Well, shucks, it looks like the folks down at Blackboard central have stumbled on to it! Innovation! Yup, with all the expertise and license bucks piled up down there, they have set up "The Blackboard Weblog" at ... Blogger.com?

http://www.blackboardblog.blogspot.com/

And all those Bbig Bbad Bbroad misspellings down in Bbaltimore are intentional. Bbbbbbbbbloggin'

Have fun with this one, James!

Who knows? That's what makes it interesting. See the details on what Everybody Posting is all about...

Northern Voice Blog Conference

Is it anything different than a garden variety PowerPoint slide show? No, not in terms of content- it is a linear series of bullet point screens, some with hyperlinks.

But is that novel? Yes, because instead of pushing out a 3 Mb PowerPoint by email, it is just a few k to send a URL. Plus it can be updated later. Plus it can be made available to those not in the room and will be there for a long time. Plus it can get comments from others. Can your PowerPoint do that?

But where is the familiar blue background, the cool screen builds, wipe transitions and woosh sounds? No comment.

I just enjoy seeing blogs used for un-intended purposes, and given Steven's content, it is the ideal vehicle to present information about blogs.

In the past few years, blogging has become something of a national pastime, and academics are becoming a core group using blogs for personal and professional reasons. Yet even though many people embrace blogging, many others have no idea what it is or why anyone would do it. In this issue of Lore, we explore the role that blogging plays for academics both in and out of the classroom.

The 13 short essays are a nice mix as they represent some international perspectives. But let's here it for writing teachers- the ones I work with seem to always be among our pioneers in things such as ePortfolios, blended learning, and now blogs.

Amy Earhart makes a connection with the social aspect of blogging and her experiences knitting:

I thought bloggers were nuts. Why would you want to put personal information online? I am a private person and certainly wouldn't want people I don't know reading about my life. And I have to admit that I wondered what the point of an online daily journal might be - pure hubris, perhaps?

Then I rediscovered knitting. I learned to knit as a kid (think 4-H fair), made some ugly slippers, and came to the conclusion that knitting was not cool. Twenty-five years later I glanced at a current knitting magazine and reached the following conclusions: (1) you can get amazing yarns with gorgeous colors and textures; (2) the styles are interesting; and (3) knitting is fun and relaxing. So I started to knit.

The problem is that I live in a small town that has no local yarn store (or LYS in blog-speak). All we have are mega stores that carry the old style of yarn (ugly, squeaky acrylic) that originally made knitting so unappealing. So I started to look for nicer yarns on the Web, where, if you Google "yarns," you get hits for knitting blogs. After a month of fascinating reading, I joined the expanding ranks of knit bloggers.

All this is to say that I have an easy answer to why I knit but a much more complex response to why I blog about knitting. The need to knit is something that makes a lot of sense in an increasingly technological world. After a day spent sitting in front of a computer, I need the tactile touch of yarn and the slow, methodical creative process. I escape to the click-click of needles. Why I knit is simple. But the choice to blog is far more complex, as blogging takes me back to the thing that I am escaping; I reenter the technological world. So why blog? I answer in several ways.

Blogs provide the community that you need to be a successful knitter. In a town with a local yarn store, knitters visit and knit in the shop, asking questions of the patrons and staff. If you don't have that community (or want another community), then you contribute to and read blogs. You ask questions on your blog, put up pictures, read and write comments. Another knitting community exercise is the knit-along. Bloggers choose a project (for example, a poncho) to knit as a virtual group. There is usually a listserv for questions and support, and individuals use their blogs to post tips, concerns, and pictures of the work-in-progress. The knit-along provides motivation, information, and a group of new friends to discuss knitting with when those in your life think you are just daffy for working with wool in the humid Texas weather. Technical issues are quickly answered by the knit-alongers based on their experience with the same project. These groups are particularly helpful when you know no other knitters, as is my situation.

In "I Blog, Therefore I Am",
Angelina Karpovich, University of Wales, Aberystwyth shares:

And of course, as I told my colleague, I have a blog. "A blog?" My colleague was clearly unfamiliar with the concept. "What is that, some kind of a disease?"

Well, it can be quite contagious. Flippancy aside, the blog (or more precisely, online journal) somehow exists separately from my academic Web site and yet perhaps not entirely separately from my academic life. These two instances of my Internet presence are motivated by different impulses and managed according to different conventions. Whereas the latter follows the accepted template of academia in presenting its subject as studious and career-minded (though passably kooky - I do, after all, use the occasional smiley), the former seemingly runs riot with nonstandard English and various forms of triviality - from what I had for dinner to which TV shows I'm particularly enjoying at the moment.

And for a dose of reality for those who think there is too much blog hyper, read "Blogging from the Bottom: A Cautionary Tale" by Eric Mason, University of South Florida:

What I want to caution against here are the ways in which blogging can alter how we graduate and adjunct instructors understand our status in the university and our work as educators.

Graduate and adjunct writing instructors are in no position to blog. Surely, there's little difficulty in finding an online service to host your blog. And there's no shortage of colors, images, and templates to choose from in designing your blog. And I don't simply mean that we are the group most easily disciplined for public statements on our blogs. What I mean is that blogging can give us a sense of security and authority that is too often unlike our actual conditions and possibly contrary to what we value most in our pedagogies. While the following trends are not universal and can be strategically avoided, they represent ways in which the logics embedded in blogging intersect with individual and institutional contexts. I admit I've found it hard to resist some of these trends and offer the following as caution to potential bloggers.

This are just samples-- there are some thoughtful perspectives here, worth sharing with some of those teetering on the edge of the high dive into the blog pool.

A tip of the blog hat to Kairos...

I am going to stay on the story of the Greensboro blogging culture that's coming of age, and of the local newspaper, led by a maverick editor, that's going open source on the rest of the press. I think it's national news...

It will be interesting to watch what happens now. My guess is the story will shortly be in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, NPR, Business Week or similar venue. But I could be wrong. Whether that happens or not, I have plenty to tell the core audience about. This post will be added to, in bits and pieces, so check back if you're interested.

Or Donata Communications' 10 Questions for Ed Cone:

Ed Cone is a newspaper columnist from Greensboro, North Carolina and one of my favorite bloggers. He's understood this blogging thing longer than most, and he's been an inspiration to his community, encouraging others to enter the blogosphere. As a result, Greensboro's blogging community has been the talk of media observers — like Jay Rosen — and many think the community is pioneering the future in terms of local media.

I can't possibly overstate my agreement with this, and I encourage all of my television friends to carefully explore what's taking place in Greensboro. Ed graciously agreed to answer ten questions, and I'm happy to present the interview here.

Yes blogging is going wild in Greensboro, look for the cover stories soon, the book, the TV series, the t-shirt...

It caught my eye for another reason was the mention of the Greensboro 101 site, which is more or less an aggregator of local bloggers. Under the hood of the 101 site, they are using our Feed2JS to power the blogger syndication (click the "eyeballs" on the left side "Blog Directory"). I was pleased since I got some panic emails last week from Roch Smith as a PHP upgrade or some other cosmic force rendered their version of the feed parsing to not work at all. I am guessing he got to the bottom of it, and I appreciate it since my investigation led to discovery of a small bug that would cause problems with Atom feeds.

Check out the blog-i-ness happenings in Greensboro!

The dictionary definition of “blog” is correct, but it says nothing about the network in which the blog participates.

By way of analogy, consider a dictionary definition of a telephone: “an instrument that converts voice and other sound signals into a form that can be transmitted to remote locations and that receives and reconverts waves into sound signals.” That’s fine if you already know what a telephone network is, but the definition doesn’t work on its own.

Just as telephones are meaningful only when connected to the telephone network, so blogs are meaningful only when connected to the blog network. Both are carriers of human communication, but where the telephone network is essentially fixed -- at least for now, until VoIP softens its structure -- the blog network is malleable and is shaped by our use of it. It’s more like a nervous system than a computer network, and for good reason.

We can’t say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.

The blog network is made of people. We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge. Clearly this architecture can help manage the glut of information. More subtly, it can also help ensure that no vital inputs are suppressed because nobody has to rely on a single source. If one of the feeds I monitor doesn’t react to some event in a given domain, another probably will. When they all react, I know it was an especially important event.

The resemblance of this model to the summing of activation potentials in a neural system is more than superficial. Nature knows best.

And this network is no under a dominant corporate thumb or government grip (yet? that we know of?).

Poetic.

So I’m thinking Blogger.com blogs (no comment spam, no setup for me, they own it completely; no trackbacks but c’mon, comment spam is too high a price to pay), a fictional “reality show” project in Flickr (no, I’ve not quite figured that one out yet, but I can just feel that it’d be cool), make something collaboratively in a wiki, maybe contribute something to the Norwegian version of the WikiPedia, and then the standard group website project but using a web-based project management site to experience that kind of group interaction, and hopefully, help the groups to work together better. And no, the university’s CMS won’t do all those things. No single system will.

(Emphasis added). Is there anything radically new about a teacher selecting from a wide range of sources (rather than a "one size fits al" approach) the best resources and methodologies to help her students learn? Isnt this been what good teachers have done for centuries?

This is how the internet game is played by the best, CDB readers. It is pulling together a loosely collection of often free, discrete tools that can do things your bloated, creaky enterprise systems would not consider until the 18th fiscal quarter. It is accepting that the technology may fail (and living with that) or may need to be changed. It is a new technology world order, of chaos, movement, things that go bump in the night... It is how the world operates. It is not for everybody, but the sooner we can move people towards acceptance of this reality, the better.

Get with the game.

I am a college student at Syracuse University. I am writing an article about weblogs. I understand you do a bit of "blogging" yourself. I would love to ask you a few questions about weblogging. Unfortunately, my deadline is tonight by midnight. I'd appreciate your help and eagerly await your response..

what are the benefits of weblogging? i've talked to a handful of colleges that are using current students to write weblogs. Admissions are using the weblogs to attract prospective students. do you think this will become a trend? have you heard anything about this? what do you think are the cons of blogging?

I guess I am not the only person who works up to the deadlines. The best I could do is dash off some quick thoughts likely too late for Courtney's deadline (is there a lesson there, Court?) especially for such broad open questions. How would you reply?

My response follow....

Blogs can do quite a bit more- they can efficiently serve as simple web publishing tools for many sorts of sites, and often it may not be directly clear that a web site pops up that screams I AM A BLOG. For example, I have previously written of some experiments in using a blog as a platform for publishing the Low Threshold Application (LTA) site, and it might be soon ( as soon as we can backload old content), that the new version will be ready for human consumption.

And I came across another good example today... I was searching for some quotes to use in our family holiday letter, and got Googled over to a sub section within the Wisdom Quotes site, a collection of quotes. Something about the structure of the site seemed very familiar, and I could see that individual "entries" were not even time date stamped, but were just one quote, and were assigned categories for topic, and search pages are pre-filled with author names. It sure felt like a MovableType kind of place, which came more obvious in the right side bar of the front page.

I cannot say exactly why, but I do get a bit of a thrill in finding web sites fueled by blogs where it is not directly obvious at first glance. Do you know of others? I was thinking of the series of About.com sites It makes the blog-o-verse more exciting when it is not just "diaries" and makes the platform more acceptable to newbies.

Blogs that do not look like blogs at first click??

For the uninitiated, Feedster provides a google-like interface for searching things found in RSS feeds. It offers tools to store your own set of feeds (like another flavor of Bloglines as a web based RSS reader), services to get updates by email, and likely quite a bit more (it has been a while since I rummaged around Feedster).

Some quick and not so dirty examples of Feedster Blog search results (you gotta love being able to save these as URLs):

Learning Object
Podcast
Social Computing

Probably a little used gem of note that Feedster search results are themselves available as an RSS feed, e.g.:

Learning Objects Feedster Search RSS

a tip of the bloghat to the RSS feed from ResearchBuzz for the link.

The just announced winner of the 2004 Best Personal Blog award at the Netguide Web Awards was the bizgirl blog, advertised with an aluring photo of the "librarian of international mystery". The awards read:

Blogs are all about allowing the mindset and personality of the writer come through.

Bizgirl does this, and more. I enjoyed reading her entries because they are witty and fun and full of personality. It seems a little like a New Zealand version of the Bridget Jones's Diary. The layout and organisation are crisp and easy on the eyes. When you get to the blog, you immediately know why you're there and where to look.

Clever, different, funny. She gets the gold here.

The only hitch is that "Natalie Biz" the author is.... a married man who lives somewhere south of Auckland ( some sort of variation on the JAFFA expression?).

Yes, in the New Zealand Herald story Gorgeous, but this blogger's fiction, we learn:

"I was stoked, completely stoked, to be nominated," he said before hearing of his win.

"It's taken a while, I created Natalie Biz about seven years ago, but she's got a life of her own now.

"I've borrowed a few phrases, like 'woohoo', from women I know, but I still just write as myself." ....

While "Natalie" has outed himself to a few friends, he would prefer to keep his identity quiet to avoid awkward conversations with people who have featured in his storylines - in contrast to most blogs, Bizgirl's antics are almost total fiction.

So what do we get in Natalie's blog? From A Day in the Sun

Josh and I met for a coffee on Saturday morning, having called a truce to some pretty petty mind games that had been going on over the course of the week. He commented favourably on my new World blouse: a white cotton number with short-sleeves, a high neck and festooned with the most fantastic little-yellow-duck print. His praise of my garment choice melted any resentments I may yet have been holding against him. When he asked whether I'd like to head out to Island Bay to check out the primary school fair, my plan A - which had been to go home and write up the rest of my Friday afternoon meeting with Artemis - went out the door.

...

I did, and was then whisked away by Josh. I'm a big one for judging a person's character by their parents, and I was now intrigued enough to wonder what Josh Sr. might be like. I mentioned this to Josh. He laughed, predicted I would love his father, and told me a story about him (sworn to secrecy again, unfortunately - it appears some people are becoming aware of how the blog thing works) that made me suspect his prediction might be right. It has to be remembered that male librarians like Josh are still pretty rare - a bit like male nurses - and that it takes a particular sort of man to want to dedicate himself to a profession the is traditionally seen as feminine one. What makes them tick? Is it in the genes? I am intent on finding out. Josh is my test subject.

Nothing is what it seems out there folks!

In about 10 hours I am on my way to Auckland, New Zealand for 3 weeks of invited workshops primarily at my hosts at UNITEC with other visits scheduled to Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Waikato Institute of Technology, and Manukau Institute of Technology. Some of this has been continued communication with colleagues I met during my sabbatical visit in 2000.

Time to synchronize watches, either by my personal World Clock or this quick hack effort:

Phoenix Time: " . date("M d Y, h:i a", $now) . "
Auckland Time " . date("M d Y, h:i a", $now + 20 * 3600); ?>

With this time there, I shall not be actively blogging here, but will be on my inverted CogDogBlog located on a UNITEC server, or the CogDog(kiwi)Blog. I am setting up an embedded feed from my NZ blog to keep things connected here at home...

The long scrolling title for today's pre-conference Seminar was "Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies" where we initially planned to focus on using RSS, Trackback, etc to connect learning objects (someone done before). It has been under wraps because, well it was infested with typos and half baked ideas, but now we release the presentation in its wiki-form:

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/wiki?ObjectsEducause04

We spun it around recently to more of a take on the Rip Mix. Feed concept for collecting information from numerous sources (via RSS?), using social filtering tools or RSS to "mix" them into new forms, and then Feed the, back as new content or re-syndicated content.

It began with some playful fun at the mysterious, mythincal, PeskyObjects where we shared some of our frustrations with the mammoth Learning Object Repository projects (heads were nodding).

Into the mix, we had participants find objects with RSS, load them in shared Bloglines accounts, and blog their results, demo-ed using Feed2JS to convert RSS to usable output in any web page, A quick overview of Trackback and how it (should) work in the MLX. But the more exciting part was introducing them to the tagging phenomena of social bookmarking with del.icio.us
and then the similar approach for tagging photos in flickr (and adding hotspots to images).

It was utterly ambitious, but we had an eager group, and much to our amazement, we covered it all. Check out a few snapshots in a flickr set.

One of our fun elements was that we randomly had assigned them to two different "teams" where each team could post to a different MovableType weblog, a bloglines account, a del.icio.us account, and a flickr account. Being from different parts of the Northern Hemisphere, one group's blog hosted at UBC as the Canadian "Objects, Eh?" team while the other blog, hosted at Maricopa, was the Arizona Western theme of "Howdy Objects". All of the above mentioned tools are incestuously RSS fed back to the blogs.

To make it even more freaky, we "dressed" up in our respective uniforms.

You can peek at the outcomes of what people did via:

Weblogs

• http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/objects/
• http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/objects/

Shared Feeds (Bloglines)

• http://www.bloglines.com/public/objectseh
• http://www.bloglines.com/public/howdyobjects

Shared Bookmarks (del.icio.us)

• http://del.icio.us/objectseh
• http://del.icio.us/howdyobjects
• Tagged for "learningobject" http://del.icio.us/tag/learningobject/

Shared Photos and "Objects" (Flickr)

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/objectseh
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/howdyobjects
• EDUCAUSE04 Flickr Group http://www.flickr.com/groups/educause04/
• Tagged for "educause04" http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/educause04/

If anything, we exposed people to some new tools to consider. There is much more appreciation for the role and potential of RSS for channeling information, but it is still an on the edge technology for many out there, even in the IT basecamps.

Well, it was fun, but draining. Now I can relax for the rest of the conference, or cynically blog from the back of the room.

But for being the heavy weight, they are keeping RSS Feeds a hidden gem only known to those that care to put on their geek headlamps and peer inside the cave. What do I mean?

By default, all Blogger blogs automatically generate RSS. You do not even know it is happening. But here is the kicker... the default publishing templates all lack the tiny bit of HTML that would make them visible. The templates lack a link to the RSS Feeds that are published anyhow.

Thousands of Feeds lie there totally alone, shivering in the cold.

For example, Stephen Downes recently noted today Scot Aldred's new e-learning blog. Dude, where's my feed? It is not to be linked anywhere because of this ommission in their template.

But here is the secret trick-- just tack on atom.xml to any Blogger hosted site, and you get the feed.

So while Scot's blog sits visibly at http://e-learning-engagement.blogspot.com/, you can get the feed at http://e-learning-engagement.blogspot.com/atom.xml! They even render the XML so it is screen readable, rather than the typical stream of ugly XML code.

Why is this happening? Is RSS that scary? Is it being kept only for the chosen few who know where to look? Why is Blogger hiding the Feeds? Perspiring minds want to know!

Blogger, let the Feeds out!