Author: grabe

Comments and CommentPress

I have followed the blog if:book for some time. I have another life as a writer and the ideas about publishing expressed in the blog interest me. BTW – interest is not the same as agree.

If:book has supported the development of a theme for WordPress and it now appears the capability of the original theme have been expanded. I was aware of CommentPress before, but it seems from the If:book post that CommentPress has been transformed into a plugin for WordPress.

Here is what this change is to enable. This is WordPress blog. It uses a theme (Blog.txt) developed by Scott Wallick that controls the general appearance of the site and several plugins (e.g. Add Meta Tags) that add specific features (e.g., the tag cloud you see in the right margin). CommentPress as a theme offers the opportunity to add comments to a post on a paragraph by paragraph basis. A “button” in the margin opens a dialog box allowing comments to be added and read. WordPress is a flexible tool allowing both blog posts and also pages. The paragraph by paragraph commentary (annotation is one phrase in:Book uses to describe the opportunity) probably makes the most sense with the pages.

I think the concept with the plugin is to allow blog hosts to control when the commenting is allowed. You may not want to offer commenting for most posts, but you may want to offer a specific document and invite detailed and paragraph specific comments. This would represent a nice technique for inviting interaction and I hope I have interpreted the if:book post accurately.

I have had issues with comments. It is not the negative comments that concern me, it is the irrelevant spam that you risk spreading if you host a blog using a popular blog engine such as WordPress. It is possible to seriously limit spam, but in doing so you also make it inconvenient for anyone to add comments to your site. I assume that CommentPress would take advantage of the spam inhibitors that can be applied. This would seem to be the case with a theme, but I am less certain about how the plugin will work. I think the strategy here is to let the more adventurous give the technique a go and see what happens.

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Change in Funding Model for Lastfm

This post has nothing to do with education. It does consider changes in social networking and the profit potential in new ideas.

I have been a fan of lastfm for more than a year. Lastfm is free (with ads I suppose), but I pay $4 a month. I don’t use most of the features because I am older and not that interested in the social networking opportunities. The technology on the back end interests me a great deal – I like the way the service accumulates data about my habits and attempts to identify what these habits might mean about my taste in music. BTW – the little widget that appears at the end of this blog page is a feed from lastfm.Lastfm was recently sold to CBS and there have been some interesting changes. The most noticeable is the opportunity to play entire tracks (rather than the standard 30 second track offered as a preview by services such as iTunes). There is a limit on how many times you can do this for a given song (3 I think). The idea is to give you a better opportunity to make decisions about purchases.

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Growing Up Online – Dateline Program

Frontline (PBS) had an hour program entitled “Growing Up Online” that aired this evening. The program explores a wide variety of topics (cheating, social networking dangers, generational differences). You can view the program and related material at the PBS site. These resources would be quite useful in a pre-service teacher ed tech class.

I learned of this program from other blogs and it appeared some felt the program would play up negative issues and this would result in an overly negative public reaction to services that have value. While the focus was probably more on “concerns” than opportunities, in areas in which I have read some of the research (e.g., danger from online predators), I thought the program raised the issues I felt were necessary to present an accurate picture (e.g., level of solicitation from strangers is rare, adolescents are aware of dangers, risky behavior has multiple causes). I did not feel the program focused on fear mongering.

(NYTimes follow-up, Washington Post follow-up)

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"Kinda Like” Thinking

Those of involved in promoting participatory web applications in education must look for justifications. I think this should be true for the sake of credibility, but also for our peace of mind. For example, my approach has been to point to the research on “writing to learn” to support classroom time spent on blogs and wikis. Instead of pointing to research on a practice, we attempt to use another type of research involving an activity similar to the behavior of interest and involve ourselves in “kinda like” thinking.

The characteristics of participatory web applications in education (education 2.0 or whatever the selected buzzword happens to be) go beyond similarities to writing to learn so I continue to be on the lookout for original research or similar research. In the last few days, the online preview of Educause Review (January/February) has become available. Check out the article by John Seeley Brown and Richard Adler (pdf available) entitled Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0. Among the topics covered is reference to the productivity of self-organized study groups among college students. I assume the “kinda like” thinking here is that the discussion of topics among bloggers is something like the discussion of course topics that happens within study groups. The references are to the book of Harvard educator Richard Light (Making the Most of College) and to the text of a presentation by Uri Treisman (Studying Students Studying Calculus). Whether or not college students involve themselves in study groups was found to be among the best predictors of academic success. I immediately tried to locate the sources Brown and Adler cite. Making The Most of College seems to have mysteriously disappeared within the UND library. I hate when that happens. I did read the Treisman paper. Interesting, but it was a speech that mentioned research but including no references pointing to full descriptions of the studies. I will have to do a little more digging.

Anyway, another aspect of participatory web experience that may benefit learners may be “collaborative study”. I think the key to the utility of this perspective will be finding ways to move beyond the sharing of ideas and perspectives among motivated individuals with a common interest to classroom situations where many students may be unmotivated in general and/or not intensely interested in some of skills or information they are expected to acquire. Perhaps this is a good argument for personal learning, but less so for mandated learning.

How’s that for “kinda like” thinking?

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You Still Must Think

Perhaps too much has been made of generational difference in the way technology has been used. And, perhaps there is a confusion between comfort level and productivity.

A research study just released concludes:

The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

The group responsible for this study intends to track individuals longitudinally. The group also seems to contend that bad scholarship is like a disease – the rest of us are catching it from our students (I made the part about the disease model up – the group says no such thing, but they do observe that similar patterns are emerging across generations).

(pdf explaining the research and intent of the group is available to those in which the problem has not progressed past the point of no return – read while you still can) 😉

BTW- the details in the pdf are a little sparse. This is more of an issue piece, but the issues are interesting and linked to some research.

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Both sides of the story – an example

This is follow-up to yesterday’s post considering how social networks might more usefully advance general understanding.

Have you been following the NYTimes debate between Rick Cotton and Tim Wu considering copyright in the digital era? I like the debate format (with side reader comments) as one approach that may make productive use of social networks. At least with the debate format you must consider active opposition to arguments. This is better than allowing one group backing one position to explain the arguments of the hypothetical opposition. It is important to consider “both sides of the story” (with a nod to Phil Collins).

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