The Strength of Weak Ties: October 2006

TechForum Texas

I'll be in Austin Texas tomorrow at TechForum Texas doing my first keynote (I sure hope that's OK with Stephen Downes) called Making IT Stick. Be sure to follow the conference proceedings through Hitchhikr, created by fellow T+L Conspirator, David Warlick, as the conference floor is wireless, and I expect several will be blogging live (I can hardly wait for Miguel's post...). It should be an interesting day, with Sara Armstrong and Sheryl Abshire also presenting. I'm looking at how innovations become the way in schools, and I'll use digital storytelling and yes, gasp, our district's use of Blackboard as two examples of how new things become part of a school's culture and way.

tags: techforumtx06

Sight Seen-Blackboard Wikis

Sight seen.

Today I had the chance to work with about 20 kids from our South Campus who work on the schools literary magazine, Calliope. I was introducing two new Blackboard organizations that I had created for them (they're all familiar with Blackboard, many of their teachers are using it).

One organization has every South High student and teacher enrolled in it. Anyone can use the digital dropbox feature to make a submission for inclusion in the publication-the submissions are then accessed by the sponsors.

The sponsors then take the submisssions and place them into wiki pages into the second organization-one for each submission. The 20 kids are enrolled in this organization, so they can access any submission and edit it. Of course, the edits are tracked in the page history, so the advisors can watch the submissions evolve. If the edits get out of hand, the advisors can always revert to a previous version.

Surprisingly, the students had been apprehensive about going digital (teachers aren't the only ones who are paper trained). But after seeing the interface and the capabilities that the wikis offer, they were convinced.

Cool.