Humbug

* and then he realizes what's been bothering him. It's the Christmas break. And as much as he loves his family and time for walks in the woods or watching the late, late show, he's missing his friends. The worry and the hustle and the warmth and the daily friendships he finds in his work. *

This Blog is Worth $6.00?

They didn't say to whom, or if that was Canadian currency. Or what the tax implications are. Ah, well.



So, today I caught one of those coffee-fed fevers and added a bunch of people to my MyBlogLog contact list - mostly people who've added me. I don't know why: I dislike the tit-for-tat mentality that dominates, say, blogcave or techno-whatchamacallit. Maybe, having gated Facebook, I got panicky.

Maybe I caught a kind of cabin fever.

Though I've been online eversomuch, I feel a little out of touch with the web these days.

I've been harbouring illusions of joining networking communities of literacy and basic adult education communities, but there aren't any. There's some listserves and a wiki or two - the literacy people are out there in the internet ether - but blogging hasn't caught on yet.

For that matter, the learners I have this year aren't much interested in blogging. That might be because multiply.com just isn't as fun and accessible as Yahoo!360 [used to be], or it might be because so many are on Fb, and confuse blogging with forwarding chain mail and pictures of kittens or popstars.

Setting Limits in Social Networking

I'm the only person I know who joins social networks and then, progressively, reduces the number of friends, contacts, online buddies they have.

I joined Blogcave and BlogCatalog, and then ignored or removed contacts before closing those out. I've repeatedly pared down my contacts on MyBlogLog. And now I've just deleted a number of friends and acquaintances from my Facebook account, raising the overall privacy settings and limiting contacts to family and extended family members.

Nothing bad has happened. I just had a twing of discomfort posting photos of my mom and dad online. I wanted to share these Christmas photos with my relatives - but not necessarily with all my potential Fb contacts.

I have the same photos posted on multiply.com. Why am I not concerned about that? Well, frankly, Fb feels a lot less safe. And I don't just mean with respect to photos. Overall, Fb feels less safe.

But it is a tool for nurturing some long-distance relationships, so I guess I'll stay with it for now.

The internet can be a... challenging place sometimes.

EDIT: I went back and removed three pics from the multiply.com set.

This is no time for a slow down!

Hey! What's up with this?

I'm away on vacation, and so could actually use a good networking site to stay connected with friends and fellow learners. But my site of choice, multiply.com, isn't working for me.

Seems like its a bad combo of javascript routines on their end and slow connection speed on mine.

My perspective has always been that a service which won't run on slower dail-up is a service with built-in barriers. And, thus, not the service I want to promote among my learners.

More and more I think I'd have been better off to just introduce all my learners to Google blogger. It works. It's working right now. Look, I can post the picture I wanted to post, and wish everybody a Merry Christmas and stuff!

How good's that?

Oh, hey. In case I forget. Merry Christmas.


P.s., that's my folk's tree in their house in the middle of these fairy tale woods. What a country!

Getting the Most from Google

When I first came across the Google Literacy Project I was pretty darn excited. It describes itself as a "resource for teachers, literacy organizations and anyone interested in reading and education, created in collaboration with LitCam, Google, and UNESCO's Institute for Lifelong Learning." Imagine harnessing the power of Google and UNESCO for literacy!

But the Literacy Project isn't everything it could be and - more to the point - is considerably less useful than standard Google products.

A good way to show you what I mean is to look at the heart of Google services - searching the internet. The Literacy Project offers specialized search engines/pages that allow you to search for literacy-related books, blog, studies and so on.

Here's what happened with the custom Literacy Search (that's the name of one of the options) when I entered the terms high interest low level, deliberately not using quotation marks.

The search took 0.37 seconds (which is a silly thing to track), and claimed to provide 4 pages of ten returns each. (I say "claimed" because the last page or two sometimes disappears when you try to access it; see an earlier post.) In the top ten returns - that is, the first ten results - two provided links to articles on interest rates and investment, not literacy. The others weren't poor matches. However, the top match sent me to a webpage I recognized. It is an index of web-resources that may once have been useful, but now contains several dead links, and seems not to have been updated for some years.

A standard Google search (www.google.ca) of the same words in the same order took 0.22 seconds, and offered 6,900,000 returns. Again, as I noted elsewhere, that's a fictitious number. More notable, all of the top ten (first ten) results were about high interest low level reading materials. The top return took me to an actual booklist (from a library). It hadn't been updated for about three years, but it was still a useful return. The second return was an undated index of sites with booklists; not as helpful. But after that the returns were reasonable. Clearly, the standard search was a more useful tool.

Another thing the Literacy Project offers is the ability to search Books and Literacy Blogs (another option) for a term or terms. I plugged community literacy into that search tool, again without quotation marks.

The first return (sorted by relevance, according to Google) was a news story from an online newspaper. The article was about a community foundation funding literacy, which is good news, of course! But this was not a literacy blog.

The next was a library blog featuring one recent post about literacy, followed by another librarian's blog on "information literacy" (close, but no cigar - it's community literacy I want).

Result number four was the Reading Rockets website, a sort of online journal with lots of articles about kids and schools and reading. (The actual return sent me to a page with this ominous message: You have no permission to view this item [Status: Rejected]. But, at least it was something literacy related - though not yet a blog.)

Return number five was a blog. Unfortunately, it was a political events blog with no literacy discussion (though the words literacy and community appeared there).

Return six was a blog that described itself as a "location to share, digest, talk about, and access information learned at the Christian Brother's Conference Huether Conference 2007." One conference presentation was on community literacy. This blog post offered a review of that presentation, but no discussion of literacy.

Return seven was a... well... I don't know... a survey, networking, charity advertising thingy called greedyorneedy.com that had nothing much to do with blogs or literacy.

Return eight offered a video-blog of "a community forum sponsored in part by the Peralta Colleges." It offered a video stream from a "Community Literacy Forum" parts one & two, wherein "Dr. Salma Rashid and David Merritt talked about the message of their new book 20th Century American Struggle/21st Century Hope." I don't know anything about Peralta Colleges, but descriptions of this book suggest it is about social and political racism, not literacy. (Maybe it's about the "literacy of being a community"?) Anyway, I had still not found a literacy blog.

Return number nine was an honest to goodness blog that talked about community literacy. Yay! Titled Notes on an Exam it introduced itself by saying "This blog is a collection of notes on various texts pertaining to African American Rhetorics and Literacies, Black Women's Intellectual Traditions, and Themes in Contemporary Rhetoric."

My curbside blog showed up as result number 10, offering the relevant post-title "Missing the 'Community' in Community Lit." Return 11 took us back to a library blog with no literacy discussion pre se. Return 12 was a "Health-E-newsletter" with the inevitable reference to "health literacy".

The next real literacy blog showed up as return number 13. Ironically, this website, the Community Literacy Journal was offered, mysteriously, at the top of page one, not as a return, but with the introduction "related blogs". Well, yes, I think something called Community Literacy Journal probably is related to the search community literacy blogs.

And so it went. The Alphaplus (literacy) blog was number 26. This blog didn't make the top 40, despite having 29 posts tagged "community literacy" as well as using that phrase in my blog's subtitle.

A standard Google search for community literacy yielded the Community Literacy Journal as return number one. After that, there was a mixture of site types, all literacy related.

When I did a standard search for community literacy blogs, I received a decent list of blogs and online newsletters from individuals and organizations. The first six returns listed four solid literacy blogsites (plus two repeats). The Alphaplus blog, a Canadian blog I read and recommend, turned up three times in the top ten, which seemed a bit much. Still, it was an impressive display of result relevance. (This blog was return number 57 - and even then, the result was a post that doesn't actually mention community lit. *sigh*)

So, what have I learned? What I always knew - general purpose tools often do better than custom-made tools when it comes to literacy or education.

I don't know why the Literacy Project tools performed so badly. But I do know that Google - ordinary, standard, everyday Google - is a wonderful boon to literacy workers. In addition to an excellent search engine, it provides free email, blogging tools for ourselves and our learners, online word processing and document storage, and a place to create discussion forums. Google already is a literacy project.

Let's just pretend that other literacy project thing doesn't exist. K?

;P


P.s. When I signed up for the closest thing Yahoo had to offer, Yahoo! for Teachers, I was denied entry because I wasn't a real teacher (i.e., not registered with a state-funded public school). Hmmm... not official enough to use Yahoo, eh. Once again, Yahoo misses the whole point of having a marketplace of accessible, democratic online tools and resources.

Shelving Shelfari

It looked cool, and I really tried.

But shelfari, the bookcase widget people, had a load-time to rival Facebook. Worse, it was one of those places that subtly retask you.

After choosing (getting search results for) a book, I was invited to click a button and add it to my bookshelf. So, I clicked. That took me to a page where I could buy the book, review it or read other's reviews, meet others who chose this book, ... and so on. And, yes, there was the same hotlink saying "add this book to my bookshelf".

Well, listen. I clicked once. I'm probably not going to do it twice. With a long load-time and a constant "stop script" error message, its just too wearisome.

"But it's free!" someone cries out. "You can't ask for everything when its free."

Here's the thing: I'm free as well. Free to pick and choose from a whole banquet of free and semi-free services, widgets, hosts and tools.

I decided I would rather invest time writing my own widget and stick it in my Goggle-provided blogs. Maybe I can even write something that will work in multiply.com. Yes, it will be clumsy and plain. It won't connect to any communities beyond my rare and timid readers. Nobody will thank me.

But I'll feel good

I'll feel good about learning and doing.

Especially since I'll be learning more than how to use someone else's service, and doing more than waiting for a page to load.

Whiteboard Blues

Ah... my kingdom for a free, daily-use whiteboard to use on my blog.

I thought about using the graffiti board on Facebook. I even created a page for it. But the page has no easy link from my profile - or from anywhere else. And it came with a bunch of other slow-loading Fb stuff. Not easily accessible. Not easy to customize. Slow to load. Quick to push ads - mostly for other Fb features. Nope.

There are some free use whiteboard (whole, stand-alone) pages out there, but none I can fold into a website as such. That is, none that I can get to work.

I took another look at clutterme.com, where I have a free account. It... Or I.... One of us is still suffering from the loading... you changed something? reloading... you changed something else? reloading.... Maybe it works swell with highspeed (and an 18" monitor), but on my end it is not an easy tool.

What I wanted was a whiteboard where I or visitors - specifically, learners keeping up on their math over Christmas - could either type or use a mouse to work out math problems.

Instead, I think I'm going to have to go back to working within the confines of my math blog. Not ideal. But it is free, accessible, easy for me to understand and use, and reliable.

Web 2.0 math still holds a lot of mysteries for me.

Testing... (again)

Type... test. Type... test.
I've been playing with simple web 2.0 code-like stuff again.

Various sites and services come with various "about me" widgets. I've been trying to create one that I can use in a bunch of locations - something with little or no javascript, just some image andwebpage links. (Yes, I know there are lots of programs that do that - I wanna do it on my own.) So far... limited luck.

Wendell Dryden Saint John, New Brunswick writewen@hotmail.com	Glad to be Home qualities - communities - literacies c u r b s i d e mmmmmmath for poetry changes nothing

Great Books?

Our public library has a Steck-Vaughn workbook series based around history"greats" - great disasters, great mysteries, great heroes, etc. These are story-plus-exercise books that ranging in reading level from about 5 to 7. My learners love them.

I'm not sure why my learners like them. I ask them why, and they say "I don't know...." One ventured: "Because it makes you think. You gotta go back into the story to [find the answer]." I think they like them because each book has several, bite-sized stories - each one just enough to keep you engaged for 30 to 40 minutes. They learn new words, as well as pieces of history they've missed along the way. Too, there is a nice mix of close-ended and open-ended questions.

I don't always trust a learner's judgement. I'm not sure that an enjoyable book is the same as an effective book. Sometimes, I think, learners' quality world pictures of "going to school" involve them doing things that don't really help them get ready to write the GED tests.

But these books really aren't bad. I like the mix of reading, re-reading and writing they encourage. I also like that the learners picked them out from the library stacks. In this particular case, I borrowed them on my card: I wanted them to be available for everyone. Still, the learners understood that they could borrow them on their own if they chose, and that's another plank in scaffolding independent learning.

So, yeah, maybe these are great books after all.

(almost) 50 Below Zero

This past weekend, we were visited by Canada's foremost children's author, Robert Munsch. Mr. Munsch has published about 50 books - including The Paperbag Princess, Mortimer, 50 Below Zero and Love You Forever - which, all together, have sold more than 30 million copies. He came, at his own expense, to be part of the Bookwagon program and tell stories to the children of a public housing neighbourhood in Saint John.

On Saturday morning, in minus nineteen degree wind chill, Robert Munsch joined the Bookwagon program. The bookwagon is a small, hand-pulled garden wagon which follows a 3 ½ kilometer route lending books door-to-door. Over the past 5 winters, children and adults have borrowed more than 15,000 books from the wagon. At each stop where Robert Munsch met children, he made up a story about them on the spot. We had hot soup for lunch and swapped stories. Then, later that day, he told stories to the families at the local community centre.

For more on the bookwagon program, see my Curbside blog. :)