Moving at the Speed of Creativity

In the fall of 2005, I was surprised when leaders of the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) decided not to publish one of the articles I’d submitted for their quarterly magazine, The TechEdge. I’d faithfully contributed to and published in the TechEdge since 1996-97, and this was the first time I’d ever been told, “No. We don’t want to publish your article.” It wasn’t a case where TCEA didn’t want me to write for them anymore, instead they objected to the SPECIFIC ideas in a specific article. I had originally titled the article, “Blogging the Conference,” and renamed it when I submitted it as “Blogging TCEA 2006: Create, Share & Access.”

I blogged about this on September 25, 2005, in the post, “Disruptive Technology Censorship?” Certainly TCEA had and has editorial rights to determine what ideas they do and do not share in their various publications. The interesting thing in this context was that my article was apparently TOO POTENTIALLY DISRUPTIVE for the organization. What I proposed was conference attendees blogging the conference, sharing Flickr photos, and inviting discussion/conversations about sessions on their own blogs/websites outside the control and purview of TCEA leaders and conference organizers. In that 2005 post I reflected:

I do not view this situation as upsetting, rather, I find it to be quite instructive. The disintermediation of traditional publishing that I discuss in the article is naturally a disruptive phenomenon, I think. I am not going to rush to conclusions, we’ll see how this situation continues to develop, but my perception at this point is along the lines of Virginia Postrel’s analysis in her book, ““The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.”. Traditional, established organizations often play the part of “statists” rather than “dynamists” in opposing change, or at least being reluctant to embrace it.

That may be the case here. If so, it is not necessarily a bad thing, more an expected thing. I would expect TCEA to come around eventually. Blogging, according to my own crystal ball, is here to stay, and publication methods like blog tagging that allow users to “blog a conference” are going to move forward with or without formal organizational support.

With NECC 2009 just around the corner and a wealth of folks planning to document and share their learning from the conference with the entire world, not only via blogs and Flickr but also sites like Ustream and CoverItLive, I was reminded of this article I wrote in 2005. Recent events in Iran and educational blogger responses to those events also reminded me of this article.

Until today, my article “Blogging TCEA 2006: Create, Share & Access” had not been shared publicly on the open web. I’d planned to seek an alternative print publisher for it, but never made the time to do so. Today I’ve both republished it here on this blog post, and also added it to my TechEdge article archive on my older site, “Tools for the TEKS: Integrating Technology in the Classroom.” These ideas may not seem nearly as radical today, given the explosion in social media use we’ve seen and continue to witness, but they certainly were challenging in September of 2005 for TCEA leaders. Many organizational leaders, I’d assert, still have problems / issues with this type of organic, distributed content creation and sharing. We’ve come a long way in three years, but we still have a long way to go.

Here’s the article!

Blogging TCEA 2006: Create, Share & Access

by Wesley A. Fryer
www.wesfryer.com
September 2005

This article was not published by TCEA. Please see this Septebmer 2005 post for more background.

The annual conference of the Texas Computer Education Association (www.tcea.org) is one of the largest gatherings in the US of teachers interested in more effectively utilizing technology in their classrooms. This year, I invite you to help make the conference even better by joining a volunteer crew of text and photo bloggers that will document the event better than ever.

The advent of web technologies like text blogs (www.edublogs.org), photo blogs like Flickr (www.flickr.com),  and tagging/search tools like Technorati (www.technorati.com) are revolutionizing the way people create, share and access real-time content. Rather than wait weeks or perhaps months for a conference CD to be released containing presenter handouts and media attachments (that may have been created and submitted months before the actual conference), read/write web tools like those discussed in this article permit anyone to create, share, and access multimedia content created during and after a conference immediately.

Translated, this means that during the TCEA 2006 conference, you will be able to access real-time critiques and highlights of presentations, comments about vendor offerings, photos from the vendor fair or presentation rooms, podcasts, and anything else posted to the Internet with a shared “tag.” A post’s “tag” is like a keyword label.  In this case, the key that will let you into this free information exchange is the tag “tcea2006.” To access any web content posted with this “tag,” you can point your web browser to the following Technorati tag web address:

http://www.technorati.com/search/tcea2006

I would recommend that as an organization, TCEA officially embrace this concept by posting a link to this dynamic Technorati search on its homepage before, during and after the conference. Whether or not this is officially sanctioned, I invite you to join in as a publisher as well as content consumer. Here is how it works.

AN EXAMPLE: THE WEBZINE2005 CONFERENCE

An excellent example of a recent conference that put into practice these techniques of distributed, organic content publishing and organized access was the Webzine2005 conference in San Francisco September 24 and 25, 2005. The official conference website (http://webzine2005.com) includes links to a multitude of resources, including some created and literally built by the conference attendees themselves. According to the website, “WEBZINE is a real world, face-to-face celebration of independent publishing on the Internet.” Not a surprise a creative gathering like this would model cutting edge publishing techniques for others to study and possibly emulate.

The Webzine2005 conference Wiki (http://webzine.jot.com) is a dynamic website anyone can log into and either create new webpages on or edit information on existing pages. This works like the free WikiPedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), except it is driven by a commercial application wiki service (www.jot.com) rather than free, open-source Wiki software (www.mediawiki.org).

In the upper left corner of the Webzine2005 conference Wiki, there is a link to “Technorati tag: webzine2005.” This actual hyperlink is www.technorati.com/search/webzine2005 - an address which as of this writing, contained over 75 different posts related to the conference and its presentations.

This model of content publication is not only dynamic, innovative and exciting, but revolutionary as well. Why? It is revolutionary because gatekeepers of content control are completely excluded from this organic publication process. In business economics, this is referred to as “disintermediation.” On this subject, WikiPedia authors observe:

… disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: “cutting out the middleman”. Instead of going through traditional distribution channels, which had some type of intermediate (such as a distributor, wholesaler, broker, or agent), companies may now deal with every customer directly, for example via the Internet. One important factor is a drop in the cost of servicing customers directly.[1]

This article could be renamed “Disintermediating TCEA 2006,” but that title might scare off many potential readers! The idea, however, is relatively simple: direct publishing power to conference attendees, with access rights granted to a global audience. Creative, dynamic, and powerful. And also free, once you have access to the Internet.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

Participating as an information consumer in this TCEA 2006 documentary blogfest is easy. Simply point any web browser to the following address:

http://www.technorati.com/search/tcea2006

As the conference draws nearer and actually begins, increasing numbers of posts tagged as “tcea2006” should appear in the dynamic search results of this web link.

My challenge to each attendee of TCEA 2006, however, is to not merely participate in this blogfest as an information CONSUMER, but also as an information PRODUCER. This models a key contention I have for digital literacy acquisition in the twenty-first century. Our students must not merely be consumers of digital content, but also producers of their own original multimedia content. Experience is the best teacher. Here is how you can get involved.

STEP 1: Set up a free blog that supports tagging

A growing variety of options exist for creating a weblog. To blog TCEA 2006, I recommend you setup (if you have not already) a blog that supports “tagging.” One of the best blog software options is WordPress (www.wordpress.org), an open source software tool offering a wide variety of customizability options for users. Edublogs (www.edublogs.org) is a free service for educators offering hosted wordpress blogs. Visit their website to create a free Wordpress blog.

Blogger (www.blogger.com) is also a popular free blogging service, but currently does not support blog post categories (a straightforward way to organize your blog entries) or an easy way to create new tags other than modifying your Blogger template, which can seem a bit daunting (http://help.blogger.com/default/bin/answer.py?answer=120&topic=39). For those reasons, I recommend setting up a WordPress blog with Edublogs instead of Blogger. It is free, straightforward, and effective for this and other blogging purposes.

STEP 2: Create a “tcea2006” blog category

Technorati (www.technorati.com) treats blog categories and tags as the same thing. Technically speaking, they are not equivalent, but for our purposes, they will function the same. If you are an experienced Wordpress blogger (or become one in the future) you may consider installing a free plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior (www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/) and use actual “tags” rather than or in addition to categories for your blog posts. That, however, is an advanced topic we will not address further here.

When you login to your Wordpress blog with your username and password, you will be able to click a “manage” link, and then select “categories.” After making those menu choices, click to create a new blog category titled “tcea2006”. Make sure you do NOT insert a space in this category. This is the category you will select and use for each of your TCEA 2006 conference blog posts.

The last administrative configuration change is to make sure the Technorati website is notified as soon as you post new content to your blog. In WordPress, click on “options” and then the “writing” menu. At the bottom, under “update services,” make sure you already have the web address for Technorati (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping) and Ping-o-matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com) added. If they are not, add them so blog tracking services will be notified as soon as your blog is updated.

STEP 3: Start blogging

From any computer connected to the Internet: at the conference, your hotel room, or anywhere else, log onto your blog website using your administrative username and password, and post new content to the blogosphere. If you have your own laptop, you may consider using a software tool like Ecto (http://ecto.kung-foo.tv) to post content even faster, without logging in through a webpage.

I recommend you post recommended web links you learn about at the conference, information from great presentation sessions you attend, reflections about the conference keynote speakers’ ideas, links to software and hardware that catch your fancy on the vendor floor, and anything else worth sharing with others from the conference.

If you are using blog software that does not support tags or categories, you can manually tag a post by adding the following code to it:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/tcea2006″ rel=”tag”>tcea2006</a>

There are many benefits to your participation in the TCEA 2006 blogfest.

1. Participation is free!

2. The process of blogging at the conference will enhance your own retention and ability to remember what you have learned.

3. Your posts may help other people locate great resources they did not personally encounter but can use in their classrooms when they return home following the conference.

STEP 4: Post TCEA 2006 Photos to Flickr

To really get into the experience of sharing your TCEA 2006 experience, create (if you don’t already have one) a free Flickr account by visiting www.flickr.com. Flickr is a website that allows members (free account holders as well as “pro” account members) to post photos and “tag” them with specific words.

Using your digital camera or picture phone, take pictures at TCEA 2006 and upload them to your Flickr account. It is possible to configure your Flickr account to specify an email address (which you will want to keep private from others) that can be used to directly web-post photos from the conference to your Flickr account. These photos can even be automatically tagged “tcea2006” so you do not have to manually tag them using a web browser later. For more information about how to do this, visit www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail after creating your Flickr account. If your photos are not set to automatically be tagged, manually tag each one “tcea2006” (again WITHOUT a space) so your photos will be indexed in the Technorati search for TCEA 2006 web resources.

STEP 5: Post TCEA 2006 website recommendations to del.icio.us

Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is a popular “social bookmark” website. It not only allows users to post and share websites they want to remember and recommend to others, which include a short sentence about the site, but also allow users to “socially” link to other saved websites posted by others with the same “tag” or category.

The process for posting website recommendations to del.icio.us is the same as previously described, except TCEA 2006 conference attendees will need to register for a free del.icio.us account and then tag their posts “tcea2006.”

For more tips about tagging and Technorati, refer to www.technorati.com/help/tags.html.

HAPPY POSTING!

We live in a rapidly changing informational environment, where anyone has the potential to “publish at will” content that can include text, images, sound files, and even video. For those with ideas to share and stories to tell, there has never been a more exciting day to be alive. Join us as a creative content publisher at TCEA 2006! See you online, and hopefully at the conference!

Wesley Fryer is an educator, digital storyteller, and creative podcaster. Catch up on his latest thoughts at www.speedofcreativity.org.

Great quotation tonight from Canadian professor David Humphrey:

…let it be said that if you don’t blog it, it’s not happening. For the web to know about your work, you have to tell it… the web isn’t something you use or something you read; it’s something you create. You become a part of it by deciding to do so, and when you do, no one will argue with you about whether you belong.

Via Ryan Paul’s article for Ars Technica, “Academic source code dust-up symptom of CS education ills.” The referenced case of a San Jose State University student who won his case to be able to post his computer science code online, contravening the threat of his professor to be given a failing grade for doing so, is worth further investigation both via Ryan’s article and Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing post, “Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course.” Cory makes a strong case for not only students blogging but also creating online portfolios of work, writing:

The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.

In a different context, again we see the case for non-traditional assignments, tasks which require real engagement, and potentially a new litmus test for the value of a course project: If a student posts the project result to his/her blog, will the post add value to the googlable “digital sum of human knowledge” represented by the Internet? If so, what is the value add? If there isn’t a value add, could an alternative assignment be conceived which could have this “value add?”

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, education

I’m live blogging Tammy Worcester’s keynote at Oklahoma City Public School’s Tech Day today! The title of her keynote is, “Beyond Copy and Paste: Building Integrated Technology Projects.” We’re starting NOW!

This evening reading one of Chris Pirillo’s old posts, I noticed in his sidebar links for “My Profiles” he includes a link for “Blog Mentions” which includes code for a Google Blog Search for his site:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&partner=wordpress&q=link:http://chris.pirillo.com/

I’m not lacking digital reading material these days, thanks in large part to the wonderful educational bloggers to whom I subscribe in Google Reader, but I am always on the lookout for ways to catch conversations and connections which point back to something I’ve written in the past. Looking at the code Chris used for this link, it was easy to customize this for my own blog by simply replacing the last link in the URL:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&partner=wordpress&q=link:http://www.speedofcreativity.org/

After visiting this Google Blog Search page, I copied the RSS link for this canned search:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&q=link:http://www.speedofcreativity.org/&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

I made one adjustment to this link, however, before subscribing to it in Google Reader. I changed the number of item results in the search query from 10 to 50:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&q=link:http://www.speedofcreativity.org/&ie=utf-8&num=50&output=rss

Then I subscribed in Google Reader, and added the feed to my “personal” category. I don’t read posts in that category every day, but this does provide a way to find other blog posts which link to my own blog that I might not otherwise notice. Examples I discovered tonight include Clif Mim’s Professional Development Meme 2009 from May 23rd, and Felix Serrano’s post “Un portátil en cada pupitre.” I do read a bit of Spanish, but since my translation skills are far slower than Yahoo Babel Fish I used its free translation functionality to generate an English version of Felix’s post.

In that post, Felix addresses a recent proposal by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister of Spain, who announced a bold plan to support 1:1 computing. Felix is a telecommunications engineer in Spain, according to his LinkedIn profile, “Coordinador de Sistemas y Aplicaciones at OEPM.” Again thanks to Yahoo! Babel Fish, I was able to glean the gist of Prime Minister Zapatero’s proposal: Government-provided laptops for all students in grade five through the end of secondary school.

Thanks to both Google Blog Search and Yahoo! Babel Fish, I composed this reply to Felix’s post, in English:

Thanks for your quotation of my blog post on ISTEconnects. I want to clarify several things, however, because I think you are attributing those words to me instead of to Dr. Clayton Christensen and his co-authors, and I think you also may be taking them out of context. That quotation is from:

From Christensen, Horn & Johnson. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. McGraw Hill. 2008. Pages 72-73.

The context of that quotation is NOT classrooms in which 1:1 computing is a reality. If I understand the proposal of Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero correctly, he is wanting students in grades five through the end of secondary school to be provided with a laptop computer. Christensen and his co-authors are not refuting, in the passage I quoted and you cited, the transformative potential of 1:1 computing projects. Rather, they are observing (and echoing Dr. Larry Cuban on this) that the ways MOST U.S. schools have purchased computer technology in the past, outfitting labs and providing desktop computers for teachers, have NOT had a transformative effect on teaching and learning.

I heartily support 1:1 learning initiatives, but am quick to point out (along with many others) that “transformation” requires far more than simply hardware in the hands of all learners. The transformation of the teaching and learning environment should be the goal and at the heart of the entire learning initiative. For some insightful, recent academic research on the factors that CAN and HAVE contributed to transformative change in 1:1 schools, I commend to you the July 2008 TCER report “Third-Year (2006-07) Traits of Higher Technology Immersion Schools and Teachers” which focuses on the four middle schools in the Texas Immersion Pilot Project which most fully implemented the 1:1 initiative and saw the best results. This is available on:

http://www.tcer.org/research/etxtip/documents/y3_etxtip_qual.pdf

…and in Spanish:

Gracias por su cita de mi poste del blog en ISTEconnects. Quiero aclarar varias cosas, sin embargo, porque pienso usted está atribuyendo esas palabras a mí en vez al Dr. Clayton Christensen y sus co-autores, y pienso que usted también puede sacarlas fuera de contexto. Esa cita es de: De Christensen, & del cuerno; Johnson. Clase de interrupción: Cómo la innovación quebrantadora cambiará la manera el mundo aprende. Colina del McGraw. 2008. Pagina 72-73.

El contexto de esa cita no es las salas de clase en las cuales el 1:1 que computa es una realidad. Si entiendo la oferta del primer ministro español Zapatero correctamente, él quisiera que proporcionaran los estudiantes en los grados cinco a través del extremo de la escuela secundaria un ordenador portátil. Christensen y sus co-autores no están refutando, en el paso que coticé y usted citó, el potencial transformativo del 1:1 que computaba proyectos. Algo, están observando (y el Dr. Larry cuban el repetir en esto) que las maneras LA MAYORÍA de las escuelas de los E.E.U.U. han comprado la informática en el pasado, equipando laboratorios y proporcionando las computadoras de escritorio para los profesores, no han tenido un efecto transformativo sobre la enseñanza y el aprendizaje

Apoyo caluroso el 1:1 que aprende iniciativas, pero la aprisa para precisar (junto con muchos otras) ese ” transformation” requiere lejos más que simplemente el hardware en las manos de todos los principiantes. La transformación del ambiente de la enseñanza y de aprendizaje debe ser la meta y en el corazón de la iniciativa de aprendizaje entera. Para una cierta investigación académica profunda, reciente sobre los factores que PUEDEN y haber contribuido al cambio transformativo en escuelas del 1:1, elogio a usted el ” del informe del julio de 2008 TCER; (2006-07) rasgos de tercer año de las escuelas y de los profesores de la inmersión de una tecnología más alta” que se centra en las cuatro escuelas secundarias en el proyecto piloto de la inmersión de Tejas que mejor ejecutó la iniciativa del 1:1 y consideró los mejores resultados. Esto está disponible prendido:

http://www.tcer.org/research/etxtip/documents/y3_etxtip_qual.pdf

I know that translation is not perfect, but it is both better and faster than I could do this evening in the time I devoted to reading and responding to this post.

Google Blog Search and Yahoo! Babel Fish are POWERFUL tools for learning, collaboration, and dialog. We need to be using these with students in our classrooms!

Clif, I’ll work on a reply to your PD Meme in the week ahead!

Technorati Tags:
1to1, blog, education, laptop, track, spanish, english, translate, yahoo, yahoo!, babel, fish, search, spain

Following the lead of Chris Duke this evening, I created an account as a publisher on Amazon’s Kindle Publishing for Blogs website and submitted “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” as an available blog.

After submitting all the requisite details, I was informed:

Your blog will be available on the Kindle Store in 48-72 hours.

According to Chris, Amazon will evaluate my blog and then determine what price should be charged for Kindle access. I have some real reservations about this, since my blog content is available FREE and it seems wrong for Amazon to charge Kindle owners to access it, even if they are going to pass along a portion of the income to me. I think the Kindle should have a Google Reader option, so anyone can read their RSS feeds just as they would on a laptop computer, iPhone, or other wireless computing device.

I went ahead and submitted my blog to Amazon, despite these reservations, because I’m interested in learning about the process and I’m certainly not going to turn down money people are willing to give me for blogging at this point. (Recognizing that there are not any conflicts of interest here: I’m not agreeing to promote Amazon’s products, for instance, as a result of this “deal.”) I’m also very interested in being a relevant and accessible information resource in our attention economy, so it makes sense to make my blog available to Kindle owners.

I’m planning to purchase my wife a Kindle DX (version 2) for her birthday this summer, and am looking forward to learning more about the Kindle via her experiences. I don’t think I’ll recommend she pays to read my own blog on her Kindle, however.

I think Amazon should provide an option for blog publishers to make their content FREELY available on the Kindle. Perhaps Amazon will.

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, publish, amazon, kindle, monetize, mobile, mobility

I setup a new Wordpress blog today for a writing project, and used the following plug-ins. My somewhat out-of-date list of Wordpress plug-ins I’m using here “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” is available on my about page.

AddThis
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/addthis/

Feedburner Plugin
http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78483

No Revisions
http://www.hostscope.com/wordpress-plugins/norevisions-wordpress-plugin/

PhotoDropper
http://www.photodropper.com/wordpress-plugin/

PodPress
http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/

ReCaptcha
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/

Riffly audio video comments
http://riffly.com/get

Subscribe to Comments
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

Wordpress Mobile
http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/

wpcache
http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/

In hunting around for a new simple, Wordpress theme, I stumbled onto Barthelme, which was created by Scott Wallick. Scott is also the author of the veryplaintxt theme, used by Doug Noon. This string of discoveries reminds me of a quotation shared today by Doug Johnson:

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. Franklin P. Adams US journalist (1881 - 1960)

Between Twitter and Google Reader, it’s amazing where incidental learning can lead.

Technorati Tags:
wordpress, plugins

Friday’s CNN article, “Army hopes interactive videos make smarter soldiers,” could be more aptly titled, “Army using interactive games to teach problem solving to new recruits.” These were the sentences which caught my attention in the article, and suggested the US Army is proactively addressing social networking challenges:

…In the 21st century, the Army was sending younger soldiers into an arena they had little cultural experience in, and at the same time, new social networking sites were poised to broadcast their mistakes to the world…. Today, a third of the men and women the Army has deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan are between the ages of 20 and 24, and Custer believes the military has now entered the age of the “strategic private” — a young soldier reared on video games. And because of social networking, that private is now armed with the ability to severely cripple a mission and spark the kinds of reactions that the world saw after the Quran shooting.

Unfortunately, despite these accurate observations, this article does not explain how the Army is addressing the social networking challenges posed by soldiers’ access to blogs and social networking sites. It basically explains that highly-realistic video game simulations are used to help soldiers learn problem solving skills applicable to a Middle-Eastern combat zone. No mention is made, however, of Army policies or training specific to social web tools. I thought it was interesting as well as disappointing that this CNN author (Suzanne Simons) raised the important issue of the Army addressing social networking dangers and propriety issues, but did not explain how its leaders are addressing them.

My impression is that mil-blogging, or blogging by military members, has been significantly curtailed in the past few years by military authorities, especially from members serving in combat zones. Two years ago, in April/May of 2007, the US Army published new directives which required soldiers to get their commander’s approval before they posted ANYTHING to a blog. See my March 2007 podcast, “Powerful and Meaningful Connections from Blogging International Students, MilBloggers, and Others (An interview with Angie Fryer)” for more background on mil-blogging. I’m not entirely sure how the military’s policy (or policies) on blogging have changed since 2007, but I’d like to know.

The May 9, 2009, article for Stars and Stripes, “Operation Serve and Tell: Servicemembers encouraged to blog,” suggests that mil-blogging is now being encouraged. Author Mark Abramson writes:

He [Troy Seward, a first sergeant in the New York Army National Guard] describes one blog he runs with other Afghanistan veterans as a way to give troops headed there a resource to learn about what the country and culture is like and other valuable tidbits to help them adjust.

Seward pointed out that several higher-ups, including generals, have started blogs, which junior officers and enlisted troops have noticed and view as a sign that it is OK for them to blog what’s on their minds.

“We are a society of freedom of speech, and soldiers have an opinion. I think [blogging] gives soldiers a chance to express their opinion,” Seward said.

Noah Shachtman’s May 13, 2009, post for Wired, “Ex-Air Force Chief: Recruit Bloggers to Wage Afghan Info War” explains Michael Wynne’s opinion that military members SHOULD be encouraged to blog.

Shachtman writes:

Former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne thinks the best solution may be to let the troops themselves document the story. “We need to make sure we capture the news cycle by providing our troops with something like a combat blogger,” Wynne tells Danger Room.

But that means changing the Defense Department’s often-schizophrenic approach to bloggers in uniform. Within the armed services, there’s a growing recognition that average soldiers are the most trusted voices the military has. But leaders are squeamish about letting their troops publish online. The result: Army secrecy regulations, read literally, make it next-to-impossible for average soldiers to blog — while leading generals, deployed to war zones, are keeping online journals of their own.

I think Michael Wynne is right to advocate for a proactive approach to mil-blogging. While operational security must be maintained, the power and impact of the social web on military affairs and international perceptions of not only the U.S. military but the United States more generally around the world is undeniable. The WikiPedia article for “Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse” provides plenty of evidence, if you’re in doubt about this. Those actions by U.S. military members were, in my view, as damaging to the national security, international image, and foreign political efficacy of the United States as the acts of convicted traitors like Aldrich Ames and Jonathan Pollard. Of course it is not simply horrific that the criminal, illegal, and immoral acts perpetrated by military members at Abu Ghraib and other facilities were photographed– the fact that they took place at all, and were permitted to take place, is a travesty. One positive thing I can note on this subject is that the US military has acted to bring those responsible to justice, and is keeping prisons/detention facilities in Iraq open for scrutiny by outside organizations. The same cannot be said for Iraqi detention facilities, unfortunately. (I searched to try and find a link to the article I read on this last week, but unfortunately I’m not finding it.)

Directly related to that subject, last week President Obama decided to NOT release additional photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse at the hands of U.S. captors:

President Barack Obama has reversed a decision to release photos showing abuse of “war on terror” detainees, saying he feared it would cause a backlash against US troops abroad… Obama said issuing the photos, which were used as evidence in criminal investigations of US soldiers accused of abusing detainees during George W. Bush’s administration, would “inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in greater danger” without shedding any new light on past abuses. “The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefits to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” he told reporters.

In this climate, where social web tools have been and will continue to be used to shape and influence public opinion about a wide range of topics, I think Michael Wynne’s view of supporting proactive military use of blogs and other social media tools is on target. He’s essentially making a case for military storychasers. Will such a proactive view take hold in the military and in our current U.S. administration? I’m not sure. Whether it does or not, however, I commend Wynne for making the suggestion.

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blog, blogging, military, milblog, wynne, proactive, policy, socialmedia, prisoner, abuse, justice

I left the following as a comment today on the ISTEconnects blog post, “ISTEConnects to Attend WordCamp on Your Behalf ~ We Want your Questions!” This was in response to Ann Grub’s question, “Do you think middle school students should blog? Why or why not?”

I definitely think middle school students should be blogging, as well as elementary and high school students. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, students need to practice their writing skills regularly, and blogging is an excellent way to do this. We get better at things we practice regularly. It is common for kids to be required to read regularly during and after school, but regular writing assignments are less common. Blogging provides a way to both encourage and empower students students to write regularly.

The second main reason I’d argue students (including middle school students) should be blogging is so they can learn how to properly and responsibly use hyperlinked writing. Hyperlinks are one of the foundational technologies of the Internet. Students use hyperlinks by clicking on them, but far fewer create their own hyperlinks as part of their class assignments. Certainly the prevalence of social networking platforms has increased opportunities for students to use hyperlinks in their writing, but voluntary student use of social networking platforms does not necessarily result in students learning about hyperlinking and responsible use of hyperlinks.

Students should be encouraged to blog responsibly so they can discover their own voice. This is not the case for everyone, but some students are able to really discover their own voice via writing. The encouragement and positive feedback which young writers can receive through writing on blogs and other social websites can play an important role in defining identity for a young person. Students can and do often discover the power of their words, and the importance of sharing thoughts as well as ideas.

I commend the Support Blogging Wiki to you for additional resources related to student blogging, including lots of great links to classroom blogs where you can find examples of student work.

I’d add to this answer the importance of helping students take proactive control over their “digital footprints” and the importance of teaching digital citizenship at school. By regularly writing on a blog and discussing the issues which arise as a result of interactions there, students as well as teachers can learn a wealth of things related to digital citizenship on an ongoing basis.

Technorati Tags:
education, school, blog, blogging, student

The title of this post may suggest these procedures might not be something you’ll discuss over the dinner table tonight, unless your family is a LOT geekier than mine. None the less, it’s possible you might find a wonderful use for Yahoo Pipes in the weeks ahead as I’ve done recently, and this post could help in that process. Here’s the situation.

I read Alan Levine’s post last month, “Smokin Yahoo Pipes” with interest. I’ve dabbled a bit with Yahoo Pipes in the past, but until today hadn’t created anything I was particularly proud of or found exceptionally useful.

Several months ago I started using Friendfeed as a way to create a more comprehensive “bread crumb trail” of my online activities. Friendfeed provides:

…an instant, customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from photos to interesting links and videos to messages just for you. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you’ve shared.

In order for this to work and be particularly interesting/helpful, however, it’s necessary to setup your Friendfeed account to include RSS content from different websites you use, share, and post to. The following screenshot highlights the nine different websites which I’m currently sharing via Friendfeed. I actually “claim” more websites than this online, but these are the primary sites I’m updating fairly often.

You’ll notice one of the included sites is Yahoo Pipes. Since I’m now posting several times per week to the NECC 2009 blog ISTEconnects, I want to include my own posts in my FriendFeed stream. The site provides an overall feed of full posts, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to get Wordpress to provide a feed which ONLY includes posts by a particular user. (In this case, me!)

Enter Yahoo Pipes.

With Yahoo Pipes, I was able to build (in literally two minutes) a RSS feed which took the overall Wordpress posts feed from ISTEconnects and cut out all the posts which do not include my last name. The blog is configured now to include the author’s last name in the content, so this was an easy way to filter the feed. Whoa la! Yahoo Pipes delivers the goods I wanted!

I added the RSS feed for the pipe’s “output” to my Friendfeed settings, and now my ISTEconnects posts show up in my Friendfeed stream.

I added the Friendfeed embed code to the “content” page of my personal website about a month ago. I’m not entirely happy with the categories I have on that site, as I’d like to more prominently feature my presentations/workshops page– it’s currently listed under “teaching” — but I do like the fact that the content page more comprehensively represents things I’m posting and sharing on a regular basis– and that now includes ISTEconnects posts.

Hat tip to Alan for the idea and encouragement to use Yahoo Pipes creatively to solve an RSS need!

Technorati Tags:
rss, yahoo, pipes, wordpress, filter, team, blog, customize

A moment for joy and thanksgiving has arrived, in a very geeky sense– I was able to FIX the mySQL error which was causing comments to not work on my Wordpress blog! I wrote about this last Wednesday in a “plea for help” post. Last week as I spent some time googling for answers, I came across a post (similar to this one) which explained how Wordpress mySQL databases over time can develop “overhead” and need to be repaired using phpMyAdmin. This is similar to defragmenting a hard drive, evidently. It is apparently natural for “overhead” to develop, and just a part of “normal” maintenance to repair/remove it periodically.

As I wrote about in my post last week, the problem I was having when people tried to leave comments on my blog they could not and were presented with a generic 404 (page not found) error. As I looked into this, I noticed that in my Wordpress dashboard it showed I did not have ANY comments in my blog, even though there should be a bunch. mySQL showed the table records for comments were there in the wp_comments table, but the dashboard did not:

Now that I’ve finished this repair, comments again show up numbered correctly in my Wordpress dashboard:

I referred to my error log for my site and found that there was a duplicate comment number, which was causing the problem. When I tried to delete the offending table row, however, a “key field” error was reported. I was stumped.

The solution, it turns out, was using the “repair” option in phpMyAdmin. To do this, when you select your database in phpMyAdmin select the tables which have overhead shown in the last column. Then at the bottom, choose “repair table.” This is the course of action suggested my phpMyAdmin, but since I had never done this or encountered this situation previously I wasn’t sure exactly how to proceed.

When I did this for my wp_comments table, my problem was fixed!

The repair results show that the number of table rows was incorrect and the repair procedure fixed this. That was it!

I am overjoyed to have this problem resolved, but this situation overall has pointed out my need to do a more complete and thorough maintenance cleanup of my Wordpress mySQL database. I need to go through my error logs line by line (something I definitely don’t relish) and figure out how to fix the problems which are being reported there. Possibly some of my past problems will be fixed by this overhead repair procedure, but I’m not sure. I’m considering posting a request for a quote on getafreelancer.com or guru.com similar to this one, to let a Wordpress guru (in another country, most likely) working for a smaller fee take care of this for me. Outsourcing IT support needs like this makes sense and can be affordable. I might just give this a try.

For now, I’m just pleased this commenting issue has been resolved. This situation highlights the value of people using a hosted/managed blogging solution like Edublogs, Wordpress.com, Blogger, Typepad, etc. instead of self-hosting Wordpress as I am. I’m still glad to be self-hosting, but dealing with these sorts of troubleshooting situations CAN cause some stress. Thankfully, in situations like these, we have Google.

Technorati Tags:
wordpress, mysql, error, fixed

These are my notes from Clif Mims’s keynote “Using Digital Technologies and Personal Learning Networks to Enhance Learning” at the PodStock09 conference. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. I audio recorded this session and also webcasted/archived the session with Ustream.

Our current economic crisis could be “the perfect storm” for educational technology, open source solutions, instructional design, blended professional development models, etc.

all kinds of discussions and research today on communities of practice
- links to whole language
- the middle school concept: groups, pods, group planning
- we’ve been doing these sorts of things for awhile

We now have this technology thing” going on, students interacting, trying to engage them, and those two things coming together as PLNs (personal learning networks)
- I heard some people ask about PLNs yesterday, so here is an explanation

Look at formal (peer-reviewed) and informal literature

P = professional and personal

L = learning

N = network, community, environment

Plurk seems to be stronger here in the Kansas educator network

brainstorming characteristics from participants:
- self-forming
- ad-hoc
- just in time
- explosive
- resource library
- tribe
- online

Can exist both F2F and online
- referring to this in “plurksburg”

Benefits of PLNs to Educators
- I would not be here but-for Plurk
- Plurk in my experience is a tighter-knit group

the loss of isolation is a BIG benefit

I joined Twitter 2 years ago, and hated it initially
- initially I wanted to be very private, signing things as “Clif’s Notes”
- story of printer problem responses from tweet
- that is when I thought: this will be what you make of it
- I had seen plenty of people sharing what they are eating for breakfast on twitter
- I realized if I wanted to have conversations about education on twitter, then I would have to find those people

I work with the teachers directly at our university
- in prior life, I was an elementary teacher
- we had a faculty of 60 but just 1 other male
- I was very familiar with the isolation that can happen in schools

Twitter and Plurk level the playing field

I THINK THESE TOOLS CAN REALLY HUMANIZE COMMUNICATIONS

The PLNs have fast forwarded my learning in so many ways

From participants:
network is non-judgemental: ask questions, people respond
- you don’t have to always ask the stupid question, others ask them too!

filtering idea comes up a lot
- I don’t have to keep up with everything going on, I just watch it to come through my PLN, best things bubbles up to the top

lesson plan help
- on Sunday night I put out what I am teaching that week
- on Tuesday I look for results and all the ideas that come out
- so with a 48 hour timeperiod, I get a ton of help and resources
- really helps on not re-inventing the wheel!

Traditional Student PLNs may be the next frontier for us in educational technology
- we’ve used these for years: pods, teams, the school itself, classrooms, these can be PLNs in the traditional setting

anytime we are talking about impacting learning, we want to move up Bloom’s Taxonomy
- we find that a lot of our teaching happens at the fact/recall level of Bloom’s

for lesson plans, what’s on paper is one thing, people intend to move up beyond lower levels, but in practice we tend to fall back to this
- it’s easier to assess
- students don’t fight us as much (IT IS PASSIVE AND EASIER FOR EVERYONE!)
- we should be striving for the higher levels

Andrew Churches has reworked this as Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy

One thing you can do with your online PLN is publish
- you know there is an audience out there
- when you start publishing, kids get more engaged in the process

from audience:
- kids can tend to self-assess more and raise their game for the audience
- kids really willing to draw others into the network, want to share
- kids tend to be more willing to do the work when they are publishing for an outside audience
- kids are actually writing all the time
- when kids write and publish for their peers, that makes a huge difference
- kids bringing writing to the teacher and asking, “Do I sound smart here?”

kids take ownership of their learning
- I don’t mean to oversell this because worksheets (specifically in math) do have their place
- the key, however, is that those aren’t the only strategies that we should be using
- I’ve never seen a child take ownership over a multiplication fact sheet in the same way they take ownership over writing and publishing online
- we are hearing more talking today about “higher order teaching” not just “higher order thinking”

I am skeptical that we ever REALLY know what someone knows, we just see what is demonstrated

When something gets published, we can start witnessing the process they go through
- it is like a data trail
- we can see the decisionamking they are going thru
- decisionmaking typically gets into higher order thinking
- there is a lot in that direction we should and will explore more

Whole idea of critique: comment, DIGG (voting/rating), starring system
- all of that is critical thinking

what happens with middle school students when things go public and they know they will start looking at each others work
- the critique dynamics change, can be in some positive ways but also negative

did a project where kids designed a game on paper with storyboards, and then developed the games back at school
- then brought developed games back to kids
- kids got to play them, share them, add ideas
- kids wanted to refine and improve their own games
- this is the kind of thing we are seeing in our own PLNs

Benefits of online PLNs to students

Lisa Thumann (@lthumann on Twitter)
- sharing an audio recording from Lisa talking about how we’ve generally valued and used experts to bring in their voices and perspectives to the classroom

someone discussing edmodo and other networking tools, giving other students that may not typically share their ideas/voice being empowered to do so with digital PLN tools

From Ginger Lumen:
- gives learning in the classroom not just an x/y axis but also the z axis
- much more depth

I wish I could have grown up learning in this world
- I grew up on the farm, and my dad was a carpenter
- I learned math hands-on, outside the classroom
- the physical setup of schools tends to box us in physically and mentally

YES, I THINK THIS IDEA OF GETTING OUT AND TRANSCENDING THE TRADITIONAL BOUNDARIES OF THE CLASSROOM IS A REAL KEY

Ability to individualize learning
- filtering things that meets your learning style

“I has a cheesburger” is a big part of some people’s PLNs today - not mine

Indivualizing your PLN is key

Multiple representations of understanding is key
- I promised a friend that I would share this

I grew up in the Mississippi delta, went away for college, came back there to teach
- most of my kids from very tough situations
- had a student I had taught the year before in math, he didn’t pass, and I was irate about it, he had already repeated twice, as a 6th grader was repeating for his 3rd time
- the next year I persuaded the teacher to get that student again for both math and science (state law encourages student to NOT get the same student so teaching is repeated)
- story of circuit switch kids, this student and his partner finished first
- I was blown away with his understanding of how to create circuits and how well he understood it
- his self esteem was in the floor generally
- I asked him to help others with their circuits around the room
- later that week I gave the test, graded them, and the student had failed miserably with something like a 20%
- I did know about his background and home life
- I thought maybe he was up all night at home, something going on
- I slowly realized that he was not failing my class, I am failing him, because he understands this topic but can’t represent it in the medium I’ve chosen for assessment
- at that point I promised myself (this was a paradigm shift) that I/we acknowledge how people express and understand things in different ways

THIS IS A GREAT STORY AND A POWERFUL WAY TO MAKE THE CASE FOR DIFFERENTIATED LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT

one more thing about multiple representations
- if you are going to let students express themselves in multiple ways, we as teachers are really going to have to design instruction carefully
- what ARE the objectives you want to achieve?
- do students have to write something as a paragraph? could they do a YouTube video or a podcast?
- this is going to challenge us as designers to become better and more purposeful as we design our lessons

Favorite benefit of online networks: Together we know more
- crowdsourcing

convergence of digital technologies becoming seamless with teaching and learning
- less separated: like we used to do with MS office, “today we are going to teach PPT”
- those tools are becoming (and will become) more seamless where we focus less on the tools
- bring in that PLN element where we can collaborate, publish, critique together
- can really boost higher order thinking in the classroom

Examples of how you can setup your own PLN in the classroom
- Ning
- Fliggo: setup your own video network
- Edublogs
- PBworks
- wetpaint
- seesmic (like twitter with video, you get 60 seconds, similar to 12 seconds)
- Edmodo and ShoutEm - make your own private, school-based Twitter network

can make your network completely private or public
- safety and digital citizenship go hand in hand

what lies ahead
- the highlight of my day will be going to hear these young men talk about what they are doing with Wiis and hacking
- I am NOT a gamer
- I spent the Christmas break wearing out our new Wii with my kids
- I think we have yet to discover what gaming will mean for school learning
- all these social aspects

The smartphones
- there are others in addition to the iPhone
- what these will mean for our classrooms, our PLNs, we will have to wait and see

Other things discussed by participants:
- cloud-based computing
- geo-caching
- SecondLife
- PS3 has something similar to SL called “Home”

OK, CLEARLY WE NEED TO GET MARIO-KART FOR OUR WII!
Semantic web: web 3.0
- filtering, so things likely to be of interest to you show up more intuitively

closing thought: it will be what you make it
- it would be possible that you could bring in many of these things, and still JUST challenge kids at the knowledge/comprehension level of learning
- we are still going to have to be very purposeful with learning
- responsible digital citizenship, safety issues
- you get to customize and individualize it
- how restrictive you are as an administrative

Special thinks to Michael Grant from Univ of Memphis also

Join my PLN and let’s learn together! clifmims.com/pln
- I am a big diigo bookmark user

Question on how to impact pre-service teachers and faculty
- from @dmantz: let others

from Kevin Honeycutt: some of our new teachers are resentful when you ask them to change their PERSONAL space (facebook) into a professional space
- young people have been free-range learners online
- many young people don’t view Facebook as a personal learning network

From Michael Grant: we have to help “young ones” leverage these tools beyond entertainment

Many not sure what this means to look professional online

Literature shows people need a personally meaningful connection to the tool when we teach edtech
- in my past course, in the same 3 hour course I had to do lesson planning AND technology integration in the same course, lesson planning wasn’t anywhere else in their 128 hours of required courses (undergradate)
- it was really hard to get that personal experience: putting together a slideshow about their vacation, a PPT about their boyfriend, etc - without those experiences they don’t ‘get it’ or get hooked
- I am a big believer in FLOW theory (Mihály Csíkszentmihályi)

Technorati Tags:
pln, clifmims, #podstock09, education, technology, learning, wichita, kansas

These are my notes from the presentation “Get Out of Your FUNK, Cut the JIVE! Make Your Classroom Come Alive!!!” Presented by - Kim Herron, Tamara Padfield, Linley Voboril from Inman Elementary School: Inman, Kansas. This was shared at the PodStock 2009 conference in Wichita, Kansas, hosted by ESSDACK. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. I audio recorded this session for later podcasting, and live webcasted the session with Ustream Mobile. Here is the UStream archive:

Choose the right tool to get the job done
- we have used VoiceThread and Mixbook a lot more this year

Study on “Blood on the River” with VoiceThread
- teacher-created Voicethreads, recorded markers throughout, asking students to make predictions throughout the book or make a reflection on what we had just read
- collaborated with another classroom via our Polycom videoconference unit

Kids used free Mac program Skitch to create their icons/avatars in VoiceThread

Kimberly Herron’s MobileMe website: Herron’s Happenings (6th grade)

Tamara Padfield’s MobileMe website: Padfield Publications (5th grade)

Linley Voboril’s MobileMe website: Voboril Vibes (5th grade)

Seamless integration was a big goal for us when we went 1:1 in our classrooms
- engagement is the key
- hands on learning experiences like dissecting owl pellets have been big for us as well

Colonial Commercials project
- we used the green screen feature using PhotoBooth on our Macs for the first time
- with Leopard or newer you can do it
- got a big piece of green material

Had the “Granite Awards 2009″ project this year
- gave kids rocks and they did many different kinds of tests
- big assembly, like a fashion show for rock re-enactment, with music, DVD created

End of year 6th grade project: Virtual Museum for 6th graders with Google SketchUp
- awareness of audience really led kids to realize they could not plagiarize, copy/paste others ideas
- easybib and bibme.com are great for formatting bibliographies

link is on my website to the Ancient Civilizations project
- Project directions included different roles for each group

Students were assigned into 8 groups of 5.  Each group consisted of a/an      Author - wrote an elementary level book on government and social classes using mixbook.
Geologist - created a hands on and online game about the daily life, resources, and landscape using Smarttech Notebook.
Cartographer - Created a map of civilization, located 3 architectural locations researched by architect in Google Earth, and created flight tour of locations inserting map pic and weblinks in Google Earth.
Archaeologists - Created a podcast in Garageband of 3 artifacts researched relating the artifacts with the civilizations culture and religions.     Architect - Created a webpage using iWeb telling about the architectural structures and resources used to make them relating their importance in the culture and religions of the civilization.

Biomes Project

Letters to the President Project
- students asking for a law to stop people cutting down the rain forest trees
- story of a student who is normally not a fluent reader in front of the class, asking to record his letter on his own with his Macbook so it could be included in the teachers’ keynote presentation, the student asked to do this, and his audio file was fantastic!

IT WOULD BE INTERESTING TO JUXTAPOSE A LETTER LIKE THIS WITH A DISCUSSION WITH STUDENTS IN BRAZIL, DISCUSSING DEVELOPMENT, HEATING AND COOKING IN VILLAGES WITHOUT ELECTRICITY, ETC.

Recognizing the importance of role models in the classroom
- started a community connections project
- contacted local leaders and
- started as a lunch once per month
- talking about “8 keys of success,” part of the Quantum Learning Model, also Boys Town social skills
- Bently (our tech integrator who has been with us for 2 years) suggested doing this as a geo-caching activity, students went to see and visit each community mentor who talked with them and gave them something, quotation, information - was a great way to start the school year

Had a veteran note writing project
- Veterans were so touched by students taking time to contact them
- Christmas letters to Veterans

Now planning a “Got Canvas?” project on going green
- our platform is reusing canvas shopping bags
- our research has been very eye opening on usage of plastic bags
- key is reduce: not just about recycling
- we spent an hour picking up trash in our community
- 5th grade field trip yesterday was to the dump / landfill: with all this background knowledge the kids had was so eye opening, how much we waste
- McPherson Kansas produces 100 tons of trash per day! (200,000 pounds of trash, every single day!)
– is that not just staggering?!

We are really excited to not only see what happens at the end of this year with this, but also what the 4th graders coming up next year as 5th graders will want to do
- if you can get kids involved in things like that, where they are passionate, you are going to change their lives

Technorati Tags:
#podstock09, podcasting, technology, inman, kansas, essdack, pbl, project, based, learning, elementary

Ah, these are the moments I wish I had my own IT staff. If you’re a Wordpress or mySQL guru perhaps you can help me!

I am running Wordpress on my main blog (“Moving at the Speed of Creativity”) and the blog has stopped accepting comments for some reason, as of Monday night (April 27, 2009) around 8 pm CST. That’s when my last comment came in successfully. I can post new entries to the blog, but no new comments can be received. I’m running WP 2.7.1. I haven’t installed or updating the blog or plug-ins lately, so I don’t think the source is a recent change I’ve made. I tried disabling all plug-ins except Akismet, but the error persisted. I think the problem is in my mySQL database.

I checked my Wordpress directory error_log file and this is the last entry. It is a “WordPress database error Duplicate entry” message:

The other strange symptom is that in my Wordpress dashboard, it shows that I don’t have any comments on my blog, even though there are almost 7000 approved.

The comments are still there, when I click the “comments” sidebar link they show up. Something is messed up with the auto-incrementing and I think it needs to be reset in mySQL. I’ve never done that, however.

I did a full mySQL database backup using phpMyAdmin. I considered reinstalling Wordpress 2.7.1, but since this appears to be a mySQL problem I don’t think that would help. I haven’t (to date) done a good job monitoring and managing my error and access logs, and I’ve got some other issues and problems that it looks like I need to fix. (Some big ones with PodPress.) Overall I know I need to clean up my mySQL database, but never having done that before I am not sure where to begin. At least I have a new backup, I know that’s always a good idea…

Do you have any suggestions or tips for me that could help? Since my blog isn’t accepting comments (isn’t that ironic) I’ve cross-posted this to our Learning Signs blog (where commenting is working) or you can Tweet me an idea or link as an @reply or direct message.

Many, many thanks. Yuk. I really don’t like technical glitches like this which can often consume LARGE amounts of troubleshooting time.

Technorati Tags:
wordpress, error, mysql, comment, duplicate

I created the following image using Twitter Mosaic and stitched the images together from separate screen captures using SeaShore. This is rather overwhelming, particularly when I consider how FEW educators (overall) are utilizing social networking tools like Twitter currently.

Thanks to everyone in my Twitter PLN who replied to my inquiry / tweet today about digital graphing tools. I posted those results over on ISTEconnects as “Options for creating digital graphs.”

Technorati Tags:
twitter, mosaic, visualize

I figured out a mystery which had troubled me for some time: Why can I readily post embedded videos to my personal blog (this one) using MarsEdit, but when my children try to do the same thing to our family learning blog (Learning Signs) the video embed code gets stripped out?

The answer, it turns out, lies with the individual user settings for the “visual editor” in Wordpress. With the visual editor disabled, video embed code can be accepted by Wordpress, whether it’s posted via a software program like MarsEdit or directly in the browser interface. If the visual editor is left on (its default setting) the code gets stripped out.

This tip just applies if you’re hosting your own Wordpress blog. Wordpress.com sites cannot be configured (as far as I know) to accept video embed code.

Technorati Tags:
wordpress, blog, video, embed