I’ve been busy over at my NaaceBlog gathering ideas for my blogging session at the 2006 Naace Conference. I thought I would ask my eight- and ten-year-old sons about their blogging and what they thought about moderation and other such issues.
The interview can be downloaded below. It’s about 2 MB and 12 minutes long and features me at my most inarticulate. It was impromtu after all. They make some interesting points though. It is interesting that my ten year is more worried about giving out his personal details for fear of receiving junk email rather than cyber-stalkers. I like his views on dealing with naughtiness on blogs – namely talking to the criminal about how they can learn from the naughty things they have done on their blog – as well as severely punishing them

Kids Blogging Interview

The Simpsomaker via James

The SchoolBlogs server has been around for years – well since 2001 then. In edublogging terms that is a fair while. It has seen many thousands of weblog sites created – perhaps getting on for ten thousand. Few made the light of day at the chalkface because the server creaked and groaned almost from the beginning and it was deemed too slow and unreliable for classroom life.

For me though it was the foundation of most of my early blogging work with students and my tentative steps to forge communication and collaboration with like-minded webloggers. The term edublogger was as yet uncoined. Along with SchoolBlogs.com, it was home to my early class weblogs and to my ten year old students’ attempts at managing their own fully-functional blogs. People said they wouldn’t be able to do it but SchoolBlogs and I proved the doubters wrong. Our school soon began exploring blogs for every class and parents created blogs and contributed to their children’s blogs. Although we later moved to a sharper server – all the pioneering work of my own experiences happened on the SchoolBlogs server. It was a totally free service and I took it at face value, knowing I would get what I paid for

I often wonder why I didn’t back up all my sites as I made them. The ‘download a site’ function was easy to use but I never got round to it. When the SchoolBlogs server went down hard I always knew it would reappear. This time it looks as though it might be the end. The company that physically hosts the server in the Netherlands is going bust and although there is some talk of shipping it to a retirement data-farm in the US, this option seems increasingly unlikely.

It was Ewan’s experience of accidentally deleting his blog and the accompanying embuggerance that brought me to the realisation that my stuff was probably lost. Unlike him though, I cannot bear the thought of trawling through the years to try and reconstruct a portfolio. I’ll just have to put up with the link rot.

I did however, use the Wayback Machine to find some key memories. Along the way I found some interesting ones – like my commentary and advice to Will Richardson back in 2002 before he was the Will Richardson that we all know and love today.

I’m the eternal optimist though. Deus ex machina – Ewan and I will wake up tomorrow and everything will be as it was

Last week I met Dave, who is a creative and extremely talented individual. I thought I should record that fact here and link to his developing portfolio. Expect great things from Dave – you heard it here first!