I continue to search for a persuasive way to describe the value of blogging to people who don't blog. Leaning a bit on connectivism theory, I have decided to explicitly identify important information I have picked up from specific blogs. I went through my aggregator to note just one for each author. While some leaped into mind right away, I found that I could not remember an item for others, even though I knew I had picked up invaluable knowledge from them before. I have no good system to track those borrowed concepts that I have either kept for myself or passed on to colleagues. As a result, the following list remains incomplete. However, look at all the good stuff just in this short list. My, how my life would be different without this knowledge.

D'Arcy Norman: 50mm lens for my camera
Chris Sessums: Connectivism
Danah Boyd: Why students spend so much time on Facebook
Ewan McIntosh: Informed planning is more important than a pilot phase.
Steve Hargadon: Suffering from information overload? Create more information.
Garr Reynolds: Simplicity makes for better presentations
Miguel Guhlin: Follow your passion
OpenCulture: University podcasts
Jim Heynderickx: Structured middle school laptop program design
Chris Lehmann: The unconference
John Phillips: Single-day start of year laptop prep
Bill Fitzgerald: Web Site Baker (ironically)

If you didn't make this list, I'm quite certain that you will chalk it up to my feeble memory rather than the relative value of your blog!


tags: blogging

My journey to understand high school writing instruction continues. Konrad Glogoswki describes his use of blogs to encourage reflective writing practice in high school English. I am struck by the Ripple Effect tool Konrad uses to help students see how blogging (or other forms of reflective writing) help them better understand a topic. Konrad also describes specific techniques to get himself out of the way of student-student dialogue about their work.

Towards Reflective BlogTalk

My latest Blackberry wish is to be able to easily post pictures I take from the Blackberry to my blog as new posts. This leads to two questions.

- How do you find out the URL of a Flickr mobile image? I want to post Blackberry photos to my blog as easily as possible, but the javascript-based image insertion tool in my blog doesn't work on my Blackberry. Yahoo Go! allows me to easily upload Blackberry photos to Flickr, but then I can't get the image URL from the Flickr app in Yahoo Go!, though it displays the image very nicely. Without the URL, I can't embed the image into the blog post. I tried blogging by email, but the images just ended up as attachments instead of displaying inline. Surely, a way to do this must exist.

- Does a good mobile blogging application exist for Blackberry? I'm thinking something like MarsEdit for mobile phones. It would just need to support the RSD protocol.

How do you post photos from your phone to your blog?

Update: writing this post brought good karma -- I got mobile photoblogging to work on Nucleus CMS by sending the photo as MMS instead of email. Never mind the above questions, since sending by MMS makes uploading the image to Flickr unnecessary. I still wouldn't mind a dedicated mobile blogging application. One final hiccup: Nucleus' NotifyMe is not firing on items added using PostMan, so subscribers don't receive email notifications. I only use that on my other blog, anyway.

This is totally 2005, but I'm happily using my Blackberry to read email from our family domain and post to this blog for the first time. GMail for domains and Google apps for BlackBerry are powering the former, and Nucleus is powering the latter. I was not aware that the nucleus stylesheets were PDA-friendly, but they look great. You can even read this blog very nicely on a PDA, if you were to feel so inclined, and you weren't completely over doing that about 18 months ago. There are previous few moments when I actually need to post and don't have a laptop, but it's good to know that it's possible.

Update 10/19/07: The audio files are posted. Speakers include Rosalind Wiseman, Howard Hiton, Laura Kastner, Marti Olsen Laney, and Eban Goodstein.

Catlin Gabel hosts the PNAIS All Schools Conference this Friday, October 12. We are planning to record and podcast all of the featured speakers and as many of the Catlin Gabel presenters as are interested. The potential to provide a national audience with a useful resource is very exciting to the conference organizers. We have purchased a half dozen Olympus WM-300 and lavolier mics and coordinated with our theater director to collect the recordings. Having had success podcasting internally with Drupal, I plan to install a new, public Drupal site for these podcasts. Permission to record and publish has been obtained from the featured speakers.

I would love feedback and tips as we anticipate this event, especially if you have done this sort of thing before.

Homebound for a few days, I have spent more than the usual amount of time reading blogs. Digging deeply, I followed more links than usual and came across a number of blogs that I wasn't reading before. Check out the new blogroll. I hope I'll be able to keep it up once I'm back at the office.

I also followed the Laptop Institute and am following Building Learning Communities much more closely than I have tried before. I have to tell you that following the Laptop Institute through RSS feeds was not a satisfactory experience -- there wasn't much happening online. Thank you, Vinnie Vrotny, for filling the gap! Building Learning Communities, on the other hand, has been extremely active, perhaps thanks to the summarizing expertise of Ewan McIntosh. Ewan writes narrative summaries and takes lively photos of the sessions he attends, which allow me to really capture what happened at the event.

tags: blc07

I have updated my blogroll to reflect what I am regualrly reading. Check it out in the bottom half of the right-hand column. Blogging has become my primary means for professional development, and the Educators category my main resource. Keep up the great work, everyone!

I have thought a lot about blogging here the last couple of weeks, but I have not come across much worth blogging. I think that's a good sign, as we have been consumed with the return of our fifth staff member from maternity leave, new job descriptions, server room power improvements, testing our new help desk system, and so on. My big open-source projects -- two alumni web sites, gallery, Moodle, and custom scripts -- have been stable lately after a period of intensive development. I have a new middle school podcasting project on the horizon, but it's still in testing and I will talk about it here when it matures some more. We are also poised to make some big improvements in online help resources by way of a new knowledgebase starting in January or so.

I did appreciate Christopher Sessums' recent post on action research and teacher technology integration and told him so. I need to read more blogs like Chris' and fewer blogs from the leading edubloggers who speak (to me, at least) solely from the ed tech consulting perspective. Other voices in my blog reader include a principal, classroom teachers, school web site developers, graphic design experts, and usability experts.

The upshot of these two points is that I will write when I have something worth writing about! Have a delightful Thanksgiving.

Having had my head in the servers for the last few days, I only just now caught up on reading blogs from this past week. A lot has happened!

• Google Earth 4 beta
  
• Moodle 1.6 (including blogging and podcasts)

I also harvested some great tips for upcoming personal projects:

• D'Arcy Norman explains how to migrate mySQL databases for an upgrade. I will be working on this in the upcoming week.
  
• Moodlebug describes a new Elgg-Moodle integration module. I am thinking of rolling out such an environment at Catlin Gabel in the fall. (Bill, are they stealing your thunder?)
  
• D'Arcy also tries out Adobe Lightroom. I need to create a better web photo gallery for an alum's Kenya photos.
  
• Numerous bloggers are ramping up for NECC. I need to write my presentation!

My last week at UHS is going to be a busy one.

The right-hand column of this blog notes the five most popular posts. It uses the MostViewed Nucleus plug-in, which displays the items that have received the most hits. This method favors old posts, since the longer they are on the site, the more hits they get (mostly from Google). MostViewed uses the following SQL query to find the top five most popular items:

"SELECT i.inumber id, v.views views, i.ititle title ".
"FROM ".sql_table('plugin_views')." v, ".sql_table('item')." i ".
"WHERE v.id = i.inumber ".
"ORDER BY views DESC ".
"LIMIT 0, ".intval($numOfPostsToShow);

I wrote a new query to take the item's age into account. This produces the top posts by calculating the rate of hits over time.

SELECT i.inumber id, v.views views, i.ititle title,
((UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW()) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP(i.itime))/v.views) AS pop
FROM nucleus_plugin_views v, nucleus_item i
WHERE v.id = i.inumber AND i.itime > '1970-01-01'
ORDER BY pop;

(Because of rounding, this calculates the ratio of the number of seconds the post has been online to the number of hits and then sorts ascending. The 1970 limit keeps drafts out of the results, as draft posts have a time of 0, which mySQL stores as 1969-12-31)

This produced the opposite effect, favoring recent posts. This is because old posts are found primarily through Google search results, whereas new posts are found through RSS subscriptions and home page views in addition to web searches. The rate of hits taper off once the item has disappeared from these two sources.

Another plugin, MostPopular, determines popularity by the number of comments rather than the number of page views. I don't prefer this approach, but most readers are lurkers, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to exclude most readers from a measure of popularity.

Periodically resetting the view counts appears to produce the best results, giving newer items a fair shot to rise to the top, but it requires manual intervention from time to time. Since the Views plugin stores hit totals, not individual hits, it's not possible to count hits only since a specific date, or to exclude recent hits that are a result of post prominence.

If I really want to capture a more accurate measure of popularity (a questionable endeavor at best), then I should modify the Views plugin to log individual hits by date and then plot a frequency distribution of hits over time. I expect this would produce a bubble in the first couple of weeks of a post's existence when the item is within the RSS feed and home page, and then taper off to a baseline popularity level based on search engine and link hits. Once the hits are stored by date, it would be possible to measure and correct for the bubble effect or implement a cutoff date in order to capture just the baseline popularity rate.

I didn't know that mySQL had so many functions for performing calculations! That's one unexpected benefit of this investigation.

Back in November, I whined about the lack of school tech director blogs out there. I am pleased to report that two S.F. Bay Area tech directors have recently started their own blogs. Barbara Cohen of Marin Country Day School writes about using vendors for professional development, podcasting in elementary school, and using technology to show the process of learning. She has even started a separate blog for Daisy the Duck, a new arrival on their campus!



Howard Levin of the Urban School writes on behalf of students with visual processing disabilities, "authentic" uses of classroom technology, and Urban's constructivist approach to student use of gaming and social network sites. Howard is a national leader in the fields of 1:1 student laptop computing and oral history on the web. Check out Telling Their Stories.

Thank you for your contributions!

Interesting stuff. The Blogswana project aims to train 20 university students to interview and blog on behalf of 20 Batswana who are in some way affected by HIV/AIDS and do not have the capacity to blog themselves. The idea is to make visible the hidden human face of the tragedy in Botswana and give voice to those from the "other side of the digital divide." The project is currently in the funding stage.

Source: Committee to Protect Bloggers (thanks Ben)

I have finally gotten around to sharing my blogroll. You will find it at the bottom of the blog sidebar (here). So now this page is officially an interactive design nightmare. The blog format is easy to digest, but it does not provide many good places for posting static content. Everything drops into the sidebar, and content like the blogroll falls far to the bottom. I could use a different skin that provides for some static links at the top. Maybe in the future.

I have to admit that I used Bloglines to convert my links from OPML to HTML but then just copied the static content into the sidebar. I don't actually add feeds to bloglines, so there wasn't much to be gained from a live link to their site. Plus, I could not get the include() skinvar to pull the live feed anyway. Let me know if you know of an easier way to convert blog links from NetNewsWire OPML into HTML.

The World Affairs Council of Northern California has launched a podcast of its speaker series. WACSF has maintained an audio archive for years, so this is not new territory for them, but it does make it a lot easier to receive new broadcasts. The above link contains subscription information and a link that will automatically bring you the iTunes subscription page. You still have to click the Subscribe button to set up automatic download of new programs.

Some months ago, Princeton University unveiled the University Channel Podcast, which provided access to hundreds of lectures and speeches from a number of universities. I thought this was a great idea and promptly transferred the first few files to my iPod. When I connected it on the bus, the quality of the MP3 recording was so poor that I couldn't understand the words! I quickly gave up on that podcast.

Stanford recently published a hundred lectures and speeches on iTunes. I have to say: they got it right. The quality is perfect, and I listened to an entire two-hour speech by Cornel West between two days' travel in the car and on the BART.

Hopefully this will encourage more publishers of audio content to up the quality. The better user experience is worth it.

Tomorrow, UHS will record the third of its 30Years school assemblies. If all goes well, we will post it to our web site, hopefully in high resolution audio for perfect listening!

As I search for good blogs to read, I find plenty from the world of education consulting, higher education, research institutes, and high school classrooms. Notably missing are high school technology directors such as myself. Why? Maybe high school tech directors are not that numerous, purely a product of elite independent schools. Public school districts commonly centralize computer administration in a district office rather than in individual schools. Or perhaps I just have not found them yet -- please let me know where they are! I will keep searching in order to include in my network of bloggers those who most closely share practical and conceptual concerns with me.

Blogging is read, think, write (and link) and read some more.
- Will Richardson

An incredibly convenient way to publish stuff on the web
- Jay Pfaffman

[using] frequently modified webpages containing individual entries displayed in reverse chronological sequence
- Herring et al

Starting a blog reminded me what it is like to learn to use a new, technology-based communication medium. (This is most valuable training when part of my job is to repeatedly teach fundamentals to novice users.) Since it is still becoming familiar to me, I often wonder what I am actually doing when I blog. At times, it is variously vehicle for self-reflection and a communication device for sharing tech-related ideas with others.

Blog purists point to the unique type of communication that happens when a community of bloggers actively read and link to each others' blogs. (It took a while for me to feel this myself.) At the same time, others (especially youth) have appropriated the blog format for other purposes, such as online diaries and standalone web pages. Herring and co-authors insist that it is elitist and sexist to not acknowledge this as blogging too.

We need both points of view. Enthusiasts promote one concept of blogging that has demonstrated value, but others find different uses that may end up being just as valuable someday.

I have recovered nearly my entire blog through Google's and MSN's search databases! Both services cache entire pages, which allows one to view them even after they have been deleted. While this has raised concerns about control over one's own web site, it saved my butt this week. It took me only a couple of hours to comb through the cached listings using queries such as "Forums Diary Kassblog site:inside.sfuhs.org." Interestingly, I found that MSN's cache went further back in time than Google's, that Yahoo! doesn't make cached pages available on its search page, and that I had to find these pages quickly before more documents disappeared from the cache!

I recovered all but three articles since I started blogging on July 1. I didn't try to recover comments.

Nucleus CMS's "post to the past" feature also helped me reconstruct the blog entries in their original order.

Hooray for Google! No need to hooray for MSN, since they only copied Google ;^)

A hard drive crash has left the most vulnerable of our three servers in tatters. One day later, it is mostly restored, but this blog took one of the hardest hits. Starting over gives me the opportunity to reflect on whether I have made any progress toward my goals for this blog:

1. Post tips that other people might find useful.
A couple of people wrote to say thanks for technical explanations or strategies that I had posted.

2. Post ideas under development in the hope of receiving feedback.
I found that posting new, partially developed ideas to my blog helped me reflect on them, but I didn't receive much feedback from other people.

3. Maintain a personal knowledgebase
If you are going to create a personal knowledgebase, make sure it is on regular backup! This didn't have much value over the three months I blogged.

I guess I'll keep blogging, though it's mostly a personal, reflective exercise at this point.

After a couple of weeks' hiatus, I am back on the blog writing trail. However, my feed reader is up to 265 unread messages, not counting many that have fallen out of the cache. When things get busy, like at the start of school, how does one find the time to read and write? Is blogging actually work ... for me? Will this be an isolated incident at the start of the school year or a frequent occurrence?

Why Blog?
Why have I decided to finally jump on the blog bandwagon? NECC 2005 helped me move beyond the hysteria of blog as world panacea to a more honest assessment of the relationship between blogger and blog. Blogs always felt self-serving to me, and it was refreshing to hear people acknowledge that perspective and incorporate it into a strategy for web publishing.

I am presently planning to publish the following types of content in this blog:

1. A short profile on each open source web application I use and each custom script that I write for school. These are items for which I do feel expert.
2. Exploratory ideas for which I do not feel expert but would like feedback from others.
3. A personal online knowledgebase. Even if no one else were to ever read this blog, it will serve as a repository for ideas and projects that I may search later.


Blogging gives one an air of authority on a topic. The author is a noted expert on topic ABC and pontificates on how the world should be. I have grown more comfortable with the idea of blog as experimental idea space, becomes less afraid to air thoughts that are not fully developed or in areas in which I am a total beginner. If someone finds my posts useful, then I will have helped someone. I will do my best to avoid the tone of voice of presumed authority where none necessarily exists.

Blog as personal knowledgebase has the potential to be a more effective notetaking mechanism than the haphazard creation of files on my local hard drive. The blog's potential external audience (even if imaginary) can be a powerful motivating factor to keep one writing. It also helps to keep one's personal knowledgebase in one location that you may access from anywhere.