Hey, good on Matt for taking the plunge, leaving CNET and going at WordPress (in all it’s varieties) full time!

As he says: “If there is ever going to be a time in my life to take big risks and reach for the brass ring, now is it.” Good call.

Wonderful stuff, after literally months of headbanging about how to get ‘latest updated’ into edublogger I thought I’d take a stroll through the list of WPMU hosts at How do you MU? and see if anyone else had it working.

Which led me to Beblogger.com (supported by Michele at BeFree – information technology consultant) who just said, ‘no worries, here you go’.

How ’bout that!

So, you can now check out latest updated blogs (and a new colour scheme… again) at edublogs.org and simply grab the code to do it yourself from here.

Well, it seems to be the week for this kind of stuff, step forward Adrian Miles with a fascinating post on self assessment and reflective practice. What, in particular, caught my eye are his plans for blog assessment:

“For the future what I will do is invite the students to write, for themselves (individually) a set of assessment criteria for their own blogs, basically what they think they would need to do in their blogs for their blogs to be an appropriate (and define appropriate) contribution to their learning. They can then assess their blogs against these criteria. This lets the students develop analytical skills, as well as beginning to learn how to benchmark, evaluate and also determine – in advance – what or why they should be doing something.”

There’s plenty more there though on how self-assessment has and has not worked this year. Critical reading for anyone involved in this kind of thing.

Today = Go Melbourne EduBloggers Day!

Well, have whacked up the first draft of an edublogs.org redesign and figured that now is as good a time as any to ask what people make of it and also of where it might go in the future.

At the moment I’m *fairly* comfortable with where it’s at technically – a few bugs (which should be easily sorted) aside and so feel kinda happy to leave the explanations for it’s ‘not entirely 100%’ state in the FAQ and we’ve also had some pretty rocky times with users getting deleted and stuff which I was able to sort out pretty simply so I feel like I can deal with most things there (with the invaluable help of the WPMU forums!)

So, where to from here… well, I figured that comes into three particular areas: purpose, functionality and sustainability.

In terms of purpose it’s pretty simple really. I want edublogs.org to provide free, high quality blogs for educational professionals. Why? Well, I reckon that having a blog is a valuable asset for people in a whole host of different ways (personal presence, conversation, empowerment etc. etc. etc.), that there’s value in having a blog as part of a broader professional community (as opposed to say, blogger, typepad or wordpress.com) and that it’s a pretty darn useful experience for me :oD

Technically, while I’m pretty happy with the WordPress tool as it stands, there’s a lot that could be improved upon in terms of making the most of being part of a big community of educators. I’ve set up a (Drupal Based) ‘community’ area for bugs, issues and getting to know each other but it doesn’t really feel like this sis ‘the solution’. I’m endlessly hoping for the wpmu functions to get fixed so I can put up a list of ‘latest updated’ blogs and / or an automated aggregator of everything in edublogs.org. If I had a bit more time I’d probably start playing with the ideas of tag clouds (cos they’re pretty) and I’d really like to figure out a way in which different groups of edublogs edubloggers can ‘self-organise’ – and, if they’d want to! In short, if I could get some of these community tools going, would it make a difference, or are people more interested in their own blog which they email to their friends / colleagues and add to their email sig.

Interesting stuff, would love to know what other people think!

Finally, there’s the question of sustainability. Currently in it’s 2 and a half months old and there are over 1,500 edubloggers. That’s up from 846 at the end of the first month so while there’s obviously a bit of a slowdown – it’s obviously not that much of one. Needless to say bandwidth issues are starting to appear and I’m estimating about 10 Gigs will last us until the end of this month – probably 8 will just do it – up from 2.84 Gigs for the first month. The introduction of image management has also put a strain on the MB storage area too… darn improvements ;)

I’m not even going to consider the possible impact of this getting a mention in any of the major educational press publications so without that if we keep on going as we are now we could possibly be looking at about 9,000 blogs by the end of 12 months, but more worryingly, something like (dodgy maths ahoy) 50 – 100 Gig bandwidth a month. Which all seems to be fine from a server perspective – there doesn’t seem to have been any slowdown with the increasing number of blogs – but could be a bit of a problem for me on the old bank balance front.

This is where I need a bit of help as my options currently look like this:

-Introduce advertising (yuk! don’t want to! would probably only make a pittance anyway!)
-Introduce fees (also don’t want to, for one I want it to be free and also it’d be too technically difficult ;)
-Hand out the begging bowl (tried this, lots of donate things around, 80 days later total number of donations = 1 (thanks Doug!!!))

So where to and what to do?

Well, I guess there’s always the possibility of inserting stuff into the actual backend of the blogs, so that your readers don’t see it but you do in the header of the back of your blog – I’d thought about this before in terms of communicating important edublogs stuff – works better than the dashboard. But what to put there and how would it recoup costs.

I could also spend some time peddling this to educational, non-profit organisations as something they could host in exchange for ‘edublogs.org – brought to you by xxxxxx’ on the front page but I don’t really fancy my chances there.

There are also the ‘add ins’ such as being able to add your own themes or access extra functionality – but am not sure how much this is feasible to a simpleton like me.

Or I could just look at this like one big happy experiment that’s worth bankrolling myself, just for the heck of it!

Who knows? Any ideas?

This post by CJ, Lemmings and similar phenomena, is another in the vein of Aaron’s excellent violence posting:

“With Secondary schooling we have a system which, in my view, is increasingly difficult to justify. It is a form of what might be called organised child abuse which repeats itself over and over again, year in, year out. The only beneficiaries of this system are a handful of private schools in each capital city. That is not to say the huge efforts and energy goes into trying to do school differently. There is an amazing array of things that teachers do to try and escape the nonsense of a sytem that was designed to send a small elite onto university in the 50’s and 60’s. But any or all of these, and particularly if they appear to be working well for students are dubbed fringe or satellite to the main game, the high status subjects of years 11 and 12.

It is important to recognise that what began as a system to select an elite has been turned into a mass system of ranking and rating that serves no purpose other than to determine access to a small number of high demand courses in a couple of universities in each State. One might say that this is a very expensive selection machine and it is. The human cost, of telling around two thirds of each cohort passing through school that they are dumb, deficient or in some way not up to scratch is an appalling outcome. While the system does not physically kill these students it stamps them as failures of one kind or other and then expects them to get on with their lives as if this trauma is akin to falling down and grazing one’s knee.” [CJ’s ‘ Lemmings and similar phenomena’]

I hardly need to mention that it’s WELL worth reading the rest.

On a personal note, funnily enough I spent a fair bit of time back home talking to some of my schoolfriends and family about the school we went to – and I can tell you it wasn’t a good review. A good grammar school stamping down can last a long time.

Here’s a thought, I wonder how many trademarks and associated stuff WebCT had taken out on ‘Vista’ (given WebCT Vista) and I wonder how much that might have (if at all) impacted on the all new & far more important MS Vista OS coming round the corner, and what with MS being a big investor in Blackboard and all…. nawwwwwwwwwww… geddagrip James.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good wiki as much as the next fella, but can we please get over sentiments like these:

“A wiki is a group blog that can be edited by its readers… Wikis are more like conversations”

I’d love to be at the wikisym, I get entirely what Socialtext and ProjectForum are doing and, well, there’s some great stuff going down, but please, please, please can people stop talking about conversations and wikis. Ward knows. I think we should catch on too!

And in that vein, ahem, might I propose that if you’re going to ASCILITE 2005 you consider my workshop: High Fidelity Collaboration – WhyWikisWork & WhyWikisWorkNot :o)

One of the less advantageous by-products of a trip back to the UK is that it tends to find me smoking again, and not in a ‘cor look at him go’ sense but more in the traditional, smelly and slightly dysfunctional one. However, one of the by-products of this is that I spend much more time outside, seem to have far better conversations, chill out a fair bit, indulge my rebellious side and actually get round to reading papers that usually get stacked up waiting for that ‘spare moment’ which (a.) never really arrives and (b.) if it does tends to do so for about 2 minutes before my terrible attention span has me checking the RSS feeds again or fiddling with any one of the million things the web allows me to distract myself with.

So, you can put it down to the cigs that I just had the opportunity to plough through another excellent Ulises Mejias draft, Social agency and the intersection of communities and networks. And to be honest, if it works for you I’d recommend grabbing a pack and giving yourself 20 minutes too!

It’s an excellent development on his other articles, re-approaching nearness and movable distance (if you haven’t read these, grab a coffee and have another ;) and explores the muddled reality of networks and communities as compared to the absolutist perceptions of them and their relation to the ‘real’ world as Borgmann and Dreyfus would have it.

“Online experiences are indeed no substitute for the ‘real’ thing: allowing computer code to assume a large degree of social agency does sever ontological ties to the offline world. But code can also assume social agency that affords ontological nearness in different (and potentially enhancing) ways. Clearly, as numerous seemingly contradictory studies demonstrate, virtuality can be a site for both alienation and engagement, anomie and identity formation, commodification and commitment. The social agency of code can augment the social agency of humans in powerful new ways, and the challenge is to design systems which integrate the two in ways that encompass online and offline spheres of action.”

(ideant)

He goes on to look at the differences, overlaps and fractalisation between networks and communities, different types of involvement, participants and action that can occur in these contexts and the relationship between the on and offline… but my favourite bit (and I know this is a spoiler) is at the end when it is put quite simply that:

“There is no such thing as a virtual community. All communities are Real.”

and that:

“When communities and networks begin to intersect online and offline, and when this is accompanied by an education that emphasizes our responsibilities in the world and the possible ways to fulfil those obligations, we see that anomie decreases and relevancy increases, and with it the potential for a better world. “

Which helps me realise – disheartened as it’s easy to get sitting on your own in a sparse open plan office spending the vast majority of your time staring at a screen – that there is actually a purpose behind all of this, there is a real and commendable point.

Quite fun to see Nielsen getting into weblog usability… should really just go check our the problogger but still pretty interesting… how do you measure up?

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

1. No Author Biographies

2. No Author Photo

3. Nondescript Posting Titles

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go

5. Classic Hits are Buried

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

8. Mixing Topics

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

Was it the specials that sang ‘how do you do it, how do you do it to me?’ – More and larger image