homoLudens

Up at 3:00 AM yearning for a beer and a sandwich. Ah, jetlag. Harry’s more confused than I am. The only advantage is a blog-friendly sleeplessness. So here’s the longest yet.

Adam wants to know what Blackboard is and has started a discussion about same.

A combination of Blackboard and Manila has intrigued me since January 2000. That’s when BAWP ran a series of trainings for a wide range of middle school teachers in Oakland. We called it BAWP ETC - Embedding Technology in Curriculum. Berkeley’s IU and Chris Ashley had pointed us at several content management services. First was WebCT - ugh! Then BB. It worked well as a platform to use in staff development. We could post announcements, run a calendar, link to good sites, up and download materials, let participants easily build a simple personal page. More importantly, by using the tool to run our in-services, we could show folks how they might use the same tool with their own students in their own classrooms. (‘When making the handle of an axe the model is near at hand???’). This aspect is really important to BAWP, an essential characteristic of our work - What you see and do and use in a BAWP workshop is immediately applicable to your classroom.

In June 2000, we ran an 11 day intensive for about 25 of the teachers involved in the Spring series. IU got us a BB site on the UC server for every participant. It proved to be a fairly popular tool. We made intense use of the discussion board for participant reflections on the training. Two things to note:

1. Having the sites on the UC server was essential. The BB free sites were frustratingly slow and unreliable at that point, probably due to growing use nationally. (EditThisPage sites had similar problems then.) In additional, that UC purchased version had lots more power - bells and whistles that the free version lacked.
   
2. Folks left excited about BB potential use but as far as I know, only one teacher really locked in. That’s Clair Stoermer, who is now heading up BAWP’s OUSD tech work this semester. (I’d love to link to her site, but you have to be enrolled. NWP does the same lock out thing with its discussion board. A blogger gets frustrated at the boundary thing.)

Simultaneously, IU had given us about 10 Manila sites on their server. It was love at first Edit This Page click for me. But not one participant followed up on the intro we gave to Manila. For the rest of 2000, I used Manila to post the original homoLudens as a personal travel journal. Note here that what motivated me to use it was writing for a real audience. We talk about audience a lot at BAWP, emphasizing that real audience engages writers - student writers or professional writers - to do their best. Interestingly, that first fun-filled travelogue started in Amsterdam.

I used BB with some MLK classes and helped Claire use it on her long distance reading mentor project. BB’s stiffness, basically its locked nav bar lock, frustrated me. I knew that Manila could work more flexibly for schools, but just didn’t have the time to sit down and learn it well enough to launch a site I’d have to depend on.

There’s someting slightly distancing about the Manila platform. Peter and I talked about this in Amsterdam. I don’t quite understand it anymore, but that’s because I’ve forgotten how I struggled over a long period of time to get a handle on using it. In January, BAWP sent me to Ken Dow’s incredible three day Manila training. Voila - MLK’s DDA! And not only was it fun. It made my work better! Not easier, not harder, but better. Better than using Blackboard.

BB helps you extend your classroom with a flexible, easy-to-use course Web site and puts a wealth of resources at your fingertips and claims the features in the list below. Manila has all of them, with some caveats:

1. You can place your lessons, assignments, and announcements online; Ditto Manila.
   
2. expand student access to relevant materials by incorporating links to your favorite related Web sites; Ditto Manila.
   
3. enhance class interaction through online discussions and chats; This one is problematic, eh? BB’s discusssion board is very, very good. Firstly, it nests threads and messages in outline form, making browsing and finding easier. Student assignment to groups and to private sub-groups is done with a simple click on a class role list. The priority placement of threads can be changed by the instructor. What Manila calls ‘gems’ can be linked to any message. Agora (which is open source and free to download to a server and I think designed for compatibility for something like Manila) and SpeakEasy (Used to be free, but no longer. However VERY cheap - $2000 per year for a community, i.e. university or school district. See how a university developed tool can be made cheaply available.) are as good if not better than BB.
   
4. facilitate idea sharing through online guest presentations; I think they’re talking about their white board and chat. Both cool, but pretty complicated used at its slideshow max. A simpler sort of chat tool would work better for K-12, something almost as simple as the Add a Comment item Manila already has. Certainly Quek would do very well. BTW, and a very important BTW, BB’s chat, like Manila’s WYSIWYG and Quek, does not work on Mac OS. (BB may have fixed that.)
   
5. motivate and prepare your students for class by letting them complete online extra credit assignments; Ditto Manila and much more because the goal is really to get students publishing their own sites! (Axe handle analogy again.)
   
6. maintain communication with absent students; Ditto Manila.
   
7. challenge your students by placing quizzes and tests online; This is cool, kind of. I dread the web as a ditto master of on-line tests and assignments. Nevertheless, if you have 150+ AP English kids turning in essays digitally, a management system is necessary. And if I was a science teacher, I’d love to post quizzes with links to sites covering the material. As I remember it, creating a test was as easy as creating a survey on SurveySuite (again, a very cheap tool - $29.95 per year), which is to say very easy.
   
8. get parents more involved by giving them access to their children’s assignments; Ditto Manila.
   
9. and make it easy for you and your students to monitor progress by maintaining your grade book online. Ugh, ugh, ugh, but everybody loved this notion in the in-service series. I don’t get it because my grading system has nothing to do with points or anything like them. This explains why I’ve stayed in middle school, where my inherently grade-inflating character doesn’t get me fired.

Now, the clincher. BB was free - painfully slow, but free. No longer: Course registration on Coursesites. Register a course Web site for $295 and receive: Unlimited use of a course Web site for one year 25 MB of storage space for course materials Technical support for the course instructor An online credit card transaction form for registering existing and new courses will be available on Coursesites in mid-January. Non-registered courses will expire after 60 days. Courses that are not registered within 60 days after the date they were created will expire and become unavailable to students. Instructors will still be able to enter an expired course to retrieve course materials or to export the course for use on another system. For those courses that are already on the system at the beginning of 2002, the 60 days will start on January 1, 2002.

As to earlier sites that a teacher might have come to depend on: Can I move my courses from the old Blackboard.com to the new system? Moving your own course materials by hand, while slow, is the most reliable method of moving from the old system to the new system, because it includes your own judgments concerning the relationship between the old course structure and the new course structure.

Adam further notes: I may not [yet] have the right business model for SchoolBlogs, but I can certainly see a promising one in providing blogging capabilities to the BB install base.

Teachers are notoriously bad on business models, especially lefty teachers in U.S. urban schools. We’re generally too pissed off at disgraceful levels of educational funding to pay much respectful attention to folks who want to make money. We don’t really make much money and we’re fairly happy. Why’s everybody have to make more than us? I know, I know, stupidly naive.

That said, I personally worry about BB gobbling up blogging technology. My immediate objectives for the next 6 months are to:

• expand MLK teacher use of SchoolBlogs,
  
• get all of the reporters on mlkNews to have their own blogs,
  
• continue the development of the BAWP website,
  
• gather and train a BAWP teacher consultant group to use their own bawpBlogs,
  
• and run a new sort of BAWP advanced institute for digital writing this summer,
  
• encourage other NWP sites and teacher consultants to experiment with Manila and SB,
  
• continue to ‘play’ long-distance with Dagblad de Haarlemeerstraat and one or two interesting bunch of people just starting to use diaries.com for some community work in Amsterdam.

Short of it is, if successful, I’ll need to create about 50 blogs. Hmm, with the BB model, that’s $265 * 50= $13,250. Not possible. Laughable. Hilarious.

Which is not to say that BB doesn’t deserve that kind of money. Just that it’s out of the question for what we’re trying to do at BAWP and MLK. And this leads back to the notion of servers and hosting, right? Berkeley bought CourseInfo 4.0 and installed in on their machines. (I heard somewhere that it cost $55,000. That has to be an exaggeration. I’ve also heard that Berkeley is bailing on its use. Anyone know about institutional pricing and UC plans?) SFUSD could do the same. That takes care of the cost thing, right? I mean, if a district KNOWS that BB is what it will be using, then cough up the big bucks for a purchase and install and then let your staff use it up to your server capacity. Max out? Add capacity. Software improves and you can’t afford the upgrade? Keep using the adequate old version.

But that word KNOWS is important. If Adam’s business plan is still in development, imagine what stage urban school districts’ technology integration plans are in. We don’t yet KNOW what one tool is the answer. (Hopefully, there won’t be one ‘one.’) Which is why it’s so damn cool that free (thanks to SB), accessible and reliable tools like Manila are out there during our learning phase.

My worry is a big picture worry, and maybe just the dyspeptic complaint of a pessimist. It’s that the most important users for educational tools - the teachers and their students - are going to be priced out of the picture; that the commodification of teaching begun in various CMS thingies will just further weaken an already disabled commitment to the commons of public education.