Pedagogue blog

Interesting:

“Listening” is vital in an online environment because it establishes “real” responsiveness – not the coerciveness or ego-crush of an automated response generated through artificial intelligence.

Also, this post discusses the reality of blogs in the classroom. Both of these interesting links were found through random mind.

Note to self: watch Wikimania for new bits about using wikis in an educational setting.

Lessig’s guest blogger talks about freeing the curriculum by freeing the textbooks:

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

This is a very interesting idea, but I wonder how the politics of disagreeing academics will play out on such a playing field. Lessig is talking about textbooks, and textbooks are often built upon both practical information and information produced, argued, and proven beforehand in scholarly journals.

What happens when this group edited discussion leaks out into that world? Currently, the publishers act as a certain arbiter in the academic publishing sector, so that heated arguments are played out civilly between combating articles. I wonder how the politics of disagreement would play out if that arbiter were removed.

The picture above is what I encounter in Wordpress MU whenever posting to this Edublogs-hosted site. Maybe it has something to do with this:

That appears at the bottom of each page in the back-end of this site. Work in progress…

This post from Cole Camplese’s ADC (Apple Digital Campus) Exchange Blog notes: “I am starting to notice some nice traction in the use of blogs and podcasting in education.”

I can see podcasting of class sessions being extremely useful for the students, although as with any podcast, the size of the files involved becomes an issue. However, I hadn’t thought of some of the other uses that this post touches upon. How can podcasting be best used in an educational setting?

Here’s an interesting post about RSS in Education, which links to an MSN article on the same. How do we incorporate RSS feed reading into a discussion of educating our students? What technologies do we recommend to our students for such things? Do we recommend services like Bloglines, or stick to programs like NetNewsWire? Which programs work best for RSS reading in an educational setting?

Edublogs doesn’t currently allow users to edit the template, although this would appear to be on the way. Unfortunately this means that I cannot change the default links at the top of the main page, underneath the picture. I wonder how difficult it would be to change this (for someone running a WordPress MU installation that is).

Edublogs is running on WordPress MU:

WordPress MU is multi-user version of the famous WordPress blogging application. It is ideal for people wanting to offer a hosted version of WordPress, but due to its complexity installation and maintainance is not supported in the same manner WordPress is. (You cannot get support on the WordPress support forums.)

Using WordPress Multi-user edition you will be able to people be able to sign up for a new blog and have them securely manage their templates and settings without affecting any other users. Only one blog per user is allowed, but you can have unlimited users, and you can have multiple users on a single blog.

This would appear to be an effective way to manage multiple blogs in an educational environment should someone want to build an in-house structure to support blogging.

…I’ve decided to name this space, “Pedagogue blog.” Hopefully, I will be able to avoid being accused of pedantry.