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I wrote may last post about two hours ago. This was post #3 after my 30 or so days interregnum. I spent a month rejigging some of my habits, getting rid of junk and clearing the decks. Now I’m just catching up with some of the blogs I watch.
After posting and reading, (as well as sorting out some junk in my intray) here is what I observe.
- I feel better about reading these other blogs.
- I think I am thinking clearer.
- I have had two new ideas for projects I am working on now.
I wrote about this in my early blog posts. “Having a blog, a place to write means thoughts stay in your mind a little longer – incubating, sometimes to actually lead to something”. If I haven’t blogged about personal reflection and blogging, I should have. [I still remember our big project in 2005 where we were developing containers for reflection for students and NONE of the 30+ lecturers involved did any personal reflection] Now I think blogging (partly because of all the stuff that goes on in your head, and the benefit of connection etc etc) is just plain good for you, especially if your work is to do with ideas. I chatted with Leigh last week in GMail. I probably owe this thought to a comment he made.
This is Stephen’s Blog:
A cool byline: A place to write, half an hour, every day, just for me I could surmise: maybe the other blog (www.downes.ca) is his work/purposeful blog, Half an Hour is his therapy blog. Like exercise. (We do it and feel good, NOT the other way round). Also: somewhere Stephen has written on writing and the disciplines involved.
Just considering the question of a disclaimer for an official site. Some samples . . .
The student blogs available on this website represent a real and authentic depiction of student life at Wilfrid Laurier University. In an effort to present this authentic depiction, the university maintains minimal editorial control over the communications of its bloggers.
Consistent with this decision to exercise minimal editorial control, the statements or communications of the bloggers on Lauirer’s website do not represent a statement of the university’s official position or policy.
Blog Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed here, except as specifically noted, are those of the individual authors or commenters and do not represent the views or policies of DePaul University or the College of Law.
Comment Policy: Comments should be civil and on-topic. The site administrators may, at their discretion, delete comments deemed to be uncivil, off-topic, spam, or otherwise inappropriate. This Blog/Web Site is made available by the lawyer or law firm publisher for educational purposes only as well as to give you general information and a general understanding of the law, not to provide specific legal advice. By using this blog site you understand that there is no attorney client relationship between you and the Blog/Web Site publisher. The Blog/Web Site should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your state. (University of Houston)
Vincent G. Rinn Law Library Blog
Just for interest:
- Discussion on thr Role of an academic and the need/not need for disclaimers when speaking as a citizen.
- Peter N Kirstein – Work for Peace! Protect Academic Freedom! Defend Critical Thinking in the Academy! – “Also, this blog does not represent the views of neighbors of SXU who bicycle, jog, walk dogs or themselves on their daily constitution at St Xavier University, in the City of Chicago, in the County of Cook, in the State of Illinois, in the United States of America, on the North American continent, in the Western Hemisphere of the planet Earth.” I wonder if he intended to omit me?
How much do you balance risk with freedom? Need something soon to go on our new economics site.
POSTSCRIPT later in the day . . .
Just discovered a blog on a Canterbury URL: http://blogs.libr.canterbury.ac.nz/econ.php?blogid=8 I think you have really got to be an economics person to appreciate this, but it’s a start . . .
A meme I suspect is doing the rounds . . .87%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?
Mingle2 -
Forget where I saw this first (I was surfing) but then I saw it on GTD Wannabe and clicked on the link. 87% seems a bit high. I think a month ago things would have been different.
I’ve taken a bit of a break from the community aspect of my life. The change from the College to the University has accounted for most of this. However, things have moved on. First the West Coast visit and now next week we have our next session on community nurture/community development, and the first for 2007. Then Derek stopped in for a chat after dropping off the guest speakers at our e-portfolio seminar. His question: How can Moodle best support communities? He is using Moodle blogs, but they have no comments feature. We have Moodle 1.8 installed to we had another look, and yes, it’s true: no comments feature in a Moodle blog.
It took me a bit of time to remember, but this is actually by design, not accidental omission.
Martin Dougiamas talks about it in the moodle docs forum. This from an oft quoted May 2006 post:
Yes, there are no comments allowed for blog entries in (Moodle) 1.6. Let me explain why.
Firstly, I want blogs to be well-integrated in the Moodle experience. I do not want to just bolt on Simpblog or WordPress. Most standalone blogs have comments because there is no other way for readers to discuss things (one assumes they don’t have blogs). In Moodle though we already have lots of ways for discussions to happen, and everyone has a blog.
So what I’m trying to do is extract the part of of what makes Blogs unique (ongoing unstructured public reflection) and make that work well first, then carefully link it in with the other tools in Moodle. It’s much harder to take features away than add them carefully.
Firstly, there is a big conceptual overlap between a blog and a forum. See this listing of all the discussions you’ve started – it looks suspiciously like a blog. I am convinced that if we allow blogs to effectively be like user-centered forums that a lot of important discussion will float out the blogs (which are not course-based) and make “keeping up” with a particular course very difficult.
If you think keeping up with forums is hard now, imagine if every user has their own.
Secondly, if you want to use blogs to collect reflections from students and comment on them or grade them then we already have Assignments for that. If there is something missing about Assignments then perhaps we need a new assignment type, but anything you are assigning students to do for feedback is an assignment.
Overall, I view blogs as an external window to the course activities, a “skin” of not-private comments that you might monitor via RSS etc and use to access the forums and other activities within Moodle.
So my aim for 1.6 was simply to have a basic framework up that we can get used to and better see where we might go with the next level. If you want WordPress go and install it now, I’m not stopping you. 
So, there we have it: the reason why we have no comments is that it will not support the courses that are going on. Nothing about reflection and interaction with other students. I think Martin does not quite understand the essential difference between blogs and forums.
In at FLLinNZ we have had a short sharp discussion last year on communities and the best or at least not a bad support platform for a distributed voluntary association community. As far as Derek’s question goes: Moodle is not really designed with this in mind. You can of course try to do it, but it’s just a little more difficult. Moodle is designed as a Course Management System. Martin said this: “If you want WordPress go and install it now, I’m not stopping you.” – he could also have said “Moodle is open source, if you want comments, go and write the code – it’s just we won’t be incorporating into the main release . . .”
From the same forum:
It’s about ownership and location more than whether the communication is possible.
And:
To me, it makes more sense to notice how people use something and add functionality to enhance that, not restrict functionality to force your viewpoints of how people should be using something.
Today, someone posted their diffuculties with their homework assignment to their blog. Now, there is no way for anyone else to express they had similar difficulties or suggest a solution for that person. Currently, they have to leave the page and enter a discussion or forum. They can also post a seperate blog entry that can end up several posts away and gives no indication without reading the entire entry that the two are related. The current approach is so disconnecting and it cripples the entire social flow.
Besides, what makes a Blog different from a Forum is not commenting. Their difference is conceptual. Blogs are a place to publish and share personal thoughts, ideas and experiences. A Forum is a place for people to post content or topics of interest to start discussions. The technology behind them is exactly the same. They are both basically CMS. Commenting is just an added funtionality that lets other users interact with other users who read that post, making it SOCIAL SOFTWARE. Removing that functionality from either one decreases the value of each one equally. (Eric Fino)
This does not auger well in using Moodle for a community support platform.
I’ve written before about my conversations with another significant Moodle user, when I asked “Show me one Moodle site anywhere in the world where there is an active vibrant community happening . . .” We couldn’t find one, and even thought the discussion continued intermittently for several months – still no joy. Moodle supports some great discussions on SCoPE, but has yet to really move to being a community environment there. But at present it’s the best I can find.
Last year my laptop was reimaged, and I’m just getting some basics sorted – like some Firefox plugins for delicious. I still have not found what I’m looking for.
I tried a plug-in I had not seen before. Delicious Bookmarks.
This extension integrates your browser with del.icio.us (del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. It does this by replacing the default bookmarking functionality in Firefox with a new experience that offers the following advantages:
- Search and browse your bookmarks
- Access your bookmarks from any computer at any time
- Keep your bookmarks organized with tags
- Share your bookmarks with friends or anyone on the Web
- Import your existing Firefox bookmarks
Installing did not go smoothly – twice. Firstly it hung somehow, so I followed the instructions (“Uninstal and it will restore your bookmarks”) and uninstalled it, to find it synced with my profile bookmarks (ie the desktop Firefox) and I lost the 512 sites I keep current. No matter, imported from backup. (Whew . . )
Reinstall plugin, does all the right things this time, takes a few minutes to synchonize, but: I loose al the folders, all bookmarks except 17 of them, a seemingly random group. And I have a gazillion tags in a sidebar. Nice. But I decided having done this, this is NOT what I want. For me bookmarks and tags are different.
—————————————
I use my bookmarks for several different purposes. eg
- CORE – daily visited sites, the first six open each morning – (course sites I teach into, current projects etc)
- REFERENCE – frequently visited sites (our homepage, newspaper, TV, whitepages)
- MORE REFERENCE – specific parts of sites (our staff phone list for instance)
- PROJECTS – what I’m working on . . . (eg a writing project on educational design)
- REFERENCE – links to specific pages: classified in folders. (over 450)
—————————————
I now realise these are different animals: CORE and REFERENCE are genuine bookmarks to sites – the others are better in delicious, pages tagged with multiple tags.
I don’t want my CORE sites in delicious. In fact, when I travel I use Netvibes for my home page, listing the sites I inhabit. All the rest is basically Google or delicious.
I need bookmarks for my basic core sites. And delicious/tagging for pages – maybe several pages in a site, and certainly several tags for the average page.
Not sure whether a combination of delicious tagged pages and bookmarks where bookmarks should be will work for me. I’ve looked at every bookmarks and delicious plug in at the Mozilla site tonight. None of them do it exactly right, or else they are buggy. I think it’s Opera functionality I need.
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Alex Boschmans discovered yesterday I’d commented favourably on his blog design, but with a little throw away comment on the Google Ads.
Alex’s comment:
It’s true, I admit it, I put a google ad on my frontpage. But it’s supposed to be just the one wee small text-ad, it shouldn’t take up much space…
I can’t see it myself, either Google or my work proxy is blocking it..
Please let me know if this is not the case and you are getting something humongous, that’s not what I want…
Alex, since you cannot see it, here is what it looks like:
I presume this is what you want. It is small and discrete . . . and obviously the Google algorithm to detect words on the page is working. I looked at the page a few times, and found there can be sometimes 2 ads, sometimes one. Hey – it’s not too bad.
Anaconda. By the way, I read Alex’s comments on the Anaconda theme. (Which is the theme I use as well) “Also, it bothers me that they want to make some money out of it, when their theme seems to be assembled from other, freely available themes that are GPL…” and “The forum was is full of spam”. Yes. I noticed this (and yes, they have fixed the spam problem). I was less worried about this than the fact that there were lots of OLD questions on the forum unanswered. Things have improved a lot now, but the replies are usually by guests rather than the guys from home base . . which is OK again. They have Google adverts to, but scattered inside their posts as well, and not just one or two but lots . . . I hope they do OK.
Book reading plugin. One of the strengths of WordPress it the plugins. Alex uses Now Reading from Roblog. (and this blog has Google ads across the top even more prominently placed). From Alex’s blog . . .
 \
This is quite cool. Links to Amazon, and has some quite complex incarnations like this blog: http://darkfaerytale.com/library. Kind of like your own personal Shelfari on the edge of your blog. Mark Bernstein’s was the first blog I saw featuring current reading, and I’ve often meant to do something about this. Do I want another plugin to maintain when I have other things I have yet to do?
Alex, your blog is OK, the ads are discrete as you want. (How can you survive not being able to see your blog??) Have a Nice day.
Last year my laptop was reimaged, and I’m just getting some basics sorted – like some Firefox plugins for delicious. I still have not found what I’m looking for.
I tried a plug-in I had not seen before. Delicious Bookmarks.
This extension integrates your browser with del.icio.us (del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. It does this by replacing the default bookmarking functionality in Firefox with a new experience that offers the following advantages:
- Search and browse your bookmarks
- Access your bookmarks from any computer at any time
- Keep your bookmarks organized with tags
- Share your bookmarks with friends or anyone on the Web
- Import your existing Firefox bookmarks
Installing did not go smoothly – twice. Firstly it hung somehow, so I followed the instructions (“Uninstal and it will restore your bookmarks”) and uninstalled it, to find it synced with my profile bookmarks (ie the desktop Firefox) and I lost the 512 sites I keep current. No matter, imported from backup. (Whew . . )
Reinstall plugin, does all the right things this time, takes a few minutes to synchonize, but: I loose al the folders, all bookmarks except 17 of them, a seemingly random group. And I have a gazillion tags in a sidebar. Nice. But I decided having done this, this is NOT what I want. For me bookmarks and tags are different.
—————————————
I use my bookmarks for several different purposes. eg
- CORE – daily visited sites, the first six open each morning – (course sites I teach into, current projects etc)
- REFERENCE – frequently visited sites (our homepage, newspaper, TV, whitepages)
- MORE REFERENCE – specific parts of sites (our staff phone list for instance)
- PROJECTS – what I’m working on . . . (eg a writing project on educational design)
- REFERENCE – links to specific pages: classified in folders. (over 450)
—————————————
I now realise these are diferent animals: CORE and REFERENCE are genuine bookmarks to sites – the others are better in delicious, pages tagged with multile tags.
I don’t want my CORE sites in delicious. In fact, when I travel I use Netvibes for my home page, listing the sites I inhabit. All the rest is basically Google or delicious.
I need bookmarks for my basic core sites. And delicious/tagging for pages – maybe several pages in a site, and certainly several tags for the average page.
Not sure whether a combination of delicious tagged pages and bookmarks where bookmarks should be will work for me. I’ve looked at every bookmarks and delicious plug in at the Mozilla site tonight. None of them do it exactly right, or else they are buggy. I think it’s Opera funtionality I need.
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Mark Nichols has a blog I sometimes dip into. He’s just finishing off one life and heading for another. Here is the start of his latest post:
Yes, just two more entries will be made in this blog following this one. I have already ‘booked’ my new professional blog site and will activate it as of 12 January 2007. I am considering flicking to a ‘bitsy’ format, updating it daily, rather than placing a ‘mega-post’ each week. Feedback and comments on this format vs that are most welcome!
I tried to post a comment, but beta.blogger.com is not working at the moment. Here’s my 2c worth.
What you could consider is an aside. I am at a loss to find anything on this idea in any sort of comeplete form on the internet – I am wondering if the term is more of a wordpress one. See for example: http://wordpress.org/tags/asides
The place where I saw these first was this blog: http://weblogtoolscollection.com/
 The tp part is a normal blog post, the items below are “Asides”
Tim Greig has them implemented below his featured ONE post:
We are currently implementing something like this in the forums in Interact: posts and postlets. A post is a little more something with substance, a postelet just a quick comment.
Photo Matt has talked about this:
As you may have noticed on this page or in your aggregator my normal entries are now interspersed with smaller link and commentary entries represented in an unordered list. These fall in chronological order with my other entries and are real posts with permalinks, comments, categories, trackbacks, and pingbacks. I have been wanting to do this for a long time and there was a flood of entries when I first got this working. I fully expect to post in this category with a much higher frequency than my normal posts. I come across things all the time that I want to link so badly but I just don’t have the time to write an entry about. Now every interesting tidbit I come across is just a click of a favelet away from my readers. It’s liberating.
This is basically a form of asides.
He follows this with another comment:
The format of a weblog dictates its writing. There is no getting around this. Ever since my redesign I’ve had these big important titles that—as a writer—are intimidating. Everything I write has to be worthy of its 32-point Dante banner. This was a deliberate to force myself to put more thought and effort into my entries and it has worked; some of my best writing has been since the redesign. It has been stifling as well. To express what I want to express these days I need something more dynamic.
Big well crafted posts take time and energy: having the opportunity to post a post/postelet or post/aside I think is quite neat. In wordpress you would implement asides with the plugin.
Maybe (Mark) this is what you need!! I reckon as soon as you start posting quick throughts, it wil only be a little time before you need to post bigger thoughts.
The standard default message for WordPress:
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
I’ve just ported all my posts to WordPress. I think this will be where I stay for a while.
AFTERWORD 1 Dec 2006: Someone has found this blog when I wasn’t ready.  I am still trying to get a style I like. Watch this space.
Learning Circuits is has their big question of the month for October as: Should All Learning Professionals be Blogging?I just thought I would have my 2 cents worth on this question. Part of my answer to this question stems from some of the dialogue we had in Florence in early October. The blog is here. Blogging proved a hot topic.
There were several dyed in the wool bloggers and others who are open but less engaged with the idea of blogging. One of the people there had been working with A-list bloggers in the education and online learning field. She and she said to him:
 Really, you should never try to blog when I see the way that you write, the level of perfection and clarity that you expect . . .. . . and the amount you will push yourself to polish a phrase a sentence and a paragraph – blogging just would not suit the way you work”. This was an interesting comment. There are some of us not cut out for blogging, the top of the head, informal and part way there writing does not sit well with us.
I do not think everyone who is an educator necessarily should be blogging, but I think I have three thoughts:
1. Every educator should try blogging sooner or later for themselves.
Get a simple recipe for blogging such as
- choose a name for your blog
- choose a simple and clear focus of interest to you
- set a blogging routine or discipline, I’d suggest once or twice a week
- plan a few blog posts and maybe even write them as if you were blogging but not in your blog.
- Blog for a few weeks.
- Read blogs on the same subject.
Note how you feel, your response to the fact you have a blog, how you felt about the thought of preparing a post, the feeling of having posted, and examine the effect of blogging on your thinking, your psyche and your learning. [IMO: you shoud never, not ever, ever set a blogging exercise for your classes without blogging yourself]
Having tried it – if you don’t like it, stop blogging.
2. This I’m more definite about:
Every educator should read other blogs in their field. In fact I would go so far as to say every professional should be following blogs in their field and maybe even every serious hobbyist.
This is not a trivial act.
Derek Wenmoth shared in the podcast to TT701 the other night about the significance of RSS feeds, aggregators and his personal discipline of 30 mins a day which help him keep up with a number of blogs.
Blogging is a phenomenon that is here to stay. Where it goes, or what evolves is another question. But it is a cutting edge for thoughts and ideas that are expressed on a given subject along with the millions of trivial posts.
Finding Blogs to read. Use Technorati, Delicious or email a few friends to find some key leading edge bloggers in your field.
Then, follow what they say. You will find reflections, followings, key events, posts on conference presentations, links to newspaper articles with comments on their significance, stories of events that have happened this very day and so on. If you notice two or three people posting on the same topic and they are thought leaders (or at least close to the action) in your field it’s something worth following up about. As well as A listers you should read the blogs of any of your friends who have them.
In my opinion.
3. Educators and learning professional can comment on the blogs of others.
Most blogs allow comments. After you read blogs, leave your mark and make some comments. Just follow a few simple rules: No flaming, no dissing, no violent disagreements, no rants, just simple short comments. You have no idea where this kind of interaction could lead. And don’t forget just to encourage as well. This is great for people who write blogs. Write your emal if you want like this:
derek (dot) c (at) gmail (dot) net
Commenting Tips:
You may like to make your first few comments anonymous just to see how you feel, but you also may like to leave a link to your online CV, your website where you have a few outdated, static pages, your institution or whatever. You never know who will find you.
This habit – I think – will keep you up with what’s going on in your profession almost as much as a conference, as being on the editorial board of your professional journal, being on a national executive, or . . . .
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