Thank you for having taken a look at the LTD Project Wiki, as well as for your suggestion to bring it over to WikiEducator (… [author's name removed {PB}], personal correspondence …, Nov 21, 2009). While I haven’t assessed WikEducator in these terms before, you’re right; the community members, and especially people like you there, have a great deal of experience and expertise to offer. I appreciate the reminder. People using WikiEducator are a wonder to behold. …

And ending like this:

… I’m afraid that reasons for not following your suggestion, including a horrendous learning curve, outweigh currently perceivable benefits from porting one of many wikis over to WikiEducator.

On one hand, as you may know, I’m involved with several wikis in Wikispaces, the interface of which I find visually appealing, intuitive, and user-friendly enough for low-intermediate students of English as an additional language to use in the target language. Those wikis are in addition to a DokuWiki, MediaWikis, pbWikis, pmWikis, and a bit of dabbling in Zoho Wiki, too. In general, I’ve found developers at Wikispaces responsive to inquiries and suggestions.

On the other, the invitation I’d received precipitated wonder whether a massive translocation of wiki content from one engine to another would be feasible and easy, or better yet automated and reliable. A quick and dirty approach, I thought, would be to plant an RSS feed in a user page on WikiEducator, at least temporarily, to display content from selected wikis and blogs.

However, even after racking up years of experience with wikis, and having audited several introductory workshops about WikiEducator, I find MediaWikis hard to fathom, and WikiEducator – in particular – frustrating to attempt to navigate, understand, and use. For example, I opened a user page to edit it (still thinking of quickly planting an aggregate RSS feed over there), but running short on time could find no cancel option.

I thought a prominent “dismiss” link might do the job, but something else disappeared when I activated that. I searched for “dismiss,” and have found nothing so far except no “search” help on the Help:Contents page or All pages (Help namespace). Though the Practice editing page refers and links to “the user manual” (P.S.2), that link leads straight back to Help:Contents.

A circuitous and fruitless foray like that into WikiEducator suggests that its wiki engine[, search engine,] and the collaborative venues in flux or stagnating around it (e.g.: WikiEducator policies, “Work in progress … last modified October 4, 2008″) may be too complex for comfort, too cluttered for practical use with English-as-an-additional-language learner collaborators, and too convoluted to unravel and reweave in what little time I have. I feel that, for the time being, the wiki pages I continue to develop, or to [archive or] disregard … [and allow to stagnate] as the case may be, are fine where they are.

What’s Your Institution’s / School’s Social Networking Policy (2009.08.17)

Though I tried commenting on that post, I got error messages twice, and then fedback to this effect, “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!” Since I’m unsure what got through, here goes again.

I thought Heather might be interested in an encapsulated gem I found the other day, and have described like this in Diigo:

Jenna McWilliams’ post frames and follows on from Steve Taffee’s post comprising Proposed Guidelines for Use of Social Networks by School Faculty and Staff (Blogg-Ed Indetermination, Social Networking Guidelines for School Employees, 2009.02.12). Her follow-ons focus “On ‘Misrepresentation’” and “On Course Use of Social Networking.”

on social networking guidelines … (2009.06.02)

The stimulus for Jenna’s post (Taffee, 2009.02.12) points further to a Facebook source, Faculty Ethics on Facebook, a group to which Taffee belongs.

The group description in the badge should be self-explanatory. If not please feel free to ask for additional information or clarification in comments on this post. Keywords for the Diigo group include: blogging, collaboration, community, education, leadership, technology, and writing.

A graphic representation for the Diigo group, to replace the default avatar, is in the works. We’ll stew on shortening the group name to fit badge width.

A suggestion I jotted down when I first encountered that chat reads, “Teach Ss to copyright [their] own stuff.” The note on the back of that tiny leaf suggests, “[T]eachers need not be techies” (no date).

As I searched to retrieve a reference to substantiate the stimulus for those brief notes, I discovered a recent, yet related comment in the EdTechTalk blog sidebar entitled Teaching about Copyright and Fair Use (Renee Hobbs, on Teachers Teaching Teachers #135, 2009.03.02).

Renee points out two more links to explore: one for educators interested in exploring fair use, and the other to videos introducing intellectual property rights issues to educators and learners:

1. Code of Best Practices … (Temple University, School of Communication and Theater, 2008.11.00), and
2. Music Videos Help … (Temple University, School of Communication and Theater, 2009.05.23).

In a post on December 8, 2008, she touches twice upon a concept of freshness (¶¶ 2 and 3, or ¶¶ 3 and 4), yet her Digital Archive for Life Diagram includes a node for “‘Legacy’ Stories” (March 16, 2008):

I realize that her current endeavor, Balancing 2 Faces of ePortfolios (January 30, 2009), focuses on higher education. Nevertheless, the broader context of her work suggests less of a two-faced concept of portfolios for learning, and more of a continuum or flow from currency to legacy, as well as from process to product.

While developing portfolios in higher education contexts may be very much one-off endeavors for students coerced or cajoled into it, where she’d originally situated reflection under the time line, between collection and selection in the graphic displayed on her recent post (January 30, 2009) hardly represented or promoted the recursive nature of the reflective process. She seems to have taken this into consideration in later developments of the diagram that she has linked to that graphic (Balancing 2 Faces of ePortfolios, 2009).

Responses are beginning to begin to trickle in (see: spreadsheet display, below). Please let your Edublogging associates know I’d like to hear about their themes, too.

However, Blogosquare asserted, more recently than Matt (above), “Most [WordPress] themes don’t come with comments on pages,” and then explains how “…to check whether yours come with that feature:

• [L]ogin to your Wordpress admin section > Manage > Pages >[;]
• Click Edit under any page and at your right hand side among the page’s options, at the Discussion box, [and] check [the] Allow Comments and Allow Pings checkbox[es].
• Save the page[,] and get to that page on your blog.
• There, see whether the comment’s form is being displayed.”

(Blogosquare, Things you should know…, 2007.06.29)

What matters to me is whether the Edublogs themes students choose for individual blogs used for classwork allow comments on their pages. When they write about themselves, and start proto-portfolio pages, comments sure could come in handy.

A couple months ago, drmike, Volunteer Support Guru on the Edublogs Forums, suggested getting together a list (Comments on Pages, c. 2008.10.?? [no readable date]). However, checking a hundred or more available themes (The Edublogger, The 100 Edublogs Themes…, 2008.07.17) is a chore more than anyone wants to take on single-handed.

The shocking appearance of Ads by Google during in the interim seemed more likely to precipitate thoughts of moving class and student blogs elsewhere than it was to inspiring volunteer work. Nevertheless, I’m giving it a go, by calling for quick responses on a Google form.

Your theme title, plus three Yes/No clicks is all it takes. Thank you in advance for your cooperation. If the form doesn’t appear here, please try the link below

Loading…

(embedded form, above)

Does your Edublog theme allow comments on pages? (link to form)

Cheers, PB

Under such circumstances, there are lots of issues instructors need to consider. For example: In that computer lab. I can display detailed instructions from a host of sources (assignments on the course wiki, for instance), but only if and when I over-ride students’ computer displays. By design, in light of cost factors, that lab lacks separate monitors for student reference while they are working at individual machines.

I chose that lab because it still serves as an part of a blended learning environment. There I can listen and speak to students with little or no technology, answer questions, provide general and individual instructions, offer suggestions, and accommodate requests for technical assistance, with little or no time-delay.

The computer monitor over-ride function in the lab probably works greats for lock-step instruction and technical training purposes. However, since one of my ultimate goals for Engl. VIII-c is creating opportunities for, and fostering students’ tentative steps towards autonomous learning, I can decide to let students stew a bit in their own juices. I often observe what they do (or have done), rather than telling them what to do (or what they should have done).

In the situation ajisaba pointed out, I noticed no one asked for clarification of the boardwork anytime soon. However some students had gmail open, and the most recent message in their mail queues was notification regarding a change on the course wiki. Some who noticed the message opened it quickly, and followed links in to the voice recording assignment. There they found more detailed instructions than I was able to list on the whiteboard, along with links to resources related to Audacity, a tool I wanted them to use in all likelihood for the first time.

Once a couple of students realized by themselves that Audacity was a computer program that they couldn’t download in the lab (rather than a personal character trait), questions and requests for help started popping up around the class. They were ready: a) to learn that the program was already on their computers, and where, b) to open it, c) to learn how to use it, and d) to teach one another about it.

Puddles of understanding burst into pools, and soon almost everyone in attendance was referring to their online profiles for content, and experimenting with microphone settings, making sound tests, and all the rest. I was at liberty to circulate and prod obstinate shells that the rising tide of on-task-ed-ness still hadn’t reached for oh-so-many conceivable reasons. It is moments like that that make blended instruction so satisfying.