Another week another educational blogging service ;) Please say hello to eslblogs.org.

Am not sure whether this one is great folly or not but I figured that it just makes too much sense to leave alone! You may or may not know that not only am I a CELTA but that I learnt what little I know of this old teaching trade in the conversational markets of Japan and as an English language teacher in good old Melbourne… and us TEFLers are a bit different you know, so I figured what the heck.

The aim for this site is pretty simple, provide blogs for ESL / EFL students wherever they happen to be. Hopefully down the line I can expand this to other cool tools and get some of the community features up and running which will allow for students to connect and engage with each other. Like edublogs, uniblogs and learnerblogs it’s a permanent fixture now and it’ll be interesting to see how people value a shift in focus.

Oh, and on edublogs news I was *delighted* to read that Chalkface are doing well out of our partnership:

It wasn’t that long ago that we would celebrate in the Chalkface office if a real teacher had been on Yacapaca that day. It felt hugely validating that someone had wanted to use our little system to run some tests with a class of perhaps 30 students.

Recently it’s been a bit busier. A good weekday would see teacher numbers climbing towards 50 – that’s 1500 students or so – or even peaking a little higher than that. I started to hope we would see the 100 milestone soon.

And today, something shifted. Perhaps because of last night’s email, perhaps because of the edubloggers who are starting to join us, we were up above 50 by lunchtime. Sometime around 3pm we hit the magic 100.

And kept going.

At the time of writing (11.30 at night) we’re up to 183. I’m just bowled over. And I’d like to say a huge thankyou to every teacher who has put trust in Yacapaca’s ability to deliver good quality, motivating, formative assessments to your students.

As you may note the ‘Supported By’ element of eslblogs.org is currently empty and I was going to let the site get into swing before officially asking for interest… but if you fancy getting in early please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thanks Robert… I guess it’s Friday – although I’m putting this into winddown.

Four Three Jobs I’ve Had: Counting people getting off buses | Throwing furniture off the top of buildings | A voice-over artiste (!)

Four Three Movies I could watch over and over: Absolutely none of them…

Four Three TV Shows I Love to Watch: ‘Love’… none of theme either.

Four Three Places I’ve Been on Vacation: Chydolk, Apollo Bay, France ;)

Four Three Favourite Dishes: Lots of beef, lots of veggies, lots of wine

Four Three Websites I Visit Daily: Bloglines, Google, The Guardian Unlimited

Bloggers I am Tagging: Anyone with an edublogs.org blog :)

• Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace
  Well worth a more considered read… one to add to the pile on this I think.

I’m heading over to the rather delightful Melbourne University tomorrow to run a seminar loosely linked up to mine & ABB’s 2005 ASCILITE paper and presentation.

You can catch a full outline of the seminar here and if I have a little more time I’ll screencast the slides too.

I like Melbourne Uni, lots of beautiful buildings, great location, tons of nice people… one day perhaps… better make a good impression tomorrow ;)

Yay! Greg Ritter is back, although it will be interesting to see how he adopts to the corporate straight… um, environment he’s blogging in.

In case you didn’t know Greg was an absolute must read a few years back and it’s great to have him back! It’s also great to see BB with a blog… finally ;)

Thanks to Scott for the link, now that wasn’t knee-jerk-esque was it? Was this?

So, some interesting news that may send a few ripples through the old edublogosphere is that Curverider (the excellently named commercial arm of Elgg) have ‘got into bed with’ Aperto Elearning Solutions founded by Sasan Salari (one founder of WebCT).

My initial thoughts on this thing go back to June last year when I got wind of the ‘powerlinks’ approach WebCT were taking to allow for open source extensions which I wasn’t too happy about :) Even suggesting that this was how it was all going to go wrong. However I did chill out a bit down the track (as has been known to happen ;) and as it happens found myself suggesting that Elgg would be a good ‘integration’ partner – amazing what you remember when you look in the archives.

-it was also the same WebCT person, Sasan, who commented on the original post specifically stating that “We are not integrating open source applications into WebCT”, which is also mildly amusing, but enough of that-

Anyway, my final thoughts there were that:

I, however, don’t believe that education should be so much for sale (that there should be so much money able to be made out of it) or that it is in education’s interest to have such dominating market leaders. Also, I am absolutely committed to the vision of online education becoming a sustainable and multi-faceted environment, as affordable and accessible so that any teacher can use it and as varied and subvertable as any classroom or progressive curriculum.

And to me the appropriation of the tools that will help us achieve this by the WebCTs of this world through stuff like the ‘WebCT Wiki Integration Toolkit 0.1? is bad news. It’s the same approach that gets people to shop at K-Mart for everything even though they can get a much greater range, quality and price just down the road… and they are not doing it out of a philanthropic to help us teach and learn online better. They’re doing it to lock in the $s.

Which I stand by, but, knowing how much value and vivre an Elgg environment could bring to one of those lifeless WebCT courses find myself quibbling a bit. This isn’t helped either by the tremendous amount of respect that I have for Dave and Ben and how I think that Elgg integration into existing systems could be the tipping point for them in terms of feedback, design and use.., something which has ‘good’ stamped all over it.

What I find myself saying more and more nowadays in my professional role is that yes WebCT / BB are necessary as ‘backbones’ but as learning environments we need to be using and developing far more effective tools and experiences. And for that line of thinking, this is an absolute boon. However, I feel like to a degree that’s shrugging off the responsibility to the administrative side of things (“As long as they leave the learning alone I don’t care”) which isn’t a very holistic approach for anyone to take.

From talking to Dave though I guess what I’d really like to see is a set of genuine workable open standards which can be implemented across the OS development sphere and which allow for user dbase (and more through customisation) integration. I wanna be able to plug in Elgg, WPMU (it’ll be interesting when Aperto try *that* integration!), Mediawiki etc. into an administration system that doesn’t set back my organisation 6 or 7 figures a year … or at the very least I want to be able to choose another system for this rather than finding all my OS applications propriatised by a behemoth Blackboard. Yeh the merger might have been approved (they obviously couldn’t give a rats about the Aus market!) but I think that it’s a big company that is probably as keen as anything to do an IE on the educational world… what it’d be really nice to see would be Aperto building integration with Sakai, Moodle, Desire2Learn etc. etc. etc.

But that ‘aint gonna happen though cos it’s $s we’re talking about, isn’t it. Sigh.

Still, congratulations to Dave and Ben and I hope this supports and encourages them and helps Elgg take the next step up to becoming a major player in educational technology… it well deserves it.

I’m delighted to announce that the next generation of edublogs.org, supported by The Chalkface Project, is officially launched today!

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 :)

Heh, via Alex, this beats 10 new web2.0 aps handsdown :)

• Feed Digest : Mix, convert, and syndicate RSS and Atom feeds
  Feed2JS anyone :)
• WordPress Help – Podz @ Tamba2
  ooooh, nice!
• Powazek: Just a Thought: Infinite Gates
  "So now, my fellow bloggers, I beseech you: Ignore the numbers. Ignore the lists. Blog what you love and the rest will follow. Everything else is just noise."

We’re moving servers as we speak to a brand spanking new one… just for incsub :)

(that’s incsub in teh everything I do sense rather than just the url… it didn’t get that bad ;)

This is going to give us far better performance and vastly improved performance. In short it’s gonna rock. However… there might be a moment or two when your incsub site or edu/uni/learner blog isn’t available or hard to get to… for that please accept our sincerest apologies and we promise that it’ll be up, running and better than ever very very soon.

If you do have problems please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me as I’ll be able to use your issues to test whether it’s all been done OK.