In reading the above comment by Drew, I can relate to the overwhelming amount of edublogs and tools like it and how to choose/recommend what will/won’t work, content value, costs, etc… I got started in doing this because I was a parent frustrated with the level of communication from our school district and found the navigation of their website to be horrible and daunting for an average user. I want to help with that and through that course, I am learning a whole bunch along the way.

Inspirations come from so many places.

Your wonderful blog and James Farmer’s Edublogs are such cool, accessible, inspirational, and terrific teaching tools that I can’t tell you enough how much I appreciate ya’ll.

‘Til the cows come home and the fat coyote sings!

For higher education, the issue is always encouraging transformation of teaching practice in order to facilite different means of student learning. Authentic assessment and the use of digital archives and comments in portfolios have come a long way to do that with the added bonus of authentic outcomes assessment. To this end, these tools replicate many of the funtions of blogging with integrated assessment programs.

The problem that edublogs and tools like it will have to inevitably encounter is that the market for these tools is quite robust with options that are tied to outcomes assessment (TaskStream, Chalk and Wire, LiveText) along with courseware and portal software like Blackboard and Campus Pipeline. Finding a way to nudge into this market with unique tools like blogging as a standalone product will be a challenge since it seems to replicate many of the tools that are bundled in these suites already. I would just hate to see another product like this sucked up by one of these companies which seems to be the model that Blackboard has adopted for many years now (just look at their content management tool for an example and the entire building blocks model which seems to use clinet developed software as R&D for products they include in service packs and incremental upgrades!).

So I am intrigued by this venture as an educational technologist and college administrator. I will be looking to see where it evloves with curious interest at the beginning at the very least! But your challenge for someone like me is to clearly address where the value added would be along with the thousands that an institution will already shell out for products that are really working and giving us the results that we want. Thanks.

Many educators (teachers, professors, designers, cabinet secretaries, et al.) still don’t understand what a computer is, much less the world-wide web. James has been masterful at juggling these disparate and often competing interests at their nexus, edublogs.org, and has encouraged experimentation, a.k.a., try it and see if it breaks. It really is good news that he is finally able to stretch himself not so thinly as before (and simultaneously in 4 hemispheres, too!).

We’ll have probably to come back to check this out.