Bud the Teacher

    On Monday, I installed Elgg .8 over at OldeSchoolSpace.  It was a bold thing to do, as the code had just been released.  But it worked great.  I was really pleased with the way in which the new version handled files — it’s a better interface and we’re about to start uploading lots of digital stories.  I tested out the file uploads, created some blog posts in our class community, and added some files.  My podcast feeds were working great and all was right with the world.
    Then, this morning, I went to the site to show my cooperating teachers how the file uploads work — and the entire class community was gone. 
    Completely.  Absolutely.  Gone. 
    So were three of the four other communities.  I was floored, and certain that I mis-installed the software.  I’m not so sure that I did.   
    The wonderful tech support folks at BlueHost helped me through pouring through the databases, looking for data.  It wasn’t there — it looked like it was manually deleted. 
    Turns out it was.
    I went through the raw access logs, looking for anything funky.  These lines are some of what I found:

66.249.72.52 - - [24/Apr/2007:20:32:47 -0600] "GET /speech/community/delete HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.72.52 - - [24/Apr/2007:20:34:15 -0600] "GET /leadership/community/delete HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.72.52 - - [24/Apr/2007:21:09:01 -0600] "GET /digistories/community/delete HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

I am only learning to speak the language — but it looks to me like Google found and executed the delete command for these communities.
  Why’d that happen, and how can I keep it from happening again?  My error?  A flaw in the code?  A malicious attack masquerading as a Google bot? 
    I’ve restored the old data and we’ve lost a few days of work — nothing too serious.  We have backups of the student work.  But before I reinstall the .8 code, I’m curious about what happened and would appreciate any response you can send my way.

    Is this patent pledge from Blackboard a victory for open source tools, or merely a ploy to appease the fine folks who are reviewing Blackboard’s patent application? 

    So a student of mine and I are looking at Youth Voices.net, a collaborative project involving lots of students and an Elgg that looks pretty interesting.  (You can read more about it, and get involved if you want to, here.  Or here.)  We’re noticing that there are lots of photos embedded in students’ posts, and we’d like to do the same.

    We need to know the API information for Elgg so that we can use Flickr’s "Blog this Photo" opotion.  I’ve followed these instructions, and they don’t work for us.  Tried them in Writely, too, and got no results.

    What are we doing wrong?  If we can figure out the API, then we can use Writely with Elgg.  And Flickr with Elgg.  And so on and so on.

    You ever make a mistake that gets in the way of the learning that you want to have happening in your classroom?
    Boy, I sure did.  And it’s been bugging me for the last week and a half.  Consider this post a confessional of my error, as well as a bit of free writing about how in the world I’m going to get out of the pedagogical hole that I’ve placed myself in.  (Okay, it’s not a hole, but it’s a danged ol’ pothole, and that’s frustrating enough.)
    See, after my first writing assignment in my 10th grade course, I found myself with several really good pieces of student writing.  Really interesting essays, the kind that demand to be read.
    I had originally planned for my students to publish these to our school Elgg.  But at the last minute, in a moment where I could see that my students, pushed to the edges of their patience by new classroom computers that almost worked perfectly and a Moodle that took them a little while to learn to navigate,  I made a decision that I thought was going to save time and create a neat way for my students to publish from right inside the Moodle.
    Instead of directing students to the Elgg, with an entirely new login and password and profile creation process (hurry up, OpenAcademic gang!), I sent them to the blogging feature of Moodle, hoping they could taste the sweet success of instant publishing.  I covered all the safety basics, making sure identities were appropriately protected, and it was easy to push their writing into a public place.
    Kind of.  See, while anyone can come along and read what my students wrote, and chose to publish, no one can comment on their work, because Moodle blogs don’t allow for that.  I’m sure I could (or someone already has) create a way to do commenting, but I need a simple solution.  Yesterday.  Comments are an essential piece of the feedback and publishing model that I see in my classroom.  I forgot that for about five minutes when I called an audible in the heat of a classroom moment.  Does that ever happen to you?
    The frustrating piece here is that when I created the Elgg, I created a simple solution.
    I just didn’t use the simple solution, because I was afraid that one more setup process would kill the writing community that I’d created.  Turns out the teacher can do a good job of that, too.      Just needed to vent.  I’ve discussed the issue briefly with my students.  They’re a little burned when it comes to publishing online right now, and I don’t blame them.  My bad.  Big bad, too, if I’ve turned them off to one of the best motivators for their future success as thinkers and writers. 
    The question is — what do we do now?  (My hunch is that we move forward anyway, especially when their next assignment comes due at the end of this week, trying to ease hurt feelings as I go.  It’s just so frustrating to slam smack into this wall when I saw it coming and had a plan.)  Any suggestions?

    Here are some quick questions for those of you either building or using Elgg.  I would like to be able to do the following things with an Elgg.  Can you tell me if they’re possible? 

1. Capture an RSS feed for all posts made to the site.  (Ideally, one for public posts and one for logged-in user posts.)
2. Capture separate RSS feeds for different tags on the site.  (This would help me to create a teacher or class specific aggregator.  Publishing a post becomes turning in homework or assignments when the proper tag is added to an entry.  Multiple tags for multiple classes and eyes, when necessary.)
3. See a list of communities somewhere that students can join.  (I understand that this feature might be coming — but I think it’d really help me create useful resources in the Elgg managed by teachers and interested students if I could point them to a page where they could sign up to join different communities.  Yeah, I know.  Elgg is supposed to work differently.  Small steps.)
4. Any chance I can stick a calendar into an Elgg in such a way as to allow everyone on the site to see what’s going on around the physical community?  (I’ve got to ask, right?)

    for all those files to transfer, I thought I’d elaborate on what I’m thinking about in regards to creating a school social network, or at least one that I might use in my classes.  Basically, everything that I think about right now as a teacher passes through the lens of me being a language arts teacher who needs to expose his students to as many authentic reading and writing activities as I possibly can, while struggling to meet the requirements of my state standards, benchmarks, and standardized test questions. 
    They need to read, read, read and write, write, write.  I’ve got to help my students master grammar, vocabulary, and all of the detail parts of writing, too.  But mostly, I’ve got to create literate students out of people who, for one reason or another, have not had success in previous schools.  And I’ve got to do that in nine week chunks with very little continuity from quarter to quarter, as students are constantly coming and going from our program for a multitude of legitimate and, occasionally, quite bogus reasons.
    Can a social network, centered around reading and writing, help me to do that?
    Well, maybe.  What if there was a member of our network (and by "our" here I’m referring to the students currently enrolled in my classes) named "Word of the Day" or "Wordsmith."  (I really wish her name was "NYTimes.com Word of the Day," but she doesn’t have an RSS feed.)    If every student read the posts from "Word of the Day," and wrote their own posts discussing the word or how it’s used or even writing about how it’s not a word they’ll ever need to know, then I’m accomplishing two things:
    1.  My students are being exposed to some new vocabulary. 
    2.  They’re writing about the words, which is one of the best ways that I know of to put a word into your active vocabulary — actually use it.  (Of course, I’m also using technology as a shoehorn to integrate some more traditional vocabulary instruction into my teaching — which might be a good thing, and it might not be.

    Maybe it’s late at night, and maybe I’m reaching here, but I’m just beginning to explore this idea some — I’d sure be eager to hear your responses.  Another thought — isn’t a book club a community of readers who are reading and discussing the same book?  So within our network, our book clubs can co-exist — with their conversations being accessible to the entire class when and if necessary.  And everything comes to me, the teacher, who is often simply a more experienced member of the learning community.  And the software will/can/should reflect that. 
    Am I heading out into LaLaland?  Are you already using a social network to build a community of learners? 
    My wheels are turning.  I hope for good reason.

    One of my dabbles over the summer that I’ve spent mostly offline was to join an Elgg community set up by the folks over at Worldbridges.  (Specifically, I think it was Alex and Arvind’s idea.  Good idea, gentlemen.)  The commmunity, open to all y’all, is a playground for talking about teaching, technology, and modeling how to create a social network of teachers using Elgg, a piece of software that I didn’t really care all that much for. 
    Until now.  I’m beginning to get how useful the tool might can be, particularly in that it’s very dynamic — participants in the community can build spaces and groups, while an administrator, I think, can maintain control when necessary.  It’s kind of like a wiki for community building, where everyone can help out.  I also like the different levels of publication available with the software, as I know that not everything that I ask my students to do should be 100 percent public. 
    I’m still exploring and experimenting, but I’m really beginning to think that a tool like this has lots of potential at my school, specifically since so many of my students use these types of communities to maintain relationships outside of school.  I wonder if I can create a successful social network that centers around education and learning. 
    I’ve seen other people have success doing so, so I’m really starting to think that I might can.  Now that Elgg is beginning to be integrated with Moodle, I really think I’ve got a suite of tools that I can use to do some pretty cool stuff.  Maybe.  Again, I’m still exploring, but I think it’s doable.  I’ve gotten to the point where it’s time to try out a few ideas and see if I can make something that I can use. 
    Tonight, I’m off to find out.  My FTP program is busily sending files onto some repurposed server space, and I’ve purchased a couple of new domain names. 
    Let the experiment begin.