Beyond School

Another limitation of RSS readers I’ve often griped about before: with a few exceptions (Bloglines for one), they exclude comment threads from the feed. This sends entirely the wrong message: that the posts are the main thing, and the writer of the blog is the expert.

I operate on the opposite assumption: I post my thoughts or questions, and expect the comments to lead to better and new understandings – and that’s what often happens. RSS readers miss all of that.

So just for the record, though I haven’t written a new post in four days, I’ve been busy reading and replying to the conversations in three recent posts – A Sunday Science Sermon (68 comments about what “knowing” means), Muhammad Ali: D- Student? Or F- School? (90 comments about whether schools sabotage the futures of smart non-writerly communicators), and For the Roses: My Latest Position on Classroom Blogging (45 comments on whether non-homework blogs should be pushed on all or pulled for the few).

I say this simply to invite those who never leave their readers to take a stroll into planet comment, where the real learning – dialogical, challenging, mutually sharpening – takes place.  It’s a fairly new development on this blog, this type of discussion, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I’m dealing this week with all sorts of trips to embassies and immigration offices (the legal hangover of the marriage party), so no new posts. But you can catch me and many smart, engaged people in the comments.

Come on – don’t be an RSS potato. Get out and mix a bit.

Bear with me. This is an experiment in Bloglines. BL wouldn’t read the Google Video embed (Google Reader did), so I want to see if it will show this YouTube version (new original GarageBand soundtrack – my second outing as an electronic “composer”).

Google Reader keeps formatting – italics, picture resizing, etc. Bloglines doesn’t. I work on those italics, blast it. (And Bloglines readers, that “work” was italicized.)

Why I don’t like any reader I know of right now:

1. They don’t include comments (I know you can subscribe to comments, but it ain’t the same).
2. Readers miss coComments and other side-bar widgets. It’s like entertaining guests without furniture.

Anybody know any readers that show the whole blog, not just the post, in its window? Please drop a comment!

Pageflakes – your free student and teacher start page

• I am a complete idiot for not reading Will Richardson religiously. Pageflakes for students and teachers is powerful stuff.
  – post by cburell

Weblogg-ed » Using Pageflakes as Student Portal

• A gem from Will Richardson on classroom use of Pageflakes. I see a migration coming.
  – post by cburell

Extracurricular :: For technologists who do their homework : July 2007 : THE Journal

• From the article:

  The benefits of integrating technology into K-12 education are being demonstrated nationwide. Here is an illustration of the quantitative impact Texas’ Technology Immersion Pilot has had on the Floydada Independent School District. – post by cburell

Borderland » Blog Archive » Teaching the Controversy

• Note the “habits of mind” approach to ‘teaching the controversy” instead of “indoctrinating.”
  – post by cburell

[Update: Short answer: No, Flash doesn't work either.]

This is a test of feed readers. I want to see if the Flash version of the polls I embedded in “A Quick Youth Relevance Poll: School, Church, and Unschooled Youths” will show up in Bloglines and Google Reader, since the Java versions don’t.

If you’ve already commented on the polls, please don’t vote again. (And so far, churches and unschoolers are getting more votes than schools for relevance….after two whole votes, anyway.)

Let’s see if it works:

Poll 1:

Poll 2:

Poll 3:

An invitation to you to snoop in my new history class website’s pages laying out step-by-step instructions for how to set up and use all the tools listed above to do research.

All feedback is welcome. I’m especially keen to hear if anybody can suggest improvements in the process I use to subscribe to del.icio.us tagged searches. I’m new at it. It seems cumbersome to me.

The burn-out I mentioned in my last post showed in the sour title. Apologies for that (and shame on me–life’s too short for sourness). I did “breathe,” as Barbara advised in a comment, and sleep in Saturday. Mental hygiene seems about done; frustration tolerance, refueled.

Especially in light of the email I woke to from Bloglines this morning. I hope they won’t object to me posting it. It only seems fair to share this, since I didn’t spare them the “petulant frenzies,” to quote Zappa, of earlier posts.

Short version: Bloglines has done good. Here’s the message–quite gracious:

Hi
Thank you for your input in the [image feature] matter. We at Bloglines went
back and came up with a solution that I hope will still allow your
students to use Bloglines and not be exposed to adult content. Basically
we moved the [image feature] to a new domain [URL omitted] and
have contacted all the major 3rd party filter sites to add this domain
to their adult lists. More information can be found at
[URL omitted].

In either case, I’m sorry about how long it took for us to get matters
settled. I hope that this change may save you some of the hassle of
rebuilding your lesson plans, but I understand that your students do
come first. Thank you again for choosing Bloglines as your original
choice. I hope that you may come back to try our service as we roll out
new features in the future.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best
[dloc]

So thanks to Miguel and everybody else who read my post and took action by going to the Bloglines forum and/or their own edublogs, and expressing their views. And thanks to Bloglines for problem-solving.

I said it earlier, and still find it true: for finding RSS feeds, Bloglines so far seems vastly superior to Google Reader (though GR is still in Beta). Their “find similar feeds,” “search for posts/feeds,” and other features are unmatched by Google Reader and Netvibes. (I will say that I like GR’s “tagging” system, and hope Bloglines adds this.) So I don’t know….

I may bring my students back to Bloglines. I may let them choose what reader to use. Again, I don’t know. The focus is supposed to be on locating, evaluating, and managing information, not comparing different web 2.0 services. It’s the literacy, not the technology. And all of this teapot tempest has distracted me and my students from that vital point.

But good on Bloglines for their solution.

Wait. I haven’t really checked it out. Is it a solution? What do you think?

Final thought: it’s interesting what a few people with a few blogs can do these days. In the last month, both ePals and Bloglines have listened to us bloggers and actually problem-solved with us. Sort of gives you hope, it does.

The continuing saga:

If you’ve been reading the last week’s post, you know about the headaches Bloglines’ Image Wall has caused me and other educators who have trained our students in using feed aggregators for research. And you know that I decided to jump ship to Google Reader to avoid future headaches.

Many of you advised that Google Reader was better anyway. I self-taught crash-course in one long laptop session seemed to confirm this. So good: Bye-bye, Bloglines; Hello, Google Reader. No more headaches.

Such was the plan. But as a long-lost friend told me long ago,

The best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans.

(–her gender and metaphysical assumptions, not mine.)

The Google Reader headache came today and yesterday when I walked students through exporting their Bloglines subscriptions into Google Reader. Done. Easy.

Next step: “Now lets find more feeds in Google Reader. Easy….Say you want to find a feed on colonialism….”

So I enter that keyword, click “find,” and all I get is two pages of feeds on colonialism–and most of those from random “About.com” sites.

Short version: either I’m missing something, or Google Reader’s “find feeds” feature is pathetic.

So really, with endless “pleases” added–if anybody can teach me how to effectively search for feeds on Google Reader with the ease and power offered by Bloglines, I’ll owe you forever.

I think I’m burning out right now–heavy grading cycle–so I’m probably missing something simple. (Like, duh, del.icio.us tag-search subscriptions; but I wanted to introduce those a bit later. I guess now I can’t do that.)

Bah. Pfft. S.O.S. How could GOOGLE, of all things, make a product whose search feature stinks? (Please teach me that I’m missing something.)

I appreciated Bloglines’ attempt to listen and problem-solve, but didn’t have time to wait.

Helpful comments about Google Reader led me to explore it and Netvibes yesterday as alternatives to Bloglines and that unfortunate Image Wall.

Google Reader is slower than I’d like, and it possibly caused some crashes on my Firefox (though I’m sure I can go to some help forum and solve that problem). But it, unlike Netvibes, allows the “keep new” feature–in Google Reader it’s “star this” or something–that made me loathe to leave Bloglines.

So off we go to Google Reader. Students will groan–but I bet they change that to “wow, that was easy,” when they see how simple an OPML export-import of feeds from one reader to another is.

And really, when you start thinking about the whole Google package–Google Homepage, Blogger, and the whole Google universe–it seems lazy to stick with an old habit like Bloglines just because it’s a habit. Another addiction to kick.

Thanks to all who have weighed in at this Bloglines forum. There’s some good, constructive dialog going on. More input from us can only help, since Bloglines is doing its part.