New blogging system August 30, 2006
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Started the day by meeting Scott Lavery for a talk about the
Enterprise section of the site which he now maintains. Scott's picking up the eZpublish system quickly - along with the rest of his new role - and has already made a few changes to improve that part of the site.
Spent most of the day on WordPress migration. I'm hoping it won't be long now until we can transfer our blogs onto
WordPress . We're planning to offer
WordPress Multi-User , which is a state-of-the-art system developed by a dedicated community. More details
here . It will provide a robust, scaleable basis for extending blogs into the classroom in large numbers. Although the installation runs smoothly, there are still one or two gremlins to be sorted out. This is par for the course for the multi-user version - although it's much simpler to use than our current eZpublish, even the community admit it's complex.
Listened last night to
John Connell's first podcast which I found inspirational and reassuring as I try to get to grips with what exactly SSDN, now
Glow , will offer. If you're catching up on this, you'll find this tells the story of SSDN from its earliest days 2001, and puts the whole thing into context very well. He describes the early recognition of the need for a web-based technology architecture to accomodate the diverse range of software and hardware in schools around the country. It's particularly interesting to hear his take on the impact of social software such as
wikis and Google's
Writely collaborative, web-based, word-processor. He describes the current use of these as the first ripples of a tidal wave. Reassurance came from the clear recognition that this isn't about creating a walled garden for a closed community, but about simplifying the creation of interest groups of any size, including guests from elsewhere on the web. It was also good to hear recognition of the importance of putting power in the hands of student users, and the risks of unnecessary control.
Looks like I'll have a chance to talk to Liz Nicoll and her colleagues in the Home Economics Subject Support Group on Friday about the using the Exc-el site for HE, and to support
Health Promoting Schools activities. Hopefully we'll gain a number of new contributors. Memo to self - must check there aren't any IT outages planned!
Initial thoughts on Glow August 20, 2006
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Just took 24 mins to watch
"Glow the Movie" (teacher version) . In it, a glowing man takes a teacher on a futuristic tour. If, like me, you've not seen it before, it's worth a look to get an idea of what it looks like and the possibilities envisaged for its use. The internet was only mentioned as a way to access Glow, which seemed slightly odd - but I suppose that's not what it was about.
Surplus ICT capacity as a source of revenue? August 8, 2006
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Ewan , in his recent
interview on Mediasnackers , talked about school students teaching IT skills in their communities.
Yesterday Grid Today (!) with
Grids for Kids by Tom Gibbs went a step further:
"Companies and local economies that need to bootstrap their workers and citizens into the global collaborative world can share their local education grids as a way to share both the wealth and the expense."
There's certainly a lot of unused processing power in schools, especially outside the school day. If this is a potential source of revenue, we need to explore that possibility. New fast networks will make it more practicable.. even if that wasn't their initial purpose!
