homoLudens

The Educational Bloggers Network (eBN) started with the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP - founding site of the National Writing Project - NWP) trying to integrate tech into our proven models of teaching writing and of staff development. We envisioned school and teacher hosting access at the same level of free public library access
within the teacher-led community culture of what Jim Gray started 30
years ago. As he’s said on more than one occasion, “Teachers teaching
teachers. It’s a simple idea. Try not to screw it up.”  Our vision
is ambitious, but for most of us these are still early days in reading
and writing to the web. It doesn’t hurt to be naive.

In the San Francsico Bay Area, believe or not, we do not have
reliable ISPs for school and teacher use. Given that limitation, we did
something local for ourselves to get quick hosting, what I call access
to digital paper,
so we could explore and play and figure out if blogs were what we
thought they were. We researched our way to Manila and then on to the Kern County Office of Education,
home of well-respected Frontier / Manila administrative and design
gurus. With affordable and reliable hosting, BAWP managed to so some
things down to the classroom level (Scuz that slight content - I’m in the middle of switching schools.) and up to the national level. Samples can be seen at this (slightly outdated due to job change) blogTour link that was presented at the National Writing Project Annual meeting in Atlanta last year.

KCSOS (as just one example) offers reasonable hosting for
multiple-blog educational clients - approximately $40 per blog per
year. (Just compare that to the cost of the standard teacher’s edition
of a textbook.) Their costs and their prices, however, could
conceivably come down if client demand went up. Or another such ISP
might be interested.

Imagine that there were 20 regional groupings of blogging teachers
throughout the US, perhaps affiliated with NCEE or NCTE or NWP, or
maybe completely independent of other groups. Let’s say
each regional group wanted 100 blogs. That’s 20,000 blogs.There’s
a scale effect here - you get that big, prices come down. And publicly
funded offices of education serving educational institutions get a
bandwidth costs that can’t be beat. Such an ISP might even be able to
access the incredibly powerful and ubiquitously under-utilized big
national pipelines, like CENIC’s DCP.
What would be necessary for such hosting? Assume $25,000 in very
high quality server hardware with complete licensing, maybe four Xeon
servers deployed with back up. Factor in 1 day per week of server room
support, 2 days of Frontier adminstrator, and one day of Manila
designer support. @ $15,000 per day for a year. Add some slack to
cover electricity and other infrastructure. It totals out to around
$100,000. That’s only $5 per blog for 20,000 blogs! 

Obviously, in blog or any kind of web hosting (Manila or
whatever), local is better than national. Distance makes for hops, and
hops mean time and outages. The whole point of such a centralized
educational ISP would be to demonstrate the value of moving things down
to regional and local hosting.

Meanwhile, teachers still need to be able to explore blogging. That’s what BAWP addressed with our eBN hosting arrangement. Weblogger
and we have been struggling to arrange reasonably priced
access to initial blogging for teachers. KCSOS chose not to try to
serve individual teachers. Billing and legal combined into a
nightmare. Weblogger was interested. We launched not long ago.
It works like this. A teacher joins eBN. Some kind of vetting of their
school affiliation is required. (But not exhaustively and expensively
monitored.) As an eBN member, they get a single Manila weblog (limit
one per member) for one year for $19.95. (Request an eBN blog.)After one year, the price goes
up to $39.95 per blog. Weblogger sees this as 1.) supporting
education, just like Userland does itself with its educational discounts; and 2.) value-adding by bringing in customers to Weblogger’s regular hosting arrangements.

There are lots of Manila ISPs out there. And then there are other
blogging tools - MT, Drupal, etc., etc. What appeals to me about Manila
is its backend versatility when your server admin and designer know
what they are doing. That’s why eBN went with Weblogger for this deal.
That’s why BAWP went with KCSOS. The server admin has tweaked
Frontier with all kinds of goodies that make institutional hosting
easier - multiple domain naming, site creation, ISP theme design and
control, specialized plugins, marriages with Blackboard or edGateway.
And both organizations are reliable and fast and responsive
to our questions. And they understand and are patient with teachers.