Should we teach web publishing?

We do not teach web 2.0 tools or online communication mores at the school where I work.
I think this is very unfortunate.

We now have two platforms for web publishing here on campus, a media server, KUtube, and a WordPressMU installation.

The faculty who have set up blogs on our WordPress install have needed help to do so, they do not instinctively know how to use the tool even in a technical sense. Why would we assume students would? It is obvious, looking at one of the few student owned blogs, one for ModelUN, that this student had no idea how to use the platform – he commented on the example post from Mr. WordPress and then abandoned the blog entirely.

Yet when they go out into the world, our students will need to know how to create web content and how to join in the online conversation as a citizen of the world.

Even the Chairman of the Republican party has a blog, though I’m awfully disappointed that he changed the title from “What Up”.
I am not saying that students need to learn how to negotiate blogs in particular, the method is not so important I think. What’s important is that they learn the etiquette, the mores of web publishing.
I read in the Baltimore Sun that

In Anne Arundel County, an online course that began last month is required for staff members who want to create a wiki, said Val Emrich, the instructional technology manager. It includes an Internet safety component, along with how-to lessons on setting up the sites and using them for instruction, she said, as does another for blogging. For students, a mandatory digital citizenship curriculum was launched in social studies and health classes this year, Emrich said.

emphasis is mine

faculty workshops

There’s been a big push on to get faculty thinking about possible distance learning tools in the light of the H1N1 virus. We’ve all been asked to think about how we’d deal with either faculty or students being isolated for a period of time.
Our school website incorporates most of the things they would need to communicate class requirements like assignments, schedule. They can post links, upload documents and so forth, even embed audio and video. It does lack interactivity for the students – it’s all one way.

My colleague Steve and I have been doing workshops all the last week and a half and that’s been a LOT of fun. He’s done the ones on WordPress and I’ve been doing wikis and Moodle. We have a Moodle install on campus – we were actually planning on retiring it. It is enjoying a brief rennaissance. Why wikis, WordPress and Moodle? We have local installs of Moodle and WordPress and we were asked to do something on wikis. More to come if I have anything to say about it.

I think I learn more at these things than the teachers do sometimes.
I had a really interesting project this morning – A teaching intern in the science department set up a wiki and then wanted to embed a spreadsheet of environmental data that students could update.

They are studying Blow Me Down Brook, a local stream, and its corresponding watershed. The obvious to me answer was to keep the spreadsheet in Google Docs, I could get that far.

That meant a quick tutorial on Google Docs (which I have used sometimes but really am not that familiar with). Then he had to set up an account at Google, and upload a spreadsheet (he could have created a new one there of course) into his brand new Google Docs account.
Then we shared the document. We ran into a snag here because as test students we were getting prompted to log in to Google to edit the embedded sheet. We didn’t want them to have to log in of course.
With a little tinkering with permissions, now all his students can edit the spreadsheet and have the embedded sheet update dynamically. Very cool! I started telling the teaching intern how his students could work with google maps to add markers to the Google map of the watershed area they are studying, with photographs, overlays and all the rest.. He said I was making his brain explode and we would have to talk about it later.

Oh, I love this stuff!

we do not serve them well

Two of the faculty asked me to sit in on classes while they introduced the blogging platform we’ve set up. I really enjoyed getting a taste of what the school is supposed to be about – learning, education. I think that often those of us in departments that do not teach tend to forget that this is the raison d’etre of our employment. I do at least. So it’s been good for me to hear the students in the class discussions, and see how good teachers teach.

It’s been pretty disturbing though, to see again that so many of our students are woefully ignorant of the tools that they use – the internet, software and the computer itself. In the last week I had one student tell me that he supposed that the reason he could not access a certain web address was because his battery was low. Another studiously typed a full internet URL – the whole thing beginning with http:// into her Google Search bar, coming up with search results every time.

Many of our students have no idea how to double-space a document or center text in Microsoft Word. I see kids that put a return after every line to double-space or center using the space bar. As for using the interactive web – creating web content instead of mindlessly consuming.. forget it.

In one of the classes a teacher asked the students – “how many of you feel comfortable with technology?”

Out of the class, three or four hesitantly raised hands. Yet over and over I have faculty and administration blithely tell me how kids today have no trouble with technology, that they just naturally pick it up, that there isn’t any need to teach them anything about it.

Bull. I disagree strongly. We are sending these kids off to college with no idea how to use these tools and I really think we are doing them a disservice.

wikipedia won’t kill the cat

Curiosity killed the cat they say, and from what I can see for most people partipating in the creation of online content, rather than simply consuming it might have the same result.

A month or so ago, my sister in Oregon emailed me me in great distress. “Grandpa Redfield has a Wikipedia page” she wrote” and they mention Uncle James on it but not Mom!” she wrote.
“Why don’t you fix it?” I wrote back.
“I haven’t any idea how to edit a Wikipedia page!” she replied.

How is it that people can be such incurious sheep? They just take what they are given don’t they?

Well, everyone knows that Wikipedia can be edited. That’s the whole idea!

That’s why teachers don’t like students to use it, because it can be edited by anyone. I even had Mr. McIntyre tell me once that Wikipedia was “evil”. I asked him if he trained his students how to edit it and he acted like I was asking if he trained his students to rob banks.
The whole idea of wikipedia was that it would be self-correcting, that if you saw something was wrong, you could correct it.
So they make it pretty easy to do. If you look at the top of the page there is a tab that says Edit this Page. Says it right there at the top.

There is also a tab for history, if you edit something your IP is recorded as well as what changes you made. It’s good manners to leave your name too so if you look at the history tab for Robert Redfeild’s wikipedia page you’ll see that I added my mother, my aunt and another brother Tito ( who died at 12 from injuries in a sledding accident) as children along with my uncle, James Redfield in May of 2009

Putting Hartford, VT on the map

I read with great interest an article in the local paper, the Valley News today Creating Hartford on the Web about a course at a local high school

Designed and co-taught by social studies teachers Mike Hathorn and Woody Rothe, the course marries the Internet and cutting-edge online mapping technology with more traditional research and communication skills.

View the result at Creating A History of Hartford
This is very very impressive! Imagine how these students feel having their imagery and research integrated into Google Earth. This is the kind of result schools can get when they are not afraid of letting students engage with the world audience available.

WordPress.com Introduces VideoPress for WordPress.com users

WordPress.com Introduces VideoPress for WordPress.com users

Posted using ShareThis
On the way down to lunch I had a curbside discussion with one of the faculty on the subject of our video server, KUtube, and our new WordPressMU install, KUAPress and we were asking ourselves – why can’t one platform do everything?

spezify

Interesting take on the search engine: spezify still in beta.
Searching for nile monitor +florida (after reading this fascinating article in the New Yorker (print version)

The new breed of netbooks

In today’s NY Times an article on the new netbooks caught my eye. Netbooks of course have become the newest cool tool. However they are still a couple hundred bucks. These, using cellphone chips, are much cheaper than that.

The cellphone-chip makers argue that the ARM-Linux combination is just fine for a computer meant to handle e-mail, Facebook, streaming video from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and Web-based documents.

Freescale, for example, gave free netbooks to a group of 14- to 20-year-olds and watched what happened. “They would use it for Internet access when eating breakfast or on the couch, or bring it to class for taking notes,” said Glen Burchers, the director of consumer products marketing at Freescale.

A lot of people I know are spending a lot of money on laptops when they never use them for anything more than email and Facebook, such overkill.

Teacher’s Domain

I seem to be on the mailing list for eSchool News, which in a idle moment led me to Teacher’s Domain “Digital Media for the Classroom and Professional Development”.

Teachers’ Domain, a library of free digital resources and fee-based professional development courses developed by Boston public television station WGBH, has added a new section called “Inspiring Middle School Literacy: Reading and Writing in Science and History.”

Some good stuff in here, in the environmental section for instance I found Alaska Native Pilots a video on how pilots use native knowledge to predict the weather. Looks like all sorts of good stuff free to download and share with registration.

caught my eye this morning

What caught my eye this morning was this Guide to Most Useful Bookmarklets for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. from the Digital Inspiration Technology Blog.
Readability of course is in there, but also things like :

PrintWhatYouLike – A brilliant bookmarklet that helps you format web pages for printing. You can save changes locally as a PDF file (more ways to reduce printing costs).

and

Short URL – This is too obvious but still a must-have bookmarklet. It lets you create short URLs for any site using bit.ly, a service that is far better than TinyURL as it offers real-time click statistics.

Many of these bookmarklets look like things I’ll be using daily