Forgot to Enable Request for Follow-Ups

Forgotten to enable follow-up notification on a peer's blog in the Blogging for Educators workshop (My Blogging Projects), I may have. Nevertheless, I've captured my reflective response here:

You've committed to starting two blogs, in addition to this one, I suppose. More power to you!

The proficiency levels of your students may dictate whether you task them with blogging, individually. However, the linguistic and technological proficiency of incoming students may be a mystery.

If I may cut to the chase, whether you require technical word verification on student posts, or moderate comments; you suggest that you will encourage "students [who blog] to see their class blog as an E-portfolio."

Since I'm keen on portfolios, I wonder how you may guide your students to articulate portfolios on their blogs. I'm looking forward to sharing your vision.

Cheers, Paul
22 February 2008 19:12

Quick Captures from Eduspaces

With free services, I gather it's better not to keep all of your eggs in one basket. Now that I've decided to opt out of forced migration from Eduspaces.net to EducatorsCentral.org (a projected TakingITGlobal service), and thanks to limited investment in Eduspaces over the past couple of years, it has been relatively easy to self-migrate those bits of content and resources that I had concentrated in Eduspaces to other free services, before my Eduspaces account gets deleted:

1. Profile information (c. 2006):
   
• Self-description,
• Interests, and
  
• Skills; and
  
2. RSS feeds (5) to:
• Eduspaces communities (3):
1. Blogs, wikis, and social software for teaching and learning,
2. Communication and Collaboration Online, and
   
3. eportfolios;
• CiteULike: Tag socialsoftware
• Wordpress blog: EdTechPost
  

Proceeding in a small pieces loosely linked fashion, I have updated and relocated the RSS feeds described above. They are now in a temporary PageFlakes page (currently private),

The Eduspaces community links (above), also updated, will probably break down by the second week of March 2008, due to the service migration detailed in a previous post (Any Elgg users out there?, 2008.02.14). The same goes for the hot-linked keywords listed under interests and skills in the profile information that I've cut and pasted in below (Who am I...).

It may be possible to update those links once the actual migration from eduspaces.net to educatorcentral.org occurs, by replacing all of the domain names in the link URLs. However, I plan not to rebuild dozens more links - at least not anytime soon.

Who am I?

An educator and a learner, a parent and a child, a colleague and a friend.

Interests

collaboration, community, culture, development, education, language, learning, moodle, open source, portfolios, reflection, software, teaching, technology, tools

Main Skills

collaboration, communication, facilitation, learning, reflection, teaching

Geo-tagging

As an experiment in geo-tagging, and in hope of detecting this and other blogs using Feedmap (beta), I've registered this blog and added the following meta tags to the head of the blog template:

meta name="geo.position" content="32.7885; 130.715"
meta name="geo.region" content="JP-43"
meta name="geo.placename" content="Kumamoto, Japan"

Before you try stuff like this, however, let me remind you to backup your blog template first, and if you have more than one blog, make sure you are using the correct blog template. You shouldn't have to learn those lessons the hard way, like I do!

As Andrew Turner suggests in Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds (2005.01.11) you can retrieve local latitude & longitude coordinates from Multimap, by city names, and get an International Standards Organization country code from the ISO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:JP

Internet searching for "ISO 3166-2, [+ country name]" should turn up codes for other locales.

I note that in Andrew's coding examples, tag closures for geo.region and geo.placename are missing (2007.04.09). Each of those tag lines must begin with a left angle bracket ("<") and end with matching right closure (" />"). I put those three lines immediately below the "head" line in the template, with the understanding that place name is optional. I'll soon see if it works.

Nope, I still couldn't update my location with Feedmap. So I've turned to Kuan Cheen's guide (2005.08.13) to find another tag of the ICBM variety:

meta name="ICBM" content="32.7885, 130.715"

I'll add that and try again....

Note that once uploaded, the template automatically redefined the tags with their elements in a different order:

meta content='32.7885, 130.715' name='ICBM'
meta content='32.7885; 130.715' name='geo.position'
meta content='JP-43' name='geo.region'
meta content='Kumamoto, Japan' name='geo.placename'

Yet each line is still enclosed with angle brackets. Let's try again with Feedmap.

Though Feedmap suggests, "If you want to update your location, simply add geo.position tags to your home page and submit it to the Ping page - it will automatically update your location"; I've done that, and I keep getting an error stating, "Unable to store blog. Please try again later. [ERROR: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: value]" - with and without the ICBM type tag.

Back to the drawing board....

Backup your template regularly!

The more involved that you get with your blog, the greater the chance is that you or the blogging service that you're using will mess it up radically. So here is a bit of advice to myself as much as anyone:

Backup / Restore Template

Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it. Download Full Template....

(Blogger: Settings: Template: Edit HTML)

You do want to backup your template before you radically change it, don't you?