Comments on: CEGSA Wrap Up

By: Dean Shareski

Dean Shareski — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:31:23 +0000

Thangaes,

If you’re looking for a perfect way of using blogs in secondary and even with science, consider how this high school Calculus teacher has his students act as daily scribes.

Graham,

As far as using a wiki for your presentation, I not only agree its perfect for collaborative presentations but also its easier to update and organize in terms of pages or sections. I tried keeping my workshops on a blog but found when I redid them, I was awkward. I agree wikispaces is great.

By: Graham

Graham — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:52:10 +0000

Thanks Thangaes, Bill and Al – I love the way fellow bloggers can keep each other honest or at least, on our toes. Our choice of wikis for the presentation notes started out as a joint venture but the failure of SeedWiki on the Wednesday night forced my hand to refit them onto a Wikispaces site. So, our original reason for a wiki about blogging was collaboration and a wiki is perfect for that – a blog less so. I am a Wikispaces fan because as an educator, you can have the ads removed by the administrators. Hope that enlightens our choice. I still stand by my comment about Bloglines being better for sharing than a Feedreader. Granted you can share feeds via OPML, but you can only share with someone you know and you can’t just browse Feedreader accounts like you can via Bloglines. Anyone who has a public Bloglines account can be checked by anyone else and the account owner doesn’t need to do anything or even be aware that others are having a look!
Bill, there aren’t many of us writing as it unfolds – at the final keynote by Lindy McKeown asked how many people had blogged during the conference and only two hands went up (myself and Derek Wenmoth). And even those interested in getting into blogs are still at the beginning stage of just dipping their toes in the water – first time out of the fish bowl!!
Al, it was a genuine privelege to present with you. I still struggle to keep up with your mind and you might have been served well to have had the whole presentation time to fully expand your ideas and concepts, instead of having me to pressure you time wise!! Now we have the challenge – how do we get those at our workshops to take up the baton and keep those first tentative steps going…..

By: Al Upton

Al Upton — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 14:19:11 +0000

Those ‘two other unknowns’ are Anne De Nicolo and Colin Becker, a couple of hard working CEGSA committee members who helped make the conference such a success.

Great wrap up mate – I’ve made some jottings/reflections here
https://alupton.wordpress.com/2006/07/24/cegsa-conference-personal-jottings/

Bill we need more ‘generators’ of online conversations – and this is now starting to happen.

Hey Thangaes – wikis and blogs aren’t a choice of ‘one or the other’ but a choice of ‘which one for which job?’ Often online collaborations use the advantages of both. Thanks for the tip of WetPaint.

By: Al Upton and the miniLegends » CEGSA Conference - personal jottings

Al Upton and the miniLegends » CEGSA Conference - personal jottings — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 13:42:50 +0000

[...] 1. Collaborating and presenting with Graham Wegner. Being in some minor way responsible for raising his profile here in South Australia. Graham provides an excellent local example in terms of exploring and promoting Web 2.0 tools for professional learning. Please check out Graham’s blog and his ‘CEGSA Wrap Up.’ It was wonderful to present workshops and a presentation on our different contributions and perspectives. [...]

By: Bill Kerr

Bill Kerr — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 06:27:59 +0000

Thanks for the overview Graham

It’s always puzzled me in the past why CEGSA conferences haven’t seemed to generate on line conversations. This time we have your just in time blogging and I just read comments from wara on the teachers-it_list, so things are changing.

By: Thangaes Waran

Thangaes Waran — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 01:13:49 +0000

I was quite impressed on your presentation on blogging, although I was a bit amused that you had used a wiki to do your presentation about blogging. I am a great fan of wikis (I use Wetpaint) and have started using them with my students but I am still not sure that how I can use blogs with my secondary science students. I think it is quite easy to use with the students in the primary school and some subjects at the secondary level (Any good examples of science blogs?).

Regarding, RSS feed readers, I still like using the FeedReader. It quietly pops up whenever new posts appear and it is always there to look at when you get some free time.

You had mentioned that the feeds can’t be shared in FeedReader, but you can export it as an OPSM file that you can pass on to others. This is what I do when I show people how to use an RSS feed reader, so that they have some feeds to start with. The OPSM can be imported from and exported to other RSS feed readers like Feedshow (a nice looking online feed reader. I am not sure if bloglines can do this).