Dear K-Loggers,

There are over 1,000 schools worldwide (Caltech, Berkeley, Harvard, Dartmouth,
Innsbruck, Vanderbilt, Cambridge, Iowa, Middlebury, Washington, Nebraska Public
Schools, Denver Public Schools, and many more) using UserLand's Manila (mainly
due to its broad feature-set, easy set-up, scalability, and low cost -- a single
$299 server license can support 500 or more full featured weblogs). As a result
of this widespread adoption, I get to spend a lot of time talking to educators
about how best to use K-Logs within an educational context.

A new and exciting area of development that I have been talking to educators
about is the student managed electronic portfolio. This is a website that
documents everything a student accomplished while at school in electronic form.
These portfolios include original writing, links to resources, documents (Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint), pictures, audio files, and video files. It seems to me
that this is a perfect application of K-Logs in education. Here's why:

1) The construction of an electronic portfolio is a structured program. This
makes it very easy to identify what material needs to be posted and when it
should be posted. This eliminates the writer's block that impedes the
development of some educational K-Log efforts.

2) A K-Log's built-in time organization makes it easy to develop and maintain a
portfolio over an entire academic career. This would allow students and
teachers (or parents and teachers in conference) to review progression over a
month, semester, or year.

3) K-Logging tools support point and click posting of pictures, documents,
audio, and video files. Further, students can assign real world names to these
files to allow them to quickly re-publish them at a later date if warranted (for
example: all you need to do to include a photo in a weblog is type the name of
picture in double quotes and hit "publish." The picture would auto-magically
appear formatted in the post.)

4) K-Logging tools make it easy to move a site from one location to another.
For example, a copy of a 7-8th grade portfolio can easily be moved to the high
school's Manila server to allow the student (and readers) continuity.

5) A portfolio published as a K-Log is automatically syndicated as a newsfeed.
This makes it easy for a parent to subscribe to their children's portfolio with
their newsreader of choice (like Radio). So, in this case I could get news
headlines from the NYTimes along with updates on what my kids have been doing at
school. Nice.

Personally, I think its great that schools are starting to do this. The early
establishment of the habit of documenting work online is going to be something
that will pay dividends throughout life. This is an important step on the road
to a knowledge sharing culture.

Sincerely,

John Robb
http://jrobb.userland.com





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