A presentation by Joe Moxley, Patricia Roy and Anne Jones from the University of South Florida at the Symposium on 21st Century Teaching Technologies:

Weblogging offers teachers a unique way to engage students in the Composition classroom. As a tool, blogs allow students to post and archive their work in a way that is easy to use and access. As a genre, blogs offer students new rhetorical situations in which to communicate their ideas. Our work explores the various metaphors applicable to blogs — blog as journal, blog as news column, blog as annotated bibliography, blog as meeting place — in order to more fully realize the potential blogs have for preparing students for advanced learning and professional writing situations.

Wish I could have been there…
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Tom pretty much breaks down my post from yesterday line by line in terms of how Plone might be able to support our needs. I really appreciate his efforts in creating and thinking about education specific CMS stuff, and I think he understands most of the limitations and requirements of such a system for schools. I’m not really familiar with Plone, but I did dig around on their site a bit this morning. What’s immediately scary is the thought of having to learn a whole new system, but with Tom’s responses in mind, it seems there may be some reason to dig deeper. Obvioulsy, it seems Plone has been pretty widely adopted, and that from the user interface standpoint it can be pretty much whatever we want it to be.

I’m thinking that maybe we could get together a BOF at BloggerCon to talk about all of this stuff. I truly believe there is a need, that as much as I like Manila and think it comes pretty close to being an answer, its lack of development makes me wonder as to whether it can be made even more effective for a K-12 installation. (It’s kind of ironic to me that they feature school sites on the Userland site, but the frustrating thing to me is that there has been absolutely no communication from the new management group as to their direction or timetables for anything. Have I mentioned that I think there’s a big potential market out there for this stuff? Ah…what do I know?)

Jour 68 — Electronic Publishing Workshop
Roger Karraker’s online class, Spring 2004 for Santa Rosa Junior College

In traditional classroom instruction it’s assumed that the instructor is the fount of all knowledge. The instructor stands at the front of the room and declaims. Everyone else listens. Only one person can speak at a time. It’s both linear (one after another) and slow. And, of course, everyone has to be gathered in the same room at the same time and the time is strictly limited: typically a 100-minute block of time. People speak at about 175 words per minute. So the total available exchange is 17,500 words.

To enjoy this 100-minute experience you must get up, get dressed, get in the car, find a place to park, etc. Undoubtedly the time spent getting to class is equal or longer to the time you spend in class. So that 17,500 words of maximum possible instruction/interchange requires three hours of your life.

In online computer conferencing we take advantage of the fact that the instruction/interchange takes place when you want it, not when the instructor wants to offer the class. Instead of it being a linear experience, it’s more “parallel”. Unlike in the classroom, many of you can “talk” at once. Yet no one is interrupted, or shouted down.

Blogs, RSS, and much, much more.
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