I don’t
know if I’ve just entered the blogging community at the right time or what, but
I sure am seeing lots of convergence between my ideas and what I’m reading
right now. Tom Hoffman is talking about a
school-wide blogging system – and that’s what I am looking for. Unfortunately, he says such a system really
isn’t in place – and might not be for quite some time.
That’s a
real bummer, because I was hoping to find just such a system when I began this
little odyssey of mine. What I’ve found is slightly different.
The tools
are out there – those for creating easy, ad-free blogs, that is – as are free
content enhancement tools (sites like Furl
for storing and showing reading, Flickr for photos), but
I don’t know if there are tools that exist that are a total package – instead
of the piecemeal system that one could create if one wants to (and I do, which
is why I am here).
I don’t want
blogging to become an exercise in technology training. That’s why I was excited when I realized that
I didn’t need any HTML background to get a blog up and running. I don’t have any experience coding, and I
don’t have the time to learn right now – my job is to teach language arts, not
computers. Even though my students need those skills, my primary interest is in helping students work with information. But if my students have to
take a large percentage of their blogging time to find ways to shoehorn these
various content management tools together, is that useful or will that be a
hurdle? Or a roadblock? (The optimist in me screams "Opportunity!" but he’s being beaten down today by reminders of past classroom failure.)
I think
about students that don’t have computers at home, and don’t have hours upon
hours of time to devote to learning how they work. They need to be blogging, not setting up a blog (two very different
skills, I realize, thanks to Will’s gentle reminder).
Thought Convergence?
4 thoughts on “Thought Convergence?”
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Bud,
I enjoyed reading your post. I agree that it would be great if we could bring Flickr, Furl, and blogs together into one slick software package. I am concerned also because of filters in schools. I’ve found that some resources are blocked by filters now and more might be blocked in future.
jim
I agree completely, Bud, and it isn’t a very big reach to do it with existing free software applications. Last year I rigged up a demo Plone site that integrated Bloglines like newsreading and Furl-esque bookmarking. The key to this stuff is starting with a full content management system and working down, rather than starting with blogging software and piling stuff on top of it. The demo isn’t on the web right now for complicated reasons involving the district IT department. Anyhow, I put that aside now that I’m being paid to work on SchoolTool. In the fall SchoolTool will be ready for people to start building these kind of tools (although we don’t have funding now for specifically blog/social software type stuff). It’ll be a uniquely good platform for this work, since it will essentially be a student information system built into a sophisticated platform for content management systems.
I think part of the problem is that we’re greedy. We want it all. A free site from blogger is fantastic until you see someone else who has a blogroll. A blogroll is great until you see dynamic content that inserts the latest post from each blog in as well. A couple photos are fine until you see Flickr in action. And so on and so forth. There are a bunch of Open Source tools that handle most tasks that teachers need. However, like I said, we’re greedy! We want more, and we want it to be easier. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but the reality is that at some point you have to decide what’s good enough to accomplish your primary goals. I think tools like Moodle and Drupal are definitely ample for now. It would be nice if flickr support were easy for a non-techie, but not everyone NEEDS to have the photos right there on the page. A link to a flickr account is good enough. Some of the greatest blogs I read are simply that, blogs 🙂 No blogrolls, no flickr badges, just content!