Firstly, the generous support of Chalkface means that edublogs.org (and associated sites) are now running on their own dedicated server. That means more bandwidth, more storage space, better performance and an all round superior edublogging experience. To celebrate I’ve increased every blogs upload space to 25MB (remember that you can make unlimited posts in addition to that.)

Second, not only are Chalkface supporting us financially but are also partnering with us to provide all edublog.org users with free access to their excellent online assessment tool, Yacapaca. Click on ‘Yacapaca’ in your menu bar to set up a free account and get playing!

And finally to celebrate the occasion I’ve installed a new design (one that shortly will be the subject of a logo / colour scheme competition!), please visit the edublogs.org homepage to check it out and let me know what you think / where it could improve.

So, with all that I’m kinda thinking that we’re pretty much out of beta now… so Monday, Feb 20th 2006 marks the beginning of edublogs 1.0 :)

So why don’t ya go and make a bunch of kiwis very very happy by proposing a paper, poster, praxis or workshop… beautiful Wellington combined with a quick scoot round the island sounds like a good way to spend the middle of March to me!!!

WPMU + edublogs.org = Free education blogs for anyone who darn well wants them.

And that’s about it really.

WPMU at edublogs.org provides anyone who wants it with a free version of the latest (checkout 1.6!) version of WordPress.

First up you’ll get the domain http://yourdomain.edublogs.org

Then you’ll get 10MB (initially) of completely free upload space… plus unlimited MySQL (i.e. posts) space.

And with the new version of WPMU you also get to choose any one of a number of bloody great WordPress Themes (just contact me if you want a particular one pre-installed). In a few weeks you’ll be able to edit them too!

Until the time that some philanthropic educational organisation comes and takes this over (that’s an invitation BTW!) this will be entirely supported by incsub and donations. No ads, no fees, no business model…. ahhh makes me smile :o)

So if you know any teachers, students, researchers, writers or ANYONE interested in education… let them know that they can start their edublog at edublogs.org.

This is gonna be fun!

“Never never approach blogs as discussion boards, listservs or learning management systems: Almost invariably the first thing people do when encountering new technologies is to try and get it to do what the technologies they are used to do and this is no exception when it comes to blogs.

Group blogs are a bad idea and don’t work: Sure there’s a place for collaborative/ group blogs but that place is not in education. Blogs work well for individuals… they are tools of centred communication and pretty far removed from community management systems like Drupal. Just don’t go there!” [Blogsavvy - professional blog consultant]

Anything urgent you can contact James on +61 (0)405 703 923

“Hello James,

It was a long semester. I have really learned alot using TikiWiki, WP Blog, and Moodle. In a year end technology training, I demonstrated Blogs, and Wikis to the teachers. I even taught a 3 hour session on using them in the classroom. The teachers were do excited about it, they asked the technology director if our district could set them up a server to use Moodle. He promised them he would “look into it”. I am not as optimistic about that. I hope I am not using too much server space. I have tried to watch what I upload. My using Moodle has caught on in other areas. The neighboring school system called me after hearing I had Moodle in my classroom and asked if I could show them how to use Moodle. They set up a server and sent me an admin account. http://moodle.columbus.k12.nc.us/moodle . I was also featured in a state wide professional development session and the professor that served as the interviewer for the program went home set up her Moodle site. http://www.bookosphere.org/moodle/

One more spin-off from you letting me use your server to learn about Blogs, Wikis, Moodle. The educational staff at NCNERR http://www.ncnerr.org/ will be meeting this week to discuss adding Moodle to their teacher outreach to help educate teachers and provide distance learning for professional development.

Not bad for a country boy school teacher and a Aussie from down under! What is it…the wings of a butterfly can cause a Hurricane to form on the other side of the Earth.

Thanks for making a difference in the way I teach. Hope to be able to continue using the Moodle. As soon as I get my server running, I will backup what I have and try to move what I have somehow to our school’s server. I have no time line as to when anything will be ready. I will contact you as soon as I hear anything. All that server stuff is out of my hands. All I know is that my students love Moodle.

Thanks,

John”

:O)

The two institutions that I know of (thanks for the comments guys :o) using Blojsom are Zane State (Blogs @ Zane State College) and USC with Blog do CETA (here’s an example).

As my Spanish isn’t so hot and as Zane look like they’re a fair bit down the track it’s probably best to focus on them as they look like they’ve got:

-LDAP integration (First Name / Last Name / Zane State ID > Username / Password e.g. Mary / Contrary / 88361 > mcont361 / 88361)

&

-Some good introductions to editing blog settings, posting, adding attachments, changing themes and using RSS.

I really like this, it’s smooth, straightforward and looks like it’s working well. It would be great to have some sort of portal to other blogs linked in to this, a way of finding similar Zane students (and others in similar disciplines) and collective aggregation built in and so on but for a first functional step this is pretty cool.

Am not so sure how keen I am on Blojsom itself though, here’s why:

-Adding a blog entry is painful… you have to code the entire thing (including breaks!) using some pretty tacky tags and then there’s a range of meta options which have no explanation / links to explanations or options for essentially enabling them

-Some of the navigation is painfully over complex (for example you have to go through a category system to get to posts you might want to edit)

-Despite the very high level of tech proficiency you’d need to be comfortable with this tool there is no simple way to edit the templates. In fact, getting your head around installing templates or plugins is something that does not come easy.

-Maybe I’m spoilt but the lists of plugins & extras for Blojsom looks pretty slim and fairly tricky compared to, say, WordPress.

-I’m pretty sure I installed the ‘multi-user’ blog version and yet there is no clear indication as to how I might bring this into being (without going into the databases & hacking code) and even if I did do that there’s no seeming way to get a ‘Create your own blog’ page (you have to have created them all first yourself for people to login)… and that’s a big downer as the vast majority of users here are not going to be doing LDAP)

So, interesting experiment but no thumbs up from me I’m afraid and Apple users… don’t get too excited about the new built in blogging tool!

Would love to hear what other people think! If you have a minute and would like to see what it’s like from the backend I’m making the account publicly accessible here. Login: default Password: blojsom

Blogsavvy is part a creature of me wanting to write about blogging a lot more, part result of my belief that blogs are here to stay and are capable of making an enormous positive difference in a range of spheres and part me thinking that this might be what I really want to do!

It’s going to be a blog about blogging, about blogging for Education, Business, Communities, a Cause and even for Money.

The business model goes like this… if you’re interested in what I’m writing about and think I know what I’m doing then you can hire me to do blog workshops, assist with developing your blog strategy, come up with and implement blog solutions and even do you some savvy blog design.

incorporated subversion remains by blog, IncSub will remain (and hopefully grow through this) the focus for online education and organisational learning and the free-for-teachers model is never going to end there. But I really really dig blogging, I’ve enjoyed putting Blogtalk Downunder together like you wouldn’t believe and I rather want to do this professionally… perhaps even full time down the road!

And if you could give me a leg up and share a link to the site through your blog, then you’ll be giving me a great start and I’ll love you forever (again :o)

So if you’re interested, here it all is… (bar the questions / discussion / comic mishaps which face these things live :o)