Education as a Conversation

Today we met at St. Ignatius College Prep to talk about blogs. 

On the Illinois Technology Conference for Educators blog, Lucy Gray shared a wonderful Class Blog which contains video posts (vlogging – video blog) – Room 132.  To learn more about vlogging, check out the link in his blog roll called Teacher Vlogging Group.  Thanks for the resource, Lucy.

I have always ruled out using Blogger with students due to the “Next Blog” (random blog) on the top nav bar.  I just discovered a website that gives you directions on how to remove it by opening the template and typing:

#b-navbar {   height:0px;   visibility:hidden;   display:none   } 

right above the style end tag

It worked! 

However, I still like my edublogs better as I can put tags (categories) on my posts and have a list of them on the side.  I also can create separate pages (see tabs under the blog title) for other content.

Mark Pearson from Earlham College, Indiana posted a great idea for using social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks – del.icio.us) for student research.

Let’s take a small class with 16 students, and divide it into 4 groups of 4 students each. There are 4 topics to cover and each student in the group will research and write about one of these topics in their blog…

Then each group will have a wiki site where they bring together these topics and write about connections and interrelationships between them.

Each student will have their own del.icio.us user account and will accumulate bookmarks to useful web resources appropriate to their topic. Among the tags used for these bookmarks will be an agreed topic tag which is shared by all the students from each group researching the same topic. Thus the ‘freedom of information’ topic might have an agreed tag called ‘FreeInfo’. In this way students will share their bookmarks with others from different groups researching the same topic and by this means will establish a community of practice across groups.

This process will be easy to assess in del.icio.us since the teacher can easily select the tag used by each topic and see how many bookmarks were added by which student.

(Originally posted January 5, 2006 to http://ltoulon.edublogs.org/)  

So how did Mike, from BlinkList, find my posting on my blog so fast? (see “Web Feeds and Readers” post)  I went straight to the source and asked him myself.  He used technorati, a blog search engine.   How does this search engine work?  According to their site,

“Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who’s linking to whom) underlying these conversations.”

You can search by keyword, website URL, or the tag which the blogger has assigned to the post.  Very cool.  Thanks for the recommendation, Mike. 

Other Blog Search Engines include: Blogdigger, Bloglines, BlogPulse, BlogSearchEngine, Bloogz, Daypop, Feedster, Google Blog Search, IceRocket and PubSub.  The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about this called “New Search Engines
Help Users Find Blogs.”

(Originally posted January 4, 2006 to http://ltoulon.edublogs.org/)  

Just hours after I posted my first entry on this weblog [my original weblog at http://ltoulon.edublogs.org/], I received an email from someone asking me to check out their social bookmarking service BlinkList.  I was amazed that he was able to find my post so fast.  I then remembered there is an RSS button on my blog which edublogs automatically added.  So I understand that my blog automatically has a web feed (RSS feed) on it and anyone with a web feed reader (aggregator) can receive updates to my blog automatically through their reader.  I have never used a reader before and started doing some research on it.

I did a search for RSS Reader on Google and came up with 105,000,000 hits!  So where to start?  I started with Bloglines and added a couple of Blogs that I read regularly.  I would be interested to hear other recommendations.

(Originally posted January 3, 2006 to http://ltoulon.edublogs.org/) 

For years, I have been using an online bookmark manager called iKeepbookmarks to manage and access my Internet favorites.  I have always liked the simplicity of the interface and the ability to access it from any Internet connected computer.  At a recent conference in Alabama, I was introduced to del.icio.us  At first glance, the interface seemed confusing and I could not understand why someone would want to keep their bookmarks this way.  However, I decided to try it out to see what all the fuss was about. 

I then discovered the power of tags.  Have you ever bookmarked something and found that it could fit in many categories?  Which folder to put it in…  With del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize your links.  For example, I found an article called Does your web policy cover student sites?  This could go in my folder on blogs or AUP.  Del.icio.us doesn’t make you choose one of them or make you duplicate your efforts.  You can use tags, one word descriptors, for each of the categories and find this resource under either one!  You can also search someone else posts for related content with the same tags. 

Yahoo aquired Del.icio.us in December of 2005.   For more informationm, see social bookmarking.