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.

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.

The wiki contains everything from curriculum-based examples to more theoretical pieces on pedagogy and blogging and webtools for teachers. It’s worth a look just for the RockYou slideshow in the Language Arts Examples.

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!

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!)

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!

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!)

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.”

You can see the test blog I set up at http://spaces.msn.com/members/derekwenmoth/

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.

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.

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!