StigmergicWeb

Its a peaceful day in the middle of my Easter break. My family has left me alone to take care of the 1001 projects that I need to get done, along with some house work. Is there a better time to update Wordpress to version 2.0.2 and play around with some new plugins? I think not - all that other stuff can wait for a couple of hours. So - this will either work brilliantly, or fail tragically. Stay tuned for details.

UPDATE - if you can read this, everything so far is good, and the update to WordPress 2.0.2 worked. Now to start playing around with some new plugins!

I’m working with a teacher in the school who wants to give students a chance to do some authentic, self-directed writing (music to any edu-blogmeister’s ears, I’m sure). I’ve set up a site using Drupal. On the first day of student writing, we’ve already had some issues about appropriate levels of self-disclosure in the students’ writing.

What we would ideally like to do is to have the students be able to describe each blog entry as public, restricted or private. Public posts would be available for all the world to see (and I’ll have the link to the class blog up as soon as the teacher is a bit more comfortable with the process), restricted posts can only be seen by users who are logged in, and private entries can only be seen by the student and the teacher (who has the role of editor for the site). I have the taxonomy set up to describe all posts as such. I was working with the taxonomy access control module, but I have set it up so that private entries can’t even be seen by students.

So - am I on the right track? What do I need to do to get this happening?

BTW, I was originally thinking of just e-mailing some Drupal geeks I know and getting their answers, but I thought that some others might be having the same kinds of questions.

UPDATE -  After a bit of experimentation (and much cursing) I’ve found that the node privacy byrole module seems to do the trick very nicely by allowing authors/editors to pick who can view (and also edit) the posts, and the interface and logic of the module is extremely elegant. Right now this module is only available for Drupal 4.6, but it looks like it will be upgraded/ported for Drupal 4.7. Thanks to D’Arcy and Harold for suggestions (and I will take a more serious look at Elgg in consideration of my next project).

A great way to get developers to release an upgrade is for me to install it.

I just downloaded and installed this and … the site looks just the same! I don’t even see any difference on the administration side of things. But nothing seems broken, so I think I’ll keep it ;^) K2 at Binary Bonsai

OK - despite borking the upgrade to WordPress 2.0, I did manage to retrieve the site from the backed up database. Sorry if this upgrade has barfed my feed into your RSS aggregator. I’ll try not to repeat that.Now I need to put on a fresh coat of paint and re-theme the site. But I think that just might wait until tomorrow.

UPDATE - As a start to the renovation, I’ve switched to the fabulous K2 theme. Tweaking and fine-tuning will wait until tomorrow.

It looks like WordPress 2.0 has been released (and the WordPress site has been spiffed up). I’m setting up a blog for someone, so this seems like a good chance to try out the installation. If all goes well, I’ll upgrade this site as well. If the sites starts to cough up digital hairballs, you know something went wrong (but my first step in upgrading will be back up everything!)

UPDATE - Alec also noticed the upgrade to WordPress, and points to a list of 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.0.

Oh boy - I have too many projects (like getting some major work done for the site that Rick has been patiently waiting for, and getting some audio edited for the posse)that need to be wrapped up in my life, so I am taking a nearly total blogging hiatus until at least one or two of them gets wrapped up. I’ll still be reading a handful of blogs (no more than 5) over this week, but I will be totally abstaining from any writing in this blog.

And now the tough part - picking the 5 blogs that I will read for the week! Suggestions?

Aren’t comment spammers just the best?

I’ve been writing on this and other previous blogs for about 3 and a half years (which I think is about 25 internet years), and during that time I have forgotten a lot of the great posts I wrote.

But tonight, as I was tossing out the spam, I checked a couple of the links to the posts that had been spammed, like this one - David Wiley on technology in schools - an oldie but still a goodie. If not for the spammers trying to clog my blog with their crap postings, I would never have thought to go and re-read it.

So thank you once again, spammers. I hope that my sincere appreciation helps to make you feel like a good person with a useful role in society despite the fact that you are being paid by the profits of pill-pushers, online casinos, and pornographers. If not for your ineffective attempts to leave comments (which need my approval before they actually get placed on the blog), I would not have had that chance to take a look at some of the content, humble as it may be, that I actually took the time to write and share with the world! You rock, dude!

Wow! Pete Townshend is publishing his new novella, The Boy Who Heard Music, as a serial on a blog. (Although I would have been even happier if he had released his work under a creative commons license.)

I’ve also heard he dabbles in music a bit. I wonder if he’ll be releasing any of that on the blog as well! A Pete Townshend podcast - now that’s a thought that is making all fans of The Who and Pete Townshend downright giddy at the mere thought of if.

And if you check out his photo on the blog, you may find, as I did, that Pete Townshend has an uncanny resemblence to Steve Jobs!

I know a number of teachers and others who use Blogger to start themselves in the blogging world. If you’ve ever gone to a blogspot hosted blog, and hit next blog a few times you may be shocked at the results! But what is the alternative for free blogging for educators?

Well, thanks to James Fisher Farmer, there is now an alternative - edublogs.org is a no-profit adventure into providing free WordPress blogs and hosting for teachers, students, researchers and writers who are interested in education. Thanks for offering this great service, James!

Alan started the meme (CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » When Was Your Blog-Ha Moment?), Brian and D’Arcy followed up on it, and after a bit of thought I think I’ve come up with the answer. But what is a Blog-Ha Moment? Thus sayeth Alan:

What was it the triggered the 10,000 watt light bulb going off in your head that screamed, “Wow! There is something really powerful about this way of expression”

When I was working as Computer Coordinator for my school division, I started taking a look at Movable Type, and I think I had set it up a couple of times, but never really did much with it - I don’t think I had much to say at that point. Same for Blogger - I made up a couple of accounts and blogs, which were quickly abandoned. I think I was looking at them from the perspective of testing some tools that I could show the teachers, not something for me.

That changed after listening to Stephen Downes speak at the AMTEC conference in 2002 in Regina. After listening to him, and subscribing to OLDaily, I became aware of some different things that I wanted to voice my opinion on. So I started blogging with Blogger (the blog is still there, if you want to take a look).

I dove whole-heartedly into blogging, and dragged other people along with me. The coolest moment - the Blog-Ha - was my participation in the Small Pieces Loosely Joined wiki-blog-chatfest initiated by Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman. Thanks to an aggregation script by Stephen Downes, posts from my blog were being automagically aggregated together with other bloggers who were writing about the SPLJ. (The SPLJ aggregation is still up - take a look, there’s some good stuff there) This created a group blog from all the individual entries on everyone’s individual blog. Wow! That amazed me - and made me feel like what I was writing really helped to contribute to a larger body of knowledge. I even wrote a post that was quoted on the SPLJ fence-sitters page:

To me, this is the sweet spot of educational technology - decentralize the tools and centralize the communication. Interestingly, the internet, particularly the web, have done both. Free applications and operating systems are being widely distributed online. Many of the applications are small, specialized tools (as opposed to the one-product-does-it-all-its-a-floor-wax-and-a-desert-topping variety of application produced by large software companies). At the same time, the internet offers many possibilities for centralizing communication.

(Yeah, I know - quoting myself is a bit narcissistic, but it is relevant)

Then I stumbled across this from Joe Gregorio, talking about stigmergy and the world-wide web:

And now finally we get the point. The whole point of this is the connection between the web and stigmergy. The World-Wide Web is the first stimeric communication medium for humans.

Blog-Ha! Sometimes, every once in a while, someone out there has already written what I’m thinking, and always much more clearly than I could put it. :^)

The ideas seem to bump around and sometimes stick to each other, and sometimes those idea clumps start to take on a life of their own - ideas like open source or open content have certainly become well developed in a relatively short time, and they were created mainly by little ants like us doing a little bit at a time.