The Connective Writing Project
I've been keen to get more of our staff blogging, since I know from first hand experience what a powerfully reflective process it can be. I've always found that taking the time to write causes me to think more deeply about what I do, it makes me more aware of the ideas and approaches that I'm using with those I teach, and it's also made me a much better writer than I once was. I'd argue that blogging really helps improve your communication skills on many levels while building a stronger foundation for understanding your own beliefs and convictions. There is something both magical and affirming about putting your thoughts down in words, and even moreso when you decide to publicly share those words with others. As you can probably tell, I'm a bit of a fan of blogging (or connective writing, to borrow a phrase from Will Richardson)
During 2011, our school had the opportunity to apply for an AGQTP grant. This grant program is funded by the Australian government's DEEWR as part of the NSW Quality Teaching Program and, in the case of our school, administered by the AIS. Its goal is to help teachers develop their own professional learning through the creation of action research projects. Our principal asked me to put a proposal together, which turned out to be about creating a blogging project for our Year 6 teachers and students. It was quite successful, and as well as a complete written report, we also produced this 7 minute video to summarise what we learned.
I remember tweeting about the fact that we were applying for a grant to get our teachers blogging, and getting a reply back from my kiwi mate Allanah King asking why on earth you'd need a grant for that. Allanah, who is not just a fabulous blogger herself but a real pioneer in the ways she has used blogs and other social technologies with her students, found it difficult to understand why blogging had to be a complicated and beaurocratic process. She quite rightly pointed out that you don't need a government grant to blog, you just need to open one of the many free blogging tools available and start writing! And she is correct. But what the AGQTP grant process bought us was the time to do that. By providing the funding to get our Year 6 teachers released from class, we could set aside the time to learn this new skill in a far more focused and somewhat systematic and committed way. While it would be nice to think that teachers would just go and learn new skills in their own time for their own motivations, sometimes that just isn't realistic, so getting some financial assistance to help build teacher capacity was seen as a very welcome thing.
As a follow up, I was also interviewed about this by Selena Woodward from CEGSA in Adelaide after she saw the video. Selena was intrigued by the deliberately open and public nature of our blogging project, a feature that I was insistent was critically important to the project. Blogging behind closed doors, without the potential for writing to an authentic audience, seems completely pointless to me. The South Australian DECS attitude to blogging is somewhat less open-minded. Some people refer to this reluctance as "the Upton effect" because of the shitstorm that DECS created a few years ago when they very publicly showed their cyber-ignorance by closing down teacher Al Upton's very popular class blog, the MiniLegends. The regrettable fallout from what happened to Al seems to have caused many South Australian teachers to be overly gun-shy of any online use that might be vaguely interpreted as "social". It's such a shame.
Back in 2008, I had the pleasure of giving the keynote address at the CEGSA conference, where my topic focused on how important it is to be a connected educator, to form PLNs, to get both ourselves and our students connected and functioning safely in this highly networked world we live in. I blogged my thoughts about that keynote at the time, and looking back at that post now, and hearing that so many educators are still just as wary and frightened of the online world as they were in 2008, makes me sad and disappointed for the kids in their care. It is disappointing that in the last 3 years, during which I believe we are finally starting to see far more educators beginning to understand the really significant shifts in the way technology is affecting the process of education, that there are still such outdated attitudes to learning online.
Overall though, I'm happy with the progress we made with our own blogging this year. It was progress. It wasn't perfect, and there is lots that I'd change next year, but it's a good start.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.
I've never understood why people send spam mail or leave spam comments on blog posts (in the same way I don't understand why people scribble graffiti tags on trains and walls), but I know that for spammers who really take it seriously there is big money to be made. I suppose in that sense, I DO understand why people create spam if there is the opportunity to make money from it... I guess what I don't understand is how there continues to be constant stream of people who are gullible enough to take action on the messages and, in doing so, continue to generate an income for the spammers.
Let's face it, the thing that keeps spam propagating and growing (and therefore making it worthwhile for the spammers to keep sending it) is the fact that there are enough gullible, stupid people in the world who keep responding to it. If we all were much better at identifying and recognising spam as soon as we saw it, then the spammers would eventually go away because the financial incentive to do so would also disappear. Fortunately for them - and unfortunately for the rest of us - human gullibility (or stupidity) will probably ensure them an income for a while yet.
Having said that, the spam filtering in Gmail is pretty darn good. I currently have a few hundred spam messages sitting in my Gmail's spam folder which have thankfully been identified and filtered before they get to me, so I don't ever need to see them. They just disappear from the system after 30 days. Thanks to Matt Cutts and his team at Google, Gmail does a great job keeping the spam away. Thanks Matt!
One of things that happens to any blog as it grows is a substantial increase in the amount of spam comments it receives. Most spam comments are just plain annoying, and many are quite laughable, but it's a good idea to deal with them before they have a chance to be published. For example, this blog receives many comments that are never published thanks to the powerful Akismet spam filter running on the backend. This WordPress plugin tracks my spam statistics, and in the two years that this blog has been running on its current server, the Akismet spam filter has trapped almost 11,000 spam comments with an accuracy rate of 99.8%. That's an awful lot of comments that never see the light of day!
I wanted to share some of the most recent spam comments because they are kind of insidious. On the surface they look harmless, perhaps even positive. For example...
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On the surface it looks like people are leaving positive comments in response to something I'd written. However, aside from the extremely poor grammar, often a reliable indicator of spam, these comments are so generic as to be completely meaningless. By constructing comments in this way, spammers can spray them across thousands of posts on thousands of blogs in the hope that some will get posted. Unsuspecting bloggers, especially newer bloggers who are often keen to receive any sort of comments, sometimes fail to see these comments for what they are. Not surprising really, since the whole point is to trick you into publishing them.
I'm still not really sure what the point of these generic spam comments is. They don't contain links to click, so they don't appear to be able to lead you to an outright scam or scheme. They generally aren't asking for money, or have any real call-to-action. They are just annoying. They gum up the Internet, clutter our email and clog up our blog feeds, but for no apparent purpose.
Let's all be more vigilant about spam. If you don't already, using Gmail is a good first step. Installing Akismet on your blog helps a great deal too. But mostly, stay aware of what spam looks like, and never, ever respond to it. Ever.
CC Photo by trustypicshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/trustypics/5423704576/in/photostream/
Popularity: 8% [?]
Just Not My Type
I've been a but sporadic here on the blog lately. I've got all this stuff in my head that I want to write about but to be honest, I guess I just haven't felt much like the physical act of typing lately. I'm actually a pretty lousy typist, despite the fact that I've tried, seriously tried, to develop a good typing technique over the years. I've had typing lessons, I've used computer typing tutor software, and I've tried to force myself to use the right touch typing technique. But all of that, and I still can't really type all that well.
When I was at school as a student, I actually did a proper typing course. In fact, I'll digress for a moment and mention that my school offered something that I've not really seen in too many other schools since... every Thursday afternoon we did "activities". We all got to choose from a wide range of activities to do for a few hours every Thursday. Some students went off to play sport, running around the basketball field or ripping each others' heads off playing football. That was never really my scene. I was one of those other more nerdy and anti-social children, who pretty much avoided sport wherever I could.
There aren't all that many things I actually remember about school, but a couple of things stand out. I remember going off to the AGL gas company in Hurstville where we did cooking lessons on Thursday afternoon. I thought it was neat, being a 14 year old kid, jumping on a train to go the two stations up the line, finding the big AGL building, and having some other adult besides my regular teacher showing me how to cook a different meal each week. At the time, learning to cook didn't quite have the same prestige as being on the football team, but over the long haul I know which one has been most useful!
Back to the typing story... the other memorable Thursday activity (call me weird) was doing a typing class. I remember being taught by our library assistant, Mrs Sobb. She was a older lady and boy could she type! I remember going through all the usual finger training activities - asd, asdf, asd;lk, dad, sad, fad, gad - and so on. I particularly remember that she had a set of large white mens hankerchiefs with long thin ribbons attached to each corner. She'd tie two ribbons together behind our neck and the other two ribbons were tied to the typewriter (yes, you heard it, typewriter!) The hankie would then be suspended like a square hammock between the typewriter and our bodies so we couldn't see the keyboard. We just had to place our hands on the home row, by feel, and bang out our lines of sad dads.
Anyway, enough wandering down memory lane. Suffice to say, sometimes as much as you try to learn the "right" way to do something it doesn't always stick. But even as a "bad" typist, I've still written a book of 60,000 words, and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that since I started this blog I've probably typed well over 300,000 words here as well. Add in the other blogs, wikis, emails, discussion forums and various things I've written (typed) over the last few years and it's interesting to consider that someone can be fairly average at something but still produce something relatively worthwhile.
I guess the lesson is that sometimes it's more important to actually just DO something, rather than worry about doing it perfectly.
Popularity: 3% [?]
I am not a prostitute
In the past six days I've received six emails from various companies asking me if I'd please be so kind as to promote their services, talk about their products or otherwise just mention their wares in a blog post. This is not a new thing - I've been getting more and more of these requests over the past 12 months - but the frequency of them has been increasing to the point where it now sometimes averages one a day. In a weird sort of way, I guess this is an indication of some level of "success" in the blogosphere.
But to anyone considering asking me to be a schill for your wares, can I save you all some time? The answer is no. This is a blog, not a brothel.
Look, I'm sure your products and services are fabulous, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere may be interested in them. I even kind of admire the fact that you "get" the power of new/social media enough to take the initiative of asking regular people like me to spruik the benefits of your products. It's nice that some of you couched it in terms of "take a look at what we do and if you think it's a good thing, perhaps you can tell people about it"... that's at least a respectful way of asking for promotional assistance. But the answer is still no. If I thought that a blogger was writing about something for any reasons other than their own, I would lose all faith in whatever they had to say, never being sure exactly where the line was between opinion and advertising. I'm used to being lied to in the traditional media, but I expect better from new media.
To that online university offering a 3 year degree program... it sounds like an ok idea, but no, I don't want to include a link to your site on my site. Actually, what is it with online universities? - I have had a ton of requests from quite a few of them, all asking me to include a "simple text-based link" to them, many even offering me reasonable cash payments to do so. The answer is still no.
To that multimedia organisation that is "creating a portal into the soul of humanity by championing the selfless acts of others"... thanks for asking, but no.
To the flashcard company that wanted me to review their product on my blog, no, sorry. Actually, after looking at what your product and educational philosophy is all about, it's probably better I don't write a review for you. Any tool that focuses on creating better ways to do rote learning is not something you want me to review, trust me.
To the other flashcard company who also wanted me to write about their "unique free services" in one of my upcoming posts, thanks but no thanks. Again, I'm less than impressed with services that help me learn better at the lowest end of Blooms taxonomy.
To the childrens' book online website that was keen for me to write a review of their product in exchange for a 6 month premium subscription... nope. Thanks for thinking of me, but asking me to blog about your product, and then telling me how much my readers would benefit from it is a less than subtle way of disguising how much you think you might benefit from it. Thanks, but again, no.
And to the commercial blog run by an online school that was interested in me reposting one of their recent posts, because it would "appeal to my readers", thanks for thinking of us all, but no. If the content is compelling enough, people will find it without my help.
Like I said, I appreciate being asked (although you can all stop asking! The answer is still no!) and I suppose it's nice to think that other people might consider this blog to be worthy or influential enough to ask for a bit of free publicity. If this happens to me, I can only imagine how many of these requests are made to other bloggers with some real influence!
The bottom line is that Betchablog is, and will remain, independent. I'm not interested in writing about anything other than what I'm interested in writing about. I don't take money in exchange for opinion. I won't write about anyone's product or service unless I want to do it for my own reasons. I certainly won't put links into my posts that I've been paid to put there. I'm flattered to be asked, but even thinking about doing it makes me feel dirty.
Image: 'Soho Street'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/86821409@N00/3479744130
Popularity: 4% [?]
It's about the Conversations
We may be just a couple of NYFBs, but I had the pleasure yesterday of catching up with Jenny Luca from Melbourne, author of the Lucacept blog. Jenny was in town with her friend Helen to attend a presentation by Garr Reynolds on how to do better presentations. We made tentative plans to catch up and fortunately things fell into place and we were able to actually meet up.
After the ridiculously difficult task of finding a parking spot, made all the more difficult by the fact that I left my wallet at home and so had no money to pay for even meter parking, I eventually found a legal parking spot only a short walk from where we could meet. Thank you universe.
Jenny is one of the refreshing voices in the Aussie blogosphere, with so much passion and enthusiasm for education and how technology can make it better. I was very keen to meet up and have a chat. After finally meeting on the corner of Grosvenor and George streets, I suggested we go take a look at the new Sydney Apple Store at King and George, just a few blocks away. We talked all the way up the street, into the Apple Store, up the stairs, and I think we talked the entire time we were there. Helen got into the shopping spirit and picked up a nice set of Bose speakers for her son's Mac, but I think Jenny and I just talked the whole time.
Eventually we went over the road, found a little coffee shop in the Strand Arcade, and sat and talked some more. As Jenny and I observed numerous times, it really IS all about the conversations and although I love the intellectual to-and-fro of the blogosphere, there is something very nice about having a face to face conversation. Jenny has a lot of great insights and ideas, (despite her insistence at being a mere noob, her Clustrmap gives a different picture!) and I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to catch up with her in person.
Heck, it's even made me an even more LR.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Things I said recently…
- Be Better
- The Connective Writing Project
- Season’s Greetings
- Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.
- My Edublog Award Nominations 2011
- Happy Snappy
- The Ron in Toronto
- Steve
- Enough is Enough
- Lessons from the Yamanote Line
Things you said recently…
- Tracy Richardson on Be Better
- Kynan Robinson on Be Better
- Richard Olsen on Be Better
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- Kathleen Morris on Be Better
- Anthony Butterworth on Be Better
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Ah, Nostalgia!
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