edublogs

All night LeWeb3 party in Paris' latest club

Netvibes are paying for my entertainment tonight at the pre-launch of Paris' coolest new night-time venue, Paris Bodega. Looks cool from the Flash blurb on the site: dancers, acrobat artists (I presume it's not  got anything to do with Adobe or they're bound to crash... hehe) and hopefully less micro-food than last year.

For those with me at LeWeb3 who haven't work it out from the address yet: it's the same place as last year but with a new name. And the acrobat artists. Should be jolly good fun (until 2am...)

Finally getting around to Flock

It's true. Flock is the best browser I have ever used - for the moment - and has given me some ideas. Chris Messina had shown me a rather unpromising holding page way back in December at Les Blogs, but the way he and Tara had gone on (and on... ;-) about it I knew it would be worth a shot.

There are two things that have made me take a look now, though.

a) I have some time as Mrs Edublogger gets all domesticated and bakes cakes (yes, it's true)

b) I am struggling to get my head around how we are going to let East Lothian teachers do their job and cope with creating and consuming larger amounts of information over the next few years. I've been convinced for a while that central portals are not the way to go, and the current research seems to back this up. But how do you tailor-make a delivery service when the users don't know what a delivery service (RSS) is?

If only we could get everyone on Flock this year then the sting would be taken out the problem. Why?

• RSS: It's a doddle to add pre-defined RSS feeds to your online reader - drag and drop
• Image-sharing: It's a doddle blah, blah, blah - drag and drop
• Blogging: you get the idea - drag, drop and everything from the same page or menu, without every having to go to a blogging application (people always get confused between the front end of a blog (edu.blogs.com, for example) and the backend where all the work goes in. Here, it appears only as if you have a front end - confusion over.
  
• Bookmark sharing: bookmarks are off and online, a concept that most people can get their heads around. It's amazing how many folk this past year have not liked the idea of having all their bookmarks online, in a place they can't see and feel. Flock gives a compromise.
• Adding other elements (files, pics, audio...) to blog posts or someone else's web pages: drag and drop. I've yet to try this out to see and believe it, but I like the idea that they are listening to what people have to say.

I know that some edubloggers have raved about Flock and already gone back to Firefox. Old habits etc, etc. But I'm going to give a prolonged shot at using this bit of kit to see if it makes my life easier. And gives me more time to cook...

Update: Flock also have the best customer service I've seen from a browser.

Blogged with Flock

Ben vs. Mena: A buzz trap conspiracy theory

Just to keep your cockles warm over this festive period, BetterBadNews has come up with a very convincing conspiracy theory on the Ben vs Mena charade: we were all seduced into a buzz trap.

Quote of the newscast: "Why would Mena Trott come to Europe to tell the Europeans how to be more civil with each other when torture is outsourced by the Americans to various secret European countries...?"

On another note, I hope you don't mind signing in to Typekey now to leave a comment. It's quick and easy to do, but all because I've been plagued by various spam on my trackbacks.

In the meantime... Happy Christmas!

Via Chris - thanks!

Shooting from the hip: Peter sums it up

Peter Ford sums up perfectly what Web 2.0 is all about when you're trying to work things out, and how important it is to take words in context. And reminds me that a trip to Brissie is well overdue for some of that "amber nectar":

But the web is different and seems to somehow add more weight to disagreements. However, we should not be afraid of shooting our ideas from the hip, of showing our thinking in progress on the blog as well as our finished masterpieces. This is actually creativity and accountability in action because people can respond to what is written with their own ideas, questions and feedback. We should also not be afraid to robustly defend what we believe or to ask questions of others when we feel we have been wronged. The freedom to do both of these things is what will break us out of the edu-blogging echo chamber and allow us have ultimately productive conversations. Flaming may be something we want to avoid but let's not replace it with a civility that is based on a measured blandness.

Yes, but no, but yes, but... What was that all about?

The 12 hour spat seems over. Is this comment on James' blog an Aussie's way of saying he got it wrong? I'm still confused:

Ewan, I’ve been reading ya because I like what you have to say… this isn’t me, um, jerking on you… I actually liked what you had to say but had pretty much written this by then… and y’know how it is… just a more general light hearted whinge!

Which is, after all, my perogative and I’ll stand by it… not sure I’d take too much notice of accountable, polite Mena though.

So this guy's perogative is to shoot people on his blog and ask questions later?

But I do definitely appreciate that the big boys actually took any notice of blogs being used in education, as peter says in the post linked to above, surprising how little so many people care!

Yeah, and my panel and I helped get 400 more of the Big Boys (and Girls) to care more. Next question!

James Farmer gets stuck in

Self-constructed blog super-über-guru James Farmer got stuck into me today in a pretty poor verbal mashup of facts. He didn't approve of the lineup in the Les Blogs Education Panel. Most of what he's complaining about is what the others said, although through his blog post it looks like it's all me. Bravo on the libel, mate.

What he mosts objects to is my phrasing: "How many blogs are about run by teachers and professors? The answer is a disaster", which he also managed to quote out of context. Talk about accountability in blogging. Well, it has been and is still. In the last five months in Scotland at least we have seen the blogosphere triple/quadruple in education. It wasn't difficult to measure, although now there are edublogs popping up everywhere, most of which have started after talks by me, John, David or my colleagues at LTS.

James, having launched the domain names such as edublogs.org and learnerblogs.org, obviously feels that no-one else should be allowed to talk about blogging, and to hell with the Long Tail while we're at it.

Worse still, he goes off on one, apparently linking clamping down on school blogs with me and my copanelists. If you've ever read my posts you know that I am heavily into authentic, open comment blogging.

In any case, I left a comment on his post which you can all read to follow the discussion, if you can really be bothered.

Podcasté on Shoob: Getting Belgium into blogs

The boys at Shoob podcast me from Les Blogs 2.0 last week and you can listen to me and François, en français, at the Shoob podcast site.

For those non-francophones, it's just me being pure dead enthusiastic about blogging and podcasting in education. And getting an invite to Belgium to convince their education minister to do something about it. Wahey! Another few edublogs on the horizon?

iRiver moments: Mena's got the Trotts

Using the iRiver to record seminars has been highly useful for me and for those who've been able to share them through the eduBlogsPodcasts. Occasionally, though, I manage to mess it up and only catch part of the seminar. In the following case I managed to record only four seconds of material during Mena Trott's speech to the masses at Les Blogs 2.0.

But what a four seconds. This IS the moment where she implodes at the "bullshit" that the BBC's Ben Metcalfe and others have been putting on the backchannel. Great fun these iRivers, and so intelligent to pick up the only interesting thing in Mena's entire speech.

Good to see, though, that Ben has found something else to divert the attention and that, according to Mena, they are best of mates, now. Boo. It was fun while it lasted.

Importantly, it did push the whole thing of accountability onto the agenda. In education it's one of the raison d'être of blogging: to make pupils think about what it is they are writing and whether it stands up. It's just a shame that Mena's speech didn't really stand up to the scrutiny of the backchannel, or she would have made some good points, I'm sure.

Download menatrottlosesit.mp3 and catch that moment again!

The full speech is here in video.

edu.blogs.com: The grumpy teen has painted his room black

After the exhiliration of Les Blogs 2.0 meeting wonderfully enthusiastic people who have made their significant crusts out of blogging and social software, I came back to the UK educational reality of blogging: there's still a long way to go. I changed my template to wintery, moody black (there is a touch of yellow to represent the three hours sunshine we are currently having).

Still, I reckon it's pretty cool having Shel Israel leave a comment on a post about getting into blogging or paying the consequences, considering the purpose of his last book for the business world. Maybe I should write my own version of Naked Conversations for the educational world. It would be great fun to get into student blogs and see what the vast majority of teachers are missing - about them, for them, behind their backs.

In the meantime, I am sounding enthusiastic for eternity in my first Belgian podcast (in French) over at Shoob.

Shel Israel (left) having a Naked Conversation with Microsoft's Robert Scoble

Yahoo Mindset: intelligent searching

At Les Blogs I heard one of the Yahoo CEOs talking about the rather cool Yahoo Mindset. What is does is search for pages. So far so good. But it offers the chance for users to choose if they want more commercial, shopping type results or if they want to get the results for a school project. The latter search means that a search on Harry Potter need not be filled with ads for stuffed puppets, but instead a wealth of information and interactive games.

I hope they get it out of beta soon and this becomes a mainstream searching tool for kids in school.