Fantastic!

What a treat to be recognized as a good commenter by Dr. Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog!

If you would like to recognize someone for their contributions on others' blogs, give them a fantastic commenter badge or design your own.

Thank you, Scott!

technorati tags: blogs edublogs

Feeling the "disconnect" firsthand

Some illuminating comments followed recent posts by Will Richardson (on managing RSS) and Gary Stager (on posting timely comments). These discussions have helped me frame my thinking on best practices for engaged learning in the edublogosphere, specifically, and in learning communities in general.

Richardson calls the new technology "disruptive" in the way it shakes up the process and places so much responsibility back on the learner.

Confession: some days I long to be a passive, mouth-breathing student again!

It's a juggling act between reading my feeds, trying to compose thoughtful and timely responses to others' great ideas, documenting insights and "a-ha's" on my own blog, and managing the demands of a full-time graduate course load at a bricks-and-mortar university.

What is troubling (and ironic) is my "linking" and "lurking" in the blogosphere is a totally self-driven, self-directed effort that runs parallel to my "formal" education within an IT master's program. Maybe I wouldn't be so scattered if these two endeavors intersected more often instead of existing on separate planes.

Seldom, if ever, the twain shall meet.

I am gradually finding ways to integrate the two, such as the independent study I described here in this blog a few days ago. But other than some notable exceptions in my core area where the professors effectively utilized Moodle and TappedIn to stimulate student engagement and raise accountability, my classes have largely mirrored my undergraduate experience nearly (gulp) 20 years ago. Even with universal availability of Blackboard on our campus, this very expensive course management platform is grossly underutilized by most instructors, from what I have witnessed.

In "Wired students need wired approaches," Melanie McBride writes that ". . . today’s students are disengaged because teacher training programs and schools are invested in traditional instructional and curriculum paradigms that are deeply disconnected from a web 2.0 generation."

I am a reasonably confident, self-aware adult learner.

If I am feeling the disconnect, imagine how the "wired" youth in our elementary and secondary schools must feel!

technorati tags: blogs edublogs student engagement instructional technology

The peril of posting ploddingly

Sorry, sometimes I revert to my past life as a freshman English teacher, and I just can't resist a cheap alliteration.

My brain has been occupied these last several days -- with a culminating project for an independent study I undertook this summer, with a new inquiry I am about to begin this semester, and with the onset of a new fall schedule.

I've been quietly ruminating and collecting my thoughts on some issues and subjects (some of which, incidentally, surfaced in my readings of others' blogs).

Consequently, I've been writing, responding, commenting less. It's indeed a balancing act; a vital intellectual life depends on both silent contemplation and active engagement with other thinkers.

But sometimes it seems the prevailing attitude in the blogosphere regarding posts and comments is: "Ready, fire, aim!" What happened to "think time"?

Gary Stager touched on this phenomenon recently in "What I Hate About Blogging, Part I." I gained a number of insights, particularly from the comments that follow his prickly post. (There I go again!)

technorati tags: blogs edublogs

Tracking blog readership

Yesterday I received an email with "computer nerd" in the subject line. It was from a good friend and fellow blog author, who incidentally is also a minister.

Namecalling is hardly an attribute I would ascribe to the open, collaborative venue that is the read/write web, nor, for that matter, is it a behavior I would associate with someone whose sworn mission in life is Christian outreach. But I digress. . . .

Within my friend's email was this question: Can you tell me how to track my readership, who follows my blog through an RSS feed?

A true "nerd" would have known the answer; I did not. What is totally cool and decidedly un-nerdy is I sort of had an idea how to find the answer. (Just a few months ago I wouldn't have had a clue what she was talking about.)

For privacy reasons, I am not sure you can ever really know exactly who is lurking on your blog. I recently read somewhere that "really simple syndication" got its name because it's easy and unintrusive -- you shouldn't have to forsake personally identifiable information just to tune into someone's blog.

Anyone reading this post who can speak knowledgeably on the issue of blogs and privacy, please chime in!

My advice to my friend is to check out these free services: MyBlogLog, Technorati, and FeedBurner. Membership with these sites is free and once you've registered your blog with them, you can start receiving almost instantaneous data on your blog traffic.

MyBlogLog provides a cool widget that allows you to see who is visiting your page, but it only works with visitors who are themselves registered with the MyBlogLog community.

Technorati is a giant blog search engine and a good way to build traffic on your blog if you tag and ping. I don't believe you can track RSS subscribers with it, but once you claim your blog on Technorati, you will know who is linking to your pages. Technorati tracks links and uses them to assign authority ratings and ranks. I currently have an authority of 3 and am ranked 1,803,855, thankyouverymuch!

FeedBurner is a quick registration process, but it takes a while for the service to generate data about your blog. (On the Internet, "a while" means more than one hour.) Once FeedBurner is done doing its thing, you log in, click the "analyze" tab, and see feed stats. I currently don't have any subscribers, so I can't tell you what these stats look like. Of course, that can all change if you click on the handy little widget I just installed to the left. Do it now! You know you want to. . . .

technorati tags: blogs RSS

My new "textbook"

One of my delights as an undergrad was the twice annual visit to the campus bookstore to buy my texts. My fellow English majors probably have similar fond memories: armloads of paperbacks with a few Norton anthologies thrown in for good measure. As a financial aid recipient, my checking account was always fat at the beginning of each new semester, and money seemed to be no object as I piled blue books, spiral-topped notebooks, and highlighters onto the checkout counter along with the semester's readings.

Now, as a graduate student with a kid and a mortgage, the book-buying ritual isn't nearly as fun, but thanks to a recent post at Weblogg-ed, I have a new way of thinking about my required reading for this semester and beyond.

To borrow Will Richardson's metaphor, one of my "textbooks" this fall will be my RSS aggregator.

As described in my previous post, I will soon begin an independent study on best practices for computer-mediated, peer-to-peer mentoring for new and novice teachers. In addition to poring over traditional, "scholarly" resources, I plan to use RSS to channel the best-of-the-best blog posts on the subject. The aggregate is indeed a text to be studied, with the added benefits of being totally topical, customizable, and (the best part) free.

This means tweaking my RSS aggregator to regain some much needed focus. I'm in the process of dropping some feeds (if only temporarily) to make room for others that may be more fruitful.

For example, I've recently added subscriptions to blogs by Christopher D. Sessums and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.

Who/what am I missing?

technorati tags: RSS blogs mentoring research web2.0 professional development

Convergence cabin

I am almost finished reading Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins. I know, I know, it was on everyone's reading list last year, but I am a latecomer to all of this!

The book is an exploration of the rapid change in our media landscape brought about by two competing and hopelessly intertwined forces, what Jenkins calls "the top-down force of corporate convergence and the bottom-up force of grassroots convergence" (p. 169). If you read my earlier post on Dewey, you might recall the phrase: "the times are out of joint."

Anyway, as I am reading this book each night, I am telling my husband Ron, "You really need to read this!" I sense that Jenkins' thesis will have some relevance to Ron's line of work as a director of a major branded network web site.

Well, while I only read about convergence culture, Ron is living it. He just sent me the link to his site's newly launched section, DIY Blog Cabin 2007. While perhaps not as sexy as the American Idol, Survivor, and The Matrix examples presented in Convergence Culture, Blog Cabin truly is a study in media convergence down to the series' tagline, "Watch DIY Network build what you blogged."

Henry Jenkins, take note!

technorati tags: Henry Jenkins media convergence blogs