DD Shift

I am hearing the song “Love Kills” by the Circle Jerks. Yes, this is part of my former-day teen-angst song list. And, it was in the movie “Feds“. One of my students actually has a t-shirt that says this on it.

I followed a Youtube link that Kelley Connolly recommended about How to Use OpenId. The introduction to OpenId is very easy to follow, and the concept seems very practical. From there, I also watched a presentation on Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt which was very interesting. He was presenting about the same issues that I have recently identified in my blog about over-bloggedness. In the end he identifies a number of other options to OpenId and during the course of the presentation he identifies why Passport (Microsoft’s original attempt at universal, single signon) didn’t work.

I think that I am ready to try the OpenId. I do have concerns about security. The concept seems simple. You log into one site and then you use that login in several sites. At the different sites that support OpenId you have the option to use your OpenId user name. You enter that and are taken to your OpenId site, you tell the OpenId site that you want to allow this application to access your credentials, and then you are in.

I have four concerns:

1. How does this work on public terminals? When does my OpenId login session end? Does it vary from OpenId to OpenId provider? Or, is there a standard that is enforced? What do I need to know as a user to protect myself?
2. In transmitting data from the OpenId provider to the other, is it transfered with at least https?
3. As a school IT administrator, do I host my own OpenId service? Or, do I rely on one of the providers that are out there? How, as an educator, do I ensure that my students and their data is “safe” if I go with an external provider? Admittedly, using an external provider would be less administrative overhead for me.
4. Is OpenId here to stay? I looked at the OpenId site, and they have a page dedicated to listing all of the sites that use OpenId. There are currently over 10,000.

I am hearing the song, “What a Difference a Day Makes” by Dinah Washington. I first heard that song in the context of the movie “Lola Rennt” years ago. My colleague evilly said to me this afternoon, “what a difference a year makes,” then she looked at me directly. I couldn’t stop it… “24 little hours” filled my head. She knew I would be trapped into the song…

So, I started looking into ways to simplify things for my kids. I noticed at some of the blog/wiki providers that are out there, they have this thing called OpenId. I started looking into it… It looks like a way to have one login and password for many different sites (blogs, wikis, etc). I haven’t figured out exactly how to set it up yet, but that is just a matter of time…

I am hearing the song called “I Always Wanted to Be a Tenenbaum” by Mark Mothersbaugh.

What about Blog-overload? Blog-o-whelmed? Overbloggedness?

Suppose my history teacher, English teacher, foreign language teacher, science teacher, PE/Health and Wellness teacher, homeroom teacher, art teacher, and even my math teacher have all had the same blog training on the last professional development day. They all find blogging to be an excellent idea, and they great ideas of how to integrate it into their subjects.

In the next week, each asks me to start and maintain a blog for their subjects. Now I have 8 different blogs that I have to keep track of. Due to the fact that my school is large, and the staff is naturally decentralized, different teachers use different service providers for blogging. I now have 5 blogs in one spot and 3 blogs in another. Two teachers will allow me to blog in one space, the others require that they have their own space that they can control… This is reminiscent of the “olden” days when I got email addresses from every institution to which I belonged…

How do we manage blog-barrage? Who manages the blog spaces? I think that before schools embark on this journey, they need to think about this carefully to save the sanity of the students. Will Richardson touches on this issue in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts…, but leaves it up to schools and school districts to decide how to manage it.

This is actually a bit of a dilemma… usually when things get started, you want to keep it open so that people can use what they feel most comfortable with. This lowers the barrier to entry for teachers which would, in turn, hopefully encourage more practice in that area. But, if you attempt to encourage growth in this way, you are setting yourself up for a maintenance nightmare later. This reminds me of a course that I had at Washington University on project management when we talked about assimilation of technology into an organization..

I’m hearing the song called “Sh**ty Day” by Soko.

I have just spied the “Add media” buttons as the top of the edit window… Excellente!

The song that I am hearing is “1 2 3 4” by Feist.

Two things:

1. Argh… my last post was too long. You have to scroll.
2. I selected this design because it uses a sans serif font for titles and serif fonts for the text body. I also like the left alignment. I don’t like that the background is white– it is hard on the eyes. Perhaps I will spend some time investigating whether or not that is changeable.

The song that I am hearing is “German Studies” by the Breeders. It’s an interesting song because it is done all in German, and they don’t know how to pronounce German words.

Blogging… so, here I am. Here are some very brief thoughts that I have about blogging.

1. In my school we do a lot with “cross-curricular” projects. I’m wondering how effective a blog realm would be in facilitating those types of projects. How would it compare to wikis? I have used wikis for this purpose, but blogs might be more effective for individual projects that are done across different classes. Taking it one step further… blogs might be ideal for individual work, wikis might be ideal for individual work…
2. Blogging is very public. And, if you have students who are weak in the writing area– is there something that you can do to make the blogging more accessible/attractive for them? Publishing your writing in a space where your peers can read and comment is a very scary thing. In working on wikis this year, I suspect this was a barrier for some of my students who opted to take a zero on the parts that required them to publish online. Of course, you can set up online-etiquette guidelines, but that does not change the feedback that is received in the hallways, in the lunchroom and on the playground…
3. Where can I post my podcasts here? Where can I post my videos? I think that a digital publishing space should provide opportunities for expression outside the realm of mere writing. Do I need to find a different provider for this and link? This will be a point of investigation.