Derek's Blog

Brilliant comment from Miguel Guhlin on Al Upton's blog which I just have to refer to here. Writing with just a modicum of hyperbole, Miguel illustrates the tensions that I referred to in my previous blog entry, of a system that is resistant to the very essence of change that is impacting on it from every quarter, and where the pedagogy of assessment continues to drive the pedagogy of instruction!

Al, as a school district administrator myself, but also, as a citizen of the United States, I have to confess that I'm a bit grateful your blog has been shut down and Australian children denied the opportunity to engage in global collaobrations and learning. Here's why:

In the United States, blogs are distractions to the real job of educators to improve student achievement on accountability measures. Blogs, as tools for online publishing, engage students with access to an authentic audience--that sometimes, let's be honest, can be TOO authentic if you get what I mean--and may result in divergent learning that is, to be frank, unsuitable to preparing children for yesterday's workforce. We want children who are literate, but lack that attitude that would hurt their careers and survival in our workforce...it is our goal to establish (and we've done an excellent job aside from your blogging efforts) a, what Paulo Friere calls, "domesticating" educational experience.

Secondly, you've no doubt read of books like Wikinomics, The World is Flat, and A Whole New Mind...these are books that speak to the interconnectedness of world affairs, peer productions--companies working in tandem across the globe to create a new product marketed to millions on the web--necessary in the future. I'm honestly grateful that Australians will be barred from this world, prevented from joining peer producers in the world. To be honest, in the United States, there's been a bit of concern that you Australians (not to mention New Zealanders) have been engaging too rapidly in this new virtual world.

It's a relief to know that you'll be "dummed down" to join the United States in a slower realization of these truths. Some argue that we need to distinguish between using technology as a way to empower students, facilitate communication/collaboration at a distance rather than using technology to domesticate our students, helping them achieve basic skills that won't get them much farther anyways. But you see, in this competitive, global economy, disempowering YOUR children may allow mine to do well.

Al, take a hit for the opposite team. Rejoice that my students will whip your's when it comes to working online, and that you won't have distractions when drilling students in basic skills.

With appreciation for the lack of leadership in your part of the world,
Miguel Guhlin Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net
U.S. School District Administrator

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My Twitterific has been running hot in the past few minutes as news about Jabiz Raisdana, otherwise known as Intrepid Teacher, spreads through the blogosphere. The story is a fascinating commentary on the times we live in. Raisdana, a teacher of 8th grade English and humanities classes has been sacked by his school after a member of the community took objection to some material he had posted on his personal blog. Raisdana explains in his latest post:

Due to a lapse in my judgment regarding material posted on my personal blog, my school has asked me to resign. I want you, as the readers of this blog, to know that I am agreeing to this decision without reservation, and I understand the steps taken by the school to protect its reputation.

As Raisdana notes in his personal blog, there are many lessons to be learned here about things such as online identities, teachers as role models, institutionalized education, etc. I'm sure they'll all get a good airing in future blog entries - but lets for the moment savour those comments from the students, and consider what they have to tell us about the efforts of a passionate and dedicated teacher who incorporates the use of online technologies in a way that is enriching and empowering!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've blogged a few times in the past about Quintura and Quintura for Kids - and have been privileged to be a part of the beta testing programme of this exciting new search engine.

Today I received notification from Yakov and his team announcing the release of their Quintura for site search. As you'll note, I've added this feature to the left hand menu of my blog site. It's easy to do for any web site - simply visit the Quintura site, click on the "embed" button and copy and the paste the generated code into the appropriate place on your website. I had to do a little playing around to make it fit the menu on my blog - some sorting to do with the sizing of the column and a stray div command, but it works now - wahoo!

Thanks to Jacov and his team for this brilliant product - making search so visual appeals very much to the way I like to go hunting for things.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was fascinated to read Robin Good's report on the annual Technorati Blog Statistics and Trends report that has just been released by Technorati CEO, Dave Silfy.

Not surprisingly the report shows that the uptake of blogs continues to escalate at an explosive pace, but there are signs also that the "blogosphere" is maturing, with some definite patterns of use establishing in what the data reveals. Some indications of this growth include:

• The blogosphere is now 70 million weblogs wide
  
• About 120,000 new weblogs are created each day, or...
  
• 1.5 million posts per day
  
• 1.4 new blogs are created every second
  
• 17 posts are made every second

The first relates to the internationalisation of blogs - and the language they are written in. According to the Technorati stats for this year, the Japanese are now the world's greatest blogging nation (based on langauge of blogs). Of the top four languages for blogging, Japanese retakes the top spot from the last report, with 37% (up from 33%) of the posts followed closely by English at 36% (down from 39%). Next after these two front-running languages is Chinese which comes in third at 8% (down from 10% in 2006, and fourth is Italian at 3% (up from 2% last year).

The other thing that caught my eye is the data indicating a rapid rise in the use of Tagging. The report noted that 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags. As Silfy states; "we???re seeing explosive growth in the tags index. People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages.. Is this the sign we've been looking for to confirm the establishment of folksonomies as a legitimate contender for how we organise and mange information>

Read the full State of the Live Web report by David Silfy in its original version with additional graphs and stats here:
The State of the Live Web, April 2007

There are also links to the previous year's Technorati reports at the bottom of Robin Good's post - these provide very useful reading to make comparisons and discover where the trends are.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's official - the Time magazine Person of the Year for 2006 is "YOU"!!! In a world where stories of war, political intrigue and natural disasters have dominated the news, Time magazine has chosen a different perspective for 2006...

look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

And from the Online Education Database is a list of their Top 100 Education Blogs. These were selected from the 5000-odd blogs that are tracked through Technorati. I'm not sure about the categorisation they've used, but there are some really useful blogs to check out here! (Including yours truly - see under the "Technology" category!)

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Day two of the CEGSA conference went very well - all sorts of interesting workshops and presentations.
A standout for me was a double act from Graham Wegner and Al Upton - both ICT facilitators from schools in the Adelaide area. Their presentation dealt with their experiences in using blogs - both personally and with teachers, focusing on the value of blogs as a professional learning tool.

I was particularly impressed with what Graeme had to say, and with the way he illustrated how his use of a blog had enabled him to become a part of a much wider and more diverse range of professional learning communities - communicating with people he'd never otherwise have had the opportunity to do so. He used a simple network map created in TouchGraph to illustrate the extent of these networks. I appreciated the thought Graham had put into getting his message across in such a clear and concise manner, thoughtfully reflecting on his own actions and decisions throughout the process of creating and maintaining his blog, and his approach to becoming an activie participant in the 'blogosphere'. This sort of reflection can be noted in the entries he makes in his blog.

Graham has posted his network map, along with his powerpoint show and some other useful links and diagrams on his Teaching Generation Z blog.
Al Upton has also posted some useful references from this sesson on his Al Upton and the MiniLegends blog. Both of these are worth a look at to get some more understanding of the use of blogs from a practitioner point of view.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Anne Davis has developed a very useful and informative wiki titled Improving Instruction Through the use of Weblogs that provides anyone interested in finding out how blogs can be used in education with some great reading!

I was particularly struck by Anne's personal statement in the Shaping Pedagogy Through Blogging section:

I think I'm a better writing teacher now than when I previously taught it in my classroom. I was bound within 4 walls and had been taught to work at getting a good final product. I was not a writer myself. That's the most important part I was missing. Blogging myself shows my students that I value writing and I realize the hard work it requires.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An humourous entry from Firda, the WeblogWannabe. Guess this result makes me a serious blogger - or perhaps a little sad - or simply a balanced person???

Thanks to Michael for the tip!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Like many others in the ICT in education field, 2004 has been the year of the Blog! Most of the discussions I've had with teachers and teacher groups has included some level of discussion around what blogs are, how to set them up, and how they can be used in an educational context.
Blogmeister is the most recent blogging software that I've come across that has been designed specifically for education. It has been created by David Warlick of the Landmark Project (another site well worth a browse for teachers!!!!)
Back to Blogmeister, an online blogging tool explicitly designed with teachers and students in mind, where the teacher can evaluate, comment on, and finally publish students' blog articles in a controlled environment. Unfortunately, it can only be used by US teachers at present, as it requires a School ID in order to set up an account.
However, it is well worth looking at this site and reading some of the background information. There is some useful thinking about the process of using blogs in classrooms, and links to a number of teacher blogs (which I'm sure will continue to grow!)

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just couldn't resist! My blog is now available on your mobile phone!! Simply fire up your mobile device and point it to winksite.com/dwenmoth/dereksblog Click on 'blog' and you'll be able to read the RSS feed of the recent entries on my blog. (Also had a link to a useful RSS validator which you'll notice is now added to the right hand menu of my blog!)
This all comes courtesy of Winksite (short for 'wireless ink"), where I was reading an article on the introduction of WinkBooks, or Mobile Books . The blog provides some urls to connect you to existing examples of books that you can access on your mobile device, and while taking a browse, I also found instructions on how to creat a mobile edition of your blog. The instructions are very easy to follow - and the results instant!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The inaugural EduBlog WebBlog awards are currently being held online. You can go online and vote for one of the nominated blogs in each of the following categories:
* Best Individual Blog
* Best overall group blog
* Best resource sharing blog
* Best Research Based Blog
* Best blogged paper(s)
* Best designed & most beautiful blog
* Best technology meets pedagogy blog
* Best use of weblogs within teaching and learning
* Best Newcomer (2004)
* Best Librarian Blog
Voting closes on Friday 10 December!

Even if you're not inclined to vote, this site is well worth a look to see what sorts of Educationaly oriented blogs there are out there. I came across a number I hadn't heard of, and have added them to my RSS aggregator (NetNewsWire Lite in my case) to keep up with what is being posted on them.

One of the sites I came across is called SchoolBlogs , a Manilla-based blogging environment that is created for school-level users.
SchoolBlogs was set up by Peter Ford, a former teacher at the British School of Amsterdam, and Adam Curry, ex MTV-vj and co-founder of the United Resources of Jamby. The aim is to make available the potential of weblogs to the educational world. To that end, anyone involved in education can create and maintain an individual SchoolBlog here free of charge. The process is simple, taking a matter of seconds to create an online writing space with its own 'look and feel'.
(NB SchoolBlogs is having problems with its ISP at the moment, so you might find it a bit slow to download - but if you're looking for a place to set up a project-based blog for your class this could be for you!)

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've just been playing with MSN Spaces, Microsoft's entry into the world of blogs. It's easy enough to create a blog, and I managed to create a profile easily enough, although the site operates pretty slowly and it took me a number of attempts to upload a photograph (kept telling me that area was not available). Adding music requires a playlist from Windows Media Player - I'm operating iTunes on a Mac, so I couldn't do that at this stage.
I found the site pretty intuitive - but mostly because it closely imitates features on the other, open source blogs. Not a lot of original stuff here. As Stephen Downes states:

"This is a typical Microsoft entry into a new field: nowhere near as good as the market leaders, painfully imitative, but leveraging Microsoft's market position to try to achieve lock-in and push the competition out. I don't think it will work this time: people are more loyal to their blogs than they are to their browsers."

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Came across this rather irreverend look at blogging this morning (courtesy of George Seimens)
Titled Everything you wanted to know about blogging but were too afraid to ask the author provides 50 tongue in cheek tips on how to successfully manage your blog. The main focus of the advice addresses how to promote your blog and increase readership and comments, rather than anything constructive about content and blog use - but it makes for a fun read.
The real value is in the list of references at the end - some very useful links to other blog-advice sites.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A posting I made about a week ago titled Weblogs going mainstream in education? inspired some debate. I criticised the article for being a bit superficial, and failing to explore in more depth the potential value of Blogs in education.
A featured article latest edition of the Educause Review provides some of the background and analysis I find more useful. Titled Educational Blogging it is written by Stephen Downes, and is a longer article, looking at the nature and history of blogging, educational applications, tools and technologies, trends, and early experiences in educational blogging.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting article from the New York Times titled In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards.
The writer claims that, with the new school year looming in the Norther Hemisphere, blogging is likely to be the new phenomenon, sweeping up tens of thousands of users in the process.
I'm a little more circumspect - while I can see heaps of potential for the use of blogs in education, this article doesn't really convince me, and conveys more of a 'hype' story than one that really portrays just how effective blogs can be as an online community building tool.
In my blog from yesterday I pointed to the multiple ways in which blogs can be used. In this article, that use seems limited to the writing of journals (probably the least attractive option) and as an alternative to using a discussion forum (although I feel a good old threaded discussion engine would have been a better tool to use in the example given.)
Rather than be entirely critical, let me give two examples from my own experience. Two of my own kids recently asked me to help set up a blog for them.
My son (aged 7) was intrigued to see me write my blog entries and, being an avid computer user, was keen to try it himself. His entries tend to be about one sentence long - but the motivation for him to continue comes from the comments that are provided by his grandparents, uncles, aunts and brothers and sisters. This is an example, at one level, of the blog as a journal, but the richness is in the form of the community that is centred on my son's writing, and the motivation this provides to pay attention to the style and accuracy of his writing.
My daughter (aged 14) discussed with me at some length how she might use her blog, and began with the clear intention of using it as yet another way in which she involves others in her world (adding to her regular use of the cell phone for TXT and the computer with instant messaging.) The first few entries on Madeline's Blog tell a fascinating tale of her sharing her need for assistance in preparing a speech for her English class, then sharing the speech she'd written and finally sharing how she felt the actual presentation of the speech had gone. Not only are her entries interesting, but the comments offered by her peers make for interesting reading, providing some insight into how comfortable these kids are with the technology.
Another interesting thought - all of this happened outside of school hours, and was not suggested or initiated by the teacher!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

George Seimens shared the following reference in his latest newsletter:
Distributed Knowledge Management - a paper by Martin Roell, presented to BlogTalk 2.0 , The European Conference on Weblogs, Vienna, July 5th and 6th 2004.

Seimen's notes...

"Improving the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the most important challenges for companies that face the transition from the industrial economy to an economy based on information and knowledge (Drucker, 1999). However, most "knowledge management" efforts have failed to address this problem and focused on information management instead. This paper briefly explores the failure of traditional knowledge management to adress the problem of knowledge worker productivity and argues that a deeper understanding of knowledge work is necessary to improve it. It then explores knowledge work and how it is supported with information technology tools today, focussing specially on the email client as a knowledge work tool."

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Came across a link to the Building Learning Communities conference that was held in Boston in July. Like Navcon2K4 , this conference had a blog set up for participants.
Some debate has followed this, however, as participants could (for a fee) gain credit for their blog participation. This has sparked a lively debate over the issues to do with "Education for free vs. education for a fee", and the question of whether conference participation like this is a valuable part of academic life???
For comments on this check out what Thomas Burn has to say, or refer to Sebastian Feidler's blog where this discussion appears to have started.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An overview of the Weblog Tools Market
Picked up this interesting article from Elise Bauer's Weblog at Elise.com .
It provides a very good overview of the size and distribution of the weblog tools market (ie the systems that allow you to build a
weblog). Leaders in the field, with about half of all blogs between them, are
Blogger and LiveJournal. Lots of other interesting statistics in the article, and some interesting links to other Blog-related articles can be found in the side-bar of this Blog.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seems to be a day for discovering all sorts of useful bits - here's a most interesting one from the macupdate site - KidzLog . Having a seven year old sone who is now getting into 'blogging' this product sounds just the thing!

KidzLog is a weblog publishing tool for children. Even children who are just beginning to read and write should be able to create a weblog with KidzLog . A KidzLog weblog consists of chronologically descending posts, each post consisting of a picture, some text, or both. KidzLog provides a canvas and painting tools so that children can paint their pictures directly in the application. Pictures can also be dragged from iPhoto or the desktop to a KidzLog canvas in order to publish digital photos as part of a weblog.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later

Is anyone using this?

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By now you'll have noticed that many web sites (including this blog and the Ultralab South Website make use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). If you're not familiar with what this is about, here's an informative artice from eSchoolNews explaining how RSS can transorm online communication.
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=5211

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A colleague of mine at The Correspondence School recently asked if I could help him set up a blog before he travelled overseas to attend a series of conferences. Ricky Utting is the manager of Media Services at the school, and wanted to provide immediate feedback to his team back at the school during the time he was away, to begin the discussions about key ideas and issues then rather than wait for the traditional "brain dump" when he returns.
Ricky is doing a really great job at using his blog for this purpose - and his team appear to be taking a real interest in what he has to say - take a look at Ricky's Blog here.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I first noticed this article from Wired magazine in George Seimen's blog.
George comments on his own personal journey as a blogger - traversing personal journaling then personal knowledge management to simply a 'personal space'. I expect we're going to see more of this sort of reflection as the use of blogs matures and more defined.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I've been reflecting more on the NECC conference in New Orleans recently where I attended a workshop given by Bernie Dodge from Sandiego State University, well known for his work in the development of 'webquests'. (Bernie will be presenting a workshop in webquests at the Navcon conference in Christchurch later this year)

Bernie's session was titled "Blogs and Wikis as Webquest Tasks". This link is worth taking a look at - there are several links from the page which illustrate how Bernie has been using blogs and wikis in his teaching, and some thoughts about the developing pedagogy behind this.

I also attended a round-table session run by Bernie and a colleague, Philip Molebash, titled "When Teachers Blog" (available here as a downloadable pdf). Bernie and Philip's paper describes their experiences across two semesters of having students maintain a blog as a personal journal as part of their course in teaching English. I must admit I was a bit disappointed in this session - seemed that the rationale for using the blogs was a bit "thin" (why would you expect students to keep a journal online when we've not been successful in doing it to any great extent on paper??) - and the statistical representation of the research also left me unconvinced given the low sample rate. I'd be interested to hear what others think having read his paper.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I came across the following two items in the CIT Infobits newsletter - useful both in terms of comparison, but also in terms of the list of features to consider when choosing blog software. (Thanks to Carolyn Koltas)

1 - Blogging services feature comparison
"Using a blogging service generally doesn't require any software other
than a web browser. Users have no administrative control over the
software itself, but have some control over a blog's organization and
appearance. Depending on the particular service, blogs can be hosted
either on the service??s servers or on the server of one??s choice (e.g.,
www.unc.edu). Users purchasing a paid account with a service typically
will have no banner ads on their blogs, more features at their
disposal, and better customer support from the service."
Check out the
Blogging Services Feature Comparison chart.

2 - Blogging Applications Comparison"Downloadable blogging applications require the user to have access to
server space (e.g., www.unc.edu). Most of these applications are
comprised of CGI scripts that must be installed and configured in a
user??s cgi-bin folder. Although they are packaged with detailed
instructions, applications can be difficult to install, prohibitively
so for the novice. Blogging applications afford users fine-grained
control over their blogs, and most applications are open-source or
freeware."
Check out the Blogging applications comparison chart online

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm now back in NZ and have spent some of the day reviewing the stuff I pickied up in New Orleans, as well as items that have come my way via lists etc.
Since blogging was a hot topic at NECC, I thought it might be useful to include here a couple of links that I came across first in George Seimen's newsletter, and are now posted on "eLearningSpace".
Part One is titled "The Art of Blogging; Overview, definitions, uses and implications".
Part Two provides more of a 'how to', with tools for blogging and examples.
Although first published in December 2003, the information and links provided in these articles remains current and informative for those starting out in this area.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Have just sat through an intereting research presentation on the use of blogs in a pre-service teacher education programme at San Diego State University with Bernie Dodge (of web quests fame). The focus of this was on a group of English students who used a personal blog to keep a journal of their experiences as a student teacher whilst teaching English to high school students. As such, the presentation provided only a narrow view of what a blog is, limited pretty much to being a semi-private online diary. No coment was made about the use of links and additional features such as "blog-rolling" etc.

The discussion got me thinking about the ways in which Blogs are used, and the connection with Gladwell's thoughts about connectors and mavins in his book The Tipping Point . Gladwell defines "connectors" as people who have a much wider social circle of friends than most others, while "Mavins" are those who have the unuque ability to gather information from a variety of sources and piece it together in a way that others can access and understand. Both of these sorts of people, Gladwell claims, have what he terms "social power" (as distinct from economic or political power) - and it is this power that is likely to be a dominant determinant of change in the future.

My musings are around what an ideal tool a blog provides for these sorts of people - and how the tool itself, might encourage these attributes in many others! Truly an instrument of social empowerment and social change!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 4:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

With all of the interest in blogs being shown recently I thought the following link might be of interest.
http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm
The guy who has put this together has put in many hours of hard work creating a table comparing the various pieces of Blog Software that are available. In addition, he explains quite a list of the features that the various pieces of blog software may or may not inlcude.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)