tagging

let's see if anyone -- even the contributors -- read this blog.

here is my problem. I am overwhelmed with information. I cannot keep a handle on what I have read and where.

With grad student help I set up a webpage with all my links. But that is static. In order to update I have to go into dream weaver, which I have resisted learning.

So I go to del.icio.ous -- especially since firefox ate my bookmarks and so I have to use the ones I saved to del.icio.ous.

Will this solve my problem? Is tagging the solution -- for organizing, finding, and sharing information? Should I tag every article or blog post I read that I find interesting and potentially useful on some future date?

I have also looked at zotero and brainstorm briefly, but do not feel like learning and setting up a bunch of different programs ...

any thoughts?

Presentation on Library Blogs

http://www.stevenmcohen.info/tricollege03022005/

Blog Bibliography

http://blog-bib.blogspot.com/

Robert

What next?

Hilary, Dewar -- should we expand this Blog to more users? If so, who, and how?
Thanks, RAH

Information Literacy

Hilary mentioned information literacy in one of the comments. You probably all saw this article from today's Times, which provides a decent place to start:

Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea
By GEOFFREY NUNBERG

Hi all

After I distributed my somewhat cynical blog workshop notes (cynical? me?) Hilary wondered what it would be like if I'd posted them to a Wiki that could be accessed by everyone who attended the event. I imagine a Roshomon-like result wherein the outside observer would not recognize a single event from the varied descriptions!

But then I tought, why not? I spent some time looking around for easy-to-use public Wiki software but couldn't find anything that matched the model I'd started with, the ubiquitous public (and often free) blog sites. So I decided to go with the blog, but give it a twist. I'd start a blog but wouldn't make it "mine," but ours.

So I started this blog and will give you the username: wpunj-tac and the password: arnies and the URL: http://wpunj-tac.blogspot.com
Armed with that information anyone "on the in" can come in and make their own entries.

So I am going to print this intro, then I'll print my notes of the lecture. Next I'll email a small group of testers -- Sandie, Hilary, Melda, Dewar, and anyone else who comes right to mind and we can give it a go. If it develops into something interesting we can share it with the rest of TAC and sit back to see what happens!

Robert

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).

Email that introduced the workshop notes

Prof. Yildiz requested that I distribute the notes I took in today's TAC workshop on blogs and blogging, so here goes. Some notes:

1. I originally wrote these notes for my personal use and, well, I talk to myself.
2. Having a portable personal computer I was able to take notes, look up the Internet sites that he mentioned (scattered throughout the document), note some sites of my own (end of the document) and shop for guitars (and he says immigrants can't multitask. Harumph.)

Robert

more blog worship

I have to agree with Robert. I found the session frustrating because I know a little bit about blogs. I would have liked more on how we can actually use blogs for teaching. His blogvangelism brought out the curmudgeon in me: How can we accept that young people are so good at multitasking when I have trouble getting them to do any competent singletasking --y'know like reading a book, finding a thesis, constructing a coherent essay or grammatical sentence?

I don't quite agree with Robert about the history, however. While it is true that something resembling democracy only began to emerge in the Jacksonian era, newspapers and printing presses were significant factors in the revolutionary period. Thus, it is a least debatable that the Founding Fathers (or as I call them, the SCFF -- So-called Founding Fathers) would have supported today's proliferation of media voices.

And re: Robert's dismissal of the relevance of Middlebury to our experience because of its "tons of money": I seem to remember, before I came to WPU, the tv commercials that touted the university's wonderful tech capability -- take courses in your pajamas!

... just having fun picking up on Robert's contrarian start to our experiment ...

dewar