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After an exhausting month of continual blogging challenges from Darren Rowse from Pro Blogger and his 31 Days to a Better Blog project we have finally come to the end. The winners have been announced and it was a unanimous decision to award the miniLegends a class of year 3 students (8 & 9 year olds) from Glenelg in South Australia as not only the blogger’s who have gained the most from the project but also the best commenter’s.

It has been an exhausting month and I still have days 23- 31 to post about. I have met a wonderful group of people through the Chocolate Challenge part of the project and wish to thank Marion from The Chocolate Box for their support and offer of a $25 voucher for Chocolate and also James Farmer from Edublogs who also came to the party with a similar offer of a voucher. Please pay them both a visit.

Now I am just trying to organise the delivery of the chocolate to the kids, as you can imagine they would be looking forward to its arrival.

Even though this challenge has finished we have decided to keep challenging ourselves and Michele set up a community at Ning, Betterblog.ning.com. This will mean that we can continue to help one another and learn from each other. Members welcome come and have a look whether you are an old hand at blogging or new to all of this.

Visit my Chocolate Challenge page to find out all about the project

Timely warning for students

Today my students received a timely warning on personal security on the internet. In class we have created Gmail accounts then gone onto create iGoogle personalised home pages. They have created del.icio.us accounts and signatures for the Gmail email accounts. One task required them to email all of their class mates and their lecturer (me) and send a link to their del.icio.us accounts. This was as way of all students getting each others contacts and del.icio.us links.

As always in these sort of classes I go over security, guarding your personal information on the internet, logging in and our procedures and student code of conduct and internet usage policies that they have all signed and agreed to at the beginning of term.

On Thursday several students and myself received an email full of swearing and sounding very upset at the rest of the students in the class from one of the other students. I spoke to this student to ask if they were having trouble with the other class mates? No and the student when shown the email knew nothing about it. On further investigation we found the student was not at TAFE on Thursday and when going through the history on the PC where the email originated we found that the browser automatically signed into his Gmail account. Now after this episode all the students in the class Sign in and Sign out of their Google accounts. Just because a browser is closed and internet connection is also closed does not mean your account is also closed especially if you have selected to ”Remember me on this computer” then someone else can come along and log into your accounts. Beware.

Sign in & ALWAYS  Sign out

e-consultation

The Australian Federal Government is preparing itself to enter the blogging realm. An article in the online Australian IT titled Canberra plans citizen sample blog yesterday states “FEDERAL plans to enter the world of blogging are well under way, with a discussion paper due soon on the proposed “rules of engagement”.” The blog will be up and running by March and will be a place that the public can comment on policy, it wont be a free for all and genuine and constructive comments would be welcomed!

They have concerns that the lobby groups or other anonymous identities may infiltrate and manipulate the blog. Will this just be another place on the web that the government places information for us to read and if we wish to place a  positive/constructive comment then that comment may appear on the blog? Censored comments – that’s an interesting concept, we have the ability to censor, delete and even change comments that are placed on our blogs but most of us would only use these options if we get comments that detail illegal activities, pornographic, spam or are racist and discriminatory.

At the end of the day a blog provides a place for conversation and I would have thought that e-consultation would benefit from conversation not censorship, will we see a spin off of blogs that will continue the conversations? Just by denying it they will in fact make it flourish elsewhere way. I suppose that is just another case of  ”not in my backyard”.

The article states that a spokesman for Special Minister of State Gary Nairn said ….”genuine and constructive comments”, I could not find another mention of this, a speech delivered by Mr Nairn in August mentions the possible introduction of blogs and talks about the things like the need for  moderation of comments would need to be looked at. I hope they do look at this and not take the Big Brother attitude and take the time to consult with people from the blogging communities both users and readers, not people who “know” about these things about do not “participate” in them.

I have tried to stay pretty much on track with this blog and that hasn’t been too hard as technology is a wide and varied field. I don’t want to get into political discussions (am I now censoring?) but as this does loosely relate to technology I thought I would place it here.