Why Blog?

I'm preparing for a ten minute presentation on using blogs for resource sharing for our faculty and just came across this quotation from
an article about history blogs. Tim Burke (of Cliopatria) answers why he blogs:

"# Because I want to introduce some unexpected influences and ideas into my intellectual and academic work. I want to unsettle the overly domesticated, often hermetic thinking that comes with academic specialization. I want to introduce a 'mutational vector' into my scholarly and intellectual work.

# Because I want a place to publish small writings, odd writings, leftover writings, lazy speculations, half-formed hypotheses. I want a place to publish all the things that I think have some value but not enough to constitute legitimate scholarship. I want a chance to branch into new areas of specialization at a reduced level of intensity and seriousness.

# Because I want to find out how much of my scholarly work is usefully translatable into a wider public conversation. A lot of my writings on Iraq, for example, are really a public working-out of more scholarly writing I'm doing in my current monograph, a translation of my academic engagement with the historiography of imperialism.

# Because I want to model for myself and others how we should all behave within an idealized democratic public sphere. I want to figure out how to behave responsibly but also generatively, how to rise to the better angels of my communicative nature.

# Because I'm a compulsive loudmouth."

RSS Feeds in Bb

I knew this was possible already. In fact, I have a local install of Feed2JS on a test server and have used it for a blogging class. But here's a fairly good set of instructions for embedding an RSS feed into a Blackboard site from American University:

Inserting RSS in Bb: "Using RSS feeds, incorporate up-to-date news and information in your Blackboard course!"

A nice find in these instructions is FeedBurner which does the same thing as Feed2JS.

Is this something we could/should encourage our faculty to do with their Blackboard sites?

Keep on Trucking...

From the "If a browser is released and no one downloads it, does it exist?" Department, Netscape 8.0 is available for your (windows only) enjoyment.

E-Portfolios

On one of the Blackboard User's lists that I subscribe to, there's been some discussion of e-Portfolios. Here's what two schools said about what they are using:

University of Denver: DU Portfolio Community

"The University of Denver uses a portfolio system we developed in-house. It is a comprehensive system which offers personal, community, and course portfolios, and also supports and facilitates academic program assessment based on student work. The portfolio may be licensed, at no charge, to other educational institutions. Visit the link below to check it out: https://portfolio.du.edu/"

Baldwin-Wallace College:

"We're using Learning Objects Inc Back Pack for eportfolio. It meets our
needs in a decentralized eport environment.

http://www.learningobjects.com/products/campus-pack.html"

LAMS: Learning Activity Management System

Another Open Source Course Management System (i.e. Blackboard alternative). I saw a reference to this on CET's Blog:

LAMS: Learning Activity Management System

"LAMS is a revolutionary new tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities.

It provides teachers with a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. These activities can include a range of individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities based on both content and collaboration.

Whether you are a long time user of current e-learning tools, or new to the area, LAMS will release you from administration and propel you and your students to a new level of interaction and satisfaction that has the potential to dramatically increase student learning."

Fedora User's Conference

Sue Cornacchia and I are currently attending the Fedora User's Conference to investigate the potential of this software for Digital Asset Management at Wheaton College. As I suspected it might, Elated shows quite a bit of promise as a good basic way to start experimenting with Fedora. Developed by Eric Jansson and a team of programmers at the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) last summer, Elated is meant to be an easy-to-use front-end to a Fedora digital repository, geared toward small liberal arts schools. Currently most interfaces to Fedora are usually only achievable by large universities with the budget and human resources to develop their own.

Personal information management, to do lists, organizer: Backpack

TJ just brought this site to my attention. It's basically a spot you can quickly and easily drop documents, photos, notes to yourself, to do lists, and so on. It has free accounts, but doesn't allow for file storage unless you pay.

Personal information management, to do lists, organizer: Backpack: "Backpack is so flexible and easy, you'll use it to...

Plan a personal/business trip Keep track of what your competitors are doing Plan a home improvement project Collaborate on a new business idea Keep track of houses you're considering buying Gather information for a research project Keep a list of gift ideas for friends and family Brainstorm product/company names Build a list of recommended restaurants, and plenty more..."

TJ thought (and I agree with him) that someday this might be a good solution for mobile students and faculty. If this company ever licensed their software, it might be a good simple way for folks at Wheaton to store, retrieve, and share their personal files. Something to keep an eye on...

Firefox: Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000

If you scroll down on this page you can see the count of downloads in real time. Go Firefox go....

Firefox: Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000:

"They said browsers were dead. They said open source would never penetrate the mainstream. But you've never cared much for rules, have you? And now we're blazing a trail to 50 million downloads worldwide. As we turn open source into a household word and reassert the supremacy of simplicity, we are making waves—and starting fires."

Dekita.org

Dekita.org: "Dekita.org highlights the Web-publishing work of EFL (English as a Foreign Language)/ESL (English as a Second Language) students, showcases the classroom Web-publishing projects in EFL /ESL and introduces links relevant to personal Web-publishing in language learning contexts. Dekita.org also serves as a means for learners, educators, and other interested people to locate student Web-publications and participate in the conversation."

Teenage "Blogging"

Will at Weblogg-ed just wrote about this MSNBC (Newsweek?) article on teenage blogging and online habits.

I think the tone of the article is a bit reactionary -- playing to a knee-jerk fear of any online interaction by teens and pre-teens. Only at the end of the article does someone finally say something postive: "(Students) are learning some basic programming skills. It's teaching them to be Internet savvy, how to make things, how to be creative."

However, the article is helpful to my thinking about our students' potential use of blogs (or even something more traditional -- like discussion boards in Blackboard) in our courses. This shows me that many students come to class already used to behaving in a certain way in online environments. If we ask them to use a similar tool for academic work, we need to keep these habits in mind and we should probably encourage faculty to set clear guidelines and expectations about appropriate behavior in an online academic environment.