Ewan has been suffering one heck of a Typepad nightmare after accidentally hitting the ‘Delete’ button…

Absolute joke… edublogs.org is a free service which (in the first instance) doesn’t make it easy for people to delete their blogs and in the second instance has full server backups daily and technicians who can get me one of them so that I can reinstall any deleted content should the worse happen.

And they actually charge for this ! Jeez!

Checkout their customer support too (parenthesis by Ewan)… Hope Loic comes through mate!

Hi Ewan,

Unfortunately, deletion cannot be undone. That’s why
there’s a confirmation dialog box that pops up to verify
that it’s what you want to do.
(Yeah, my fault – I know I’m a complete duffus. Thanks for reminding me, Kimmy)

If your weblog is indexed in Google, you might be able to
find some of your pages in the Google cache and copy and
paste your posts from there to restore your weblog.

Or if you had done an export using the Export utility
(there’s an “Import/Export” link on the Manage tab) you can
restore from the export file.
(You know I didn’t do that from my file, you sadistic Typepants!)

You can find more information on Exporting here:
http://support.typepad.com/cgi-bin/typepad.cfg/php/enduser/
std_adp.php?p_faqid=62
(I just love those easy-to-remember URLs for those times of need. Silly me for having heard of that one before)

Additionally, if you had Syndication enabled, your readers
might have some of your posts in their RSS reader, so you
might check with them. You can usually forward items from a
feedreader via email.
(So Typepad sucks, but your readers might have kept some random posts back – they must have known that this was likely to happen one day – James did ;-))

Please let us know if you have any questions.
(Any questions? Any questions? I just LOST MY BLOG. Hours of thoughts, reflections and, above all, conversations, lost into your Typepad black hole. Why, why oh why are you in Customer Service? Are you typing this from a preset on your computer?)

Thanks,
Kymberlie
(Yeah, thanks Kim.)

Peter Ford is not just blogging at the upcoming Naace conference but also providing all attendees with a seriously cool blogging platform (disclaimer – you may note a hint of incsub in this ;) and asking:

To the world in general – What sort of stuff should I be covering in a blogging session with the great and the good of the UK’s educational ICT community as my audience?

And if you happen to be going:

What questions do you have and what do you want to see in a blogging session?

Why don’t you nip over and share your thoughts with the Ford in Torquay?

• Abject Learning: Don't call it a Northern Voice wrap-up. Part one – what worked
  I so want to go to the next Northern Voice… perhaps we could do a ‘Southern one’. No, avoid enormous amount of work… I just wanna go to this one…
• Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?
  Excellent new edublog (but not at edublogs.org.. hmmm… what can be going on there ;), lots of interesting stuff ranging from Jam to "Stop the excuses: Children’s ICT Charter"…

“You’re not from New York city you’re from Rotherham” :)

Lol sent me this video and it’s ace…. watch it!

Possibly one of the best things it’s done is to make me go out looking for a search engine for about the first time in 5 years!!! And guess what I found… snap.com.

The search is probably still not as good but the interface is darn fine!

Any other suggestions?

Wow… wish someone would pay me to do more of this but I just took a little more time than usual to scan through the edublogs.org feed and there have been some absolutely great posts going on in there… here’s just a sample.

Knowledging across life’s curriculum has come up with a couple of absolute corkers, Folksonomies…what the heck and Aesthetic data display from which I take the image on the right.

Cerebral odd jobs is getting sitemeter (and other apps) to work in the edublogs.org environment, something that I definitely want to make easier (especially for tools like Flickr!)

A whole bunch ‘o people are doing some great work on Motivation and some Brophy chap :)

Higher learning is doing some seriously odd things with photoshop.

Independent thinking is following the excellent work of Mike Hetherington in using edublogs.org and learnerblogs.org… these guys are pushing the boundaries in a big way!

Bawers 2006 blogs are worth a visit too.

And I do like this from Lynsey:

Today I realised I’m making little notes and writing little snippets on my list of things to do pad. It’s not that my life is becoming more organised – really, anything but, however little accumulated marginalia is arriving…interestingly, and as an aside, today is the first day where volume has passed 1,000 hits – 1,290 to be obsessive.

And as for phylogenesis amnesia, well, Knowledge across Life’s Curriculum is blowing my mind (heh).

As are all the great resources that Mrs Gadberry is putting together, Caylan Cook’s take on socializing alienated students and lastly, but not leastly, Hullo’s commentary on freedom and the internet (which I don’t agree with but which is put in such a way that I have to reproduce it here):

I wouldn’t even consider letting kids loose on the internet in a K-12 setting. Even with a dozen filters and Net-Nanny-style programs you never know what might slip through. I’ve ended up in very scary places while looking for (what I thought to be, at least) completely benign info. God knows what a 9th grader who was intentionally trying to find something they shouldn’t would be capable of. It’s about the same thing as dropping a bus load of kids off in the red light district in Amsterdam, handing them a wad of cash and saying “have fun, kids!”

And that’s in just the last 24 hours… phew!

• myComments | All your conversations in only one feed!
  Um, just ‘subscribe-to-comments’ plugin would work OK wouldn’t it? I’m much more in favour of blog owners taking responsibility for this.
• Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Advisorship
  From someone who knows… this is a keeper!

Excellent news that a project my dad has been working on has received an extension:

We are now going to put a computer , with connectivity, into the house of all Year 3 children linked to three schools in Aston (210 pupils) and some year 7 (probably 90).

It’s a really interesting concept (for me) of focusing on the home environment (in terms of technological support) rather than the centralised school context. What makes this particularly interesting is that Aston (the area this is happening in) “is one of the poorest areas in the UK (the 16th poorest)” and with some pretty encouraging experiences from the first stage of the project this could have a powerful transformative effect.

“Each computer has about ten users. Each family seems to consist of at least five children, two parents , two grandparents and some nephews and nieces who live either next door or across the road. For whatever reason computers didn’t seem to rate highly in their lives even though they had high aspirations for their children when it comes to education. You also had the problem of home language versus English language. When the kids get home they are faced with their home language for communication and entertainment. We must thank Sky for that….” [read the rest]

Q: “Did vendors and institutions kill the initial promise of e-portfolios by trying to turn the concept into a single tool (product) used to measure student achievement?”

Some answers.

Me – couldn’t agree more – except for one thing… ‘eportfolios’ I don’t like. Perhaps by calling stuff eportfolios (as I have done but I don’t think I would anymore) you’re inviting a reverse Midas?

[such a good term, something that you’d get in WWF I reckon ;)]

Yes, there’s plenty of stuff out there on portfolios that’s directly relevant to this (PLE) area, yes it fits nicely with assessment schedules & criteria and yes it’s a good way to breach the fort, but, perhaps when everything turns to sh*t down the line because people expect nothing more than eportfolios you might need to look at how you got there.

One of the best leads I’ve had for a while was a few weeks ago when I got to have lunch with, among others, the guys from Anecdote. Not only because they’re good bangers & mash company ;) but also because their insights into and discussion of effective research methodologies, communities and qualitative perspectives on experience rocked my little edu-world a bit… “Wow! People know about these things outside of Academia!… Heck, they seem to actually know a whole lot more!!!”

Also they have a great blog, which, even better, is essentially their company website. And over the last few days there’s a host of good stuff going up there which, for me, is refreshing, rejuvenating and highly relevant. For example see Will the community of practice get started? A test and the effect of titles… I can’t think of a more effective, realistic or powerful way to decide whether your CoP has any chance of succeeding.

Narrative narrative narrative narrative narrative. Good stuff.