Bill Fitzgerald | Project Lead

Blog: Bill on FunnyMonkey

Bill has worked in education as an English and history teacher, an administrator, and a technology director. Bill initially discovered the Internet in the mid-1990�s at the insistence of a student who wouldn�t stop talking about it.

Welcome to funnymonkey!

At FunnyMonkey, in addition to our ongoing work with our educational clients, we are working on a series of Drupal-based learning tools. You can find out more about our development work at the OpenAcademic site.

If this is your first time to funnymonkey.com, relax and enjoy yourself.

Sincerely,

Marc and Bill -- the primates behind FunnyMonkey.

Welcome to the site.

This site is a first pass at a DrupalEd install profile.

All feedback is welcome; ideally, create it on the feedback section of the site wiki.

For those so inclined to pitch in, it'd also be nice to create some Getting Started documentation. 

This site can be used as an informal learning site where all users have comparable permissions, or as a more hierarchical learning environment with students, teachers, classes, and working groups.

Some of the functionality within this site includes:

• a personal workspace;
• a group workspace;
• the ability for site members to create informal working groups;
• the ability to create formal class spaces;
• podcasting;
• wiki functionality;
• personal and class blogs;
• rss feeds for the entire site, individual courses, individual terms, and individual users;
• personal image galleries;
• personal file repositories;
• the ability to create private, invitation-only groups;
• social bookmarking, with searching within bookmark descriptions;
• spam protection;
• assignment calendars by course;
• event calendars for site-wide events;
• every other Tuesday, as you log on, it sings you your favorite song.

I'll admit I made the last one up.

The goal of this site is to create a flexible framework that allows for users to set up a social learning environment or a more traditional learning environment depending on the needs of the learners within the site. With this current framework, both approaches are supported.

Bill's Excellent Drupal Adventure

A Screencast Tour of Open Academic's
specially configured Education  Drupal

Audio version uploading soon

Marilyn is a Chicagoan living now in Tucson. 

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Miami University (Ohio), where in five years she earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English. 

Marilyn was a high school English teacher at Evanston Township High School, and then a teacher, chairman of the English Department, and director of instruction at New Trier Township High School -- both are school districts in suburban Chicago. 

In addition to some private consulting, Marilyn has been teaching since 1995 for University of Phoenix, the last six years exclusively online. 

She started back to school in 2003 for this final degree after years of her husband's urging her to do so.

Marilyn says, "I've found that pursuit of a doctorate is rather like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, with the difference that he wasn't going anywhere special, and I am."

Hi,

It seems to me that there are two different issues at play here, the noun "a blog" and the verb "to blog." The first is relatively easy, while the second is more complex, more difficult to teach and to learn.

For most of their school lives, students are trained to know learning as a noun. They go to a class, write a paper, take a test, listen to a lecture, complete a homework assignment in a closed loop of teacher -> task -> grade. There are occasional excursions outside this loop, for instance when students work together in small groups to critique each other's papers (not always a useful exercise if they don't have the tools to recognize what they see and provide useful explanations), or to complete a joint project. But the loop is still there, with the teacher the final word on the value of whatever it is.

A blog is different, but still a noun. However, it is in a different realm altogether: blog posts are public voices. Students need to have the time first to recognize the sounds of their voices, and then to realize that they have become part of a community when they post at all, when someone responds to something posted, or they decide to write a comment to a post. That is the perfect opportunity to start the transition to "blog" as a verb: to remind students that their engaging with others via a blog is a variation of what they are already doing outside of school via text messaging and other interactive communication.

Writing as a tool can't really be regarded separately: it is the essence of both "a blog" as a public voice and "to blog" is an act of communication -- with all the possibilities to come for enrichment of the blog post itself, of the thinking that precedes writing, of the reading that helps prompt writing, of the networking via links and threaded conversations with others.

I agree with Tony: students make some transitions from blogs to blogging naturally and indirectly. More complex uses of blogs that change the focus to the verb -- from the writing to the person doing the writing -- evolve with time and experience: learning to use links, learning how to read and think and be prompted by ideas rather than assignments, learning to reach out and become part of a network of thinking writers. And all of that must still be in the context of what children (elementary, middle, high school) are capable of doing. Not all learning is readily discernible . . .

Posted by: Marilyn Olander | March 01, 2007 at 04:28 PM

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Ganley, B. (2004). Blogging as a dynamic, transformative medium in an American liberal arts classroom. Paper presented at the BlogTalks 2.0: The European Conference on Weblogs, Vienna, Austria.

Richardson, W. (2006a). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of  intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being [Electronic version]. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.