BloggerCon

Final Thoughts

Below are some links, items, and explanations of some of the top items I took away from Bloggercon:

1. Bloglines -
Will Richardson pointed this Aggregator out to me. He's working on developing some tremendously exciting content and feeds so his teachers, students and community members can pick and choose different content items to view, read and keep abreast of. At this site, he has some of the choices his community can choose from.

2. Feedster
The bloggroll for Bloggercon is a tremendous location of all the various sites and postings refering to the goings on at BloggerCon.

3. EduBloggers
I met with Pat Delaney and Will Richardson to discuss the upcoming NCTE conference where the EBN will have a pretty interesting presence. I'll write more and add links to this later. Also, there were some interesting folks from the Ohio Edubloggers Network who are getting ready to help about 75 teachers get started with weblogging.

4. Susan Mernit
Lead the Day 2 Technology discussion had some interesting insights and comments about using weblogs in education.

5. Local Feeds
This is a great site for finding, linking and, in a sense, managing blog content especially at an event like BloggerCon where so many folks are blogging like crazy...

Future Needs

Some of the concerns and resolutions suggested for weblogging in the future
(though, admitedly biases towards education)

1. Userability - especially posting and saving content (prevent it's loss)
2. Setup concerns - the complicated nature of users/educators setting up their site
3. Syndication - this issue is paramount for me; that educators can easily roll together varying content
4. Look and Feel - whether this is css/html or web-based, my concern is certainly the issue of educators (and general users) moving from a simple text-based interface (read blogger) to the kind of 'site' that most folks want - text, photos, multimedia, and look and feel.

Presidential Candidates, etc.

Movable Type and the ability to add, schedule and setup Comments on Weblogs seems to have been the 'Great Leap Forward' for the Howard Dean blog. Commenters began to see themselves as Bloggers and the site hits (etc.) began to take off.

Ben Harris (of Ben's Head) is a big fan of the political-Weblog-gambit. I'm not sure if I get it. I like the communication angle, but I'm just not sure.

For the DNC blog, there are 18 'approved' bloggers. When each one submits an article (to a 'private' blog) the rest have 1 hour to review and comment before it goes live. Unless their legal objects, all postings go up but viewers/reviewers have the option to suggest changes and edits. This seems like a very interesting model for publication

Me at the Harvard Law School

Thursday Evening Meetings

Thursday evenings at the Berkman Law Center, Dave Winer hosts weblog writers meetings followed by dinners. See his post here to read a bit more.

I'm thinking we ought to start up something like this in the PDX area -- say, Weblogs Northwest.

In other news, the blogroll about bloggercon at Feedster links to a great number of the folks who are here and posting about the Con.

Thursday Evening Meetings

Harvard Law School

Death of the Gatekeeper

What has folks so giddy about weblogging?
To quote Chris Lydon, "the nature of human nature is a really big deal."

So, why are folks here so willing to go to the mat for weblogging? Is it the 'transformational nature of the technology?"
Do people only seek facts to support their view?

Hard at Work

Shifted Librarian

The Shifted Library (aka Jenny Levine) is sitting next to me bloggin up a storm. Take a look at her site, The Shifted Librarian or click here.

BloggerCon-ers

Glenn Reynolds
Pat Delaney
Will Richardson
Jenny Levine

Educational Commons

Pat's on FIRE!!!

There are a lot of issues surrounding the use of weblogs by teachers and Pat highlighted many of them in his most recent comments (I hope you were able to view them on the webcast ...)
Some of his most salient concerns are: 1. Literacy gap between under-served schools; 2. Need for Educators and Schools of Education need to get involved with Weblogging (and using it for students...)

and much more...

Other Languages

Gleen Reynolds (of Instant Pundit) noted in comments during the education panel that localization of weblogs so they could be read (and 'virtually' translated) would be great. He also seemed to suggest that this isn't too far off.

I have great doubts about this. The idea that we'd want to rely on a blog interface to translate Writer X's content to be read by a speaker of a different language seems attractive but I'm not confident that it gives the reader a truly better understanding of audience.

More to come...

Shifted Librarian Recommended Sites

First Search Database clickable here.

World Cat clickable here.

BloggerCon URL

The BloggerCon Web site is accessible here. Not sure if the webcast is working ...

Why Use Blogs in Education

Kaye Trammell, Pat Delaney and Jenn Levine (the Shifted Librarian) discussed the funcation and capability of weblogs impacting education. Some themes included:

1. Students Creating the Future
2. Privacy Policy and impact on students
3. Collaborative Capacities available for students
"Weblogs as an Open Community"
4. Media Literacy
Will Richardson makes a great point about how the Internet and Weblogging begins (at least) the conversation of have students and teachers evaluate their sources, information, etc.

Weblogs and Journalism

A Few Items that I noted from the first Panel
(I'll add notes and comments soon)|

Will Richardson has posted more about the Journalism Panel at his site here.

1. Ability to control the date/time of publication
2. (Glenn Reynolds – instapundit.com) brand naming and building an audience
3. Linking and commentary that points others to site
4. Access to writing in real time
5. differing audience b/t weblogs and newsletter (etc.)