Chat Widget for Blogs

Here's an interesting tool that was shared on educatorslog.in yesterday - a live discussion widget that can add a chat feature to any blog or website.

It is of particular importance to India, as it incorporates the Google's transliteration API for typing indic scripts for Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. It requires one to be signed in with their Google (gmail) account to make sure that only the signed in users leave comments.

It integrates with Google Talk as well so that people can see their "friend" lists and "presence" cues (online/offline/busy/other status).

I can potentially see a class gathering online for a discussion around a blog post that a teacher has posted as an assignment, or even groups of friends meeting online at a designated time to discuss homework on a class blog. I guess blogs and blogging need to become part of mainstream educational use by teachers and students before tools such as this can be leveraged for collaborative learning.

A neat idea and potentially useful tool nonetheless!

@ NECC - 4: Education 2.0 in India

From my session on educatorslog.in at NECC 2008 - Education 2.0 in India: Community and Sharing through Blogging and Tagging...

My Brush with Indic Language Support in Blogger

नमस्ते! (Namaste! in Hindi script)

Blogger (and some other Google products) have had Indic language support for a while now, but only today did I, for the very first time, really read a Hindi blog post on the very interesting Hindi blog of Mr. Gyan Dutt Pandey titled GyanDutt Pandey Ki Mansik Halchal.

It all started with an email I received from Mr. Pandey, who blogged about his (blog-worthy) meetings with my father, Dinesh Chandra Grover (of Lokbharti fame), a doyen in the Hindi (print) publishing world in India. (See this and this post of Mr. Pandey's as well).

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that (given my background) this was the first blog post in Hindi that I read, comments and all (and there were many comments - this blog clearly has huge readership!). That said, going through the blog was a huge eye-opener for me...

Like getting a sense for the number of bloggers in India blogging in Indian languages (I'm sure Google has the figures); phrases used for the Search, RSS feed buttons, "Posts by categories" - "इस ब्लॉग पर सर्च का जुगाड़", "कृपया ब्लॉग-फीड सदस्यता लें", "लेखों का वर्गीकरण" respectively; options to read the blog in your favored script- choices were English, Gujarati, Bangla, Oriya, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam & Hindi (Indic to Indic online transliterations done courtesy girgit.chitthajagat.in, embedded slideshows in hindi (hosted on Zoho) and much much more....

A subsequent gmail exchange with Mr. Pandey (in Hindi script!) revealed that for composing his posts, he is in fact not using Google's online transliteration tool, but Baraha and Microsoft's Indic IME offline tools instead.

I cannot remember the last time a single blog post led to so many 'a-ha's!

Indian Edu-blogger - Wither Art Thou?

Indian educators are conspicuous by their absence in the blogosphere! It struck me about a year or so ago when I was going through the wiki for a blogger meet (barcamp or some such) somewhere in India (Delhi/Chennai/Bangalore), and 'education' did not even exist as a category for Indian bloggers! Several moons, and millions more new blogs in the blogosphere later, the India edu-blogger still remains a non-existent entity in the blogosphere.

This has been borne out in recent weeks by a couple of other stark indicators. One, the International Edubloggers Directory which now has hundreds of edu-bloggers listed from around the world, has only 3 from India! Second - a google search on "Indian bloggers" took me to a list of the "Best Indian Blogs". The list, which has hundreds of bloggers divided into about 35 categories did not have an 'education' category (surprise, surprise!) until I suggested my blog and urged them to create this category. [This blog has now been listed - thanks Amit! - and more importantly, an 'education' category has been given its due place at the bottom of that long list!] Two other blogs, besides mine showed up in the education category, but my hopes were dashed when a cursory scan through both revealed that they concern themselves only with guiding students applying abroad for higher studies - helping them navigate issues like visas and financial aid! Not edu-bloggers per my definition.]

I enjoy reading and participating in discussions and debates that rage on issues of education, in general, and 21st century learning, in particular, on the blogs of edubloggers like Will Richardson, David Warlick, Karl Fisch, Wes Fryer, Ewan Macintosh and many others, most of who are based in the US. I believe such communication and discussion benefits any community that is working towards a common goal.

I reckon that there are several (read hundreds of thousands) educators - teachers, school leaders, policy makers - who surf the Internet, especially in urban centers in India. I reckon that many (read thousands) of them are fairly comfortable with written communication in English. I reckon, no, hope, that they have views and opinions that relate directly, or even tangentially, to education. What then is keeping them away from expressing and sharing their views with other educators?

My guess is that the answer lies somewhere in anthropology and HCI and information science.

More on this, and educatorslog.in (an attempt to create an open group blog for educators in India), later...

[This issue has been bothering me for a while now, so even though this post is only half-baked, I decided to get it out there. I'm quite sure this is only the beginning of a lot of questioning/conjecturing/researching on the subject!]

Back to Blogging

“Could you help me start a blog for my literature class?”

That question posed to me by a teacher the other day truly warmed the cockles of my heart (pardon the quaint expression!)…I thought the idea of leveraging her students' new-found interest in poetry through a classroom blog was a brilliant one. Writing poems is just the kind of Language Arts activity that can benefit immensely from a forum for publishing and an audience of readers (for praise and critique) in teachers, parents and most of all, peers.

Blogging in the classroom - it’s a slow but sure trend in urban schools in India - one that I’m happy to fan along in any way I can, because I see such tremendous possibilities in these common platforms for expression and discourse that extend beyond the four walls of the classroom.

Blogs in K-12 can have various purposes – as a quasi-course management site maintained by the teacher alone; or a collaborative platform for sharing ideas by the teacher as well as the students; or a personal space for publishing maintained by individual students that the class (or even the school community at large) has access to. Having used blogs in all these different ways with my students (teachers in professional development programs), I think it’s important for teachers to be aware of the different ways in which blogs can be set up and used – driven, as it were, by the purpose of setting up this collaborative learning space.

I came across a fantastic article that provides crystal clarity on various blogging techniques that can be employed by teachers. A brilliant piece of expository writing that is well-supported by excellent diagrams (such as the one shown here), this article would be good guide to any teacher in nailing the implementation strategy of her class blog.

Teachers - read and blog away…

Of Folksonomies, Blogospheres, Tag Clouds...and Education

Read an article recently - Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? in the March/April 2006 issue of Educause Review. The article, which was mostly a descriptive account of the emergent “social software” and tools that justify the 2.0 in the moniker 'Web 2.0', fell somewhat short in its analysis of how these would lead to innovative teaching and learning, other than mentioning the obvious affordances of the read-write web in collaborative projects in higher ed.

Reading the article left me a bit depressed – this emerging new web paradigm is progressing too fast (even by Web standards, according to the article) for us to keep pace. The education community in India has barely tapped the enormous potential of the old web (Web 1.0, if you will). There are enough tools for collaboration even in our familiar Worldwide Web of old. How many teachers here are using even easy-to-setup-and-use e-groups or wikis or even email for telementoring or collaborative projects? How many have even heard of Webquests? Why are urban schools with email-savvy teaching staff that has access to the internet not using the affordances of the internet for communication (a la corporate houses)? In this world, RSS probably means little more than Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh!

It is not my intention to suggest that it is mandatory that every available technology be used by every educator. But what stops a teacher from exploring these new tools that don’t cost anyone anything other than some time and effort? While some of these do require a cursory understanding of xml and html, simple blogging and social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us don’t. To me all this again points to the lack of digital fluency among the majority of our teaching population as well as a dearth of educational technologists who can help teachers stay abreast of tech advances and even aid teachers in such explorations (ref. my post on Enabling Conditions for Successful Technology Use).

If the aim of every good teacher and school today is to prepare children for the 21st century, are they not obligated to provide these children with exposure to the new paradigms of interactions – and the openness and social quality that are the hallmark of collaborative work in this century?

Weblogg-ed

No conversation about blogs in education is complete without at least a mention of the blog dedicated solely to the subject - Weblogg-ed.

Other sites worthy of note - edublogs.org - for setting up free blogs on education.

Schoolblogs, also a free service for educational blogs and set up on the Manila platform, has great features (a discussion board for asynchronous threaded discussions, and the ability to upload files & links), but it seems to be plagued by technical issues - it is slow and downtimes are frequent. (I even set up the PPSE group blog and "bulletin board" there at first, but we had to abandon it due to these recurring technical problems).

Blogging in the Classroom (...not literally!) / Blogging Teachers

A comment on a post here touched on the issue of blogs in education – something I’ve given much thought to over the last year or so. Much has been written about the benefits of blogs especially in the context of K-12 education – mostly ideas around publishing and collaborative learning, facilitated by the ease of setup and use of this tool. The last couple of years have seen a phenomenal rise in the use of blogs in the classroom in the US.

[In keeping my with firm beliefs in first making teachers aware and fluent in the technology we would like them to use], I do think that we cannot expect teachers to design curriculum around blogs unless they’ve experienced blogging first-hand. So teacher awareness about the world of blogs one of the goals I set out to achieve this past year.

Educational Blogging (an article that appeared in the Sept/Oct 2004 issue of Educause) was one of the earlier writings on this subject. It was this article that I distributed to a group of teachers that I work with (at MAIS, Bangalore) as an introduction to the world of blogging in education. As part of the team that was facilitating a teacher professional development program (called Professional Practice and Studies in Education, or PPSE) for these teachers, and designing their coursework, I worked the use of blogs into their PD curriculum – having them reflect on their teaching practice or any other specified topic, on their personal blogs that I helped them set up. (I think a teacher’s blog could serve well as his/her e-portfolio too). I also set up a group blog that would operate as a common platform for discourse on education, or even just for announcements and general communication among the group.

Some of these efforts were also aimed at building a community of practice (CoP). Teaching is known to be (to a large extext) a solitary activity and we wanted to set up modes of communication that would alleviate some of the isolation teachers experience in their profession.

As was expected, some of the 21 teachers who are part of the PPSE program took to blogging more easily than others. All in all, it's been a rewarding experience. The fact that some teachers have started blogs for their subjects with their students is icing on the proverbial cake. Mission Accomplished!!!

(Unfortunately in a country such as ours, hesitancy in written communication in English can be a huge stumbling block in such an endeavor even for some teachers in urban English-medium schools such as 2nd and 3rd language teachers. Will save that for a later discussion…)