blogJacking

(Go read Karen and Will’s posts first!)


I don’t think there is a debate. “Let a hundred flowers post,” no? (If Will’d wanted a debate, the k12bW news item should have been headlined , “Manila’s a maze; Blogger’s better.”) I’m as ignorant of Blogger as anybody. Haven’t even set up a site. My abecedarianGeek Radio blog is just a toy at this point, though I’m thinking that it might be a great repository for unpublished personal writing, easy to link over to this public site, and accessible from anywhere I’ve got a power outlet or a battery. (Albert will tell me it’s much more powerful than that.) Just built a site in Conversant and felt the initial annoyance with having to learn anything more than I already know. I look forward to the 5/24 release of pMachine. And want to find time to fool around with Tinderbox.


So, why Manila? Luck of the draw. IU had it available when I was complaining about blackBoard’s stiffness. They wouldn’t host multiple sites though. (I think that was a mistake, but I don’t know the politics and vision thing over there. Seems like blog hosting for schools by the premier area public university is a no brainer, like what the British Library is starting for the whole damn island. The only UC program I ever worked for full time was ACCESS and, thankfully, its goals were set by client needs, not the university’s. Teachers told us what to do for them, we did it, and we wound up with a community. Didn’t do much for test scores though. Then sfusd decided to take over the program. I ran back to a school site as quick as I could.) A vacation in Amsterdam led to a serendipitous meeting with Peter at School Blogs. That led to bawpBlogs.org but then the Atlantic got in the way, with regular outages that were no fault of sB. Routers fail. The more routers, the more failures. I noticed one day that Bryan Bell of Manila theme fame had his name on a math site hosted by Kern County Superintendent of Schools. Bryan was the one who sold me on Manila, without ever trying, for a reason even more basic than ease of content posting (It is easy, btw.): ease of access.


In a large urban school district there are all kinds of folks watching and worrying. They want the appearance of control (branding) if not the actual control. By this I mean, they get uncomfortable with kids using a .com domain. I do too (for different reasons). They want .edu, or at least .org. This should be a small issue, but it’s not. So with Kern & Bryan and Erin Clerico we stumbled onto a .org ISP that is a public school district just like us! (There’s an emphasis on public there. It’s a different world from private schools.), with these advantages:



  1. Reliability. Kern’s made a Manila commitment. Just look at all the k-12 and non-profit county stuff they’re hosting. They may fold or move and jack up the cost someday, but so might blackBoard or webCT (see michelle’s lament) or Blogger.
  2. Understanding. These guys not only work for schools, they like them! This is no small feat in the world of techies. For me, it’s like a writer having a good editor, a rare and wonderful thing.
  3. Politics. They want teachers and kids on the Web, with all the precautions necessary, but on the Web, using it for more than a brochure or a dead museum of forgetable projects.
  4. Money. $6 a site annually. (I may be shooting myself in the foot here. If demand increases, prices may too, but what the hell??? see #3 above.)
  5. Support. SchoolBlogs provided this, but try calling Amsterdam at 3:00 PM. When our Kern isp acted up at 7:30 AM on the morning of our blogathon, I called Erin (Bryan was in London getting married) and the prob was fixed in 3 minutes. Proximity still counts, for pings and people. 
  6. Creativity. Bryan is working for BAWP (at a reasonable rate) to install all sorts of cool plug ins - including BAWP Themes, CommentIt, newsLink, and maybe more. What we learn from their use goes toward other writing projects’ and schools’ and districts’ uses of the same. (Again, see #3 above.)

Using our k12bW blogChat room with terryE last night, we wandered around the site and looked closely at how the newsLink option works and can work. It’s not available on schoolBlogs (yet). So I offered Terry a bawpBlog. “I’ve been blogJacked!” he quipped. Point of course isn’t “stealing a customer.” No one cares what cms any of us use. In the end, ba jyou bu li shr, as they say in Mandarin: “8 and 9 aren’t far from 10.” What’s imp’t. is what we can tweak the things into doing for us.


I like the simplicity thing, yes. Get a blog, write, publish, receive response. That’ll work for awhile, but so will driving to Safeway in a Cadillac. Sort of a waste of resources. What’s intriguing me now is how the early adopters of blogs can push things for the come-alongs, customizing the interface for particular users (see the new sfEa Summer Institute site and our own k12blogWrite) while at the same time, but more slowly, teaching those communities of users how to customize for themselves. This is inherently no different than the continual and informal tradition of mentoring that veteran practicioners do all the time with committed and potentially good new teachers. That non-digital mentoring, the apprenticeship - in classroom management, project design, humanly do-able assessment, writing as a process, resource gathering, etc. - presents challenges to those new teachers no more complex than Manila (or Blogger or pMachine) presents. Amy Leach will tell you that learning how to run our old free voluntary reading program, with the in- and out- boxes of books, the library acquisition (read: how to beg borrow and steal books), the sentence strip holders of individual student reading histories, the book talk poster assessments, etc., was no easy learning. It took time, like Manila or Blogger or pMachine take time. Teachers will climb a steep learning slope if it makes sense at a classroom level, with kids. And that’s why the connection between the teacher and the isp has to be close. That’s why, I think, the isp has to be, in the end, a local district or public hosting, staffed by some folks who know what classrooms are like and even like classrooms themselves, another room on the virtual hallway with its door open to teacher suggestions.