Ten Reasons Why

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article titled Scholars Who Blog:

Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?

[link via Gallowglass]
Great lead. :-) But the story seems to focus on wannabe talking heads, the *pundits of the world, those scholarly few who salivate at the idea of being a guest commentator for CNN or FoxNews. Nary a mention of using weblogs for actual teaching and learning.

Education, Weblogs

Evan K. has a terrific review of The Matrix: Reloaded, titled At Least They Haven’t Ruined Tron.
(Oh: read the review to understand the title of this post.)

Film

Wow! I’ve been busy and missed a lot of activity over this discussion in the last couple of days. I wish I had time to respond in depth to all the good thoughts, but I don’t. So linkage and an exhortation to Go read these! will have to suffice.
UPDATE (05/29/03: 10:05AM): Corrected one of the attributions, based on Joe Luft’s comment to this post.
UPDATE (05/29/03, 10:20AM): for those of you coming from Online Learning Daily (thanks, Stephen), the list has been expanded to include the earlier posts in the conversation and is in roughly chronological order.
Will Richardson (who started all this!): Legal Issues of Student Publishing
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy
Greg Ritter: Student Publishing and Privacy, Take Two
James Farmer: Student Publishing
James Farmer: More on Student Weblogging
Tom Hoffman Joe Luft: Publishing and Privacy
Ann Davis: Writing to Learn (Ann, I’ve seen this same reaction in college students, so it’s not limited to elementary school age!)
Tim Lauer: Student Publishing and Privacy
Tom Hoffman: Class Weblogs and Privacy
Will Richardson: Student Publishing Cont.
Trying to collect this list makes me realize that we still lack a good technology for tracking cross-blog discussions.

Education, Weblogs

The buttons have gotten out of control. Thanks, man.
Steal my buttons:

Weblogs

It seems like Bonnie B. is implying that my dissatisfaction with the “everything’s a weblog and weblogs are everything” mentality means I want people to spend big money on enterprise software. Maybe she didn’t read my follow-up or the comments to that follow-up where I pointed Lindon at dozens of open source options, as well as the commercial ones?
Anyway, Bonnie asks “Why administer a half-dozen different systems if you can offer the same functionality with a single system?” Ah, but that’s a misleading question. It presumes the “same functionality” exists, and that ability to achieve the “same functionality” is precisely what I’m questioning.

Read more…

Education, Weblogs

James Farmer makes some good comments in my previous post on Student Publishing and Privacy. In particular he says, “Were you more mortified cos of possible legal consequences or the pressure on students? I don’t quite get your main concern.”
I’m all for using weblogs in education, particularly in the writing classroom or (probably more importantly) as a way to bring writing to non-writing classrooms. And there are many disciplines where assignments require public “performance” — dance, music, theater, journalism (writing for the school newspaper), etc. So no reason we can’t make writing a public performance as well — that’s a terrific idea because it can really change the concept of audience for the emerging writer.
However . . .

Read more…

Education, Weblogs

Dave Winer implemented a weblog search using the Google API. He seems really thrilled by it.
‘Cept it’s been done. Speaking of prior art, a Google API-based weblog search tool has already been built by Micah Alpern. The results return isn’t nearly as nifty as Dave’s, but Micah’s does integrate with your blogroll to add a “Search Blogs I Read” feature. That is nifty.
However, both Dave’s and Micah’s tools have a fatal flaw: Google.

Read more…

Weblogs

Microdoc Reviews: 2003/03/11:

“FM Radio Station brings into one application a News Aggregator, Publishing Tool and Browser. For the first time since beginning with Radio, I can safely leave a partially finished blog and go see a news item, or surf to a site in the browser without the fear of losing my partly completed log. This is one of the best feelings I have had since beginning to use FMRS.”

Finally! A tool for the user who doesn’t know how to open another friggin’ browser window. Thank goodness you can now pay $39.95 to avoid learning how to use ALT-TAB!

Syndication & Aggregation, Weblogs

Amazing. If I’d had a laptop with wifi this morning I might have blogged from the coffee shop that I was thinking about privacy issues related to Will Richardson’s post last week of the online peer review his students are conducting in public on weblogs. But, no wifi, so you’ll just have to take my word that I was ruminating on this over latte an hour ago.
So what’s in my news aggregator this morning? Will ruminating over legal issues of student publishing!
I’m glad he’s thinking about it. Frankly, as a former writing instructor, I was mortified to see the student’s peer reviews publicly available. First, from a writing pedagogy perspective, I think you risk significantly increasing the pressure on the students, many of whom are already intimidated by sharing their work with a small group. Second, I would be concerned that it is treading dangerously close to a FERPA violation, since this is making a students work and, more importantly, the teacher’s evaluation of their work publicly availably. Thin ice!

Education, Weblogs

I was excited to notice that the Supernova 2003 conference that Joi Ito referenced today (or…er…tomorrow…so international dateline action happening there, I guess) will be around the corner from me in July.
Then I noticed registration is $1795. Yikes! It ain’t coming out of my pocket and since it’s not directly related to my job, there’s no way I’m gonna get my employer to front for it (especially since we don’t have a conference budget).
Bummer. Maybe someone will organiza an extra-curricular activity around the conference?

Technology & Internet