Posts Tagged ‘edublogs’
Edublog’s university of blogs
Posted on: November 20, 2008
Edublogs recently announced “The University of Blogs“. Unfortunately, you can’t get a degree in blogging here!
The University of Blogs is actually a demonstration of a multi-blog management tool. Take a look at the video at the link above to find out about some nifty features. From an educator’s and administrator’s point of view, I think that being able to manage many blogs and batch import lists of students are brilliant!
Get $10 credit from Edublogs
Posted on: October 15, 2008
If you were affected by the Edublogs recent outages, you can get $10 credited to your account.
Here is the tweet I received on Oct 10:
Please email support@edublogs.org for a $10 credit for each user by means of an apology. Just let us know your username.
This is not a prank or a ruse. The $10 can be used to upgrade your account.
Wherefore art thou?
Posted on: October 8, 2008
Bloglines and Edublogs, you let me down! I think you let some of my preservice teachers down too!
I love that Edublogs was set up with educators and students in mind. The fact that it has a WordPress engine was a plus too. This gave it RSS feeds for comments and other conveniences. But Edublogs is sometimes slow to load (either to view or to write) and sometimes the feeds don’t work. I do not know if the latter is entirely Edublogs fault though.
Bloglines seems to be in perpetual beta-testing, but surely the service should get better, not worse. Just before and right after a recent downtime (Oct 1 by my records), I have noticed that it was not collecting feeds from most of my trainees’ blogs. It did not matter if they were on Edublogs, Livejournal or Blogspot. I thought that they had stopped blogging due to the semestral workload. I am sure that the workload had something to do with a lack of postings, but it had never caused a deafening silence!
Fortunately I had a plan B and even a plan C. I use Google Reader as an online aggregator backup and Vienna on my Mac as an offline aggregator. But they cannot do some things like Bloglines does. I cannot clip and keep exemplary entries in a separate folder. I cannot mark some postings for later reference or bonus marks. Google Reader does allow me to “star” entries, but it is not as convenient. Google Reader will tell you the number of X unread postings in a blog, but it also seems to take more time to collect feeds or it will tell you that it cannot get the X postings it has detected as unread.
So, Bloglines, I hope you feel better soon! And, Edublogs, please shape up. I know that education is always the last to respond to new technologies, but that does not mean that we must be in last place all the time! It’s time to catch up!
If not, I will not be recommending Edublogs and Bloglines to my trainees next semester.
Addendum to my posting: I noticed that some feeds in Bloglines were coming in like clockwork. These were feeds that were not in folders (I keep my trainees’ feeds in folders to be organised). Maybe the upgrade or maintenance did something to affect the feeds of RSS in folders. How about it, Bloglines?
