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A Blog Makeover

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It’s Saturday and you can tell that I only had a few hours of school work to do today.

I decided that this blog needed an update. Actually, I’ve known that it needed an update for awhile, I just haven’t had the time or the inclination to do it. I guess today was that day.

I started last night by looking around through the Worpdress Codex for a theme. I ran into a few that I liked, downloaded them, installed them, and then kept right on looking.

This morning I ran into Cybrechimps and the themes they have available. I’ve never bought a WordPress theme before, but this time I was looking for something a little different. I also needed a theme that was more responsive to people who surf the web on their mobile or on their tablets. My old theme didn’t reflect the way that people use the web now. So I spent the $30.

It’s often hard to tell in your blogging stats how many people actually visit the site vs. getting the content from an RSS feed or some other way, but if you show up here, hopefully everything is working fine. I’d appreciate any feedback or thoughts that you’ve got and be sure to let me know if things aren’t showing up on your screen just right.

Building Identity

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Watching the kids in my classroom use technology as the school year begins has been interesting. Many of the kids in my grade seven and eight class already have facebook pages, or twitter accounts or an online presence before they enter my classroom. But few (if any) of them have a space like a blog that can be given over to extended writing, or posting videos they find interesting, or sharing their passion in another way.

Watching these students begin to feel their way around a new online space has got me thinking about identity. They have a blank space, which really means a blank slate. They can be whoever they want. Their identity in a space like this isn’t something that is given to them, it is something they construct. This is new for our time in history. Our parents may give us our names, but our identity online is something that is malleable. We can share part of who we are on a facebook page, another part on a blog, and a completely different piece on a podcast we produce. The potential exists for our identity to be much more fluid between these different spaces.

Overall I’ve always encouraged my students to think of their blog as a container. As a space where, if they were writers, they could write. If they were photographers, they could share their work and if they felt they were better at producing an audio message, they could do that as well. This year I’m wondering if we need to go further. Do we need to be offering different spaces? Given the choice, would kids choose a wordpress blog as a container? Or would some of them choose tumblr spaces, or flickr accounts, or pinterest or something completely different to build up and share their digital identity?

If identity is something we construct instead of something that is given to us, would the identity of my students be reflected in the spaces they chose? Would it make a difference?

 

What I Need From Technology

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School starts for me in a week from today.

Over the next month, I’m going to see all sorts of tech configurations show up in my classroom. I still have some of the original Asus eee pc netbooks running a form of Linux, I have a cart of Dell netbooks, I have a Macbook Pro and an ipad. I spent some of my prize money from winning this CDW sponsored contest on four Lenovo IdeaPad A1 tablets. As well as all of these things, kids are welcome to bring their own laptops and devices from home to use in the classroom.

It’s a crazy patchwork quilt of operating systems, name brands, tech troubles and connections.

Using this kind of a system (if you can even call it that) in a classroom means that we have a difficult time talking about software and hardware. Kids start something at school on a school computer and need to finish it at home. They begin working on a project at night and need access to their files and information during the day. Google docs has solved many of those issues when it comes to text. Their model is simple and easy to use. Any device, anywhere, anytime. It simply works.

Lately I’ve been trying to find a way to support a similar model with video and audio. How can kids shoot a video, or interview someone, and have access to it later in another place, on another device?

A simple example:

I plan on having students do some reflecting using video and / or audio. I would also like to see the students in my classroom do more interviews with people in the school and in the community. Given all of these devices, there are any number of scenarios that might outline how this might happen. Basically, student A has a device and they go somewhere to record something. First of all, the hardware needs to actually have a mic or a camera. It needs to be portable. Once they have recorded their audio, they need to be able to export what they have recorded from that device either to the web or to another device and piece of software for further editing. If they are exporting to the web, the software needs to produce a file that others can access and that is embeddable in a space like a blog. If the file is to be exported to another device, it needs to be in a standard file format that can be worked with by other software.

In the end, I really don’t care about the hardware, as long as it satisfies a few basic needs. The same can be said of the software. As we jump from device to device, and from school to home and back, cloud based software makes our lives much easier, but I’m not about to be tied in to anything.

What I need as an educator working in this type of hybrid, multi location, multi operating system and device environment is the ability to move my data around between accounts and applications. I need to be able to share it, to embed it, to edit and remix it. We need a few basics from companies that will be cornerstones of what we do. WordPress, Youtube, Google docs, Sound Cloud, Dropbox all help us to do what we do.

Do you have others? Do you work with specific software or companies that empower you to move data and information around in all of its forms? Do you work in an environment like this? What helps you to do what you do?

Idea Hive – the Tech Set Up

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The technical set up behind the Idea Hive community has grown and changed into its present form over a few years. I have been blogging with students since 2005 and each year, something gets changed, tweaked, and hopefully improved.

When I first started, I worked with Blogmeister, David Warlick’s excellent service. It was comfortable for me at the time as I could edit and approve everything that my students were placing online. After this article from Cnet hit the internet and gained us a lot of publicity though, we started working with other classes from around the world; most notably, Jo McLeay’s class from Australia. One morning one of my students came to me quite upset and questioned me about why I hadn’t approved and published his post from the evening before. I told him that I hadn’t seen the post and questioned him about when he had written it. His reply: “about 10:30 last night.” He then proceeded to tell me that he wasn’t very pleased with me and that he had an audience who he needed to talk to. “You know,” he told me, “that time of the night here is morning in Australia. My friends were waiting to read that post.”

At this point I realized that I was standing in the way of my students and that I needed to move.

My next move in the educational blogging world was to James Farmer’s edublogs. Another well run service we stayed there for one school year before moving on to wordpress.com. From here, I finally took the jump and registered the ideahive.org domain and started looking after my own website. What is important for me always to remember is the length of time this took. There was (I think) 5 years where I worked with a model where myself and all of the students in my class had blogs hosted by other servers and services. It was a slow, gradual evolution as I learned more and worked towards having my own site.

All along, between all of these jumps, I had a similar set up. I would set up a central blog for me to write at, and then each of my students would have their own spaces. I would post a link on my blog to each of my student’s blogs and they could link to each other (or whatever other school appropriate sites they cared to link to). Between blogs and accounts at various other places such as Youtube, flickr, etc, we were small pieces scattered across the internet.

Taking all of this into account, I eventually felt the need to bring some of these pieces together into one space. This got me to the Idea Hive community as it presently stands. The teach set up behind this community in its present form is:

- I began by registering the ideahive.org website and installing wordpress on it. There are great instructions for doing this on the wordpress site. I’ve been asked before about hosting services. There are many out there and they are worth comparing and looking in to. I use Bluehost and have been very happy with them and their live online chat based tech support. It’s been great the few times I’ve used it.

- The new versions of wordpress have the ability to be cracked open and turned in to wordpress multiuser (or a wordpress network) with only a little bit of coding and some cut and pasting. The instructions to do this can be found here. By doing this, you can have all of the kids in your class have a blog of their own on your domain.

- The next step is to install buddypress. Buddypress is a wordpress plugin that lets you turn your site in to a social network. It gives you the ability to have groups and forums on your site. There are also other plugins that extend buddypress, giving it additional functionality. Here are all of the plugins that are currently running on our network:

Something like akismet for spam protection is essential. Installing and running an achievements plugin and program on the site has been interesting and a worthwhile experiment. Having a wiki available for groups if they need it is a valuable function.

I have also worked through the year to update and increase the number of themes that are available for the students to use on their own blogs. I look for themes that are free to use, that are simple to install and are simple for the students to use as well as affording them some level of customization if they want. I uploaded new ones when I find them and let the kids know. Currently there are 32 different themes available for the students to choose from.

All through the year we’ve worked to improve the site and make it valuable for the kids to use. We added a weather widget for each of our communities. There are links to each of the kids’ own sites. There is a display of the flickr photos from the account that the classrooms share. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a mymood plugin to see if the kids would use it or find it worthwhile. This is one of the greatest assets with wordpress being the software behind the site. There is a huge international community that is standing behind the software so there is a constant release of new pieces to the puzzle. They are easy to install and try out. If they don’t work or don’t meet your needs, they can simply be deleted.

There are things that have not positive about hosting your own full network:

- the response time on the site has sometimes been very slow. We have occasionally found at times that the site has been unreasonably slow to log in to and I can’t figure out why that is. I am sure a plugin or a piece of code is acting up somewhere, but I can’t track it down.

- running this type of site requires a pretty steady set of updates. The core pieces of wordpress and buddypress are being constantly worked on and improved. This means both for security and functionality reasons you need to keep the network updated. Updates sometimes have unexpected effects that need to be sorted out.

Overall, the technology behind the community is a constant work in motion. New ideas and functionality get added, while things no one is using get deleted. This is simply part of running a network like this. I believe that the time involved has been worthwhile and has allowed us to be responsive to the needs of the students in our classrooms.

 

Idea Hive – the Stats

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My teaching partner Heather Durnin and I run a community for our two classrooms that we call the Idea Hive. This site is a WordPress Multiuser setup combined with Buddypress and additional plugins and functionality. This setup allows us to have a central blog for ourselves, blogs for the kids in our classes, and allows them to have discussion groups and forums along with other functionality that can come in to play when needed.

Overall, one of our main goals has been to build a community, a hybrid space where kids feel just as comfortable writing an academically focussed blog post as they do talking about the hottest Youtube videos or the latest NHL hockey games.  Over the two years Heather and I have worked together our community has grown and changed. As we have watched our kids engage in these digital spaces, we have learned a lot about what draws them in, what helps them to write and be present for each other even though they live 2 700 kms apart.

We have approximately six weeks of school to go until we head into final exams. As our community in its present form has been an active space over this school year, I plan on looking back and reflecting on some of the things we’ve learned leading this community of learners.

Here are the visitors stats for the Idea Hive blog for this school year:

(Note that it is only May third as I write this so the stats for this month are just beginning to be collected.)

Whether you use “visits” or “hits” as your benchmark, we’ve had quite a successful year. It is easy to see that our students use the site. With approximately 60 students in the Idea Hive total, most of them are coming here to check in here regularly over the time they spend in our classrooms. What else I think is significant over the year looking at these stats is that the visits to the site have increased, month over month, over the school year. There was no loss of engagement or interest across the year.

Here are the stats on a daily basis for April, the month that has just been completed:

What I always find interesting about these day by day stats is that they show the weekends are almost as busy as the weekdays (weekends highlighted in blue).

While hit counts don’t necessarily equate with learning, they do show a significant level of engagement and that is an important point of what we are trying to do in our space.

Our students have blogs that are tied to this community. There are also 42 different groups, the overwhelming majority of which have been made by the students, that have been posted on the site. These groups range from photography to facebook to minecraft to movies and everything in between. While some of the groups are definitely more active and have more members than others, there are hundreds of posts in these spaces. Engagement, collaboration and community building are the overriding goals of including the functionality of groups in this community.

While the stats don’t tell the whole story of the community, I believe they do show that this type of space is valuable in a classroom and that students absolutely will use it when given the opportunity.

 

Does Size Matter?

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For years I (and many others) have argued in favour of openness in classroom work. “Blogging communities will die closed off from the world,” was my mantra at many conferences I’ve spoken at.

I have argued passionately in favour of openness and used items such as WordPress, Wikipedia and Linux as examples of communities that thrive because they are open to the world. My classroom community and my student’s blogs always have been and still are open to the world. (Drop in and leave a student a comment or two. Trust me, it will make their day.)

But over the last few years we’ve tried to turn our heads quickly to the side, away from the fact that some of the largest, busiest, most profitable networks on the web are closed systems. Apple and it’s entire juggernaut of media rentals, downloads and apps are a famously closed network and people need to be prepared to jump through all of the hoops to be included. Google is creating a growing ecosystem of tools that are hooked together through policies and histories. Facebook is a completely closed network of hundreds of millions of users that does all it can to keep you in it’s space.

It’s hard to be a network of about 65 teachers and students and argue that you know more than these three massive corporations; demanding openness from ourselves and others.

So what is it? Do size and openness matter?

I think it has a lot to do with critical mass. Facebook is a closed system that works hard to gather your information and keep it within the walls of the network. Facebook and Google continuously crash up against each other when it comes to issues of privacy and search results. But Facebook is also closing in on a billion users. Their network is so huge that even though it is a closed system, most users simply never see the walls. The same is true of apps in Apple’s store. Hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces of software, every developer needs to agree to a strict policy where, if Apple doesn’t agree with something that you do, they can ban your productions from there store leaving you on the outside. But these are unusual occurrences, most people never having to worry about these things.

To these closed networks, size matters. They thrive on their size. It gives them the ability to be closed off and to control the hoops that people need to jump through without having to emphasize that the fences even exist.

On the other hand, for small networks  and learning communities, I still believe that openness is vital. Having students write and create is good. Having students write and create in online spaces where they have multiple media they can use is better. Having students write and create in open online spaces where they can get feedback from others is even better. The ability to connect with others from around the world and gain their ideas and their perspectives can help a network to grow and strengthen. Only a certain percentage of members are going to be heavily engaged in the activity of your community so finding a way to attract new members or to allow “outsiders” to easily take part will move conversations and learning ahead.

We still have a lot to learn about online networks and communities for learning. Are they fundamentally different from online spaces for commercial purposes? Do they have special needs or do the same rules apply? Are smaller communities where people know and trust each other better or are larger spaces where there are multiple perspectives and voices available more beneficial for learning? Compared to any of the massive commercial spaces online, our communities and networks are relatively small and we need to learn how to best leverage their size and openness for the benefit of our students.

 

The Open Web

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Matt Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress. He was interviewed as part of an ongoing series featuring tech leaders. In his interview Mullenweg concentrated on the importance of the open web and about WordPress’ place in the information economy.

A few valuable quotes from the piece:

“I worry about the independent web. I worry about the content creators, and I worry that if 100 percent of the distribution of everything starts to go through just a few websites, that kills the vibrancy.”

“As things like Facebook’s news feed become ever more ingrained in our lives, the knobs they turn are hugely influential. For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.” (I’ve read Rushkoff’s book and parts of it have had a big impact on my thinking. Its definitely worth your time if you haven’t had a look at it)

“One of the beautiful things about the WordPress community is that it’s a lot of original content creation rather than just a few things being regurgitated over and over again, which is a fair criticism of what happens on social networks. I think of blogging as a craft. It’s something that you think about, that you try to do your best at. It’s part of your identity.”

I worry about the open web as well. As large corporations make things we hadn’t even imagined a few years ago not only possible, but easy, I wonder about the price that we pay for those advancements. Who owns the data you create? Can you export it to another platform? Is 2012 the year that the platform or host you choose to use becomes a political decision? What are the consequences for choosing a certain company or space or tool? How safe is your stuff? Who can access it?

As if education is not political enough, I think these are important questions for schools and classrooms to spend time with.

 

Tablet Time

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Tablets have taken the world by storm. This isn’t a secret. I’ve probably seen as many ipads in the past year in people’s bags as I have laptops. People that would never carry a laptop have no problem being seen with a tablet. While there are certainly a lot of tablets out there, you can probably argue that there is an ipad market, and then a bunch of others.

In October, Wired released stats saying that 97% of all tablet internet traffic is produced by people using ipads and another site stated that over 80% of all tablets sold are made by Apple. That may be changing slightly this Christmas season, but these stats are probably basically still true.

I’ve spent my time with two different tablets this fall and neither of them are ipads. I’ve got an Asus eee transformer and now my son has a new Blackberry Playbook that he received for Christmas. Both of these machines have performed well. The eee pad hooks to the Android Market, is responsive, has a great display and flips between applications easily. The new Playbook has only been around for a few days, but I have to admit – I like it. It is a bit smaller (a 7 inch screen compared to the standard 10), but it is well designed and feels nice in your hands. It doesn’t feel like a cheap piece of plastic. It has a great screen and runs RIM’s own operating system which is proving easy to learn and allows for full multi tasking. It handles flash content easily and renders the web quickly. It’s downfall comes in the size of its applications market. RIM is obviously a 3rd player in the tablet wars and it shows in what is available. Big news last week when Angry Birds hit Blackberry’s App world, months after the Android Market and the App store. No movies to rent. I can’t find a decent WordPress app. While there are certainly thousands to look through, some of the standard ones are simply not there. Plenty of rumours about RIM allowing access to the Android Market (which would solve all of their problems), and about people jailbreaking their Playbooks, but nothing official from RIM yet.

Both of these devices have been great to have around to pick up when you need to get online quickly to find a piece of information or to post to twitter, etc. but I’m still having trouble seeing them as machines to do anything other than read and surf from. I can’t see them as creative platforms.

I know districts have spent millions on tablets, I know people will disagree with me, telling me stories of all of the wonderful things they have done (or had their kids do), but I’m still not convinced. Don’t get me wrong, I like the ones I’ve lived with for the past few months. I think they are great devices and are getting to be powerful multimedia platforms. But what place should they have in our classrooms? Are we aiming only at an education based on the consumption of media and information? If every student (or classroom) could have tablets and laptops, then I think we are getting somewhere. But we all know that with budgets like they are, that isn’t happening in most schools any time soon. I am interested instead to see where schools are going to go with devices like the new Raspberry Pi initiative. That interests me. What can we do with low price (or no price) software like WordPress, Gimp and Scratch? How can we help kids use platforms like Youtube and Figment to share what they make? We’ve only scratched (no pun intended) the surface of possibilities. Do we want students to be consumers of information or creators and community builders? I know which I’d rather see and I’m worried about the priorities that I have been seeing.

Achievements in the Hive

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I’ve never been much for rewards in classrooms. When I taught younger grades I might occasionally drop a sticker on a completed assignment, but I’ve never had a reward box or a reward economy or anything of the type in my classroom. I’ve always thought that learning is its own reward and as long as the content is interesting and personalized to the individual student, the majority of them would find it that way as well.

Which is why I’m wary of a move that we’ve made in the Idea Hive. – adding achievements to our community. This year Heather and I have a wordpress multi user set up combined with buddypress. The reason for this is that we wanted the kids to have access to things like groups and forums and built in wikis all in a single space. Heather and I spent long hours and many emails talking over this move and  finally  were convinced that this was a move we needed to make. Which is why I was disappointed when the students in our class weren’t taking advantage of all of the pieces. They blogged. We blogged. They left comments for each other. We left comments. But the message boards and forums remained largely quiet at the beginning of the school year. We wanted the Idea Hive to be a space  that was a hybrid place, where kids felt comfortable working on academic topcis as well as less formal topics such as posting about their favourite sports teams and their hobbies outside of school. To us, this is what part of being a community is – accepting our kids as whole people who have lives and interests outside of our classrooms. We also wanted them to be free to talk about these things in a safe space, supervised by adults since research shows that the majority of parents have no idea what their children are up to when they are online. We felt giving our students spaces of all kinds was important.

So to generate some activity in these boards we focused on them in class. We talked about them with our students. We gave them class time to post their ideas and come up with new topics – and we added a wordpress plugin to the site that added achievements.

The plugin was simple to use and added a new tab simply called achievements to our community set up. It allowed us to add both awards (something that has to be granted to people by a site administrator) and unlockable achievements (something that is granted to people automatically after completing a certain amount of activity). We started with unlockable achievements. Awards were granted to students who posted X number of comments (the conversation award for 5 comments, the comment guru for 10), others for posting regularly in the forums and still others for posting updates.

Since then we’ve moved ahead, but this time with adding awards that students can nominate others for. We’ve added badges for people who are community builders, another for peer mentors, good communicators, code geeks and problem solvers. Students need to nominate others for these things. We thought it was another good way to build community and would promote the students paying attention to what was happening in our learning community.

The results? So far, the results have been very favourable. We’ve seen an increased amount of activity in the Hive. More people are posting, our hit numbers are up and kids are taking part – even on the weekends. Over the weekend of December 3rd and 4th for example, over 1000 people visited the Idea Hive site. While there is no way to tell how many of these are students compared to outside visitors, the activity on the site all comes from students.

But all of this makes me nervous. I’ve read my Alfie Kohn. I’m well aware of the dangers of motivating people using rewards as Seth Godin says. But on the other hand, I’m also aware of initiatives such as the Mozilla Badges program which is working to try to recognize experiences and skills gained in online courses and communities. I believe this ties into initiatives such as the Google Ninja Training Centre Jeff Utecht has running at the International School of Bangkok that is helping students there to gain a set of great skills. Kids taking part in our community are learning real skills that will serve them well as they move through life. Of that, I’m completely convinced.

So I’m interested to see if the numbers and activity remains high, or if they taper off. My hope is that the badges program is a way to motivate people to begin the habit of posting and taking part in the community and that once this habit is established, the need for the reward or badge won’t matter. So far it has been an interesting and worthwhile experiment. Some of our reluctant readers and writers are taking part more. Our participation by males is up quite substantially.

So for right now, we’ll watch and see what happens. That’s what teaching and learning are about. Trying out new things and seeing what we can do as teachers to help kids be their best.

 

 

Rewarding Community Members

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As someone who leads an (fairly quiet at the moment I will freely admit) educational community made up of students from two different classrooms, the idea of rewards is something that I’ve spent some time considering.

Kids are often rewarded for a variety of things in the classroom and I fully believe that most of those reward systems do more harm than good. They go a long ways to producing drones and not independent thinking, critical citizens. But that’s another whole post (or book).

But I do admit that I have spent some time looking at, and thinking about reward systems in online communities. As these spaces are often new for the students who take part in them, I have thought about different ways to encourage students to take part in them and to develop good online habits. I know the idea of gamification is a hot buzzword in a number of ed tech spaces right now, but I have yet to see a system that moves beyond being a simple reward system.

But once again, the FeverBee blog has come to my rescue. One of my favourite places for online community management knowledge and tips, a recent post there has me thinking along the lines of rewards again. More than outlining a “here’s how you do it” scheme, FeverBee has offered some questions that we need to think about:

1) Who do you reward? You have to segment your community members by activity, contributions, status, duration in the community and identify those whose behaviour you would most like to change.

2) Why do you reward them? Your most active members are often those you don’t need to reward. They’re already doing exactly what you want them to do. By offering a reward you can create expectations of rewards and upset others. You have to answer why you would reward this group. What would be different in the community if their behaviour changes?

3) How do you reward them? What are their motivations? Efficacy? Fame? Money? Power? Achievement? How do you translate these motivations into a reward you can offer?

4) How do you measure the effectiveness of that reward? When you issue the reward, how will you measure what level of influence it has on the individual’s behaviour? What are the benchmarks you’re following? You need to benchmark the group you’re rewarding with those outside of the scheme. You also need to track this over a period of time to see if the reward delivers changed behaviour or just a temporary change in behaviour.

The entire post is well worth a read and goes on to lead readers through a few different scenarios that are valuable to take some time to consider.

For online spaces that are focused on education and learning, we need to be very careful when we think about and create a reward system as our goals are much deeper than simply being about the number of posts produced, time spent online or comments left. While these might be indicators we want to consider and take into account, a student who occasionally leaves behind a spectacular post or spends their time greeting others and helping them along need to be considered extremely valuable members of a community.

Overall, the topics of motivation, encouragement and learning are deeply intertwined and need to be considered together.