Daniel.

I completely agree with that. I used to use blogger and blog a lot. But it really didn't have the community feel and never grew in that direction. It has stayed more as a way to "purge" oneself of feeling, more like a diary and less like a conversation.

I do like the possibilities of Ning. Especially, with its low threshold of user friendliness, meaning, it is very accessible to techno neophytes. I've tried to get colleagues interested in many technological things with little success. But ning seems to have had success where these others haven't.

I also see many other capabilities beyond community but I think its point of being a "sharing" resource is just wonderful.

David

Dan,

Thanks. I am just about sharing and decided to walk the talk. Just throw up material and let teachers have a place to browse. No dictator saying this or that, just browse and find what is suitable to their own class, level, teaching style etc...
I am working on something more user friendly and which will appear over the summer. Also thinking about starting a ning for us teachers in Korea, to discuss more teacher oriented things -- with direct use in the classroom. Specifically, materials creation for the classroom. I'll send you an invite when I set it up.

Cheers,

David

Hi David,

I simply like the amount of design control I have in Blogger. With a little CSS, the sky is the limit.

Though, with their new layout, I rarely need to alter the template any more. They make it really easy to add and remove stuff (code, widgets, etc.).

I think that you're right about the community aspect, but it's not much different than a service like this. The benefit here is that it's so much easier to get your name out there and get traffic to the site.

With that said, I'm pretty excited about Ning. If they just add RSS for comments, I'll be in heaven :)

Dan

Hi Daniel,
You've certainly done a lot in the area of researching and studying professional development. It'd be great to hear what you've learned--you mentioned that basically it's pretty clear what needs to be done, but it's hard to implement on a systems level. (Is that an ok paraphrase?) I'd sure like to hear more!

Hi Daniel, greetings from Germany! I focus on Web 2.0 apps as to education llike you do.
Check out my group DigiSkills about digital teaching methods with 209 members. Would love if you join as well. By the way, your video about Web2.0 is a great one! Congrats.
Hans