Fri - January 14, 2005

Fri - December 3, 2004

Tue - April 20, 2004

Tue - March 23, 2004

Tue - February 17, 2004

Thu - January 29, 2004

Tue - December 2, 2003

Tue - November 25, 2003

Updated Resources-LEAF

This is just a blog to announce some updated resources that our LEAF-y friends might find useful. Find here links to the Folsom pictures, the Sacramento workshop powerpoint presentations, and a LEAF-y blog site.

Mike Danzig has asked if I would post the powerpoint demonstrations that were used in the workshops at the networking meeting in Sacramento.

You can find them here.

Once again, you can find the Folsom photos here.

As for we Carpinteria folk, we had a very successful Garden Party here on Wednesday, November 19.

Here is a brochure that explains the events we had planned for the day:
Garden Party Brochure.pdf

Posted at 02:57 PM    

Thu - November 6, 2003

Wed - November 5, 2003

Blogging Health and Nutrition

Blogging, or Weblogging, has sharply increased recently on the Web. A Weblog is a dynamic form on the Web that allows someone to post text, photos, hyperlinks, and other multimedia on the Internet with little experience. A Weblog may be updated often, and it has the added value of syndication. Newsreaders can be used to subscribe to a blog, and receive regular updates of postings. This article discusses my perceptions of the differences between blogs and regular pages, and the advantages to an educational setting in using blogs.

Problems with Webpages

The Web has grown quickly, and many schools have embraced Websites as a method of communication to reach out to parents and community. As more and more educators have developed strategies for posting information to the Internet, it has become apparent that the ambitious effort necessary to keep a Website current and relevant is difficult for most schools. For example, in my own school, updates to the Website are irregular. At times during the year, the site is outdated, bulging with information that may not even be current. At other times, the site is current to the year but static; materials may not come in from participants, and new information may be lacking. Often, one person is ultimately responsible for the site, and this person may become a bottleneck for site usability.

In any case, the reliability of the site is called into question. At best, it becomes a reference point for basic school information: major school holidays, school phone number, address, and teacher contact information.

Blogs

On the other hand, the blog is specifically designed for constant updating. The blog format allows materials to be posted without any formal html experience. When a posting is prepared, it is published to the blog format with the push of a button.

A blog format is consistent. It usually maintains an open list of the most recent postings, with links to past postings and archived information. In other words, it is a chronology of postings, not a flat view of information nor a hotlist of previous pages, with the most recent information on top and previous information under. It is designed for active use, for continual posts, for minimal rewriting of the page context. A blog entry may contain text, photos, hyperlinks, and other multimedia. Each blog may be as rich as one can conceive.

There is an additional advantage to the blog that is not readily available on a Webpage. A blog is available for syndication. Syndication means that the blog can generate a separate file, called an RSS file (Real Simple Syndication), that can be used by another special class of software called News Readers. A news reader essentially tracks syndicated files, flagging them; when something is added to the page, it signals to newsreaders that there is a new posting.

This is all not as difficult as it may sound. The newsreader program lists all of the subscribed sites, and then shows in a list that the site has a new posting.

Managing information

There is too much to know, too much to follow these days. Let's do a couple of examples to see how blogs and Websites differ:

Imagine a user who has specific interests: news about Macintosh computers, NFL news, a child's lunch menu, Howard Dean's political progress, new updates for Macintosh software.

Now, all of these interests could be pursued by finding Websites, through searches or previous knowledge, and the sites could be bookmarked, and an individual could run through all the pages and look for new information. This would take an inordinate amount of time and reduce the efficiency of the searching.

A second option would be to use a Web portal, such as Yahoo, as a start page. Special interest topic areas could be identified. These usually list new, major events within a topic area.

A third option is a newsreader. With a newsreader, pages that generate syndication code would update on regular intervals. Subscribed pages are generally much more specific to an interest.

For a person or group with specific interests, the syndication method brings a focus and structure to information.

Networking Common Interests with Syndication

Here is another possible application of newsreaders and syndication. Assume that you have a group of people with common interest, for example, different schools involved in the LEAF grant, or different classes within a school that are working on healthy recipes or family fitness. Each group could maintain its own blog of postings, recipes/fitness tips/or LEAF progress, and each member of the group would subscribe to the other blogs available.

This would result in a local information network of shared information.

Here is a screenshot of a Newsreader:


Subscriptions are on the left. The numbers after each entry demonstrate the number of new messages in each subscription (this was a brand new one, so there are lots of updates.) The entries on the right are the postings to the Carpinteria Middle School Bulletin Blog, which includes staff notes in addition to the daily menu.

Each item will show an abstract in the lower right box.

Here are some examples of reader media:

(Unfinished.)

Posted at 02:01 PM