Just recently, Stephen Downes pointed to an iteresting, long thread on this topic inside the house of Moodle, the forums where Moodlers are trying to get their hands around fitting a blog tool. Take a gander in Blogs, Forums and the Nature of Discussion (you can read by logging in as guest).

It seems like there is a village of people who dwell in tree houses, and spend all their time there. They sometimes see through their binoculars 1 or 2 people who live far away in the caves. The two societies rarely meet, yet they form amazingly concrete opinions on the relative merits (or lack thereof) of the others living styles. How can opinions be so firm based on such little interaction?

Inside the Moodle forums are some utterly star, grand, sweeping proclamations:

Very few bloggers bother to engage in conversation with the people who comment on their original post. They usually just post and move on to another topic without engaging readers in a discussion.

I must admit I don’t really understand all the fuss about blogs. They just seem self indulgent to me. They have very little value (especially educational) compared to the input required to maintain them and they can very quickly become dated and laborious. The only people who tend to read them are the authors themselves.

Another difference between blogs and forums is the time nature. Blogs tend to be very time sensitive. The relevancy of their content usually decreases over time. I’m not going to care in 2 years what you had for dinner on July 13, 2005, nor is a collection of outdated links to news Web sites covering the London bombings going to be of much use to me either. Whereas information in a forum tends to have a more lasting value than the content of blogs.

I mean have you considered the reason nobody but the authors read blogs is because they don’t make for very good reading? I mean, if those people really intended the blog for no one but themselves then why don’t they just open up a document on their own computer and record their thoughts there?… I believe most blogs are pretty much like portfolios in that they aren’t really polished work,

These “facts” and summaries are astounding, and to echo myself earlier, make me wonder if I am really using the same internet.

Frankly the “control and structure” glasses of the people who live in the tree houses of Forums make them draw some odd conclusions about all the bloggers running in and out of their cave complexes in the valley below. The tree folk have never even seen the inside of a cave, yet they can handily dismiss it.

As a primary counter example for the tree folks, just spend a few minutes reading Brian Lamb’s post about accidental discovery of a Live Journal site of students from his University who are trading valuable (to them) bits of information and commentary about student life at UBC. Is that conversational or what? Is it just “self indulgent” and only “outdated news”? Can you really say “nobody is reading” them?

It gets even more interesting as Brian, who has set up one of the most free and open educational wiki sites, finds out these students are proposing to create one outside the university’s reach. (And what a fair and open response he provides to them– he joins their conversation in their space).

Maybe I am singing a broken record, but after all these years, we still have people dismissing blogs as juvenile diaries. They are mistaking the product of blog (the noun, the published thing) form the social process of being in blog space (blog the verb).

Come out of your trees for a while.

Lastly, and I am on my own limb since my Moodle experience is slim to nil, I empathize the complexity of successfully trying to roll a blog tool into / around Moodle. They are weighted down by the CMS approach where everything needs to fit under one big roof. You might want to keep your eyes on a FLOSS project by Teemu Arina in Finland… I’ve been inside and seen a demo of this software, where it takes everything from a blog entry to a discussion board thread to a wiki page as entities than can be mixed into new forms by recombining elements joined by RSS, and user/group control over portions which are public vs private.

So here is a roadmap of a change I set up in about 30 minutes time to rescue some stale links. This approach is something teachers can easily do to populate their own web sites with new web resources for their students, and can be done so efficiently, and without much effort. It fits in to an instructors own discovery process of resources, and boils down to:

(1) Find interesting sites
(2) Bookmark (using browser tool link) to del.icio.us
(3) Tag it with a special identifier
(4) Create a cut and paste Feed to Javascript code
(5) Past to Web page(s)

By repeating 1+2, the pages in (5) are auto updated. It is no great Einsteinian leap, but cannot imagine where there is not a goldrush stampede of faculty using this approach.

So back to my situation. Our web site for the Ocotillo Online Learning Group has pretty much a stock template for all of the internally linked pages in that site. When I set it up, I did so in a manner so that a box of content on the left side navigation bar representing a collection of new web resources, was generated from a single external text file. Without getting too techie, the PHP technology we use for all of our web pages allows me to create a place in all documents that says, “Take all the contents of this external file, and stick it right here”.

The benefit of a PHP include is if I update the little text file, all changes that reference it are updated.

So my original plan was every now and then I would manually update this file, and there would be a “see more” link to a larger set of web site links. The pitfall to this approach is I either get lazy, or run out of time to keep doing all this manual editing. Thus, the links that were listed as “new” were pretty much 2 years old.

So I had a brief flash of light. Or maybe it was just an extra jolt of coffee.

I already do a lot of site bookmarking on my collection of my del.icio.us bookmarks. I could just start tagging stuff I wanted on my OLG site with a tag of… olg in addition to other tags L might add like “teaching”, “code”, “ajax”, “technology”, “socialtech”, etc… in my normal review of web sites, and extra click using the del.icio.us bookmark tool files sites into a special OLG category.

Now a link to this collection is a start, but we can do more. If I copy the RSS feed URL for this tag collection, and then take it over to Feed2JS, I can build a cut an paste JavaScript line of “code” that will generate a simple list of say the ten most recent marked sites.

Just by putting this JavaScript code created by Feed2JS
:

<script language="JavaScript" 
    src="http://feed2js.org/feed2js.php?
    src=http%3A%2F%2Fdel.icio.us%2Frss%2Fcogdog%2Folg&num=10
    &targ=y&css=olg" type="text/javascript">
</script>

<noscript>
<a href="http://feed2js.org/feed2js.php?
src=http%3A%2F%2Fdel.icio.us%2Frss%2Fcogdog%2Folg&num=10&targ=y
&css=olg&html=y">View RSS feed</a>
</noscript>

into a text file named new.inc I can have the dynamic feed of new sites inserted into my web pages (the formatting is controlled by some extra CSS styles, but that is not essential. In all the pages I want this on the sidebar, all I need to have in my HTML code is:

<?php include 'new.inc'?>

I also add to my new.inc file an extra link for “more resources” page that goes to another new page that now uses the same construct, but displays the most recent 20 bookmarked sites, and includes the item descriptions.

Now if all of this sounds complicated, it’s only because I’ve tried to over explain. but think about this- once set up, you can use the Feed2JS code on any number of web pages, be they PHP, ASP, CFM, HTML, home page, Blogger template, Blackbaord/WebCT site… And if you set up tags for say your different classes you are teaching, as you find new resource sites relevant to these classes, you can tag appropriately, and the most recent items will be automatically published to your different course web pages.

It is simple, and elegant, or at least I think so. Being able to update numerous web sites via the basic act of bookmarking and tagging in a collection, and having different subsets of content being “pushed” out as new content to other web sites… well it is just sweet music to me.