Jonesieblog

David has been busy!

He has just announced two new tools that are going to make a big difference to the blogging community in East Lothian: a Grazr feed reader of all exc-el blogs and a widget that lists the latest posts from all exc-el blogs.  These two tools open up exc-el in a dramatic way.  Before them, it was not possible for a casual browser to see a list of all the exc-el blogs, nor to get a handle on what the current activity was.  Congratulations to David, and to Ewan who has, I think, been working with him on this stuff.

Stumble it!

In this instalment of “Blogging for Beginners” I’d like to answer a few questions, and explain the simple things you can do to make it easier for potential readers to find your posts. Subscribers (people who have put the RSS feed from your blog into something like Bloglines) won’t need these, but how is anyone going to become a subscriber unless they read one of your posts?

Write something worth reading!

I don’t claim to have any clear idea of what constitutes a good post, but there’s clearly no point drawing huge crowds to your blog if they find mince when the get there! ProBlogger (a blog that covers every aspect of blogging in much more detail than I have in this series) has a category full of great advice on writing worthwhile content.

Liz asked me how long a blog post should be. ProBlogger has an answer of sorts here.

Actually, ProBlogger has the answer to just about everything! You should definitely stick it in your RSS reader because it’s full of useful advice.

Tag your posts.

Now that you’ve got something worth reading in your blog, you want people to be able to find it. Help them by adding tags (or categories) to you posts. All blogging software allows you to put posts into multiple categories, and many also allow you to add Technorati tags. These categories and tags make it much easier for readers to find relevant material.

Track conversations with CoComment.

As I said in the last post, commenting on other people’s blogs is what keeps the blogosphere going. It becomes very time consuming to keep track of all these conversations once you’ve written comments on more than a handful of blogs. This is where CoComment comes to the rescue. Once you’ve registered (free again!) and installed the Firefox add-on the comments you make are automatically tracked. You can subscribe to a feed of all comments made subsequent to yours. Very cool! I gather it even works with other browsers

Stumble it!

Don’s post about a virtual advisory service has set me to pondering how far we have come in the last few years in our use of the Internet to support effective teaching and learning, and the extent to which central educational bodies can support further development.

We have reached critical mass for the live web to become an integral part of education. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been encouraging maths teachers to blog and to set up class blogs, and discovered that I’m pushing at an open door. Craig, Tim, Mags, Jenny, and Paul have all made a start already. I know that we still have a majority of staff for whom the whole thing is a bit of a mystery, but more and more teachers are realising that blogging is a simple, easy thing to do with classes that enriches the learning and teaching experience. My guess is that within a year or two class blogging will have become a routine activity – just another part of good practice that most people do. In the words of Darren Kuropatwa:

All my classes are hybrid classes. They have both a face-to-face component and an online component. Each class is supported by a blog.

In this context, it’s important that LTS’s actions nurture and support the growing blogosphere that already exists in scottish education. I think East Lothian’s work on Exc-el points the way. The key feature of East Lothian’s approach has been the freedom that bloggers have been given. Want a blog? – go ahead and set one up for yourself, no questions asked. No heavy corporate disclaimers and acceptable use policies to sign. No paperwork to fill in. No formal support mechanisms even! Just go for it! We trust you.

This has been a brave experiment, and the results are plain to see – usage of Exc-el is rocketing. It’s being used by everyone from lowly heads of education right up to the students themselves!

So, the future’s looking rosy, right? Well, not necessarily. The nightmare scenario goes something like this: every class in Scotland is given a bland, “Education Scotland” branded blog over which they have no control in terms of look-and-feel. A restrictive, risk averse blogging policy is created that forbids class blogging outwith this environment. A heavy-handed filtering system is implemented to censor access to blogs and who can post comments on them.

We’ve seen exactly this kind of approach taken to Web1.0 in education. Neil points this out in “Computer Say No” and goes on to examine the causes and possible solutions. Unless we actively engage with decision makers in educational IT at an authority level and try to persuade them to be less risk averse, we are bound to see these policies repeated. What is the person who believes Flickr, Blogspot and Youtube should be blocked going to think when they realise that a blog is a place where anyone in the world can write a comment? No chance. Wikis? You must be joking! We are still under the radar now. The struggle to keep the door open to Web2.0 in education has not yet begun.

I’m delighted to read that LTS are aware of the problems highlighted by Neil. All the people I know working at LTS in this field are definitely good-guys, far more forward thinking and knowledgeable than I, so I’m optimistic. My only concern is that the good guys may not be the ones that get to make the decisions.

Stumble it!

My colleague Craig Stebbing has recently seen the light and begun to keep a blog to use with his maths classes: Stebblog. He is using it in a way that I haven’t seen before. Rather than it being a scribe post blog, it is a place where he posts homework assignments. He is encouraging his classes to post questions about the homework as comments. Then either he or other students can reply to the questions.

The pupils seem quite enthusiastic about this, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out. I suspect that in time Craig may decide to run a separate blog in which to reflect upon how things are going.
Meanwhile, I spent some time on Wednesday helping Paul Goodall at PL to set up a class blog for his S5 maths class. I’ll post the URL once he’s got started properly.

Stumble it!

The Scottish edublogosphere (that’s a mouthful!) seems to be growing at an amazing rate.  As a relative latecomer to the party, I was welcomed and encouraged.  I guess that now I am one of around 20-40 blogging education department employees in East Lothian. It’s a cozy little crowd

I wonder how it will feel when we have 200-400 staff blogging?  I’m very excited by the prospect, but am also aware that we will need to think about how we, as a community, manage that expansion if we are going maintain a sense of community. I would like the 401st blogger to have as positive an experience as I have had.
What do you all reckon?

Stumble it!