EduBloggerCon at

Classroom teachers are currently standing and explaining how they are using collaborative tools in their classrooms for teaching and learning.  I’m going to post snipits here for your enjoyment and education:

• Not everyone is a blogger.  It’s important for teachers to figure out how they want to engage in the conversation.  It’s also important that kids be involved in making the dicision on how they should give voice to their learning.
• Teacher speaking now says that in 27 years of teaching at all levels and all levels of income, he’s never seen students want to write like the poverty students he’s teaching now.  His students spend two hours a day writing.  He says that his students, who are largely ESL, are learning by working language.
• Teacher now talking says that for it to be about the kids, it’s got to be about me first.”  The teacher has to understand the value of the technology, and then the professional can figure out or invent ways to take into the learning experiences.  She says that wikis are easier to maintain in the classroom than blogging with students.
• Lots of talk about people Skyping into classrooms and talking about stuff with they’re doing.
• Librarian is talking about a newsletter she use to publish in print.  Then she made it an e-mail through a mailing list.  Now she’s using Facebook, because that’s where the student are. Earlier in the morning, I asked her, isn’t putting this stuff on Facebook catering to the kids?  I expected her to say, “It’s where the kids are.”  She said, “It’s where the 21st century is.”  Good answer.
• Teacher (New Zealand) says she has Skype on all the time, and if Brian Crosby (Nevada) knocks on their door, the interrupt whats being taught and start a conversation with Crosby.  We start to talk about what students are learning, not just being taught it.  “No matter what you are teaching or where, you can take the walls down.  It is so easy!”
• Educator now is asking the question, “But why?”  We have to get beyond the “Wow!”
• What exactly is 21st century literacy.  None of it is new.  I’m not interested in the pockets.  We need systemic and sustained change.
• We’ve got every teacher with a blog.  We’ve got every student blogging.  But I’m worried about the parents.  I feel that I have to celebrate all of the technology.  Here question is this:  Should I have all of my teachers blog?  Am I making a mistake?  Two threads of answers:
  1. Small steps.  Support a teachers who are ready
  2. Teachers need expections.  Just don’t call it “blogging.”

Now breaking for smaller group conversations.  So I’ll post this now.  Please forgive any typos or awkward wording.

I asked my supervisor if i could get the techno guy at my school to unblock a website so my kids can use blogs in my language arts class.  I was told I need to write a letter to the superintendent to explain my justification for using blogs in the classroom.

Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve received this kind of e-mail, and from certain perspectives it actually makes a lot of sense.  Rather than just sending him my 2¢ Worth, I thought I would open it up to my readers.  [[image¹]]

• So why should students be blogging in the classroom?
• Are your students blogging?
• What’s the benefit?
• What’s the down-side?
• Are there other surprise impacts?

Please keep it short and sweet, as he’s only been asked for one letter.

Thanks from me!

1. Penn, Christopher. "Ted Demopoulos' book Finally Arrives." Financial Aid Podcast's Photostream. 18 Jan 2007. 4 Sep 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/financialaidpodcast/361533467/>.

It never fails to amaze me, the power and quality of this utility, Skype.  So many of us almost take it for granted (though I don’t make nearly enough use of it), and yet, so many educators are completely unaware of it — and don’t even believe it’s possible until you show them.

The teachers I was working with in Kannapolis the other day were using it to organize impromptu staff development, learning about and how to operate new web apps.

How have you used Skype to enable and enhance learning?

Blogging is becoming more and more popular in the classroom. Teachers can blog to stay in touch with parents and students or they can incorporate blogs from all of the students as a learning tool. The beauty of the student blog is that children from Kindergarten to high school can blog. No matter how you use blogs in your classroom, these tools will help you get started, enhance your experience, or bring the students into the fun.

The categories include:

• Where to Create Your Blog,
• Blogging Tools and Help for Teachers,
• General Blog Tools,
• Blogging and Internet Safety, and
• Getting Students in on the Action

I was gratified to see Class Blogmeister at the head of the list, though I continue to worry about the increasing number of users — over 160,000 now.  Users have noticed a buckling of the service over the past few days, which was a surprise, given that this is an off season for all of my services. 

Working with the techs a Rackspace, who hosts my servers, we discovered that one of them was undergoing a “denial of service” attack.  They blocked the attacker IP and set up monitors to guard against continued or future attacks.  It seems that there are people out there who illegally install software on unprotected web sites that are designed to launch attacks against randomly selected servers.  If they can break the server (which they were not able to do with CB), and they can do it consistently, then they will notify you, anonymously, and extort money in return for letting your server alone.  Insidious.

Anyway, these 50 Usefuls are pretty comprehensive, and I look forward to scanning through them.

First of all, congratulations to all of the winners of the EduBlog awards, and especially to all of those who were nominated.  While I’m at it, congratulations to all of you bloggers who been doing this for some time, who have contributed in large, small, supportive, and critical ways to the conversation that I consider to be so important to education’s efforts at this time.

I especially want to congratulate the TechLearning blog for winning the best group blog distinction.  I feel only a very small part of that effort as I marvel each week at the creativity and energy of these young folks.  I say young because I think that Terry Freedman is the only one who is anywhere near my age. 

Second, one of the only blog posts that I took time to read from my aggregator this morning came from Mark Alness, announcing to his students that their blogs are back.  A few weeks ago, in an effort to ease the stress that the Class Blogmeister server was feeling, both from the 130,000 bloggers who are using it and the nearly one million page views being served up to Citation Machine users each day (End of the semester), I’d cut out to a new database table all of the blog entries prior to May 2007.  Admittedly, I’d not considered the impact that this action would have on teachers south of the Equator.

It was only a temporary relief, and as I’ve written here already, I ended out getting an additional server.  As it turned out, re-joining the two database tables was much more complex than it was to separate them out.  I’d thought it would take some simple MySQL action, but I had to write some script to do the work, and I only got it right yesterday afternoon, here in my hotel room, in Philadelphia.

Mark writes:

To all past bloggers here at roomtwelve.com – all of your blog articles are back online! For the past few weeks, they have been unavailable, while the servers for classblogmeister were upgraded.

So, for those in Room Twelve from 2005-06, your blogs are all intact, right here, where they always have been…

I found it especially interesting that he went on to add:

May not seem like such a big deal, but I had groups of former students coming in to my class asking about their blogs – like, what happened to our blogs? Are they gone?

Although most of these kids are not actively contributing (right now), it’s clear their writing is still important to them – even what they wrote way back in third grade.

Finally, a while back I met a superintendent in California, Jeffrey Felix, who was working on his doctorate, and he’d decided to do his dissertation on classroom blogging.  We talked at length about it then, and he continued the conversation, via formal e-mail exchanges.  He also sought consultation from Will Richardson and Alan November.

I’d been thinking, for some time, that there was a lot of data and experience being generated among Class Blogmeister users, so I offered to post an announcement to the CB mailing list, asking for teachers who would be willing to help Jeff with his research.  Frankly, that’s the last I heard about his study until yesterday, when he e-mailed me a copy of his paper, which has been accepted, passed through peer review (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education), and he will be presenting it at the SITE Conference in 2008.

Among the findings that I zero’ed in on from the summary that he sent me were the four communication patterns that  teachers perceived as a result of their students’ blogging:

• increased peer interaction among students,
• increased teacher interaction with the students,
• students exhibiting more positive emotions about learning, and
• an increased sharing of ideas among students and with the teacher.

Also, he found that edubloggers (his term for teachers who blog) describe student learners who have been a part of a blogging classroom as engaged in four types of learning:

• students increasing their understanding of topics, making sense of what they learn, and developing their own understanding of the subject matter,
• students cultivating deeper thought processes; creating meaning and new ideas from the subject,
• students exploring the subject beyond the immediate requirements, and
• students connecting with previous experiences learned in or out of the classroom.

At several points, Felix noted the excitement and enthusiasm that the participating teachers expressed during the exchanges.  I would love to see more quantitative data.  It’s why I added a readability tool to CB, so that each student blog is given a Flesch Index and grade level score, just to see what teachers might make of this.  Not heard much so far.  But all things considered, when classroom teachers are seeing something that is working, and excited about it, well that’s good enough for me.

I saw it again, as Brenda forwarded me an Associated Press piece (College Recruiters Use Student Bloggers) that was published on WRAL.com, a local TV station’s web news site.

Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online.

The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.

Further in the article…

Chris Smith, a sophomore at Ohio Dominican University, posts lively weekly descriptions of his life as a college baseball player. He gets $20 a posting and has been unafraid to hide his preference for playing ball over going to class or criticizing professors for assigning too much homework.

“Being in class is literally the last place you want to be at this time of the year,” he wrote on April 12.

How might this manifest itself in the pre-higher ed world.

Another connection was with two authorities on the Donner Party.  His students held a debate about the guilt of the party leaders.  He recorded their debate and e-mailed it to the authorities.  They each sent back four pages of critique on each point that the students made.  It’s about conversation!

Now this is interesting.  Eric podcasted a phone interview with the author of a book that his classes were reading.  He also had his student blog their conversations about the book.  Interestingly, some of the parents and grand parents of his students read the book along with his students, and engaged in the blog discussions.  Look back to my previous blog about School 2.0 and bouncing conversations out of the classroom and into communities.

Alas, I have to leave the session early for a conference call!

Before I shut down, Meg Ormiston did an amazing presentation about how we need to stop preparing students to be students, and prepare them, instead, for their future.  Some great examples of students produced multimedia.

Otherwise, it was a fantastic day of my learning from some really smart people — the other panelists.  The the larger session was called Publishing 2.0: Flourishing in the Era of Digital Natives.  Among the other panelists are Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President of Alexander Street Press, Timothy Burke, Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College, Greg Suprock, New Technology Director of Nature Publishing Group, and CJ Rayhill, Chief Information Officer at O’Reilly Media.  The moderator was Patricia Seybold, an apparently very well known consultant. She’s written a book on innovation.

Patti provided some context and listed, as the main themes: intellectual properties, user produced content, and online communities. She is making several mentions of re-mixable content,  information that is more of a raw material that consumers can remix. 

Stephen Rhind-Tutt said first thing that, “One of the conditions brought about by Web 2.0 is that is no long real expertise.”  It’s all growing too fast.  Web 2.0 is not about the Web 2.0 companies. He says that if the job of publishers is to make sure that the consumer has access to the right information at the right time, then publishing must tap into the new web.

Stephen ask how many people know about blogging, RSS, API, del.icio.us, etc., and most hands go up.  This is going to be a tough crowd.  Rhind-Tutt’s company has a web site about the post-60s feminist movement.  When they found that most of the people who were visiting the site actually had personal experiences, photographs, and other resources related to the topic, they opened it up, and turned the site into an online community that invited participation among the visitors.

In talking about taxonomy vs. Folksonomy, he suggests that we actually need both.  There are advantages to user applied tags, but also vast advantages to librarian applied tags (Go Librarians, Go!).  He says that we need both, that they support each other.  They are not competitive.   Stephen reminds us that we are developing some very sophisticated search technologies and features, even though only 5% to 10% of users take advantage of them.  He says that this is ok, that our job is not just to make content available but to promote scholarship.  Google, on the other hand, doesn’t (Stephen Rhind-Tutt’s words).

Wow, he’s demonstrating a product of his company where college teachers can scroll through videos, and then select specific clips within the videos.  The service then provides a hyperlink directly to that clip.  This is not new, but exactly the kind of value adding re-mixable resource that teachers (and students) need.

After giving my presentation, I reflected that perhaps our children, who are so intensely engaged in their information experiences, are going to be a very hard customership for publishers to connect with.  That could be correct, or it may be that they are even more reachable for the same reasons. 

One person reminded me that I said, early in my presentation, that children were willing to pay for their information.  He asked me to explain, since my audience was out to sell information.  I corrected my statement by saying the they are willing to pay for an information experience.  They by music and movies, and books, but its the experience of the video game and of mixing content that value.  I suggested that publisher need to find a way to turn their content into and experiencable product.  I don’t think they like it when you make up a word.

Timothy Burke then talked about academic blogging, and he was very very good.  He said, first off, that “monograph is over and good riddance.”  There’s a message there for education as well as publishing.  He says that academics do not consider themselves part of the Web 2.0 generation.  Yet, the community is starting to rethink blogging as a venue for academic publishing. 

Timothy’s presentation was extraordinarily balanced.  I tend to evangelize, perhas too much.  He says that there are many ways that blogging can be used in the academic world, but that the very best that can be said is that it will make academics better writers — able to write to broader audiences.

Academics do three kinds of blogs

1. academic blogs (intended to serve traditional functions of publishing)
2. Academics who blog (basically diaries or live journals)
3. Hybrids (includes elements of serious reports and diaries)

In a recent article in EdTech, I labeld three types of K12 teacher bloggers

1. Teachers who blog
2. Teacher bloggers
3. Teachers who promote student blogging for instructional purposes

Burke said that although he is not sure that blogging is all that important, all that disruptive, he admits that his blog has been incredibly useful to him professionally.  He puts his course syllabi on his blog and has changed his material and even required reading based on the comments that he has received.  He’s suggesting that one value of blogging to publishers is to take advantage of the blogged reviews/conversations.  This reminds me of the Laptop Institute, which grew dramatically in 2006, largely as a result of the blogging that happened during the 2005 conference.

He’s also suggesting that blogging can be a source of possible authors.  Publishers should be paying attention to blogs, looking for writers who are good communicators and knowledgeable.  Finally, he suggests blogs and wikis can be a very effective way to extend and update books.  It has to be in a model different from the textbook, perhaps a controlled wiki. 

Blogs can be the incubator for a book.  The Long Tail is certainly an example of this.  They (blogs) can also be converted directly into a book.  But he suspects that only a few academic blogs are suitable for this, because of the writing styles.  He also suggests that blogs might be something that could replace conference proceedings.  This is an interesting idea to me, to put session descriptions on a conference blog, and then invite reading and commenting on the sessions.

At lunch, a number of people have talked with me, but mostly from the context of their own children.  The connection between our children’s information experiences and publishing, especially in terms of business models, is not obvious, either for them or for me.  Any ideas?

The next panelists are undergraduate and graduate students who are involved in digital content projects.  Two are involved in open access, one of whom is a bit of a radical, the other appreciates librarians and publishers.  The third, a post doctorate students, is working on a project to hyperlink middle english literature.  The first student, the radical, says that there is a perception that publishers are getting in the way.  He challenges the audience to change that perception.  Kinda applicable to librarians.  Change people’s perception of who you are.

Another student states that researchers are insulted unless the work is not available digitally, and as scholars, they are insulted when their work is not printed on paper.  How true this is.  Authority, to some extent, is social.

Interestingly, two of the young men stated at different times that the issue of the authority of content is not new and it is not a technical issue.  It is an issue of literacy.  One of them mentioned a report recently published by the Education Testing Service about technical fluency.  It cited that 49% of youngsters did not know how to determine the authenticity and timeliness of information.  He then said that this is not an issue of technical fluency.  It is information literacy.  Bingo!

Greg Suprock, emerging technology director of Nature Publishing Group, says that there are four natural forces at work in the evolving information environment.

• The Power of Users (Digg)
• The strength of collaboration (del.icio.us)
• The energy of groups (talks about Nature Network from his company that allows users to form groups that collaborate together)
• The value of quality (talks about Nature Protocols — journal web site that also accepts entries from visitors with moderation in place)

Unfortunately, I had to leave right after the final panelist, CJ Rayhill, Chief Information Officer at O’Reilly Media, got started.  I did note that she claimed to have lost count after 26, the times that the term Web 2.0 had been used.  I think I only used it once.

Technorati Tags : warlick technology publishing information literacy web2.0 web20 blogging

My personal inclination is to ask, “Are you teaching blogging?” or “Are you teaching communication?”  If it’s blogging, then you do need a separate blog evaluation rubric.  However, if the reason for student blogs is to improve their writing skills, then use the same rubric you would use if the students were writing on paper, or typing with a typewriter or word processor.  (Did I say typewriter?)

Of course, there are some distinct differences between writing on paper and writing on a blog.  Your assignment might involve reading the blogs of classmates and then comment, responding to their writings in some way.  This would probably require a richer rubric for evaluation, because you are evaluating a conversation, not just the putting down of some ideas.

On the other hand, we are talking about an avenue of communication that is fundamentally different, resulting in a new and rich source of content — a blogosphere.  In what ways does this dynamic and diverse information landscape differ from our traditional print/published environment?  What are its advantages?  What are its weaknesses and potential problems?  I think that these are conversations that should be happening in almost every classroom, especially in conjunction with blogging assignments.  It challenges, in my opinion, our very notions of what it means to be literate.

A few months ago I posted a number of questions that might be used with blogging assignments to help students think about the content that they are writing and reading, within the context of a different kind of communication.  I’ll repeat them here.

When reading a blog, ask:

1. What did the author read in order to write this blog?  What did he or she already know and where did that knowledge come from?
2. What are the other points of view?  What are the other sides of the story?
3. What did the author want readers to know, understand, believe, or do?
4. What was left unsaid?  What are the remaining questions and issues?

When writing a blog, ask:

1. What did you read in order to write this blog?  What do you know and where did that knowledge come from?
2. What are all points of view on the issue?
3. What do you want your readers to know, understand, believe, or do?
4. What will not be said?  What are some of the remaining questions about the issue?

Technorati Tags: warlick education assessment blogs edublog

First of all, the long tail and the flat world are two different things — sort of. So is there really a chance that over worked, over stressed, under appreciated, and under compensated professional educators might get confused? Well, yes!

So let me elaborate a bit more about my thoughts as they ride down the tail of the emerging information landscape. I’m starting at the top, and at the beginning (at least the beginning of my education experience).

Added on 10/10 Tom Hoffman criticized this graph early this morning in his usual subtle and good-natured way. He made some good points, so explanation is warranted, and should have been provided when this post was submitted. I see the long tail graph as a platform that describes an emerging information landscape. I drew this graph using Photoshop Elements, and have been playing with it for a number of days from the perspective of an educator. For instance, it makes sense to me that the tail, a place of limitless geography and limitless shelf-space is where students might start to direct their own learning (they are already), as opposed to the spike, where textbooks live. But I may be wrong, and I’m certainly considering what Hoffman said. I do plan to play with this some more, and hope to give you a chance to play with it. So ya’ll come to the K12 Online Conference.

1) In this region we had no personal computers. In fact the personal computer hadn’t even been invented when I started teaching. We used textbooks and taught from local curriculum, because of the limits of geography and shelf-space.

2) Then we started seeing computers come into some of our classrooms, and started seeing computer labs. Only some teachers adopted these new technologies in meaningful ways, but some pretty interesting things happened in some places related to the emerging tail. For instance, Oregon Trail had students learning with seemingly limitless combinations of experiences (unlike the textbook). Printshop gave us our first taste of desktop publishing and the opportunities to become producers of content, not just consumers. Yet, it would be overly generous to say that these developments in any way redefined a curve in what schools did.

3) Then came more PCs and dial-up telecommunications. Integrated Learning Systems arrived as great information systems that provided students with limitless variety on how to perform long division and the proper placement of the comma. Not insignificant, but also, not redefining of education. FrEdMail, on the other hand, started to reshape the thinking of a handful of educators across the U.S. and beyond, as teachers started to give students assignments where they literally communicated with students in other lands (or across the street). Yet, again, this was so rare, that I can’t change the curve of education, though the curve of our information world was certainly beginning to shift.

4) Netday and E-Rate brought us were we are today. I didn’t fully realize how much E-Rate has done for us until I worked in Canada a few weeks ago, where they pay market rate for their Internet connections. unfettered communication made state and national standards possible. Many teachers started running their own web sites. But this was still old school. What shows promise in terms of access and leveraging the long tail of content are teacher blogs, course management systems (teacher controlled curriculum), education-based social networks, student blogs, and class wikis. Still, these developments are not a part of the institution yet, merely the experiments of visionaries. So I’m leaving the school up against to Y.

5) Finally, more and more homes are getting broadband. If you need it, you can find it. I’m sure I’m going to get hit on this, but there is almost no excuse now for not having a computer. If you want one, there are ways. But it’s the near ubiquitous access to broadband that we see the full breadth of the tail. This is where we’re seeing IM, MySpace, online video games, collaborative media development, YouTube, etc.

Now, if we consider the classroom as a room of millennial children, literate in the skills of digital, networked, and overwhelming information, then we’d have to say that that classroom is flat — against the X-axis. However, when we consider our schools or schooling as remaining reliant on textbooks and centrally created and maintained standards, then they are flat — against the Y-axis.

How did I do?

In conclusion, it’s that very small point of intersection that must concern us. The children in that flat classroom will very soon be voting for or against our bond referendums and deciding between pro public education politicians and anti-education politicians. For the sake of maintaining an institution that is central to a democratic society, we should be very very concerned that the education that today’s children are experiences means something to them.

technorati tags:warlick, education, flatclass, longtail, textbooks

Blogged with Flock

Among the findings was that

94% of the participants said that they have “..taken some action to ensure their children’s safe/responsible Internet use.” I found the breakdown of those actions to be very interesting.

• 88% say that they have talked to their children
• 82% monitor online activity
• 75% limit use to open spaces
• 74% set time limits
• 55% installed filtering software
• 54% sought advice from other parents
• 42% sought advice from school

This breakdown is encouraging to me. The highest number of parents in the survey acted toward their childrens safety on line by interacting directly with their children, by talking and watching. The more procedural actions were less often stated. I’m not sure if this really means anything, but it goes along with what I hear so much from teachers who use student blogging in their classrooms — that they are having new conversations in their classrooms, conversations about conversations. It’s not just the curriculum and content, but how you communicate about what you know.

Contrary to their reliance on talking to their children, only one-third of parents said that they were “..’very knowledgeable’ when it comes to educating their child or children about how to use the Internet safely and responsibly.” This doesn’t discourage me, because I suspect that it means that they were having true conversations with their children, not just telling them what to do. I think that we have to get use to the idea that this new information landscape is something where expertise is not dependent on age. However, we must continue to accept our responsibilities — because judgement is.

Of course “do you consider yourself an expert or a novice” is a really hard question to try to get a good picture of in a survey. It’s all relative. It was interesting to me that only 10% said that they were “..not at all knowledgeable..”

Apparently, a previous survey, conducted by Grunwald Associates in March, also on behalf of Cable in the Classroom, found that 60% of teachers thing that we are not teaching students enough about information/media literacy. 78% said that what they know about media literacy skills, they learned on their own.

The final result that I want to share was actually the first to appear in the report’s presentation slides. 90% of the survey participants said that parents “..have a lot of responsibility for ensuring Internet safety.” 71% said that schools have a lot of responsibility. 49% said that the government has a lot of responsibility.

Clearly, Internet safety is something that concerns us. But I think that it is just as clear that this new information landscape is something that we value for our children.

You can find more information on the survey and the report on the Cable in the Classroom web site, Parenting the MySpace Generation.

Technorati Tags: cableintheclassroom, medialiteracy, parenting, warlick

But what intrigued me the most, were the untold parts of the story, the parts that were counter-intuitive to what we, progressive society that we are, might expect. One thing that struck me was that Fisher left my Class Blogmeister classroom blogging tool and chose James Farmer’s LearnerBlogs. The interesting story is that he left for exactly the reason why scores of educators from around the world are signing up for Blogmeister. They want and need the control that blogmeister is designed to deliver. Yet, Fisher found that it was the control that was preventing classroom blogging from working to the degree that he wanted. Therefore, he switched to Farmer’s Wordpress-based blogging service for students, a system that is open, where student blogs immediately go public.

The other counter intuitive part of the Clarence Fisher story is that he’s not in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, or even Toronto. He’s in Snow Lake, Manitoba. See the map. Why is his story here, and not here?

To be fair, there are certainly incredible pockets of innovation happening in every city, state, and province. But I believe that there’s a story in where Fisher teaches. What do you think?

But one person said something the other day that got me to thinking. I know, for a fact, that the statement he reported is not characteristic to his experiences as an educator, but it bares repeating just the same. He said that a student replied, when asked if she would enjoy blogging in her class, “If it does not improve my grade, I am not doing it.”

This statement bounced me over to some ideas that I have been exploring around various similarities between flat world issues and new forces driving economic growth, and flat classroom issues and new forces that are required to drive academic growth. You can re-read my introduction to Flat Classroom Learning Engines here, but the bottom line is that when teachers are no longer so clearly above their students in skill and knowledge (at least from the perspective of the students), then the gravity of a symbolic grading system begins to lose it’s force. A new source of energy is needed to drive the classroom as a learning engine.

Classroom blogging is a very flat endeavor. A teacher, who does not understand this, may use it explicitly as a writing tool, giving a writing assignment, and then grading the work based on writing technique. This would not surprise most students who are accustomed to the gravity forces behind teaching from the hill.

But if the assignment is less about the technology of writing, and more about our inalienable need to communicate, involving as much the reading and responding as the composing and editing, then the work flattens out into a classroom endeavor that engages both learner and teacher. The boundaries between the two begin to blur. This is a good thing.

As students become empowered by their own curiosity and need to communicate and influence, and a cultivated orientation to the future and grounding in heritage, then teachers can come down from a hill, that is all but transparent to their students, and participate in a learning engine.

2¢ Worth.

I suspect that we are approaching the capacity of the hosting service that I’m using, so I will have a decision to make soon. My choices, as I see it, are to move the site to a more robust server solution or limit new teachers to an invitation system. I may set up a procedure where new users will have to receive an invitation from current Blogmeister teachers. I’m still struggling with this decisions.

The fact is that there are other options that were not available when I first built Blogmeister. Alan November’s November Learning is attracting a lot of users. James Farmer is now offering student blogging accounts through Learner Blogs, which he hosts through his Wordpress installation. I suspect that more enterprising tech directors will soon be installing and tweaking tools like Manila and Wordpress to server their teacher and student bloggers. The purpose of Blogmeister was to provide a place for classroom managed blogging experiences for students, when there wasn’t anything else available.

Experimenting…

It’s an A.D.D. thing where you wake up after only four hours of sleep with a brilliant idea…or so it seems at the time. Anyway, I finally got up at 4:00 AM and started programming. Here’s how it works.

If you are a teacher, using Class Blogmeister, you now have a new word cloud icon for each article when viewing them in “edit” mode. When you click the cloud icon, a word cloud window is generated, displaying the article. Words that appear in the blog articles of other teachers appear blue. Larger fonts indicate words that appear in many other teachers’ blogs.

If you click a commonly used word, Blogmeister generates a list of teacher articles that include that word. You can then click an article title back into Class Blogmeister, where you can read it in its entirety and comment.

The idea is to use the content that is continually being generated inside of Blogmeister to promote potentially valuable connections between teachers, and, perhaps, one day, connections between students.

I’m trying to lighten up a bit here at the end of the school year, but my mind keeps getting drawn into these issues. I just looked at my vanity search that I have installed in my aggregator and found that the name of my podcast had been used by Chris Harris, a “Director of a School Library System in Western NY”. He laments that he can’t listen to my “excellent educational podcast” at school, because all media downloads at Archive.org are blocked. He continues to explain that resources at SourceForge are blocked because they are tagged as games, Google is tagged as a “loophole”.

Yesterday, Will Richardson posted another entry about the alleged school newspaper closing in Georgia, referencing Steve Dembo’s podcast where he predicted that…

I jumped in with a comment from my reading (years ago) of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the point being that people/customers are going to network, and as a result are going to know more about what’s going on in your school than you do. My point was that information will find a way. Does it do us more good to try to control/block the network, or facilitate it?

Two other comments were posted, both missing my point completely, issuing in on blocks and filters on the school networks. Well it wasn’t Bill and Bud who missed the point. It was me. I’m out here, way outside the box. Inside, it comes down to whether you can access that web page in the classroom that you selected at home last night, play that animation or video, access that open source wiki engine.

Bill pointed out that according to a recent survey at his school, less than 20% of students regularly use the technology provided in schools, where more than 80% have access at home, and that in most cases, the performance capabilities at home exceed those of the school computers and networks.

For the sake of protecting our “behinds”, are we shoving learning out the doors of our schools?

I know that this is a serious and complex issue that concerns teachers, but also extends far beyond the classroom. It has to do with staffing resources, community sentimentalities, government regulation, and the presence of truly dangerous content on the net. But we must solve this problem and be willing to invest in solving this problem.

Because when the students see their network as a wall between them and information, then that school is no longer being a school.