As we talk about Social Networking 2.0, I wonder what safe spaces we are providing students to experiment and explore?
📝 Blogging as a Safe Social Space for Students
I went into Global2 today and cleared out my data before it closes down at the end of this month. I exported the various sites and deleted them. I can understand the decision to move on from Edublogs, however I think that this is (still) a very under-utilised platform. A Google Site is not a blog and it has many limitations.
I have to work out what to do in the next few weeks. Will probably just host our own wordpress blogs in the cloud. Staff are comfortable with WordPress changing would be a major pain.
Makes sense. What I like about @edublogs is that it offered best of both worlds. Both interoperability, but also convenience of a platform adjusted for education. Not sold on the transition options fuse.education.vic.gov.au/Pages/Global2D… & fear about risk of schools going solo w/ self-hosting
Agree, though it did lock us (DET schools) in and made it very difficult to get media (images and videos) back out. We had 10 gigs of media across multiple blogs, an easy way to get it back out wasn’t provided. Self hosting keeps ownership and accessibility of the data.
There is a bulk media downloader plugin option available. If you have any more issues or questions, there are support links in the dashboard to send emails to our support team and we are always happy to assist.
Thank you, I assume you are talking about this help.edublogs.org/bulk-media-dow…. One aspect I think is overlooked in this change is the great support from the @edublogs team. As @kathleen_morris recently captured theedublogger.com/school-library… it is still fair to say there is life after Global2
We’ve network activated the bulk media downloader so you just need to follow the instructions after the bit where it says activate in Plugins
And use the Advanced WordPress importer if importing into Edublogs or CampusPress blogs by following these instructions docs.campuspress.com/en/articles/71…
Supporting our daughter at home with her learning this year was interesting. One of the challenges related to knowing where you stand and what is your roll. Early on, our daughter cared a lot, putting effort and detail into everything she did. However, as time has passed, this interest turned to apathy. Although she looked forward to the daily online session, the rest was something of a chore.
One of the ideas the school introduced was the idea of a ‘passion project’. I found our daughter frustrated with the task of identifying deep interests and following through with them. Initially, she said she was focusing on ‘slime’. She discussed a whole range of tests she wanted to do, but it did not go anywhere with them (other than create a whole lot of slim). She then turned her attention to Minecraft. In part, I think that this was a justification for spending more time on her tablet doing things that she wanted to do.
Although I have no issue with Minecraft and have always encouraged her with this, my concern was with what she was actually doing and whether it fit the brief of her ‘passion project’. I therefore suggested that instead of having a clear outcome, she at least document her learning. She was still unconvinced. I then proposed that I would create her a blog where she could record a log of her thoughts. After explaining that she was the only one who could access the space, she was convinced.
Although she did not have a clear plan for the project, recording thoughts in a blog led to a number questions, such as how can I add video and images. This all reminded me of the power of blogging and the importance of letting people find answers for themselves, even if this means being frustrated and failing forwards along the way. As Clive Thompson posits in regards to blogging:
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks@1/quoteback.js
On a side note, it is sad to see the end of an era in regards to blogging in Victoria.
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Passion Projects and Creating the Space to Fail by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.