Blog Juice for Educational Technology

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:

There is some good advice in this piece on Wired News about best practices for tagging posts. My favorite is

“Utilize the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) system,” D’Agostino added. “Don’t try and tag a bookmark with the first 20 tags that come to mind.”

To me, posts which have 8, 10, 15 tags are less useful because they attempt to tag every concept that might be in a post rather than providing the most relevant.

Meanwhile, please take a look at this and the rest of the advice if you post regularly to Kairosnews. I’m hoping that in the spring we can move to a free tagging system here on Kairosnews. Would it be worthwhile to discuss this advice and begin describing our own best practice ideas?

Clay Shirky’s weighed in on the freetagging vs structured taxonomies debate:

I, on the other hand, am of the unreasonable view that classification schemes are going to be largely displaced by tagging for the same reasons that search has largely displaced directories for finding things, namely that distributed intelligence, for all its faults, tends to beat the work of a professional class when dealing with large, dynamic systems.

See the rest of his post on You’re It! a blog on tagging. Notably, Shirky categorized his post under “uncategorized”

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

A few months ago I picked up The Island of Lost Maps to an Amazon order so that I would qualify for super saver postage rates. It was being hocked as part of Amazon’s often amazing under $5 book section. What’s surprising is that this bargain book turned out to be much more enlightening and interesting than the books I had ordered.