Every now and then we get a support request for a ‘CommentPress Plugin’ and we kindly remind them that it’s not a plugin, but a theme, and that it’s already available on edublogs (and all the student sites).

As Alan comments, it’s a ‘slick, elegant, and powerful way to put papers online’ – however, it’s also only available to educators and students who can set up their own WP installs…. unless they come to edublogs where you can get it for absolutely free, without any advertising whatsoever and with plenty of complementary plugins and spam stopping measures built in.

I was actually pretty shocked at the lack of w00t value deploying this initially got… maybe it was just a communication thing… either way it rocks and you can try it out for yourselves at you know where.

Just not late Friday night US time today as we’ll be splitting databases :)

Fray, the pioneering storytelling site, is back and back with aplomb is a rather beautiful web / quarterly hybrid.

This edition is called Busted and is, as ever, beautifully illustrated.

You can subscribe to the print version for as little as $15 a year.

Me, I’m getting the T-Shirt… literally :)

Great example of where web / paper subscription hybrids can go and I reckon they’ll clean up.

Well, that was significantly more work than in 2004!!!

Voting is now on for the 2007 edublog awards.

You can check out the full list of brilliant nominees here.

Heh, quite right:

On the face of it, this seems to prove that half-cocked punditry trumps personal storytelling and helpful essays, at least where traffic magnetism is concerned.

Now, what was I saying about the web being no different to anything else, really ;)

On the day that *hopefully* we unsubscribe from the suckhole who took Australia into this nonsense, why not unsubscribe from the ongoing abuse.

Today I have mostly been editing 80+ WordPress themes to include tags in them.

It’s been a riot ;)

Stephen quotes Michael’s summary of the D2L rubrics, specifically:

“Every competency has at least one learning objective under it. In turn, every learning objective has at least one assessment which is the actual instrument for checking to see if students have met the learning objective.”

And asks:

“But can the objectives of learning be reduced (for that’s what this is, a reductive process) to competences?”

To which I would deign to answer… they certainly can, but they certainly shouldn’t be.

I speak from some experience having worked with and alongside teachers working on what surely must hold the world record for the most competencies ever stuffed into a single course, the otherwise admirable Adult Migrant English Program.

So rammed with point, sub-point, sub-sub-point and paperwork is the program that the (often extremely experienced) teachers would shake their heads, randomly tick a few boxes (isn’t ‘satisfactory’ a great option) and, if at all possible, try to work around the nonsense into something vaguely resembling a decent learning experience.

It’s deadening, but, as and decent educational marketer knows it’s most of the time what the administrators and bureaucrats running education are after

Measurables… mmmm.

Schema… oooooooo.

Methodologies so prescribed as to ensure 100% accountability and control over these pesky, individual, disorganised, independent teachers… ahhhhhhh.

And as the teachers aren’t going to be making decisions about their OLE, CMS, VLE, LMS or WETFYWTCI, it makes perfect sense for D2L to go straight to the top and give them exactly what they want.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have goals, or assessments, or that all curricula should be torn up and burnt in a pile as we dance round it whooping and drinking hard liquor (although that might be one sort of step forward ;) but for heavens sake, let’s not swamp teachers already weighed down by paperwork stuffed with this stuff with technology that is equally anti-learning.

Well, I gotta say that I was pretty pleased with how WordCamp Melbourne 2007 turned out.

Sure, it was a little warm, and not quite dark enough to see the slides well and there were a few flies (strewth mate, we were downunder!) but I reckon that the turnout was just right, the speakers excellent, the roundtables interesting and engaging and the beer cold.

Lots of nice pictures are up on Flickr and hopefully we’ll have some video soon too – which I’ll post up on the main blog.

Thanks to everyone who came… and looking forward to the next one :)

Update: OMG there we go !!! Now… the question is whether I satisfy the notability guidelines… yoikes… apparently that means:

“If you are familiar with the subject matter, please expand or rewrite the article to establish its notability. The best way to address this concern is to reference published, third-party sources about the subject”

So, ahem, feel free to do so ;)

My little sister’s Wikipedia page is filling up nicely, and I have no doubt my even littler sister will get one soon too.

And I get a mention too, ahem, “She has a younger sister, Laura Farmer and an older brother James Farmer.”

But alas… no link is there for her poor brother, no article chronicling his groundbreaking work, no… sob… Wikipedia love.

Who, he cries, who might change that?

(image from Chapter)

;)

Movable Type 4 is out and going for the “social media sites” angle.

Having worked extensively with version 3 at The Age it’s very different to WPMU in a whole heap of ways… and I reckon it’s time for someone with less – ahem – bias than me to do a decent side-by-side (possibly chucking in Drupal and Elgg for god measure?)

Any other software that really ought to feature?