Blog Apple
Sorry for the inconvenience. This whole threaded discussion has been moved over to k12blogWrite.
Paul Allison from NYC Writing Project e-mails with some queries (in italics below) and some links. My responses in plain text below each bulleted item. Hector’s responses can be found here.
- If I know how to have students designing Web sites with Frontpage and Dreamweaver without much difficulty, what do weblogs add?
To start, should note that this whole conversation is perfect for inclusion at k12blogWrite. Or somewhere else that we can have a conversation about the tools while using the tools. (”When making the handle of an axe, the model is near at hand.”)
We’ve been using Manila for lots and lots of BAWP stuff. I don’t know if blogs add anything. They take away some stuff that I find distracting for myself and for students. At BAWP we’re focusing on what I’m calling Find it! Read it! Write it! activities. This emphasizes the Web as a reading and writing environment. That’s narrow - leaves out art, design, music, multimedia. Sigh. But all of that can be imported later. It’s like when I ask students to type their drafts into a Word doc. Over half the class initially starts with one line of text and then gets heavily into changing font size, typeface, and colors. “Uh - scuz me, folks, but could we get the text on the page first and then play with layout?” Manila blog templates, called themes, come with some built-in functionalities, like loose leaf paper comes with pre-punched holes and horizontal lines. I’ve gotten so used to working within the limitations of blogs that I look at Dreamweaver and Frontpage and even Composer as a kind of paper making activity - fun to do, but who has the time? Besides, with free time, I can import all the DW and FP bells and whistles right into the blog template. In the end, it’s all just html and ether, right?
All of the above leaves out the real powerful “get it done stuff” that comes with content management systems (membership options and other admin goodies, editorial status options, absence of the FTP or Fetch step and instantaneous editing of pages, hit counting, syndication and aggregation options, buleetin sending, discussion boards, public comment options, etc., etc.). I leave them out becuase you CAN build them with DW or FP. What’s nice with Manila is I don’t have to build them. They’re just there, packaged by the Frontier folks and then added to by generous digital dwarves who contribute to the semi-open source Manila tool box.
- My short experience in designing with them is that it is much more tedious than using Web design software. Is that just because of my inexperience with weblogs?
Well, 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Tedium comes with the work and you just choose your digital tool poison. Manila is like second nature to me now. Dreamweaver is tedious. That wasn’t always the case. And to repeat, you can just cut and paste any html doc into a blog page.
- A similar quesiton: Along with several other teachers in the New York City Writing Project, I’ve been happy with the ease and accessibility of Nicenet.org for discussion boards. How do weblogs expand the possibilities? or change the ease of use?
This is a good one. Manila for one has a slightly clunky discussion board layout. Topical or chronological, with no nesting of threads and sub-threads. If I remember Nicenet right, it’s a little like Agora or Blackboard. Very clean and easy to admin. AT BAWP, we’re looking into those three and NWP’s board and old faithful Yahoo.
But for me this has opened a really intriguing question: What’s the point to Discussion Boards? I find most of them to be stilted, artificial, almost boring. I hate reading them. I think the reason is that discussions, even virtual online discusssions, are ephemeral human acts, not meant to be historicized, preserved, embalmed. Most discussions between teacher colleagues (aside from dreaded faculty meetings) are brief and to the point. What comes out of those conversations - new approaches, sharing of resources, nagging puzzlement - gets heard and then taken and worked out on word processors and copy machines, actually used in classrooms, and stored in file folders, virtual or 3-cut. karenMc at MUWP and albertD at CAWP and I have been experimenting for the last year with a password protected, small group Manila blog called A Kool Place. We use it like we’d use a discussion board, but I don’t think any “thread” has ever gone beyond 6 postings, maybe 7. Yet it’s the site, aside from my own, that I visit most often on the web. (I receive an email notification whenever it’s updated in any way.) It’s because we really discuss stuff that we want to DO, to ACCOMPLISH, to START AND FINISH. When things get hot over there, we pop into the chatRoom that we installed on the nav bar and go at it in real time, saving whatever we want from the transcript and posting it right on the blog. There are some macros in the works that may let us dispense with even that intermediate space, so that posting particularly labeled items on our own blogs will result in each others’ blogs receiving that content. In short, blogs seem to replace discussion boards.
- Can students set up their own weblogs or schoolblogs?
Yes, there are free blog hostings places still. You’re lucky in being on the East coast. Peter and Adam are still generously offering schoolBlogs. Unfortunately, we found access problems from out here in CA, due to distance and # of routers. Karen’s students are using antville. willR uses Blogger. At BAWP, we searched forever and finally decided on the Web Team in Kern County. Read all about that process here. It involves issues of COPPA and a lefty disinclination to have any school-related site end in .com . In addition, it appears that NWP will have 200 sites available from Kern within a month or so. At least that’s what I’m led to hope.
- Ultimately, I’m interested to think about what kinds of language are privileged in weblogs/schoolblogs as compared to a Web site and Nicenet.org???
This question I don’t quite get, but I think it may have more to do with functionality of tool thatn with type of language privileged. Rss syndication is an example of how the tool can make communication of language (or art or multimedia, for that matter) on the Web more seamless, more natural.
Some links from Hector Vila in Middlebury:
staff development - Follow the links to Writing 02, and if you read my second draft and view the PowerPoint online you’ll get a sense of issues, etc.; there’s also a link to our proposal for the NY 4Cs conference–haven’t heard yet.