Learning Aloud

MERLOT is an open source multimedia educational object outlet for higher education [see MERLOT (not the wine)]. MERLOT has now expanded to offer an online, peer-reviewed journal (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching – JOLT). Articles already “published” are available. Online journals are not new, but the association with an Open Source group implies this venture is different (see Case for Creative Commons Textbooks).

Technorati tracks the blogging scene and reports that interest in blogging continues (a new blog is created approximately every second). About 55% of blogs are considered active (at least one post in last three months). Only 13% of blogs are updated on a weekly basis. The activity level is about the same as when last assessed in 2004. One trend noted described ISPs offering access to blog software (such as the software used in this blog) as part of the service provided by the ISP.

eSchool News describes the departure of Susan Patrick as head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology (Aug 6). Patrick is associated with the development of the National Education Technology Plan.

I ran across a post from Weblogg-ed that got me thinking about school blogs. The topic now appears to be whether specialized blog environments are required for K-12 use. The issue is not whether free or inexpensive blog options are available to teachers (e.g., Blogger.com), but whether the popular alternatives for the general public present some security risks in the classroom (see previous post). The weblogg-ed post suggests some options for educators – David Warlick’s Blogmeister and Alan November’s Learning Communities.

The folks who have taken the trouble to create “educational blog sites” have done great work and I encourge interested educators to explore these sites.

I am interested in educational blogs and have written the software for an “educational blog” for research purposes. I started thinking about some of the security issues and whether or not special “educational blog sites” are needed. Here are some comments:

1) General purpose public sites (blogger.com) are intended to be noticed not to provide security. However, such sites do not necessarily require that attention for the site be encouraged. For example, this blog was predated by a blog I operated for more than a year on Blogger.com (I tried it and it still exists). I tried searching for my original blog (in Goggle) and decided that locating the blog by chance would be very unlikely. If one keeps personal information out of a blog, the odds of locating a blog are not great (try it – another Grabe blog).

2) One approach to specialized educational blogs centers on teachers approving posts before the posts are available to the general public. I assume this allows the teacher to make certain nothing inappropriate or personal appears in student posts. The software used to offer this blog (WordPress) has such a feature (user levels). Any user classified as “level 1” can create what are called drafts rather than posts. Drafts must be approved before they are available to the public. The downside of this software is that a school district would have to install the software on a school server and someone would have to function as blog administrator.

3) A core question is what is it that needs to be controlled – what is posted or who views what is posted? The research tool I wrote requires that any user (writer or reader) be registered. This design defeats the purpose of writing for the general web audience, but it was fairly easy to implement and it allows students to show their work to others (e.g., parents) by first connecting themselves. I took this approach because it seemed a way to focus on communicating for a fixed group in a way that allowed a high level of security (almost to the level of an intranet). I really believe that students would be more motivated by knowing that their work is available to the world, but this openness may not be acceptable to some educators, administrators or parents.

How schools work through the issues of educational value, motivation, and security will be interesting to follow.

I am going to try and sneak this post past my wife. She gets upset every time I have something to say about keyboarding. She is not against keyboarding. Her position is pragmatic. She works in schools and nearly all schools have limited technology resources. She feels keyboarding instruction and related drills simply eat up too much of the time available for the instructional use of technology. Without getting into all of the related issues, I will just summarize her observation as keyboarding time ends up being subtracted from the time technology might be used in other ways.

This “issue” and a more general discussion of keyboarding instruction is discussed in a technology article provided by Education World. To me, some of the relevant questions include – How bad are the keyboarding skills of students who have received less than optimal instruction and what are the consequences of such differences? Are we wasting time teaching a motor skill that may soon be unnecessary (note Tablet PCs, interest in voice control)?

A new report from the PEW Internet and American Life Project (Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation) concludes that adolescent use of the Internet continues to rise. IM is possibly the area of heavy use that most drastically differentiates adolescent and adult users.

Some data were surprising to me. For example, 97% of girls 15-17 have used instant messaging, compared to 89% of younger boys and girls and 87% of older boys. While technology use and programming are clearly different activities (see yesterday’s post), the impression that males dominate ALL computer use is clearly false. The authors argue “Girls ages 15-17-year-old are the power users of the online teen cohort.”