StigmergicWeb

We were never really gone, actually, just all extremely busy. I think the conversation is worth the wait!

EdTech Posse Podcast #13 - Why is this worth doing in schools?

Rick Schwier has claimed that I have converted (or is that corrupted) him into a podcaster. P’shaw - Rick is a natural storyteller and speaker and, therefore, a natural for podcasting. He has started a new podcast

Now you hear me …

He is using the latest version of GarageBand to put together the podcasts and hosting it in a .Mac account, so the podcasts are in m4a format which, I believe requires iTunes to play, and the subscribe button on his page is for iTunes. Is the Apple-centric product the price for the ease of podcast production in GarageBand?

If you aren’t using iTunes, you might want to consider it just to get Rick’s podcast. Each one is short - 1 to 3 minutes - and does a great job of provoking thought and reflection. Its not quite EDCMM 802 (a class Rick teaches at the U of Saskatchewan in the Educational Communication and Technology program), but its good stuff!

That makes 3 of the posse - Rick, Dean and me (albeit irregularly on my own) - who are independently podcasting. I think its time Alec got into the act (but maybe after the dissertation is finished) and we can start our own EdTech Posse Podcast Network!

We’ve all become fairly accustomed to this read-write web thingy where we are all consumers and producers of information. I use the pronoun we assuming that if you are reading this, you are probably also involved in creating some sort of online content (blogging, wiki-ing, podcasting, contributing to discussion groups) or you soon will be. But I’ve noticed lately that another element is being emphasized, that of blending different RSS or Atom feeds together to create a sort of meta-feed. I don’t think that its new because I’m sure that I remember reading Brian and Alan writing about Rip-Mix-Feed, a pithy little meme summarizing how information can be repurposed using some fairly simple small technologies. In a sense, we all do this every day. I talk to students and colleagues, I pick up ideas from them (as they might also do from me), our ideas all get remixed somewhere in the connections my frontal cortex, and I pass the remixed ideas on to others as I speak with them or, most notably, as I write. I have found that blog writing is a medium especially well suited to this forwarding of my mental feeds.

I’ve noticed this sort of RSS-blending technology seems to be catching on lately amongst us edu-geeks. Stephen, of course, has been doing this for a long time with EduRSS, and as usual its just taken a few years for the rest of us to catch up. SuprGlu is a web service that also does this mix blending, with very polished looking results. As cool as SuprGlu is, I was slightly dissatisfied because I wanted to put something like this together on a page on my domain. Shortly thereafter, Stephen released MyGlu, which is a subset of EduRSS that replicates the functionality of SuprGlu, but with all the yummy freshness of open source code included. Additionally:

MyGlu not only aggregates feeds, it also filters them according to your specifications. So, for example, you could aggregate your posts, photos and bookmarks with the term ‘Amsterdam’ in them.

Impressive! Shortly thereafter, D’Arcy began musing:

I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.

His post on EduGlu is worth reading not only for D’Arcy’s musings, but for the brilliant conversation that is evolving in the comments. Its like my bloglines account talking amongst itself!

So where does that lead us? It turns out that the crew on the good ship elgg have built this capability right into elgg, as D’Arcy just blogged (Elgguglu?!? Yikes, I hope that name doesn’t catch on!). Scott Leslie was simultaneously, synchronistically also pondering if elgg is the mythical EduGlu, his post prompted by reading Dave Tosh’s notes on feedbooks and populating an elgg blog with external content. (By the way, if this works, this blog post will show up not only on my personal blog, but also on my elgg blog).

The emerging theme in all of this is that we seem to learn (and in this context I’m not sure if we means edtech geeks or people in general) through the strange combinations and permutations of ideas that we have picked up from others, which we then pass along to the people around us. I think this is what George Siemens means when he describes connectivism:

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

I know that this is how I, as an edtech geek-blogger-podcaster, learn. When I get the chance to watch students engaged in powerful learning, I believe this is how they are learning as well. When I am blogging, I am also hooked into the same process - I read many potent ideas that others are posting on weblogs, I blend the ideas in with some of the secret herbs and spices dwelling in my pre-frontal cortex, and I write down this strange concoction of ideas in public so that you can read this and the whole process reiterates over and over and over …

Now we are pulling together tools to make it easy for us to do the same thing automagically. The thought of that is so profoundly revolutionary, I can’t begin to fathom what this might lead to. Truly, the read-write web is rapidly becoming old-fashioned, and the read-blend-write web is waiting in the wings ready to take its place.

There are many over-whelming ideas left to explore here, but its getting late. If I don’t stop now, I might end up turning this into a Jerry Maguire-esque breakdown/epiphany.

I just saw this via Alan, a site from the University of Wisconson-Madison that talks about designing educational podcasts podcasting @ the university of wisconsin - madison: Five Steps to Designing Podcasts that Teach

Interestingly enough, there is no advocacy of what seems to be marketed as a model for educational podcasting - just turn on the microphone, record your lecture, then try to convince your students that its not just the same old stuff repackaged in a flashy new suit. It seems like it still comes back to some of the tried and true practices of instructional design. The master will be pleased!

I’m being interviewed tomorrow on the Web Talk Show webcast. The topic for the webcast this week is Kids and the Internet, and I’ve been asked to contribute my knowledge for 10 minutes specifically on the topic of the role of the Internet in education. Upon reflection, I realize that my knowledge would only fill up 1 minute of discussion, but only if I talked very slowly. ;^D

So, I’d like your ideas and help. What are the most positive ways that education is changed by the use of the Internet? What are the negatives, and how do we deal with these? This seems like such a huge topic that trying to find some specifics I can draw upon in 10 minutes is boggling my poor brain.

If you are interested in listening, the webcast is Thursday, February 23 from  20:00 to 21:00 UTC. I believe that the show is archived for later listening (but not podcast!?! Hmmmm ….)

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.

Well, not quite yet since there is a PD workshop tomorrow for me, but the presentation/workshop co-presented with Donna entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose is now done. My brain is too tired for a full autopsy right now, but my general impression is positive. Many teachers are ready to start looking at some new (and I think better and easier) online ways of communicating and collaborating with each other and with students. Of course, I had the iRiver on record mode during the presentation and if the audio is reasonable, I’ll have that up as a podcast sometime soon (or maybe I should say sooner or later).

Sometime soon, I need to spend some serious blogging time to write down some stuff about projects I’ve been working on at the school, reactions to other people’s blogs and my almost virtual attendance at the Social Software Salon hosted by Brian, D’Arcy and Alan as a warmup to the Northern Voice conference (and it almost worked except I kept gacking Jason’s computer with my Skype connection - sorry about that, Jason). For now, though, I get to take off the ed-tech guy hat for a while, and spend a bit more time wearing the husband-and-dad hat for a few days of being with the family. It won’t be too much of a rest since the house is in midst of rearrangement in preparation for the newbie we are expecting sometime around the middle of March. Watch this space for details.

Earlier this week I wrote about building a school website one blog at a time, and some thoughts on the merits of not building a monolithic site, but as a series of small inter-related pieces. I’m happy to report that things have already started to move in that direction. You can see the main school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School, and right in the middle of it is a set of links with the title NBCHS Happenings. (See screenshot below) (Dang - the screenshot got automagically reduced when I uploaded it. Someone must know how to get the full size image up there - D’Arcy, any ideas? Yay - D’Arcy knew what to do! See comments for details.)

The NBCHS Happenings links are actually all harvested, using feed2js, from the NBCHS Happenings blog. We had done something like this before using a Blogger powered blog to generate the feed. The improvement in this system is that the entire system resides on our own server. Its also going to be very easy to put new dynamic content via RSS feeds from our blogs on the main web page, or any other page that we’d like. Of course, this doesn’t preclude anyone from choosing to use a different tool - wordpress.com, for example - as long as it generates an RSS feed from its content.

The next step - some really good discussions with the teacher librarian (Hi Donna!) and others to start defining what information belongs on the front page of the website and what information can be enfolded elsewhere in the website. Then we figure out how that information gets entered, sorted and displayed where we want it. But at least we have step one taken care of! Not bad for one week worth of effort, which included other distractions such as teaching! ;^D

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! :^)

I’ve just posted at my work blog about a project to create a new school announcements system that will be powered by WordPress. I wanted to put some notes up here about how it works, and hopefully get some feedback. I also have some ideas about how this could grow - again, feedback would be great. (This does not mean that I’ve recanted my earlier posts/podcasts about how schools could make great use of Drupal - I just like to have lots of tools available.)

Here’s what we do for our announcements now:

• Announcements are given to a secretary who types them up, photocopies them for all staff and a few extra student copies.
• The announcements are read to all classes in period 1 of the school day.
• The word processor file is e-mailed from the secretary to the library technician.
• The library technician copies the announcements and pastes them into a post in Blogger. Other announcements also get posted in the Blogger account.
• The Blogger account publishes the school announcement blog to our own server.
• Using some feed2JS mojo (thanks, Alan), the atom feed from our blogger-powered announcements blog end up on the front page of our school web site

Here’s the great irony in this whole, elaborate fandando - every teacher in every classroom of our school has a computer terminal on his or her desk. It is entirely possible, from a technical standpoint, for each staff member to enter their own events/announcements onto some sort of content management system (including, I will admit, a Blogger powered blog). The teacher librarian at the school has struggled valiantly trying to get teachers to add their own announcements, with only some recent success. It is also possible,right now, for every staff member to go online to read the announcements to their class. Instead, however, we waste vast quantities of paper for ROTA (read-once-throw-away) announcements.

But, the system has failed us this past week. For reasons that I cannot, and do not, care to understand, Blogger can no longer publish the announcements site to our web server. Here’s what I’m using to replace/revamp this system:

• A WordPress powered blog for the announcements and events. The blog will reside entirely on our own server, so outside services failing can’t cripple our site.
• Use feed2js to place the blog content on the school main page.
• Start showing staff and students how to use an aggregator like bloglines to stay in touch with what’s going on at the school!

To do this, I’ve set up a WordPress install with some basic themes and plugins, including:

• K2 theme for wordpress - it just rocks!
• Adhesive plugin - to keep events at the top of the events list so they don’t fall off the main page
• EventsCalendar3 plugin - might be used to create a page of upcoming events for a week/month

If this catches on, and I think it just might, then other staff and students may also want to set up their own blog. Its easy enough to set up a default wordpress install directory with all the desired plugins and themes. The 5 minute install is great, but it would be even nicer to have a script to create a new blog based on a default wordpress directory. I’m not going to explore WPMU - I’ve had problems getting it set up on the school server.

Once we get a bunch of classes and groups with active blogs, we can start to put some of their content on the school front page. This could be done with feed2js, but there are a few plugins (BDP RSS Aggregator and FeedWordPress are two that I’m aware of) that might be able to redirect the RSS content into a single wordpress blog.

Anyone up for some discussion about this?

Further thought: I had a great big well duh! moment last night as I was heading off to bed. I could probably use MyGlu to mix a bunch of feeds together on the front page! Sad to say, though, that my perl hacking skills have atrophied from lack of use, and I’m a little more proficient in PHP. Maybe I’ll try to find a way to integrate MyGlu into a PHP page.

UPDATE - I’ll post some more details later, but I just wanted to let anyone who is interested know that the school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School now has a listing of events and announcements that is put there by Alan’s uber-cool feed2js thingy which processes the RSS feed generated by the school events and announcements blog. Its not much, but its a start and a proof of concept to show others. There are some discussions that need to happen before the front page can be revised, but I think this is a nice model for how to shift the school website, including the way information gets added and updated, at a gradual pace.

I’d also like to thank all the commenters for some terrific suggestions and ideas. These are very much in my mind as I’m planning the next step.