.. and now, for a walk in the blog forest: blogging, RSS and what it means for teaching and learning

Big Possibilities - Danger of Hype!

It has been suggested that blogging represents a threat to the institutionalised journalism of large corporations. There have been reports that popular journalists are publishing their writing firstly on their own sites - before the newspapers hit the stands - and that readers are going first to the blog sites before they read the paper itself.

Now here’s a leap - can you imagine a future public /community broadcasting system, which enables extraordinary Earth citizens everywhere to broadcast audio/visual/text, direct and collaboratively - and to be seen or heard from anywhere on the planet? Imagine your learners easily setting up a networked text/image/radio station for their class discussion?

In a few years, tiny video cameras may have computer and phone built in or easily connected, for direct, live upload. Web software is already enabling individuals to join community publishing efforts - will the program evolve to empower communities in our battle with destructive, outdated systems of distribution, in knowledge, media, governance and wealth?

Or will the system remain dominated by large corporations with an interest in keeping the issues shallow? Will the communication system be controlled to limit the focus to coffee flavours for the wealthy classes, without addressing workers’ rights in coffee-producing nations?

This article examines the background for an interview with Alan Levine (cogdogblog) and Gary Putland (EdNA). I have tried to sum up the current situation and explain what blogs and RSS are all about, to make a point by contrasting the culture and communities which emerge from bulletin boards, email lists and the ‘syndicated blog’, and also to describe some practical ideas that have emerged from all the writing.

Background: It’s all about standards and decency!

Lately I’ve been reading a couple of great new books about the future of web design. Carrie Bickner with Web Design on a Shoestring and Jeffrey Zeldman Designing with Web Standards. Tremendous reading, from two people whose web designs are examples of crisp, clean, aesthetic layout.

For a while, you had to build a separate site for every browser. Thankfully that’s all been changing with the work of the web standards people. Now web designers can build ‘forward-compatible’ instead of ‘backwards-compatible’ web sites. (Sites won’t need to be redesigned to match the new browsers, and they won’t break the old ones either.)

To make sure everyone can access your site, you can keep your information structure separate from your presentation styles. Thanks to a transitional structural markup language known as XHTML - in combination with a document full of presentation styles (CSS) - the web can be safe for designers - and faster than ever. Behind this stylish new set of standards lies XML - Extensible Markup Language - universally accepted as an open standard.

Now, out of this new XML creature, have also emerged the phenomena of ‘syndication’ and ‘aggregation’ - technologies that make it possible to spread your words far and wide, as well as to keep up with your favourite writers.

There are many forces driving us to work here -

the need to make every document easily understood, by many different users around the world;
the need to ensure that what we build now (learning resources, web sites ..) will still work in a few years - that we can re-use it;
the human urge to communicate and share, to build community for building knowledge together;
the hope that one day a teacher will be able to find exactly the resources they’re looking for - exactly at the time they need them;
the teacher urge to offer the best imaginable outcomes to learners;
the teacher urge to enable learners to do all this stuff for themselves;

Out of these needs, comes the urge to overcome currrent barriers - access limited to the wealthy, fear of technology, proprietary closed standards, isolated outdated web pages that require high skill levels to update, and learning resources that are all in different formats - and unable to be searched and indexed by computers.