homoLudens

More for the “Giving mouth” department. Terry Elliot named it in IM the
other night, a Kentucky phrase used to describe hounds’ audibly and
passionately on the scent. It came up in a conversation about
audience and encouragement for writing, with the two of us agreeing to
write more regularly for (at least) each other.

But the first thing I’ve written for him to read feels both too
personal and???, well, uneven if not downright trite. Still, knowing
Terry over the net and f2f now for close to two years, I want to
“publish” the thing for him and for some others, from within my
“personal publishing folder of work,” without making it part of this
cover page of homoLudens.

And thus, the recent installation of Tinderbox, an attempt to
simultaneously leave and stay with a blogging tool as the “cover” of a
digital paper workspace, a space in which organization of writing and
reading (and who knows what else?) is efficient, flexible, and easily
moved to publication. 

Is this a hot trail we’re on, Terry? J. Vornov (who’s using Blosxom, a blogging tool that Bryan Bell has been enthusiastic about for quite a while) writes: “At this point I’m trying to leave something I’ve been dissatisfied with, the reverse linear weblog.” Then there’s Michael Feldman on Dave’s Channel Z. And Doug Miller (He pointed to all of the above. And hey, note the multiple categories for his one post. How he do that?) who sums it up quite nicely:

The first panel at edBlogger resonates, leading to questions and intuitions about
blogging and writing. “Blogging,” for this moment at least, seems one
small piece of managing writing and reading on the web, just one particular and peculiar use of “digital paper.”

From Doug Miller: “To a large extent, Doing Something Different is the public face of Commonplace Book,
where I publish selected material that I want to share with a wider
audience.”

I installed Tinderbox. Now how the hell to I learn to use it?

Hunting for a de-centralized solution to the provision of digital paper. More later.

Mark Bernstein on educators needing to create  “overnight communities” of weblogs if any of this is going to having sticking power:

Interesting, yes, but right now just completely disastrous when you need it to be exactly opposite. I ran a Manila weblog workshop for NCTE teachers today. We started with about 25 enthusiastic newbies and ended with 10 patience-exhausted newbies. The rest ran out into the spectaculary SF autumn day. I would have done the same. Seems our ISP had installed a new something-or-other on its server the night before and it was having a very negative effect on speed for Manila sites. I’d sent a heads-up to the admin that we’d be creating 30 or so new blogs and hitting them pretty heavily, but reliability has seldom been a problem, so I wasn’t very worried. And besides, what distant admin has time to deal with e-mail? I assumed the glacial pace of site creation and story posting was the result of my severely tech-dysfunctional district. Not so. It was the ISP, only I didn’t know that until about 5 hours into the training. And yes, yes, I should have “thought” of it, called the admin, run some tests on other domains. But remember, please, this is a public high school teacher you’re talking to, dealing with making sure the bathrooms are open and presentable, that the signage gets visitors to where they should be, that the attendance lists are in on time, keeping the substitute teacher on task, and living in a work situation with no access to long distance phone calling. It didn’t help that two slightly knowledgable partner presenters bailed a few days ago, that the parent organization sent attendees’ incomplete e-mails in advance of the event, or that the online tutorial materials that I was borrowing were seriously confusing.

The short of it: It’s completely crazy to do this ‘blog-letizing’ without local (as in “on site”) tech support and understanding. And what school or district or teacher support organization can afford that at this point? (I shudder when I allow myself to answer that question.) How did we pull off the Sunday edBlogger conference without major connectivity issues?  Pure luck.

It’s simply time to stop pushing for awhile. I’m going back to my library for the next few weeks, ordering new books, weeding old ones, moving furniture, organizing files. Let the few interested teacher newbies that have surfaced in the SF area dig into all this on their own. RTFM. That’s how I did it. If they ever really committ, we can support each other. I’ve started packing for an extended Christmas break in Amsterdam: a laptop, a Tinderbox installation (Xmas gift to myself. There’s a sale on, folks.) , and some twice-read Dickens novels. From smokey, ale-dark cafes along the Prinsengraacht I’ll daydream a future of decentralized solutions.

Among many other things:

That Terry Elliot should write every day because he can really write.
That Josh Allen was an English major and he runs a Frontier server.
That Tim ?, a finalist for the Chief Information Officer job in SFUSD, actually uses the web to get information. (Progress happening everywhere. Praise Buddha.)
That Mark Bernstein thinks long and hard about the things that I want to could think long and hard about, only he does it years before I even know that they are important things.
That Carol Tateishi really gets it about BAWP’s values and approach applied to blogging.
That the Gal Library CAN handle over 50 people comfortably, with a reliable wireless interent connection.  That Hank Macthay may have found a work-around for Chinese character support in Manila.
That Karen Claxton’s daughter Nina will be posting on her blog in a few days.
That arranging “coffee and???” for over 50 people is too much work for any one person.
That I have the best bunch of teaching assistants in the country.
That Terry Elliot should write every day because people want to read him.
That using public school facilities for an educational conference is an excellent way of keeping costs low, the atmosphere real, and the wireless internet connection fast.

To be continued???

I think Mark Bernstein and Nathan Edleman just started the first panel discussion scheduled for Sunday.

and mentions the duaghter of one of our Galileo teachers: “From the SFUSD press release about EdBlogger SF-03 Galileo staff and students, U.C. Berkeley Bay Area Writing Project, KCSOS Web Team, and teachers from kindergarten through university levels from across the country. This event will be taking place over the???” [via Tim Lauer]
more…

responds to an earlier post about categorization, taxonomy and directories on the web. “What I like about Dave Winer’s idea is that it puts a directory at the hands of every person on the web. It doesn’t suppose that we will create the One True Categorization, and thus is less likely to succumb to the self-importance of ignoring the unclassifiable and inability to express relationships. Our directories relationships to each other wi[ll] help relate the rest of the web by proxy.” Well stated. I’d call such an individualized directory a commonplace book:  “A personal journal in which quotable passages, literary excerpts, and comments are written.” Read comments as MARC records and you get a layman’s view of cataloging. Now what does a catalog of commonplace books look like?

more…

“The Sunday 12:30 - 2:00 Roundtable 2 ‘Blogging in the classroom, lab, library and school’ will
be facilitated by Terry Elliott. Conversation partners (as of this posting) will include
Will Richardson, Karen Claxton, Paul Allison, and
Tim Lauer. Note: These folks are
really just partners in the conversation. They’re charged to briefly
and adequately delineate the topic, and then to engage the gathered
participants in a conversation. ” [via edBloggerSF2003 News]
more…

Jenny Levine’s
insistent mention of libraries and librarians at bloggerCon highlighted
categorization of the web as an unaddressed topic. Any librarian or
skilled library-user understands that cataloging systems are nuts. Doug Miller says it with more patience in a reflection on Dave Winer’s latest directory exploration: “???Worse, if someone else creates the taxonomy, it’s almost guaranteed
that it isn’t going to make sense to me. I’m not going to necessarily
see the logic of classifying item A in category X, sub-category X.1,
sub-sub-category X.1.2. I have to first understand the taxonomy ??? learn to
navigate it, and then make judgments on how well I feel the taxonomy
agrees with my perception of how things are organized and relate to
each other. Hence, I’ve never been able to stand Yahoo! or DMOZ or any
other web directory. To me, they seem arbitrary and confining at the
same time??? Finally, at the end of the day, what tends to interest me most are
the relationships???and relationships are often the most relative thing
in the world, at least when one is talking about people or ideas.
Relationships between people and ideas change and evolve constantly,
and so any system that seeks to reflect those relationships has to
change and evolve constantly as well. That makes maintaining taxonomy
and hierarchy, particularly shared taxonomy and hierarchy a very, very
high-cost task, if not down right impossible.”

That last italicized paragraph, applied to teaching practice and the
emerging field of “learning object repositiories (LORs),” explains my
standing contention that learning itself  “objects” to learning
objects. I remember teachers from my learning history, moments of being educated, “led forth” to some new discovery. I don’t remember textbooks, those ur-LORs. From my teaching history, I remember
teaching partners, those magical relationships that pushed me to make
something new out of what I already knew in order to keep fresh a
passion for learning in myself and in my students. I don’t remember scope and sequence binders. (And Buddha be praised, I don’t remember any “learning standards.” LOL!)

Blogs, linking and unlinking, are just such non-taxonomic
partnerships. More power to the WWW’s Dewey Decimal System pioneers. As
you proceed, however, revere the unclassifiable.