Ten Reasons Why: Student Publishing and Privacy, Take Two In the past week or
so several folks (James Farmer,
Will Richardson, Greg
Ritter) have been talking about the use of weblogs with students and the
publishing of student work. Legal issues revolving around COPPA
and FERPA are being
discussed along with pedagogical issues.
I have been thinking of this as I work with Barbara
Lüscher at Buckman Elementary
and plan for the use of weblogs with her and her 5th grade students this coming
fall. Am thinking that we will want to have students publish two sites. One
public, and one behind a login. The public site could be for final published
pieces. Pieces the student chooses to share with the public . The private site
can be the site where comments are enabled to facilitate peer review, and places
for drafts to be saved. Am trying to figure out how to do this in Movable Type.
With the creation of an alternate index template in Movable Type, and the use
of category tags, I should be able to create two sites with one blog.
One problem I haven't figured out is how to save the alternate index file into
a private directory, or make it only readable behind a login. I believe LiveJournal
has a feature like this. Regular posts are published to the public site, but
special "friends only" posts can be enabled that only "friends" can view. Something
like this in a weblogging tool would be very nice to have. Some way to designate
public and private posts. Maybe I'll post something up on the LazyWeb
site.
Update: Tom
Hoffman adds some more to the discussion. Looks like Plone
might be the tool I am looking for... Also just discovered that Movable Type
will do what I want it to do. Just did a little experiment. I created two index
files, one gets saved in the regular directory, one in the private directory.
With a little bit of work using category tags, I should be able to create two
templates. One with all of a student's posts (the private area) and one with
items in the category that is published to the public site. But I still have to mess with file permissions...
