Category: socialware-online

Been thinking hard about blogging for students again.

How am I going to put all this into action?

I think I need to write a paper and presentation, as that is only thing managers and course leaders seem to understand.
What i should do is use main parts of other peoples presentations as the base of mine. I've been looking at the blogtalk 2003 presentations and theres a lot in them i can use to explain the basics and advanced concepts of blogging. Then I can use my personal experience with the last project i ran to put the killer blows in? Hummm maybe i should start writing the paper now rather than talking about it…

the draft outline i've drawn up so far in outline (opml format) and
html for those without a outline viewer

Interesting maybe i should sign up

Its starting, the students are starting to stir…
I noticed a post on our internal newsgroups today, i have omitted some items for speed and convence of this blog

Hello CNDI / CHIRP people,
Just had a fantastic idea which i think might improve
convergence between departments and collaborative working
between students here at college.
Many departments require or reccommend that students keep a
journal or research log of their work… a great idea for
sorting ideas, have been keeping a paper based one for ages.
Howeverf, keeping a notebook of things which intereset you
seems fairly insular, and does not encourage interaction
between students with similar research interests.
Therefore, don't you think it would be cool to set up a
weblog server, upon which students could enter their
research sources and thoughts on relevant subjects onto
their blog, which is fully searchable, and available for
everyone at the college to see?
that way, if someone is
researching the Bauhaus, for instance, they could search the
blogs for it, and share their research sources with other
students. also, for instance, if a Graphics student was
researching the work of Peter Saville, and a Fashion
student was researching his influence on fashion promotion,
the two could get in touch and share information easily.
Do you think this is a good idea? obviously there would be
some issues concerning plaigarism, but none more so than two
students discussing work offline.
Should be technically
feasible too, applications such as Movable Type should make it
fairly simple (which is more than can be said for the video
over IP idea i posted last term)
see ya,
Tim

Great piece which made me think good and hard
Some extracts…
It made me think of weblogs. Initially, weblogs caught on with geeks and kids. These geeks and kids weren't at all interested in ROI, knowledge management, or even in defining what it was they were doing.

Steve Cayzer from HP labs in Bristol, emailed me back with some great links and advice on semantic blogging in the context of education. I've added a lot of them to my feeds.

Oliver Wrede and Kieran Shaw's weblogs are a great start.
Then I found tons of useful links here SeBlogging, been here before for the blogtalk 2003 paper but never had a delve around.
Also found educational bloggers network but it seems very american. Looking for UK or at least european based.

I love this so much, i had to quote it…
Using the Internet as a teaching tool can expand the classroom beyond discussion daily interactions. The purpose of this weblog is to give students in my 4/5 class an opportunity to respond to prompts and their peers' thinking in a new format.

By presenting weblogs to my students, I will enable them to interact in a new way. One students thoughts can be entered into the weblog and saved for another student to respond to at a later date.

In addition to enriching class discussions, this weblog will help students understand the expansiveness of the Internet. Too often, students ask if they can “play” on the computer. My goal is to help them discover the power of computers not as a toy but as a supply of knowledge.

I'm going to write a damm paper one day in August I think… Here are some issues tackled.
RSS: The Next Killer App For Education
Student publishing and privacy
A great collection of blogtalk presentations from this year, I so wish I'd had gone. Maybe next year?

Finally got my feeds working with flock rss reader. So if you now goto my feeds you should beable to see my news feeds I subscribe to.

I've had major problems getting Flock working with Resin and no one really knows why. So I've deployed it seprately using jetty.

Ok I had a try writing my own rss aggregator in xsl and it only works if your inside my network, which is a shame. So I'm now on the look for a java servlet rss aggregator.

Interesting enough the older cousin of blojsom, bloxsom does have this already. Blagg News aggregator for the Bloxsom weblogging system.

Tempting to put a application on the server though… Seems to be quite a few .net ones. I cant believe no one has wrote a server based one for java yet! Specially with things like this done Java Collect

2 hours later after searching, I found it.
Flock is an RSS aggregator written in Java. It is a server-side web application accessible with a browser, similar in spirit to AmphetaDesk
Subscriptions are stored in an OPML file, yeah!

Interesting paper about blogging in education – Thanks Dave.

So yeah its a weird one.
i've been thinking about blojsom and how this affects cubicgarden.com
realisticly i've been thinking this is what cubicgarden was about orginally, but i feel things have progressed on. I want to have solid links I can depend on when quoting things etc. I know you can have Permalink which will basicly do that but the arrangement isnt as I would like it. Maybe its the designer in me screaming for control again?

Anyway what I'm thinking is if I keep my source weblog files as xml then I can always apply a xsl to cetain ones or all of them to fetch out the best content for direct linking and what not. Yeah it seems blojsom does support html and xml because it just outputs the lot to the browser, and of course any tags which dont make sense to the web browser are ignored. So in all my postings I've included a content tag to enclose the lot. It seems about now is when I need my generic xhtml schema more than ever.

I've been thinking of ways to get the students blogging. One of the easy ways is a desktop client. The list is mainly from searching the web for desktop clients. Will reduce the list as I try them out and look at there actual interopability with blojsom and features.

w.bloggar – Looks quite big and very developed. Too many features to mention.
blogBuddy – Seems very under developed but has th ebasic features and nice and small. No xml-rpc but supports the blogger api.
Slug – not good, seems to work for the moveable type only and requires the .net framework. One to forget for sure.
Kung-Log – oh this looks good, first things the developer is looking at the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines draft and his thinking seems to be going in the right direction. Ah but its totally for mac osx only. No good but looks sweet. Maybe one for the mac heads?
EspressoBlog – another osx only app, whats the deal with macs and blogs?
Azure – J2me based, so any mobile phone in the uk should work fine. Supports xml-rpc and moveable type. Looks promising and could be a extra app for those students without expensive phones or pdas which supports instant messager
My simple Google query

Something's buzzing online about weblog APIs. Someone posted a comparison between the Blogger and the MetaWeblog API on his weblog. Then Dave Winer is getting pretty riled up about Google's plans to develop a new version of Blogger API, which should better be based on the MetaWeblog API instead.

Another interesting service in regards to blogging which I came across.
TypePad is an upcoming hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart's popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a turnkey service, suitable for beginners and experts alike. Google's blogger beware…

Chronicle Lite – java based works with any platform which supports java but only plays with the blogger API.

I'm a little lost on how to change things around on blojsom?
I've looked at how to customimse blojsom and it seems quite straight forward using css but to actually move things around seems a little more difficult. You seem to need some odd kind of *.vm file. Now I think I understand as default blojsom uses the Jakarta Velocity engine instead of jsp. And I'm unsure if I should change it to jsp which I know and understand a bit or learn what the weird commands in vm mean?
I remember reading on david czarnecki's weblog that the performance of jsp was poor and there were other issues. I cant remember what the other issues were but I need to know before i make the change.

But that aside, if I did want to change the current blojsom theme. How the hell would I do that? seriously because I cant see any *.vm files which I can change except the ones in the themes directory. And thats a different theme from the current one.
I'm either really stupid and missing something really obvious or need to do lots of research. Looking at the log file might help, when i find the time.

I really need to sort out file syncing when it comes to my weblog now, most people are lucky they have one way of writing into there weblog only. Me, well i have about 5 or so. The ipaq and tabletpc are going to be the most used i feel and I need to sort out a way of centralising my syncing so for example this weblog i'm writing on the ipaq while on the bus will not be over written by old data from the tabletpc