Well in an official-esque announcement sense I now pronounce learnerblogs.org and uniblogs.org open for business.

Basically these are sites in a similar vein to edublogs.org in that they are seeking to provide free blogs, but this time for K12 school students and university / college students.

learnerblogs.org is basically born of demand. Soooo many teachers wanted to use edublogs.org as a place for their students to set up blogs that it basically seems to be needed and let’s face it, if you’re not tech savvy then Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga etc. don’t really cut the mustard for what you want for your school kids doing blogging. So, my aim for this is to make it work as well as possible -specifically- for school students in educational contexts…. feedback / requests / comments / thoughts very welcome here!

uniblogs.org seems like a natural complement (and also a pretty funky name) and I have to admit that I’m a bit excited by the potential with this one. Things like global categories could do amazing things in terms of getting people blogging about particular disciplines together, and then there’s the social aspect… huge I reckon. So again, a slightly different focus to learnerblogs or edublogs (which both have a kinda ‘independence’ about them) and one that I’m looking forward to toying with.

Now, what I need [read: am begging down on my knees] people to do is to share these with other teachers, university student groups and the ol’ listservs, you know it makes sense ;)

CJ’s posts on the importance of being a pain in the ass… a bit like I’ve been ‘advocating’ at Blogsavvy (and no, that does not make me Lighips ;)

Anyway, you should go and read the whole thing.. here’s a taster:

“Intellectually I am drawn to the loopy, the “enfant terribles” of the academic world. I figure that folk who keep repeating, reinforcing particular epsitemologies, ontologies are, more or less, intellectual sycophants. We enjoy an enormously privileged position in being paid to think and also to contribute to the well-being of the citizens of this country/planet. Being an intellectual “yes person” does not cut it…” [CJ’s]

Had a great chat over lunch today with Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network fame and Mike SeyFang of the excellent Learndog.

Two great ex-MSers with cracking ideas about learning, podcasts, production, where we’re going and a frickin’ HEAP of experience about where we’ve been. Thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the obligatory ‘ah you’re being very [insert dot com bubble company here]’ which is worth a fair bit given that in ’99 I was teaching English in Japan and didn’t even have a net connection!

More to come on this, let it gurgitate first.

Well, you know how sometimes you get into a situation where you’re saying “Yes, there should be an edublogs-esque place for students” and “Yes, there should be a dedicated K12 environment for that too” and “Well, yes, I know how to do that”.

Well, that’d be a fair summary of my experience in edtechtalk at lunchtime today and the net result, while all you lazy dudes have been sleeping, is learnerblogs.org – Free Blogs for Schools.

No special theme yet (although a neat package of 30 themes are there as options) and there are a few ongoing WPMU hiccoughs (like the image thing doesn’t work properly) – but I’ll fix them up next week.

Otherwise, there you go… now learners have a place as well as educators.

(BTW uniblogs.org is also on the way for Uni / college students… watch this space – as opposed to that blank one ;)

This is interesting, Akismet (short for Automattic Kismet – not that that helps ;) is Matt’s latest venture into the comments spam wars.

It’s new in terms of WordPress plugins because it uses the API key that having a wordpress.com blogs gives and, presumably, develops protection intelligently from there.

Oh, btw, I’ve got 1 invite at the moment which I’ll give to the first person to leave a comment on this post asking for it… although apparently using Flock can also get you on (although I wouldn’t know as I’m not ‘admin’ on this machine, even though I can get admin rights, Flock won’t let me install and Lol doesn’t want me screwing with her PC ;)

Anyway, bandwidth problems aren’t showing any sign of calming down with using a robots.txt file so now I have to figure out how to find the ip range and try and block that through .htaccess instead… wish me luck.

So these are the things that have been getting my goat of late.

1. I reckon this has got to be someone pretending to be googlebot for some nasty reason or another… the net result is that I’ve had to use robots.txt to keep googlebot out – which is not something that I want to do but have to do as otherwise it’ll shut the site down.

2. I have to ‘fess up to being, on occasion, a pretty lazy technical blogger… basically I’ve been leaving some themes writeable by the server so that I can edit them through WordPress and not 644-ing them again… so some buggers ‘bot has gone and inserted viruses into the footer of each blog. This hasn’t impacted any edublogs, just individual installations. You’ve been warned though!

A (fair) while back I think I mentioned that I had put together a little project full of interviews with online teaching and learning fellows at my, ahem, place.

Well, that kinda got picked up on (as these things kinda do) and the net result is the niftily titled “Contemporary Online Teaching Cases”.

Basically it’s over 70 (!!!) interviews, flash movies and resources from teachers doing good stuff in online teaching and learning at the Uni… you can look through them by faculty, discipline, graduate attribute, study level, approaches to learning and a fair few more approaches. Each case (for example) has interviews broken down into chunks, transcripts of those interviews, related cases, flash walkthroughs of the environments and sometimes a fair bit more.

Anyway, with the team having pretty much put this together in isolation in the last 6 months or so (I was kinda more of a ‘consultant’… you can tell this by the fact that it’s not a blog ;) I guess what we’re really after is some feedback and perspectives from, hey, you lot!

So whaddya reckon? Could you see yourself pointing anyone to this site? Considering a similar project for your institution? Designing it differently?

Blimey, don’t know if I’m going to make it to the end of this month in terms of bandwidth at incsub.org, Googlebot has absolutely whacked me again with 5.21 Gig of bandwidth used up already!!!

Don’t really get what’s going on, had this problem a month ago too and it went away but no idea why.

It’s not like incsub.org (and subdomains) gets a heck of a lot of google hits either, 3916 as of today for this month… am baffled… s’pose I can’t ask them to hold off, is anyone else having similar issues?

Well… you’ve gotta give these things some thought you know ;)

It’s not going to happen for a while but I have extracted an agreement to make the love of my life the love for my life.

Here’s to you Lol, here’s to our journey!

Well, time and a distinct feeling of wanting to move on has brought an abrupt halt to my overview of different multi user blogging systems with only Drupal, Movable Type, pLog, Manila, WPMU and ELGG covered… but I reckon that’s enough to be getting along with, and if people wanna add more then they can – with their own reviews – in the comments!

You’ll find the final reviews (with stars out of 5 – how cheesy is that!) here. And the overview of the whole process (I’m looking at different multi user blogging platforms, from blogger to wordpress.com to livejournal), here.