I’m experimenting with different blogging clients as a way of exploring different tools that might help faculty and students work offline and synch up with the LMS when it’s convenient. Today I’ve been trying out ecto.As you can see here, ecto provides a standard three-pane view:
Looks a lot like an email client, right? The items in the topmost pane are actually blog posts downloaded from my web site. You can see the text in the bottom pane.
Writing a new blog entry is as easy as writing a new email message. Here’s the authoring window:
I can either upload it to my blog immediately or save it to my local computer and upload it later. I can also edit posts that have already been published. There are a few glitchy things; for example, right now I can’t get the images to upload properly. I believe that’s a blog setting problem rather than a fundamental technology gap, though.
Interestingly, the Midgard Open Source content management system is compatible with blogging tools like ecto. So why not use the same thing for an LMS? Why not let faculty and students author discussion posts, assignments, lectures, or other documents using an offline blog editor? It’s pretty simple technology. Plus, there is a wide selection of tools you can use–some for the PC, some for the Mac, some cross-platform, and a few that are just extensions to the Firefox web browser.
I use w.bloggar ( http://wbloggar.com/ ) which I like very much, but it’s Windows only. And for the Palm (handier for discreet blogging), I’m very happy with Vagablog ( http://www.bitsplitter.net/vagablog/ )
I downloaded w.bloggar but the setup process annoyed me, so I bagged on it (at least for the moment). The Palm client is interesting; thanks for the tip.
The one thing that might be difficult to tackle with offline editing and discussions in an LMS is the multiuser component. How does one work around the issue that a discussion is a conversation? I post something, someone replies, then someone elses replies to the reply, etc..
The sequencing is really important.
Before posting, one would want to make sure that the post is still on topic. It would be very cool if there was a check in the system that says — “between your response to the post and now, 3 messages have been posted… click here to preview”).
One can certainly already compose offline in some type of editor and cut and paste into a discussion post. (I’ve recommened that to a number of people in the past anyway, just in case the net decides to “go away” in the middle of composing — and you lose all of your post in the ether).
But the idea that all of of your posts, assignments etc. are composed from a client based interface is quite intriguing – and a natural extension of an e-portfolio-approach in many ways.
Kind of an interesting thought — an e-portfolio (for faculty and students) as the editor of an LMS…
Just a few random thoughts….
I tend to agree with you on the context issue, Michelle, although I point out that both threaded discussion and conventional email interfaces fragment the context in the same way and yet people manage to carry out the conversation anyway. At any rate, the offline client need not fragment the context. The Atom protocol is capable of modeling a thread. There’s no reason why the interface couldn’t reflect that. Picture something that looks a bit like Gmail, for example.