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There have been two posts in the blogs I read that have been creating a lot of thought.

The first article is from Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed. The basic premise of the post is a review of a book, “True Enough”, by Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo suggests that Stephen Colbert’s ideas about “truthiness” have some merit, and that technologies are making it easier than ever for individuals to connect with others whom share views. This has the paradoxical effect of narrowing our world view, because it is easier than ever to narrow our information stream to just others who think like us.

This is scary and has a huge negative potential. It also helps explain why our society has such a fragmented feeling these days. I also can’t help but notice how this book as not been mentioned on any of the other blog sites that I normally read. It would seem that edubloggers are ignoring an important ethical conversation that is lingering in the wings.

The next article appeared in some form in nearly every blog I read, the Gin, Television, and Social Surplus talk by Clay Shirky. The catch phrase of “Cognitive Surplus” is the talk of the town. Personally, I think it is a brilliantly simple idea to explain a complex event. And while a agree with everything he said about TV, I can’t help but wonder about the societal ramifications when you think about Manjoo’s paradoxical effect. TV, while a colossal waste of time gives many people something in common. Of course, this is kinda sad but the truth never the less.

I worry that the majority of “cognitive surplus” will be squandered in activities that are no better than television and in some cases worse (i.e. the search for “truthiness”).

As educators, we are doing a lousy job at preparing students to leverage the power of social technologies. In most cases it is feared and downright banned (i.e. MySpace). So, I just wonder what are the new literacies or ethics we need to acknowledge so students are cognizant of developing a balanced information? Are we (educators) developing a balanced informational stream for ourselves? And finally, as Web 2.0 technologies diminish the expert in favor of the folksonomy, how do we judge what if true and what is “truthiness”?

Our Elgg site is up and running with forums, folios, and full-LDAP authentication. It was actually easier than I thought.

At this point I’m sharing it with a few educators who expressed interest in using student blog portfolios.  It ill be interesting to see how students will react to a school-based social network.

There seems to be a little funkiness with some of the site RSS, but it is an issue being addressed in the road map. I wish there were more documentation on the Elgg schema. I find it difficult to see how things are linked together and where various files are kept. This may be my short coming, but it is a bit trying due to all of the guess work.

I eagerly await the next version, and hope that I can give back soon enough.

As I was experimenting with Elgg and LDAP, I realized that none of the users create via LDAP authentication would so up in browse until somebody added them as a friend. Of course adding somebody who doesn’t show up in the list is a bit difficult so it was sort of a deal breaker.

It turns out that the friends able is used someway in the browse feature and users that register themselves are automatically made friends with a “0″ user that doesn’t really exist. So basically, you have to add a little code to the /auth/LDAP/lib.php and then your LDAP created users will work wonderfully.

Basically, I slightly modified a post that I found on the Elgg forums.

1. Find line 153:

$user_id = insert_record(’users’,$user);

2. Add the following below:

// adds “virtual” friend, so that user has at least one connection, and shows up in the browse feature.
$newid = user_info_username(’ident’, $username);
$owner = 0;
$f = new StdClass;
$f->owner = $owner;
$f->friend = $newid;
$f->status = ‘perm’;

insert_record(’friends’,$f);

The additionally code simple grabs the new users “ident” from the User table and inserts a friend record with the shadowy “0″ user.

Now, if I can just figure out how to setup the tag cloud to work correctly.

It turns out that getting the LDAP authentication working with Elgg was very easy.

All you need to do is look in the “home/auth/ldap” folder, where you will find “lib.php”. This file gives you basic directions on setting up LDAP authentication. I followed the following steps:

1. Copy lines 18-43 of “home/auth/ldap/lib.php” and paste them below line 10 in “home/config.php”.
2. Next you need to clean up the code by removing all of the asterisks. There are also several places where semicolons are missing, so put them at the end of line where they are missing. When your done it should look something like this:
   

   // Authentication set to LDAP
   $CFG->auth = ‘ldap’;

   // LDAP Authentication parameters
   // LDAP host
   $CFG->ldap_host = ‘your.domain.com’;
   // LDAP port
   $CFG->ldap_port = 389;
   // Base DN - can be string or array of string for multiple DNs
   $CFG->ldap_basedn = ‘cn=users,dc=your,dc=domain,dc=com’;
   // Protocol version
   $CFG->ldap_protocol_version = ‘3′;
   // Filter for username, common are cn, uid or sAMAccountName
   $CFG->ldap_filter_attr = ‘uid’;
   // Search attibutes: associative array with the key being the attribute
   // description, and the value being the actual LDAP attribute. firstname
   //lastname and mail are used to create the elgg user profile. The
   //example below works for ActiveDirectory.
   $CFG->ldap_search_attr = array(’firstname’ => ‘givenName’,
   ‘lastname’ => ’sn’,
   ‘mail’ => ‘mail’);
   // Create user, relies on the givenname, sn, and email attributes for now
   $CFG->ldap_user_create = true;
   // Fallback option, try internal authentication if everything fails
   $CFG->ldap_internal_fallback = true;

3. Use your domain information instead of “your.domain.com” and make appropriate adjustments to “$CFG->ldap_search_attr” if you are using non-standard LDAP attributes.
4. Als0, you will need to use a couple of additional lines of code if you require a password to bind to your directory. These are found in the “home/auth/ldap/lib.php” file.
5. It should now work!

Now the only thing that is bugging me is that default name is your surname. But that should be easy enough to fix. This was done on a xServe G4 running OS X Server 10.4.9, running entrophy php 5.2.4.

It has been a long while since I’ve updated this blog. Life has a way of getting ahead of you.

I’m almost done with the implementation phase of my master’s program and look forward to getting back to some of the newer things I’ve been toying with at school.

I’d like to get a program start which takes advantage of Elgg to create a school social networking/blog/portfolio system. It was incredible simple to get the installation running and the portfolio piece (by Nathan Garrett) installed. Also, it looks as though the LDAP authentication piece should be easy to implement.

My only real complaint is that standard registration requires an email address. Unfortunately, there are just to many institutions, at the K-12 level, who are worried about students accessing email. It would be nice if the LDAP authentication removed the need for an email.

I’ll be sharing my discovers about Elgg as the project develops.

On the 4th of December, I went to Phoenix to attend a half-day seminar on the new client and server software from Apple. I wasn’t that amazed with the client (although it is pretty nice), just a lot of 3rd party ideas that are now part of the base OS. However, the server piece has amazing potential.

Apple was managed to stupid-proof a convergence of wiki, blog, and  web-based calendar. While none of these services are new,  the manner in which they are pulled together and centrally controlled by OS X Server will open these tools up to a wider audience.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, it is worth a look.

The semester is almost done (a long with my entire program!) and I can finally start thinking about blogging again. It is no that I don’t have anything to say, but I’ve been so busy that blogging seems to be the last thing on my priority list.

What made me want to post is that I heard a great saying on the radio yesterday. It was the director of the new movie “Atonement”, who was talking about how when he was younger he always felt like he had to have something to to say, because everybody around him always had something to say. Then one day he had an epiphany.

He realized you don’t always have to have something to say, as long as you are still listening and learning. I think this may be a good definition for wisdom. Wisdom is listening and learning even if you don’t have something to say.

Let just say, I’ve been doing a lot of listening and learning in the last month.

At the conference, I presented the blogging project that has been active at my school for the last year. I talked about some the plugins we found very useful, but this post meant to gather them in one place. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been churning over the words of Dr. Tim Tyson, who I recently saw at the NAU Peak Conference. There were several things that he said that really stood out to me:

1. Childhood as we now it today, did not exist until the last 10-20 years. His point was that until fairly recently, children were given responsibility and right to be a contributing member of their family and community. Now children have very little responsibility or rights.I’ve been watching the students at my middle school for the last few days looking for students doing something beyond themselves. Not surprisingly, I was unable to find a student with any exciting going on. The majority of students that I have had the chance to speak with want to do or be something, but don’t have the tools to be active in their community or family.
2. Another point was that students are not asked to help solve world problems. He talks about how an overwhelming majority of teachers believe students could change the world, but an overwhelming majority of students are not doing anything.I think that anybody who has been in education for at least five years feels like something major is missing. I remember my teachers telling me about the hole in the ozone and we did projects about the deforestation of the rain-forests, now all students do is the basics. Instead, teachers are reverting back to worksheets and direct instruction. Why do we keep trying to make our schools into factories?
3. Finally, Dr. Tyson pointed out something that we all know deep down, but may not always been fully aware. State standards are minimum expectations.There seems a perverse paradox that in the process of meeting minimum standards we are destroying amazing educational opportunities for students. We keep lowering the bar and dragging students down, instead of giving them the world that is so easily accessible with cheap, readily available technologies.
   

   California State professor, Art Costa, recently said: “What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value.”

   from Dr. Tyson’s blog

I also got the chance to present for the first time. It was not great, but my audience was wonderful and we had a great conversation about WordpressMU.

Recently, I’ve been working quite extensively with WordpressMU. I’ve developed our school and teacher websites using it as the backbone. Recently, I started working with teachers to create project and topic specific blogs for instruction. The problem was there wasn’t a quick and easy way to import large numbers of users (i.e. classlists) into newly created blogs.

Dagon Design and Nicholas LaRacuente had developed a very nice plugin for importing users with just a username and emai. Unfortunately, this did not import existing blog users. I added a few lines of code to their work and now it adds both existing and new users during an import. This means you can dump classlists from you student info system and import right into your blogs.

This plugin comes without warrant. Use it at your own risk!

Edsysad mod of Dagon Design plugin