Blog Workshop Notes

TAC – BLOG Workshop

02-10-2005

Will Richardson, Journalism Teacher and IT Guy from Flemington High
see: http://www.weblogg-ed.com/

• Interactive Web

• Collaborative Web

• Constructivist Web

Kids today are born into the web they have im and and blogs and web pages and mp3 ec.

Educators are “immigrants” to the experience. (Here is where I've edited out my commentary that this whole bit isn't at all different from anything that I've been saying for, oh, years now. And it wasn't that original when I said it. But, see, I'm nice and am going to edit it out of the distributed version of these notes so that I don't sound impatient that this guy can't get to the bit on RSS because he wasted the first 20 minutes going over very well trodden ground. So here is where my commentary to this effect would have gone if I weren't such a nice guy).

Podcasting (=On the Media= is Podcasted)
Kids re podcasting – Matthew Bischoff, for example, a 13- y/o kid from NJ

His seven year old daughter posts all kinds of neato stuff on a photo posting site called Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/

See Lawrence Lessig – author of Free Culture, founder of Creative Commons – on the new copyright culture. See: http://www.lessig.org/blog/ and http://creativecommons.org/

Speaker insists that the “founding fathers” would love it if they could see a world in which everyone participated and contributed. He may know his blogs but he don't know history. The founding fathers were upper-class elitists who didn't even envision universal manhood suffrage. The democratization of American democracy wouldn't come along until the Jacksonian period in the early nineteenth century. So I sure hope he's not telling these high school kids that the founding fathers would have loved a system in which everyone gets to participate and contribute because he's just feeding them historical hogwash that was already being questioned by historians as early as the 1950s.

Northwest Voice is a newspaper, but it is put together by the community, blog-like.
See: http://www.northwestvoice.com/page.asp?CAT=100

Higher Ed: Some schools use them for recruitment – Simmons is a college in Boston that has its students publish “real life” blogs in the hopes that high school students will see it and be motivated to go to the school. See: http://www.simmons.edu/

He suggests that blogs are being used like course management systems, combining the archiving of course material with even listserv and discussion. (Yeah? And who''s going to do all the work setting these up, thank you very much??).

Bgblogging – Barbara Gainley – does courses on blog at Middlebury (a private liberal arts college with tons of money to throw at tech infrastructure and personnel.)

http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/

His high school uses a server tool called Manila – uses a dedicated server and the software costs about $500 per year, and they get thousands of blog sites. http://manila.userland.com/

Some sites I wandered across when the speaker got repetitive (or boring) and when I wasn't doing other things (shopping for guitars):

• NJ Weblogs: http://www.nj.com/weblogs/
• Educational Weblogs: http://educational.blogs.com/
• eLearnSpace: http://www.elearnspace.org/edutechblogs.htm
• Seeing Ourselves Through Others: http://weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/poland/

Your humble reporter, Robert, at 3:46 PM on Feb 10 in this the 2005^th year of the Common Era (Year of the Rooster, is anyone is keeping track).