Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Well, looks like everyone’s second favorite social software is opening its pages to people who, like aren’t in school anymore. Seems like the Facebook crew is getting restless and looking to expand beyond the tower. Just think–pretty soon facebook junkies could get their fix in their cubicle, reliving those glory days of facebooking in the computer classroom (like OMG, why can’t that stupid prof buzz off??). And this will no doubt spur productivity. Oops–sorry, I’m shaky. Been ten minutes since I last facebooked. If you want your name written in the facebook of life, you gotta stay active and try to get random people to be friends with you and stuff.

NB: Mike Edwards contributed heavily to these notes. In fact, most of what’s here is his work, so I want him to get credit for it.

The CCCC Blogging SIG had a large and productive meeting Thursday night in
Chicago. We began by discussing some of the initiatives the SIG had proposed
the previous year, including the one-page paper handout guide for teachers new
to blogging (which, we might hope, will continue to be revised collaboratively and kept up to date as necessary), as well as thoughts about assessment of weblog writing,
outcomes of weblog use in writing courses and professional endeavors, and a possible large multi-institution study investigating the
classroom uses of weblogs.

Following the initial discussion, we split up into five small groups focusing on
action in specific areas. The groups discussed their areas and reported back when
we reconvened. Here are the results of our discussion:

An article in the NY Daily News documents a woman’s unfortunate job interview when her potential boss "Googled" her and found her name and photo on a friend’s MySpace profile. The photo had a caption that suggested she may be using an illegal drug. It was enough to make her an undesirable candidate for hire.

Esquire magazine writer A.J. Jacobs put up an article on Wikipedia about Wikipedia and asked the community to edit it. Esquire will publish the final version in their December issue.

The original version (Sept 20) was a rough draft with many–some intentionally added by the writer–errors. In the first 48 hours there were 373 edits. On Sept 23 the article was deemed complete and locked at 771 words (originally 709).

Read more about it at CNET’s Esquire wikis article on Wikipedia

1. Write a craptacular draft full of factual errors, incredible sources, and grammatical/mechanical mistakes.
2. Post it to Wikipedia.
3. Wait a few days and let the community clean it up for you.
4. Turn it in!

The open source development model at work, so the article says. Maybe something we can address in the Caucus come March.

Via Lifehacker.

If you haven’t heard of it, you will: Web 2.0. It’s exploding into conversations online at the moment. Is it a useful way of describing the way that the web is turning to a distributed environment where users push/pull/share content in communicative acts rather than just visiting static virtual spaces? Or is it just business hype?

• from BusinessWeek It’s A Whole New Web
• MacManus and Porter ’s Web 2.0 for Designers
• Downes’s What E-Learning 2.0 means To You
• apophenia: Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization

To me, Web 2.0 is Tim Berners Lee’s Semantic Web meets social software.

An article many of you will want to read, via elearnspace, who notes that the overview “covers blogs, wikis, podcasts, video logs, etc. Each .pdf is a 2-page overview of the technology, addressing questions such as ‘what is it, how does it work, where is it going, what are the implications?’” Perfect for a lot of people I know who say that they “don’t get” social bookmarking, wikis, etc.

Dear Kairos Readers,

The Institute for the Future of the Book is pleased to announce the launch of next\text, a new project designed to encourage the creation of born-digital learning materials that will enhance, expand, and ultimately replace the printed textbook.

There are two stages to the next\text project. The first is a curated website showcasing significant projects currently in the field. The aim is to draw attention to a broad range of experiments that identify ways in which digital media and networks are expanding the potential of textbooks, redefining the role of teacher and student, and converging to create new ecologies for educational institutions. These areas include, but are in no way limited to: “expanded” multimedia textbooks; “open-source” textbooks continually improved by teachers and students; dynamic, networked textbooks with live or regularly updating components; collaborative work spaces; and multi-user games.

Hi everyone. I’m happy to announce the grand re-opening of CCC Online. I’ve posted a longer, semi-formal announcement and description of the site over at my blog, but thought I’d post a quick announcement here as well.

What we’ve done is to turn CCCO into a site for the management of that journal’s metadata. The content itself (i.e., articles) is still password-protected over at NCTE, but CCCO provides abstracts, keywords, bibliographies, et al. We’re using Movable Type and del.icio.us to make as much of the journal accessible to searches, bookmarking, tagging, and research as possible, and we’re pretty pleased with the results. It’s only one journal, and we’ve still got a ways to go in terms of adding back issues, but there’s enough up there now for you to see some of the potential of the site.

Please feel free to take the site for a spin, and to let us know what you think, either through blog comments or over email. Thanks!

cgb

During the last academic year, many of my fellow teaching assistants (and full-time faculty) struggled with Blackboard. The primary issue was the desire of most users to type in another application, then paste the results into discussion boards. The results tend to be a mess. High-ASCII and Unicode characters become question marks, formats are lost, and everyone gripes.

I tended to prefer using Nvu, which works pretty well on my PowerBook. I’d paste the resulting HTML into Blackboard, and all was good. However, this is not a practical solution when dealing with 84 instructors and more than 6,000 English 1 students.

Wikipedia, like the Los Angeles Times “Open Ed”, New York Review of Books “User Notes”, and other “open” editorial forums meant for peer editing and corrections, is now a frequent victim of vandals. The end result of this is a move to end, close, or limit user interactions.

This same thing is happening with some Open Source projects, after some “contributions” turned out to include intentional buffer errors or other security issues. In any open society…

From Reuters, 5-Aug-2005:

Wikipedia plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying Friday.

In an interview with German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, Wales, who launched Wikipedia with partner Larry Sanger in 2001, said it needed to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing open access to improve entries.

Citing a recent example of vandalism, Wales recalled how following the election of the new Pope Benedict in April, a user substituted the pontiff’s photo on the Wikipedia site with that of the evil emperor from the “Star Wars” film series.

ConsultantCommons.org has created a Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison resource in an effort to keep track of and compare social bookmarking tools. From their site:

“Introduction Purpose
This article looks at the evolving crop of social bookmarking tools, their functionality and examples of use. The goal is to help nonprofits understand the value of using social bookmarking tools and to determine which social bookmarking tool would be serve their needs. This is directed at nonprofit uses of these tools.”

I’m trying to get my thoughts together to respond to the great thread that Matt Barton, et al., started on the problem of assessing student writing in wikis. But I just stumbled across this article in the last issue of The Chronicle, and I thought I’d pass it on here. Unfortunately, The Chronicle is password protected, but maybe you know a way around that:

http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i45/45a03501.htm

I think it’s significant for several reasons, but I would note that it’s fortuitous that one of the first articles to appear on wikis in The Chronicle discusses how teachers are using wikis in terms of teaching writing/literature.