(time-poor) thoughts on elearning
Because I am lazy I always have a list of things I would like to blog about but never seem to get around to. I may write about some of these things in the future but I will need to chose which one(s). Here is today’s list - anything grab your fancy?
Why the top of the web is beginning to the look like the bottom.
Why blogger is my new favourite disruptive technology.
What “separation of concerns” is and why the Moodle meta-course is your friend.
Participatory media and how to develop web 2.0-style user-generated content in Moodle.
My greasemonkey ideas for making Moodle life easier (need to employ some full-time macaque monkeys to churn out my greasemonkey ideas)
Why I love flip even though I haven’t even seen one.
Given my current project, I’m wondering about the blogging packet switching comparison.
Cheers for the vote @Will. Not blogging thouhg, mobile or micro and packet switching. The twitter-stream looks like a primordial network without packet delivery checks.
I’m finding my blog has been neglected lately. Lots of notes on what to write - just need the time to think and produce something (hopefully) interesting and worthwhile.
I would be interested on your views on Blogger as a disruptive technology and user generated content in Moodle
I hear ya! It is a struggle @Niall
I’m not sure how prolific bloggers do it. They must have a regime I guess. I console myself thinking they have no life.
Re Blogger (and with insight from you saying that some of your colleagues are using it): If I was starting this blog again I would use blogger not WordPress. I think WP is a conceit of techies - its not mainstream enough yet. you get some cool features but not enough to counter the overhead of installation, upgrade, maintainance, configuration.
I have taught both Blogger and WordPress to non-technies. Blogger is better if you just want to blog and don’t care much about themes, widgets, plugins etc. I could teach Blogger in an hour. WordPress gets squeezed into 3 hours. Also one of the tech team has to set up WP while the users can set up Blogger themselves.
Some thoughts…
Blogger Pros:
- Easy to use
- Free…nothing to install
- Lots of neat, easy to use widgets
- Google owns it, so it’s not going away soon
Blogger Cons:
- You don’t have complete control of your content since it’s not on your server.
- The “Next blog” link at the top is problematic for lots of users. For example, a school teacher using blogger as their classroom blog, and a student or parent clicks on “next blog” and gets a surprise.
- Due to the point above, many schools throughout the US at least, block access to Blogger blogs.
WordPress Pros:
- Easy to use…maybe not as easy as Blogger, but still easy.
- Open Source, so when you download it, you own it.
- If you have the skills, you can hack it to do virtually anything you want.
- Literally thousands of themes, plugins, widgets available.
- You run it on your server (or maybe shared account) and have complete control of your content…unless of course, you use something like wordpress.com or edublogs.
Cons of WordPress:
- If you own it and it breaks you have to fix it.
- You have to update/upgrade it to keep it secure and working
- May not be as easy to use as Blogger…but not much harder.
- Unless you use something like wordpress.com, edublogs, or host it on your own “home” server, then you at least need a shared account…$5 to $10 or so a month.
Tip: One way to be seen as blogging more, is to got down bloging topics when you think about them. Then set aside some time on one day and write several posts at the same time and use the time-stamp/scheduling feature to have those posts automatically posted in the future. I do this a log with one of my Photoblogs:
http://www.georgetownprofessor.net/photoblog/
Steve
Great comments @Steve
What is your conclusion though? Blogger or WP?
The “next blog” can be removed. There used to be an option to remove the navbar in blogger though in some versions of the template this was not available. In this case you need to put a little bit of css into the blog template yourself. Something like:
#navbar-iframe {
display: none !important;
}
This solution may be too technical for the very type of non-techie blog user that blogger is best for.
What this example shows though is that there is a lot that can be done with blogger to tweak it that power-users may not be aware of. WP relies on serverside plugins which are more robust and universal than client-side solutions. But if you are willing to rely on Javascript and aJax (which are not as robust or universal) you can have almost any functionality you want for blogger.
I used google analytics on blogger for instance to generate web-stats. users will required javascript for it to work but its a super service and only requires putting a line of code in your template.
You can use your own domain name easily with blogger http://www.somermills.info or even hook blogger up to ftp and host it yourself which I have tried http://www.dcu.ie/~costelle
This works ok but you have to use an older version of the blogger template which means you lost the nice wysiwyg editor. If it were not for this one snag this would transform blogger into a web page composer come cms that is itself web-based. Maybe where something is hosted is becoming increasingly redundant. Its not very cloud but it is a nice niche feature for some people.
Scheduling blog posts is a great idea. Will have to try this.
Nice photos
They are both very good, but for me it’s WordPress…but I am a bit of a tech geek
I didn’t know about the ability to remove the header in blogger…in fact, I didn’t know the user could edit the theme css in blogger. That does make things a lot better…shows that I haven’t spent a great amount of time exploring the details of Blogger.
For me, I like the idea of having the code in my hands, so WP wins out, but for most people, I can see where Blogger would be perfectly fine…ease of use is the best feature any web application can have and blogger has that.
Maybe it just boils down to what most technology boil down to…most people favor what they are most familiar with. I’m most familiar with WP, so I favor it. I also like the fact that I can host my own blogging network with WPMU…see here:
http://kentuckyclassroom.org/
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