Using blogs at Southern can disrupt the conceptual continuity I attempt to create in my instructional program there. The whole concept of the Internet community as one organic repository of human knowledge, a teeming unity of ideas promoted, supported, developed, and often discarded by the sentience of the being itself, can only be further advance through the technical medium of blogging. More people can now readily promote their own world-view for human consumption, if desired, with blogging tools. So now this year I make the plunge and experiment with numerous blogs.
Like vox.com, the first blog I heard about. An article in the Economist magazine about vox's founder and her technical contributions to the blogging infrastructure on the Web alerted me to the vox.com domain. I found Vox easy to use and nicely integrated with youtube videos, and other online video/media sites; within seconds you are tapped into the vox.com community with your writings and media of choice. There are a fair amount of ads at vox.com, but the format of your blogs are all appealing to the web surfer in terms of organization and color schemes. And a decent amount of blog customization is available to more experience web-users.
One might say, that if anyone can publish their missives and manifestos, at will, whenever, to a worldwide media delivery system, wouldn't that only cheapen the idea matrices humans are hard wired to develop? Sifting through the rabble that can be cyberspace is made even more daunting by its wholesale use (overuse?)?. I say, so what? information gatherers like post-modern mankind should have the right to access whatever they can to suit their needs and desires. Within limits, of course, and now anyone who so chooses can contribute to the cognosphere that is the Internet.
(Now that term, cognosphere. I thought I was original when I coined it a moment ago, but the word has been used in a few select circles).
When I write, I mainly do it because I enjoy it, first and foremost, and if anyone wants to read it also, they are welcome to. I don't admit being a wise sage with every post, but occassionally something comes up people can relate to. Really, blogging is mostly to me an easy way for people to tame the Internet. My commentary surrounding those cybertravels is an added bonus.
Now in public schools, these online communities can be problematic. Ideas ill-suited to the youthful mind are spread through the vox network, and sometimes you run into inappropriate materials. But the benefits can outweigh these risks; students are thrilled with quickly seeing their work posted online in a medium they understand.
I use blogger.com for my current forums (personally, I dislike using "blog" all the time. Do we not have synonyms for this word? How about "forum"?). It is functional, easy to use, and full of great features. However, as in the vox example above, with freewheeling exhanges of ideas in the blogger-world, comes the risks of encountering non-instructional materials. Each blog setup at blogger.com comes with a navigation bar that includes the possibility of paging through the various forums set up by blogger.com users. Rarely things come up when scrolling through that go for shockvalue and not enlightenment. In spite of that, blogger.com works excellently for the average user.
I circumvented the blogger.com navigation bar with a bit of HTML customization, which, like vox.com blogger.com is available to advanced html coders. Whether it violates the blogger.com Terms of Service is an open question, since removing the navigation bar prevents a blogger.com feature automatically created with every blog.
Now I discover another solution to the blog-in-public-education problem: the website edublogs.org - a forum service designed for teachers and students of all levels. I assume, therefore, that objectionable materials are filtered out of their blogosphere. I may convert to it for my education-based blogs, and maintain blogger.com for other things. I need to experiment more with it, but on first glance it seems to be the best suited blog for educators in our public-schools.
So I go back to my first sentence above: since I use the blog frequently for my professional life and for my instructional delivery to students at Southern, restrictions to them on the WWW through badly cofigured web-filters frustrate my plan. Today I find that only when teachers are logged on the school network, can they view blogs at blogger.com, particulary kandah.org, which now uses a frame for a forum at the blogger web. Students couldn't see that blog, from where they get their assignments, nor their very own, which they use for their own assignments and such. Pretty lame, I thought, how kandah.org was blocked from Southern. I hope that gets resolved soon. I sent an email to the HelpDesk at DPS, and they responded promptly saying that indeed the Websense filter defaulted to restrictive sate when updates were applied; they said that soon that issue will be resolved.
However, my students, the smart kids that they are, have discovered work-arounds for the Websense Filter installed at DPS, using proxy servers around the world. These international proxy servers sometimes do weird things to your blogger dashboard, like make all the menus the same language of the server's host country. We learned a few Turkish words from this experience, finding a way to change to English.
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