Just a thought

I want to see if this works.

It’s a voice recording made in GCast, a web based podcasting tool. Since Edublogs don’t appear to support podcasting, I’m curious about ways to create/store an audio file somewhere and then link to it from inside the blog post. What intrigues me about GCast is that you can create the recording for free using a telephone. Just call the phone number provided and enter your PIN, then record you message. Hmmm, interesting. What can we do with that idea?

The dial in number is US based, but I suppose you could always Skype it. Otherwise just record locally with Audacity and upload the audio file to GCast as usual.

It’s not technically a podcast if you just link to it like this, as there is no RSS feed involved, but it still has possibilities.

Swept up in Blogging

With all the hype about Web 2.0 in the classroom, I have been very keen to explore the use of blogs as a learning tool and have been busy reading lots of articles and blogs, listening to podcasts, etc, trying to absorb lots of ideas on how this might be best done. I don’t think anyone really has any clear strategies about edublogging… a handful of teachers are just trying out different ideas and I guess the most effective uses will just bubble their way to the top eventually.

In the meantime, I decided to set each of my students up with a learnerblogs account and attempt to create some sort of blogging ecosystem in the classroom. Of course, I hope they expand and link to idea way outside of just the classroom, but it’s a start.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Natural Law of Blogging

I just finished reading an interesting book about blogging, titled Who Let the Blogs Out, but a guy called Biz Stone. I’m still wondering what the name Biz might be short for, but regardless, I did find it quite an engaging read. Biz Stone was a very early blogger, was involved in created Xanga, has written a couple of books on the subject and now works at Google helping run Blogger. I guess that makes his opinions worth hearing, purely just based on his credentials.

The overriding message I took from his book was that the true worth of blogging cannot be appreciated on a small scale. A single blog post, or even a single blog, is not what it’s all about. Blogging gets it’s power from becoming a large scale ecosystem, a thriving community of people all cross linking to each other, creating connections and networks of ideas. The power of blogging is way more than the sum of its individual parts, and to gauge the power of this new medium it needs to be seen in the light of the much bigger picture that it creates.

He draws some good analogies, some of which coincidentally come from the last book I read before this one, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The point made in that book, in fact both books, is that groups of people can be collectively smarter than the brightest individuals within the group, if the group is made up of diverse individuals with a broad range of views, supported by a medium that allows them to communicate freely.

Sounds like blogging to me.