education

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Distance Collaboration

February 19, 2008 in open source, Social Networking, Technology | No comments

I teach in a remote Adirondack school in which elementary classes typically have 10-12 students. While this may seem ideal, there are benefits to having larger groups with which to collaborate. With such small groups relations can become static. The same students have the same classmates year after year. Hopefully on-line interaction will lead to face to face collaboration as well. I hope to broaden students’ community of learners.

I have contacted the fifth grade teacher in a neighboring school district with a similar situation and we plan to explore ways for our students to work together using Web 2.0 tools. I’m considering a variety of tools:

WordPress using the Prologue theme gives a quick, clean, easy-to-use, microblogging format that makes communication spontaneous and fast moving. Students can figure it out immediately and dive right in. I think that it may be particularly useful in quickly creating discussion–especially with small groups as it keeps all discussion in one place. I’m not sure that it has all the functions that one might want for extended collaboration, although the tagging helps. It would be great to find microblogging within more comprehensive packages.

I’ve have tinkered with Moodle for several months. Moodle provides a wide variety of tools: forums, wiki, blogs, quizzes–a wide variety of tools. I think it might be too confusing for beginners. Yet Moodle is a great LMS and has a lot of collaboration tools built in.

I just created a new Elgg installation using version 0.9.1 . I’m experimenting with the user interface. It is more like the traditional social networking software with friends, personal spaces, etc. While the interface may be more complex, I think it may be more familiar to users already familiar to social networking software. I’ll post more about elgg soon.

Wiki represent a degree of collaboration I hope to obtain. It could be free standing, within Mooddle, or Elgg. I am most familiar with MediaWiki.

To begin, I’ll probably stick with Prologue/WordPress. We have relatively few participants, so the microblog might be an easier way to keep a critical mass of comments flowing. Whether we progress to Elgg or Moodle depends much upon my experiments with Elgg in the near term.

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Experimental Prologue Microblog

February 14, 2008 in Blogging, open source | No comments

My students now have a Prologue microblog that they are using actively. I thought that I would also set up a microblog as a companion to this regular blog site for my own use and that of others.

Unlike the student microblog, this one is open for public viewing and comment. In addition, I set it up so that anyonce can register and post as well. I’ll leave it this way unless there are any problems.

Take a minute to view the Prologue counter-part to this site. Feel free to register and post yourself, if you would like to get a feel for microblogging.

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Prologue and WP Hacks for School Microblogging

February 8, 2008 in Blogging, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 2 comments

I remain enthusiastic about using Prologue for school “twittering.” I was disappointed when it came to my attention that a regular self hosted version of WordPress did not have the option to keep the blog private by requiring a login to read. This is an important function for privacy of students in a school setting. I found a way to hack the wp-blog-header to make this possible. I tested it on a WP 2.3.2 installation and it works great. If you go to the blog’s url, you are presented with a login screen. Once a user has logged in, it brings them to their backend. While, I’d rather it bring them to the frontend, all they have to do is click the prominent “View Site” button. I’ll see if I can change that at a later time. Simply download the file wp-blog-header.php.zip, unzip it, and upload it via ftp to the blog’s main directory (public_html/wheveryourblogresides/

I also changed the Prologue user interface a little. The build I downloaded had a number and an “e” next to the title of the post. The Number reflects the number of responses. You have to click on the number to make a comment–not very obvious to my fifth grade users. I modified it so the word comment or comments appears next to the number. The “e” stand for edit. I simply changed the file to say edit instead. Download index.php.zip, unzip, and upload to public_html/wheveryourblogresides/wp-contents/themes/prologue. Make sure don’t put it in the main blog directory because it will overwrite the wrong file.

Another hack to create a more appropriate opening message was mentioned in the previous post.

Here’s a link to the files and the zipped Prologue. Just push the log in as guest button and the next screen will have links to the files.

Please let me know what you think. If there is interest, I’ll package the whole WordPress set of files up. I’ll also to continue to look for more ways to make this great theme work even better for those in a school setting.

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Prologue and Student Twittering

February 6, 2008 in Blogging, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 2 comments

I got my students to try out the Prologue installation today. They really enjoyed it and took to it instantly. Conversation was wild and somewhat unfocused at first. Before I knew it, there were twenty odd posts. I directed them to feel free to socialize, but I’d want them to avoid totally frivolous posts that would be of little or no interest to the “community.”

As I see it, there are two ways to respond–either by creating a new post, or by creating a reply. They all started by just creating new posts until I pointed out that they could click the comments button to respond. Now that I reflect upon what has been done so far, I’m not sure what is best. By creating a new post, all information is right there on the page–more like twitter itself. By using comments, more “starting posts” are visible and you can click on comments if they interest you.

I look forward to seeing how much it is used after school and on weekends , and how the usage evolves over time. Of course, I will prod it in certain directions.

Here’s the promised zipped file of Prologue. It is the latest update. I will try to keep it reasonable current until it becomes generally available in this form.

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Prologue and Microblogging

February 6, 2008 in Blogging, open source, Technology | No comments

I have been intrigued by Twitter since going to our state Educational Technology conference. I know it has potential and I’ve been eager to give it a try. When Will Richardson blogged about the WordPress theme Prologue, I was excited. First, I am reluctant to use “hosted solutions” especially with elementary students. Secondly, we already have a WordPress MU installed on our server space.

The first obstacle was that the theme was not packed into a zip file as most templates are. I had to learn to use a subversion client to gather the file for the template (Subversion or SVN is very cool as I have discovered and I plan to explore this avenue more). Once I put the files into a folder to ftp up to the server, it is a simple matter of selecting the Prologue template. Next, I wanted to change the opening message. After a brief look through files, I found the text in line 13 of post-form.php in the template folder. I created accounts for my students and I was good to go–or so I thought. To make this work, users had to be set to “author.”

It is all working now and my superintendent has given me the go ahead to try this out with the provision that I keep it out of public view. Only the students and I can view the contents (Using the “More Privacy Options”) extension for WordPress). Students will give it a test run today. I’ll post later along with a link to a folder with all the Prologue files for easy download.

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