Bud the Teacher

    My Jotspot wiki is too full.  If I don’t do something by next Wednesday, it will be deleted.  Any ideas?  (I know I could probably move it page by page to another free site — but that sure seems time intensive.  I also know that I could pay Jotspot to stay with them — but I can’t really afford yet another hosting fee.  Jotspot has been really good to me — I feed badly about leaving.)
    Is there a way to automatically export one wiki to another?  I’ve got room to host a MediaWiki build or something like that — but I’m not sure how to move the data.
    I’m really open to your ideas.

    John has a  suggestion for those of us frustrated by our districts blocking blogs:

Looks like there are some filters that are putting the blanket over all
things in the edublogs realm. Check for yourself. Does http://www.edublogs.org
work at your place of work? If not, drop a line to your friendly
technology director or school administrator as ask “What’s up?” As a
guy with a bit of experience with these things, a) it usually starts
with the filter vendor pushing an update, not a direct decision by your
local IT gurus, and b) technically, it can easily be resolved. Your
policies and procedures may vary.

Speaking of John, he’s had lots of good suggestions lately since I’ve been reading him.  One from last weekend was:

Here’s a weekend activity. Suggest somebody different. Pull a link from
your aggregator that you think is worthy of a little more attention
from the rest of the edublogosphere. I’m looking for some new faces!

Here’s a recommendation:  Ben is about to be a student teacher here in Colorado.  He’s just begun blogging about his ideas and processes.  While his blog is a new one, he’s had some interesting ideas.  Looking forward to more.

    I bought a new laptop last week, and have been enjoying the extra speed and processing power, not to mention the extra battery life.  (When did laptops become notebooks, anyway?)
    I’ve got an old version of Microsoft Office that I could install on this machine — but I figured the new machine was as good a chance as any to try out Open Office.  I was curious and a bit doubtful about the ability of the software to seamlessly import and export Office file formats.
    It took five minutes to install, and after another five, I think it’s going to be okay.  I had a bit of difficulty with some old PowerPoint files not quite converting — one slide was mis-formatted.  I can live with that.
    I’ll postpone installing the Microsoft stuff for a while.   Anybody running into any trouble with Open Office?

    James Farmer has weighed in on blocking, after his Edublogs service has begun to be blocked from schools.   I echo James’ feelings when he writes:

So howabout it, I want to be part of something that stands against
this ridiculous censorship in schools, that states clearly and
unequivocally that he most important thing is to teach people to swim and that can clearly and unequivocally say to these educational establishments that what they are doing is WRONG and STUPID.

Are you with me?

    Please, stop by his site and let him know what you think.  Will even took a break from his Thanksgiving blog vacation to mention the issue, as well as a couple of important links:

Decisions continue to be taken out of teachers hands. Make sure to read the comments after James’ post. And D’Arcy Norman’s post on the topic. No sense in once again getting into all the reasons why this is just wrongheaded, but it may be time to go on the offensive in more imaginative ways…

Gentlemen, I’m with you.  But I don’t have a clue about how to best proceed.  What might an international effort to stop or change the nature of filtering look like?  How might it be productive and still honor schools’ (perceived or actual) needs to "protect students"?  Is this really censorship, or are we just being persnickety? 
   In one comment to James’ post, Judy Breck shares this gem:

Here in New York City this fall there is a big moot court competition
among 57 public high schools. The student attorneys are arguing about
what schools can/should do about blocking students from the Internet.
The case was created and the competion being judged by Fordham Law
School students. The whole project is of/for/by young people, with many
of the competitors 14-18 years old. You might be interested in looking
at the case materials here:
http://www.jrcnyc.org/mootCourtCase.05/case_documents.html

      Why haven’t I begun my thesis on this issue already?