Volume 3, No. 23
11 June, 2004
[To view this newsletter on line:
http://www.emck.net/eline/04_06_11.htm]
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|
 Let's
keep in touch!
The E-Line
fits nicely into the list of resources reviewed in
this edition. Make it
interactive! Send your resources, ideas, favorite lesson ideas, websites by return email, and join The E-Line
community!
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 E-Communications and the Classroom Teacher
A lot of virtual ink has been spent on the idea of "community" -
school communities, teacher communities, neighborhood communities, workplace
communities, learning communities, virtual communities. Communities can happen
for lots of reasons - proximity, shared purpose, shared interest, shared
practice, shared experience. The key to the development and maintenance of
communities is communications. That's where the virtual variety really
shines. E-communications can transcend a wide range of boundaries - physical and
learning challenges, political, long distances, even time constraints - to
support and nurture communities of all kinds. As summer comes on, this edition of The E-Line
focuses on ways in which technology can help to connect teachers to each other,
and to other interested and supporting parties. We'll start with a description
of the types of e-communications formats, comparing how they're used for
communication.
| Format |
Communication
style |
Description |
| Email newsletters |
One-to-many |
The The E-Line
is a newsletter, and there are lots of
them. They can be interactive (we'd love for this one to be!), but they
don't have to be. |
| Email distribution groups |
Many-to-many: controlled |
Since this capability is a part of private email
systems (rather than publicly available), we're including it here just
for reference. Groups are simple email addresses that forward to a list
of recipients. Membership is
controlled by one person, and a "reply" goes only to the sender. |
| Email discussion lists, "LISTSERVs" |
Many-to-many: egalitarian, enhanced |
LISTSERVs are very different from email distribution
groups - "reply" goes to everybody, membership and participation is
voluntary, and the discussion is usually archived and available
publicly. LISTSERVs often develop into communities, with familiarity
between members. |
| Forums |
Many-to-many: egalitarian, web delivery |
Forums are similar to LISTSERVs, but instead of the
discussion being delivered to your email account, you must visit a web
page to participate and read. Thus, since members actively participate,
strong alliances and a community feel often develop. Discussions are
"threaded" - arranged by topics. |
| Web Logs ("Blogs") |
One/many-to-all |
Blogs are similar to forums, but the comments are delivered on an ordinary web page in the order in
which they're posted. Usually, blogs are used as personal or group
journals, with others adding comments. |
| Wikis |
All-to-all |
Wikis are public websites that allow anyone to
access, contribute, and edit the content. Wiki comes from Hawaiian for
"Fast." This conceptually different e-communications idea is
by no means widespread, but it has incredible potential as a way of
connecting people on group ideas and projects. It's a capability looking
for uses! |
Below are some examples of each type except "Email
distribution groups," which are not globally available. We've also included free
software resources, allowing anyone with some web server configuration skills to
support these e-communications platforms directly in your own district.
|
Newsletters |
|
Examples |
 MiddleWeb's
Of Particular Interest -
http://www.middleweb.com/mw/aaOfPartInt.html
John Norton's venerable and text-only Of Particular
Interest serves up readings and teacher resources on middle school
reform. The E-Line
has been using it for years!
MarcoGram -
http://www.marcopolo-education.org/
MarcoPolo is an organizational shell for curriculum development and
initiatives produced by other professional organizations. Their
newsletter, the MarcoGram, promotes the projects they fund.
MarcoPolo has partnered with the Kentucky Department of Education
for several years.
|
|
Resources |
A good place to start is with educational professional
organizations, almost all of which have newsletters. See The E-Line
(The Help Desk), June 13, 2003, for a
list. |
|
|
LISTSERVs |
|
Examples |
 EDTECH
-
http://www.h-net.org/~edweb/Fifteen years old
and 5,000 members strong, EDTECH is a part of the H-Net umbrella. Its
focus is on technology integration in K-12 instruction. It's an
extremely active list, and is moderated.
LM_NET -
http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/The flagship list of library media
specialists, now hosted by
Educator's Reference Desk, has a slightly different format, but is
nearly as venerable and
active as EDTECH.
|
|
Resources |
Here are a few places to look for email discussion lists for educators:
- H-Net -
http://www.h-net.org/lists/ -
H-Net lists cover the gamut of education and humanities.
- UK -
http://www.uky.edu/Education/kylists.html - established when the Kentucky Education Reform Act was first
instituted, this cluster of lists has a few that are quite active,
notably KYTRT.
- Topica -
http://lists.topica.com/ - Topica took over the Liszt listing of email
discussion lists, and now hosts many.
- L-Soft -
http://www.lsoft.com/ - The venders of the LISTSERV software
maintain the "Catalist" - a searchable database of discussion lists that use their software.
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|
|
Forums |
|
Examples |
EDTECH also exists
as a forum on
the Google Groups site (see below), and participants can
post to the discussion directly from its presence there. |
|
Resources |
- Google groups -
http://groups.yahoo.com/ - The original Bitnet, which pre-dates the
World Wide Web by years, was purchased by Google several years ago. Some
of the forums there are pretty bizarre, but they still stand as the
original.
- Yahoo groups -
http://groups.yahoo.com/ - Yahoo hosts forum discussions for free,
but requires membership and forces you to view full-page ads.
|
|
|
Blogs |
|
Examples |
Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth -
http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ -
Andy is the moderator of WWWEDU, a LISTSERV in
support of educational use of the World Wide Web. His blog is pretty
active, and includes pictures sent from the field via cell phone. |
|
Resources |
- Educational Bloggers Network -
http://www.ebn.weblogger.com/
- Hosted by the commercial blog hosting service Weblogger and supported
by the Bay Area Writing Project, there are lots of examples and other
resources here.
- Radio Weblogs -
http://radio.weblogs.com/ - A
listing of blogs by popularity of feed. Includes some commercial
presences, such as the New York Times education news blog.
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Wikis |
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Software resources for your own school/ district (all free!) |
|
LISTSERVs |
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|
Forums |
|
|
Blogs |
There are hosting services for blogging which require no
software. Blogger,
http://www.blogger.com/ , is one of the original ones, recently
bought out by Google but still free. Everything you need to have a blog
without the hassle of maintaining it yourself! For those who want
software...
- Movable Type -
http://www.movabletype.org/ -
They still have a one author/three blog free version, but they've gone
commercial for the rest. Probably the best known and used blogging
software.
- WordPress -
http://wordpress.org/ - still
completely free, nicely visual and stable. PHP/MySQL based.
|
|
Wikis |
We admit to a certain lack of knowledge here, since we have never used
any Wiki software. However, Randy Kramer provides this extensive list on
Ward Cunningham's Wiki:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines. We'd love to hear from anyone
who's used something! |
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WikiWikiWeb
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Snitz
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