StigmergicWeb

It has been such a busy week that I haven’t had time until now to finally post the audio from the workshop that Donna and I led on Feb. 13. I think it is fair to say that Donna had some reservations about how the workshop went; I tend to think that it went well, and I particularly enjoyed the collaborative process that went into making the presentation. The presentation is in a wiki, and we built the presentation in a fairly organic sort of way, adding and adjusting to the different parts over time. Here are the links:

• How to drink water from a fire hose (audio - part 1 of 2)
• How to drink water from a fire hose (presentation wiki)

As I said, I thought the workshop went well. To be honest, some staff were resistant to any kind of presentation on technology. There are various reasons for this, but I think one reason my colleagues were resistant is that they believe (rightly or wrongly) new ways of doing things means more work. I would agree with this, but instead of focusing on the extra effort that may be required of them, they should perhaps focus on differences they could make by putting in that extra effort. This is what we ask of our students every day so how can we honestly expect less of ourselves?

I should mention that I work with some of the most amazing, caring and talented teachers I have ever known. As a technology lead teacher, I get the chance to be in many other teachers’ classrooms, and I am in awe of the skill and compassion exhibited by my colleagues. Would I tell any of them that I believe their teaching methods to be insufficient? Absolutely not! But I would ask any teacher to give a fair consideration to methods that might enhance their communication with and understanding of their students, which is what I hope our presentation did.

I tend to be a “glass half-full” kind of guy, though, which is why despite some resistance, I spent my time in the presentation focusing on the staff who were receptive to some new ways of doing things. If I had to pick one technology that seemed to catch people’s fancy, it was social bookmarking. We have installed scuttle on a school server, and I’m delighted to note that a few staff are now making use of it. I hope to see some students using it in the near future.

I also tend, like Doug Johnson, to have a different view of how to implement change than I did a few years ago. After spending some time working to make some changes at the division and school level, I take a much longer view on things. I don’t think that very many meaningful changes happen suddenly. I work towards change by making sure that I’m walking the walk as well as talking the talk (and we all know tht more walking is healthier anyway ;^D ). I think that I can be more effective working with individuals than in large workshops or presentations, and I tend to be somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of workshops for changing people’s behaviour. Workshops and presentations are great for raising awareness and generating interest, but real change happens one person at a time.

I’ve had some ideas in the past about using some sort of CMS to run a school web site, but after my recent post about building a school website out of a colony of blogs I’ve been encouraged to consider scaling that project up.

The feedback and ideas that were left by Stephen, James and Christopher were very helpful. My original stated goal was to have a variety of wordpress blogs being used by various staff, students and groups around the school. If a teacher wanted a web site, they could build one themselves or I could set them up with a blog. If a creative writing class wanted a public online writing space, I could set them up with a blog (or a set of blogs). If a team or a club or anyone in the school wanted some way to put stuff online, I could (OK - all together on the chorus please) set them up with a blog. It should be noted that I have a pretty generous view of human nature, and would assume, perhaps naively, that all these sites would not be used for malicious behaviour such as online harassment of others. Whenever I’ve worked with students in a way that involved communicating online, I’ve found that this is generally the case.

Christopher made the terrific suggestion that I could use a more fully featured CMS such as Drupal to power the site. I love Drupal - I think it is such an incredible application, and loaded with functionality. But I’m going to try things a different way, at least for now, for a couple of reasons. First, I think Drupal is too much for what I want to do, and when I show other staff and students how to post and edit material, they will be overwhelmed with information. Well - I think some of the staff would; the students would probably show me some features I didn’t know about. The main reason for going with WordPress instead of Drupal is a much more pragmatic one - its the tool I know best. It also fits with my affinity for a small-technologies-loosely-joined approach to building a learning environment.

I also want to thank Stephen for his suggestion about RSS aggregation in PHP using MagpieRSS (I had forgotten about that) and James for his offer of help with WordPress MultiUser (I still might get ahold of you for that!). The three of you got me thinking about different ways a multiple author web site might be put together. The main issue that I’m trying to work out is whether it is better to have a site in which everyone contributes to one centralized CMS, or if I can let everyone work on their own site (maybe a WP blog, but it could be anything else that squeezes out some kind of RSS or Atom feed) and glue the whole thing together. I’m favouring the latter plan because it gives any potential contributor a choice of content creation tools.

I’m also favouring the latter plan because I’ve shown the prototype of the announcements site to some colleagues, including the school principal, and they’ve encouraged me to use what I’ve done so far to revise the main school web site, and the tools at hand are always the easiest ones to work with!

My revised mental plan, then, is to put the school website together using WordPress. Legacy content can be linked from the main page, which will also be used to display school news, events, deadlines and similar information. As individuals or groups in the school want to get involved in adding content, they can be added as a contributor to the site, or given their own blogging space if they want to create content but not necessarily add it to the main school page. Such content can be linked to from the main page, or aggregated together somewhere on the “core” school site.

I’m going to try getting some more work done on the preview of the site tomorrow. So far, the core is looking good, and I’m just going to assume that there will be some way to route the feeds into the blog once that becomes a necessity. And if there isn’t an existing solution, the school division has a very talented PHP nerd on the technical staff! :^)

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.

Again, I am following in D’Arcy’s footsteps by trying out Performancing for Firefox which is a handy dandy little extension that creates a little blogging window to appear in the firefox window, kind of like Flock does (but hopefully without the bugs).



Now, can I edit this without any of the problems that D’Arcy noticed?

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?

The flock web browser is based on Firefox, and includes al sorts of cool web app integration, such as using del.icio.us for bookmarks, blogging built into the browser (I’m using it right now!) for ultra-easy blogging, feed integration (haven’t checked that yet, but I assume that means RSS and Atom), and Flickr integration so you can drag your photos on Flickr right into a blog posting.

I’m totally impressed with the UI - the integration with all the tools I use daily is tremendous! But the most impressive thing I’ve noticed so far is the passion of the people who are building Flock.

We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online.

Check it out for yorself - Flock

Google Reader plays audio enclosures!
Originally uploaded by omegageek.

A bit of playing around with Google Reader revealed a very useful feature - audio enclosures (at least for mp3s) can be played from within the interface. Nice touch. There are a few things I don’t like about the interface like its very low information density for browsing a lot on a single screen, but this audio player is seriously cool and should increase the audience for podcasts.

Podcast recording setup

Here’s a picture of my setup that I used for recording a Skype conference call with no echo or feedback! The audio quality was good (as good as the Skype audio). Pushing the audio recording duties onto the iRiver prevented my sad pathetic CPU from becoming overloaded. Click on the picture to view a larger version (including notes) on Flickr.

I’m writing this from a computer lab at the University of Saskatchewan tonight, after a quick trip into Saskatoon to attend a reception honouring John Thompson and Rick Schwier for their both being awarded a 3-M fellowship this year. This is a great honour not only for these two great teachers, but also for the University of Saskatchewan.

I’m sorry that I missed hearing John Thompson, but I did arrive just in time to hear the accolades for Rick along with his own comments. I’m honoured to have Rick as a teacher and a mentor. I’ve been lucky to know a lot of great teachers in my time as a student and a school teacher. Like all the other great ones, he’s just so good he makes it look effortless, but as a teacher I know that looking that easy takes a lot of hard work behind the scenes.

Congratulations, Rick.

Scott Leslie comments on the presence of aEdTechPost: new O’Reilly publication - Using Moodle, and I would agree as to his assessment of the importance of having this published:

The majority of the content you could likely glean yourself from Moodle’s various online communities, help docs and demo courses, but if for instance you have an administration that remains skeptical about the widespread nature of Moodle adoption, maybe this might help convince them.

It seems to be the nature of manuals, especially manuals about open source software, that they contain information that is freely available on the web. For a Moodle novice, this might be a nice compendium of useful information all in one place, but for veteran Moodlers this will probably just gather dust on their bookshelf.

The greater value is having a book to toss in the direction of administration when decisions about LCMSes are being made. Short of having a shrink-wrapped product, nothing adds legitimacy to a software package quite like having its own book, especially an O’Reilly publication. I’ll probably end up getting a paper copy of the book just for the purpose of lending it out to skeptics.