markz space

A quick and dirty PLE demo

2007-09-20T22:09:00.000+01:00

So whats been cooking in Manchester? We've been making a prototype personal learning environment with a some interesting features. (We being Ian Bell, Greg Bouteiller, Mathieu Perrin, Eric Raffin, Ashish Ughade and myself.)

Now I and some of the above are looking for funding to transform this prototype into a production quality product. This could be from a grant awarding body, in which case what you see here surfaces as open source software in a year's time. But we aren't OSS proud, hey, make any suggestion. With what we (and our friends know) a savvy web company could clean up in the educational market.

And what you see here is just the tip of the iceberg folks! We have a whole bunch of ideas to support very large populations of registered users, to help develop students' metacognitive skills, and so on.

Warning, what you do see below is PROTOTYPE and this is visible to any astute observer. But it's certainly good enough to be proof of concept and for small group use now. And somehow after a few months work, we realise how little we like FLEX and RIAs, the interface will be going back to good old HTML, CSS, Javascript and AJAX with a dash of Flash for editor implementation.

Here are three five minute screencasts demoing the PLE; unscripted and single-take after a day long struggle in getting hold of reasonable quality screencasting technology. So, please forgive any imperfections, and look past them to the system itself:

Part 1 where I talk about the background to PLE, and show some of the social networking facilities in the prototype: Individual profiles, friendship, communities, manipulating community membership. Pretty standard stuff these days.
Part 2 where simple searches are illustrated, for communities in this case, but we could also search for users. Search facilities so far are pretty basic, but enable navigation around the social network of users and communities. Then this screencast moves on to constructing a learning plan, shows how del.icio.us linked resources can be incorporated into the learning plan.
Part 3 Shows how learning plans can be transformed by one or more users into representations of what they are learning. Learning plans and their transformation into media rich expressions of learning fit well with HEFCE's emphasis on the use of a diversity of media for learning purposes. Together with social networking facilities, learning plans and their transformations constitute the core of the PLE. They also fit well with the education 3.0 approach discussed elsewhere in this blog, particularly when ideas of the use of open educational content are paired with a PLE like this.

And if you are a funder with moolah, spondulicks, Russian oil rubles, folding money, or just plain cash to burn please send me an email. Just google my name and you will find an address.

Thanks! Enjoy!

Liberating biotechnology: Watch this video

2007-09-10T12:59:00.000+01:00

I chanced on A LAMP Stack For The Life Sciences. "What's this?" I thought, "Surely a non-problem, a LAMP stack is well known" (its an open source computer science thing that underpins much of the Internet) "Why is there a video on it?" So clicking on I found a marvelous Google Tech Talk by Richard Jefferson of CAMBIA on biological innovation for open society.

CAMBIA's mission is thus

"CAMBIA is an independent, international non-profit institute. For more than a decade, CAMBIA has been creating new technologies, tools and paradigms to foster collaboration and life-sciences enabled innovation. These tools are designed to enable disadvantaged communities and developing countries to meet their own challenges in food security, health, and natural resource management."

Jefferson maintains that if you really want to change the world its identify a method that allows others to do things. And this is what his talk boils down to (with excuses for gross simplifications):

Change the biological innovation system by working around the patent system with open licences.
Provide tools for people to use in their own situations; thus, e.g., empower ordinary farmers by giving them plants which provide a soil constituent analysis, e.g. leaf tips turn orange if there is less than a certain level of nitrogen in the soil, enabling the farmers to then decide what to do, take out a loan to buy urea or plant plants to increase the nitrogen levels in the soil.

OK, there is a mass of interesting stuff there but suffice it, in the interests of saving me time writing this to just quote Jefferson's abstract from the video:

"It is commonplace to regard health crises, sickness, malnutrition, famine and natural resource collapse as overwhelming problems of our world, typically associated with poverty. Rather, they are symptoms of a more fundamental failing in how we deal with the world, and to whom we give the tools to engage. Four billion poor people are not just a problem, they are world's greatest resource for problem solving. What we lack are the norms, the tools and the mechanisms to harness and empower their commitment, their drive, their local knowledge and their creativity. But this is within our grasp. In this presentation, I will outline the real origins of Open Source - not the recent phenomenon in software development, but the very foundation of all of civilization: plant and animal domestication and breeding. Virtually every key element of productive, economically savvy Open Source innovation was developed and presaged by millenia of plant breeders and farmers who created the wealth upon which society is based. The engine room of civilization has been agriculture, but the fuel has been shared innovation. The problem is not solely multinational corporations gaming the patent system and the associated business practices. It is also the failure of public sector to engage creatively with their responsibilities. I will describe how the patent system has evolved (if indeed we can grace such an accretion of carbuncles with that glorious biological process) and how business practices and models are groaning under the weight of its excesses. I will also describe the enormous potential of modern informatics to parse and integrate this information so that anyone can understand and appreciate the landscape upon which innovation must operate, and can guide new business models that use shared and accessible tools to create myriad applications, products and services."

Watch it, or even, just run it in a background video.... it's truly fascinating.

Education 3.0

2007-08-22T23:16:00.000+01:00

Education 3.0 is an interesting approach that views Web 2.0 as an enabling technology for change in HE. While the approach has no particular name in the UK or Europe, it has been labeled Education 3.0 in South Africa. The material below is in part about the approach at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town; my one-time home town.

The material itself is drawn from an upcoming report on Web 2.0 and Higher Education by Tom Franklin and myself. The report, for the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education builds, with JISC's kind permission, on our earlier Web 2.0 report for JISC. The new report will be published on OBHE's site early next week. Ostensibly the new report is only available by subscription, but there is a ten day trial access scheme that will enable non-subscribers to reach the report. Alternately your institution may already be a subscriber.

From here on is a quote from the draft report. Numbers from 118 onwards refer to footnotes in the report; these are reproduced at the end of this post.

We have examined how Web 2.0 can be used to support learning and teaching within the current higher education system, here we briefly look at a more radical view that Web 2.0 technologies will enable a radical transformation in the nature of higher education itself. In "The genesis and emergence of Education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa" 118 Derek Keats and Philip Schmidt of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa, explore how developments in social networking and technology, and developments in legal and economic understanding may lead to change in educational institutions. Characterising three stages of education they describe:

Education 1.0 as being in a didactic style,
Education 2.0 as Education 1.0 enhanced by use of Web 2.0 technologies.
Education 3.0 as "characterized by rich, cross-institutional, cross-cultural educational opportunities within which the learners themselves play a key role as creators of knowledge artefacts that are shared, and where social networking and social benefits outside the immediate scope of activity play a strong role. The distinction between artefacts, people and process becomes blurred, as do distinctions of space and time. Institutional arrangements, including policies and strategies, change to meet the challenges of opportunities presented. Education 3.0 as used here embraces many of the concepts referred to by Downes (2005)119 in his concept of e-learning 2.0, but complements them with an emphasis on learning and teaching processes with a focus on institutional changes that accompany the breakdown of boundaries (between teachers and students, higher education institutions, and disciplines)."

These concepts are widespread. In Europe there is a groundswell of interest in whether Web 2.0 will act as either a transformative or an enabling force in changing universities by blurring the boundaries between individual universities, by blurring the boundaries between higher education and open education, by giving rise to the need for other qualification awarding bodies at HE levels, and by changing learning and teaching practice. For example, there may well be a future role for third-party accreditation organisations awarding qualifications to individuals for learning based around open content educational materials and individual contributions centred around that material.120 At least in the UK, there is also a strong opinion that there is too much capital invested in universities and too much societal dependence on the degree awarding function of universities, and that the large amounts of useful research performed in universities for Education 3.0 to significantly affect how universities function in relation to each other and to society in general. In this view, adjustment to Web 2.0 and the increased co-operation between students that it enables may simply consist of working out how the concept of individual assessment and award of degrees on (mostly) individual work can be reconciled with increased student co-operation and group work.

However in the less developed countries there may be strong reason to change HEI models, coupled with less societal inertia. In this context and in relation to Education 3.0 Keats and Schmidt discuss challenges to HE in Africa. These include skill shortages that lead to lack of critical mass in different subjects in individual institutions. The authors point to web connectivity and Education 3.0 as being able to address this challenge. However the authors also point to lack of funding that affects computing facilities and available bandwidth. We note that there are, in South Africa at least, efforts to reduce the high cost of bandwidth. Keats and Schmidt discuss free open source software as part of the solution to high costs. While Keats and Schmidt note that UWC is not at a stage to address Education 3.0, there are various UWC initiatives that could lead to the establishment of UWC as a Education 3.0 institution. These include:

The development of open source software for educational purposes via the UWC established African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project 121 and the Free Software Innovation Unit (FSIU) 122. AVOIR received ZAR3.7M of funding from International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in 2004 123. AVOIR has a variety of other African universities participating in the project 124 as well as participants iAfghanistan, India and Philippines.
The Free Content and Free and Open Courseware Project 125 currently being established inside UWC.
The Rip-Mix-Learn Research Group that considers both educational experience and assessment in higher education courses which make extensive use of open educational resources, and in which students create significant parts of the course content themselves. The interdisciplinary group focuses on five UWC courses which use a range of technologies and tools, including podcasting, on-line discussion forums, and peer assessment.
Collaboration in the NetTel@Africa programme, where "The overall goal of the NetTel@Africa is to make the provision of ICT more efficient and ubiquitous to the citizens of targeted countries. Achievement of the goal will require improved policy and regulatory reform and increased private sector investment in ICT (telecommunications sector)." 126
Action under an HP Digital Publishing Grant127 to promote the use of digital materials for learning, including the use of wikis for the development of wiki books by students. The HP grant includes membership of the Chameleon Federation 128 which is dedicated to using digital publishing to improve education. The federation is composed of HP and 24 participating universities in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Russia, the UK, and the USA.

118 Keats, D., and Schmidt, P. (5 March 2007 ) "The genesis and emergence of Education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa", Vol 12 No 3, First Monday. URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/keats/index.html Last accessed 1 August 2007. We would like to thank Derek Keats for referring us to this article, and Philip Schmidt for commenting on our interpretation of the article and associated research.

119 Also referred to elsewhere in this report: Downes, S. (17 October 2005) "E-learning 2.0", eLearn Magazine, ACM. URL: http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1 Last accessed 1 August 2007

120 One author (van Harmelen) had a conversation in May 2007 with Patrick McAndrew, Director of Research and Evaluation for the Open University’s Open Content Initiative, with both agreeing on the possibility of a third party organisation awarding certificates based on a learner reading open content and posting contributions on a blog centred around that material.

121 African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources. URL: http://avoir.uwc.ac.za Last accessed 1 August 2007.

122 The Free Software Innovation Unit, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
URL: http://fsiu.uwc.ac.za Last accessed 1 August 2007.

123 International Development Research Centre. URL: http://www.idrc.ca Last accessed 1 August 2007.

124 “Other universities participating in the project are the University of Jos (Nigeria), Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Senegal), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Kenya), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Catholic University of Mozambique (Mozambique) and The University of Eduardo Modlane (Mozambique). In addition, a number of other universities are collaborating with the AVOIR project through other means of support, including the University of Ghana Legon (Ghana), the University of Port Elizabeth and Peninsula Technikon (South Africa)." Tectonic (25 October 2004) "UWC gets R3,7million for free software development", URL: http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=372&tags=ind Last accessed 1 August 2007.

125 The Free Content and Free and Open Courseware Project , University of the Western Cape, South Africa. URL: http://freecourseware.uwc.ac.za Last accessed 1 August 2007. We are told that this site is currently being redesigned and all existing content will be reposted during August 2007.

126 NetTel Africa. URL: http://www.nettelafrica.org Last accessed 1 August 2007.

127 Witkin L., and Vanides J., "Digital Publishing boosts higher education", Hewlett Packard. URL: http://h41111.www4.hp.com/globalcitizenship/uk/en/bulletin/10/interview.html Last accessed 1 Aug 2007.

128 Chameleon Federation. URL: http://www.dp-chameleon.org Last accessed 1 August 2007.

Using social software in education

2007-08-16T21:05:00.000+01:00

Some time ago I uploaded a couple of sets of slides to slideshare. I looked back at them today and still like them, so I'm also posting them here. The presentations can be seen full screen and/or downloaded via slideshare.

The first for a presentation in connection with a study written by Tom Franklin and myself, for JISC on Web 2.0 in Higher Education. You can also obtain our report. An updated version or the report will shortly appear on the OBHE site (more details on this blog in a later post).

The second set of slides was a talk I gave at a recent Mimas conference:

Reviving this blog

2007-08-13T18:39:00.000+01:00

This should not appear in Emerge's Elgg... sorry if it does, my feeds are messed up!

I've been quiet for a while and this blog was dead, even though I saw a steady trickle of visitors via the stat counters, something which continually amazed me.

But I will resume posting, probably in a shorter more slapdash styleee...

And probably mixing my life and my technical interests up a bit more than before.

Coming soon too a new look, less of this techie black!

Importing from my blog to Elgg

2007-08-13T18:05:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Scott Wilson, I learned a little Elgg trick which will enable imports of posts from my non-Elgg blog to Elgg.

The trick, which should really be more widely known:
1. login to Elgg
2. go to your profile
3. click on resources under your photo on your profile page
4. click on Feeds on the lhs side of the page
4. add the address of an RSS or an Atom feed for your blog (see notes 1 and particularly 2 below)
6 click on Publish to Blog (next to the Feeds you clicked)
7. tick the checkbox next to your newly added feed, and add a tag for Elgg to tag your incoming posts with, then click the update button.
[ Added: Hmm :-( seems update has to be pressed after making a
post on the foreign blog, probably each time an import is needed ]

Thats it! Thanks Scott!

Note 1: Don't know what RSS and Atom are? Try this little video.
Note 2: It probably is a good idea to only import posts pertinent to Emerge. I am using a feed for posts in my blog which I tag as emerge. That way you wont get an entry about Tony Wilson, should I make one.

Some usability references from a course on interactive system design

2007-02-01T22:14:00.000Z

I'm just about to start teaching a course that I teach at the University of Manchester each year (alas for the last time this year due to various internal factors). It's a course on participatory interactive system design that uses a largely experential learning approach.

Each year we choose an interactive system to design, and mostly run the course as a design exercise dealing with all the contingencies of real world design. This year I've made the choice, we are going to be exploring an educational/community support system. More about this later.

There are some other activities to accompany the experiential learning component, and this year, as part of some pre-course warm exercises, I asked the students to bookmark references that they found pertaining to usability.

Today I looked at the result, about three hundred bookmarks in del.icio.us. From about 36 students. Weyhey! Go students go!

I'm of course making some last minute preparations, so no time to talk more about the course. But I will return to it in future posts, under the tags appearing below. (One of these days I must get my tags into the sidebar here, maybe this will be impetus...)

Seven sites in seven days 8-14 Jan 07

2007-01-19T19:21:00.000Z

Some silence has ensued, mostly because I've had my head in strategy and tactics for online community development. One of the slides I produced (with a small modification suggested by my friend and colleague Tom Franklin) appears above. Because of this community focus, I'm devoting almost all of this week's seven sites to Communities of Practice (CoP) material.

CPsquare is the CoP for CoP facilitators, theorists, and practitioners. One of the useful pages is "The reification of our practice: our resource base", with links to various articles on practice. Some of the remaining links on this page come from this resource base.
Weaving Together Online and Face-To-Face Learning: A Design From A Communities Of Practice Perspective describes heuristics (here meaning common experiences) of particpants in mixed mode online and F2F learning communities / CoPs.

The abstract reads "Weaving together online and face-to-face learning improves the quality of working in both media. Based on the observations of nine different experiments that went through a similar process of weaving together these two media we share our observations of outcomes and an evolving design framework from a community of practice perspective. Arguing that weaving participation using different media in succession is different from blended or hybrid learning, we suggest that careful design of an online ramp-up can make a face-to-face event more potent, and the subsequent online collaboration more productive. Key elements of this design process are inclusion, interaction, and social structure designed for the negotiation of meaning. We offer heuristics that help trace the threads from first online contact to the development of productive relationships at later phases in an emerging community of practice."
Continuing the on-lin off-line theme, phase change occurs in the transition between on-line and off-line meetings by CoP members. One group of CoP practitioners made notes of various kinds (text, including a poem, drawings, images) on the phase change they experienced, and the growth that is enabled by the phase change. Chapter 3 deals with the synergistic effect of phase change.
The Foundations of Community of Practice Workshop Final Handbook (from 2004). A participant course handbook for the training supplied by Etienne Wenger and CPsquare colleagues. A good start for anyone thinking of doing some CoP training themselves.
I like the how to guide provided by Teasing "readers" of an online forum to communicate.
Anyone interested in cross cultural CoPs might turn to Cultural Crossings: Using Stories to Inform Your Learning Journey. As a taster, the authors provide ten strategies useful (or, perhaps, essential) for building cross-cultural CoPs. They are:
- Common goals and commitment
- Communication protocols
- Learning about self
- Importance of emotions
- Cultural brokers
- Feedback
- Resolving conflicts and misunderstandings
- Surfacing and owning assumptions
- Respect and openness
- Importance of trust
The authors recommend that "Successfully applying these strategies ... will help people build trust, which is the bedrock of deep, sustained relationships."
So I've dried up on the CoP bookmarks. "That's only six links" you say. True, so how about a quick link to Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires. Sounds good, huh? And it generally is an interesting take on a Maslow-like hierarchy of needs (Participation /Engagement /Productivity /Happiness /Well-Being) that might be fulfilled in product design. I can't say that I fully mesh with the vacuum cleaner as exemplar in a hierarchy of fulfilled needs, which makes me think that, as applied, the hierarchy is not a hierarchy per se, but rather a list of categories where a product may be ranked as to how it contributes to particular categories. If we were dealing with a hierarchy, I think that there may be rather different products that hit my well-being spot. How about a fully functioning National Health Service that runs with BUPA-like efficiency? Ahh, dream on...

Technorati Tags: cops, communities of practice

Seven sites in seven days 1-7 Jan 07

2007-01-07T12:59:00.000Z

Best of my week's bookmarking on e-learning, social networking, web, and techie stuff. This week I focus on ICT for the developing world; the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D).

Actually, I bookmarked some of these links at other times, but hey, you're not paying for this service are you?

May as well kick off with a biggie, The United Nations development Programme's Information and Communications Technology For Development.
Bridges.org's "Real Access criteria are used to frame the analysis of all issues surrounding ICT access and use, including the 'soft' aspects that are often overlooked. They are designed to anticipate or detect the reasons that ICT development initiatives, government e-strategies, or grassroots projects fail to achieve their goals or highlight how and why these projects succeed.
There are twelve inter-related Real Access criteria that can be used to improve the way that ICT-based development policies and initiatives are planned, researched, monitored and evaluated. Each criterion is set out below, with a short description and a set of example questions that can help frame thinking about how to apply it to ICT projects and policies."

These criteria are:

Appropriateness of technology
Affordability of technology and technology use
Human capacity and training
Locally relevant content, applications, and services
Integration into daily routines
Socio-cultural factors
Trust in technology
Local economic environment
Macro-economic environment
Legal and regulatory framework
Political will and public support

12 Habits of Highly Effective ICT-Enabled Development Initiatives

I notice that here and here that Bridges.org has also done some consultancy for my home city, Cape Town. In fact, further browsing reveals that they are based in Cape Town and Kampala.

Indicative of some of the scale of the South African problem: Shanty town on fire, Langa, Cape Town. Image Victor Geere, CC licence here.
Still on the Cape Town connection, the University of the Western Cape is well set on open source software for technological infrastructure UWC has developed KEWL.NextGen, an open source LMS. I look forward to the UWC moving to brower based PLEs to complement KEWL!

This appears to be the umbrella FOSS site at UWC, and there is a related FOSS product kGroups as indicated here:
"This collaborative workspace (also known as KGroups) is an implementation of the KINKY application framework that was developed to build KEWL.NextGen. KINKY, kGroups and KEWL.NextGen are Free Software (Open Source) and available under the GNU General Public License."
Anyone interested in ICT4D will ponder the role of communications in ICT solutions. UWC's Centre of Excellence for IP and Internet Computing has a Broadband Applications and Networks Group (see via the sidebar menu) that takes an interesting approach of semi-synchronous communications. They write:

"We work with multi-modal semi-synchronous communications. Multi-modal means that communication consists of multiple modalities, e.g. text, voice and video. Semi-synchronous means that communication occurs in real-time (synchronous), store-and-forward (asynchronous) or anywhere in between (semi-synchronous). Instant Messaging is a good example of an application that has many of these features. |

We are interested in all these forms of communication because they appear ideally suited to bridging digital divide gaps where there is a large variation amongst power provision, networks, end-user equipment, communication and temporal modalities, and human computer interfaces BANG research explores how to build communication infrastructure that enables, and even automates, communication across such a wide variety of issues."

Bridges.org has done some work with students in BANG, here.

I found an interesting tool for those interested in Africa here, one that uses a novel user interface to access large amounts of information. Choose a country in the right-hand sidebar, and a theme such as national ICT strategies, or telecommunications in the left-hand sidebar, and be presented with a well selected list of links and short descriptions sorted by area, e.g. analysis, legislation, presentations. The link above is for Kenyan telecommunications.
I'm not sure about the One Laptop Per Child initiative, considering the infrastructural issues, or the amount of work needed to remove infrastructural issues. Nonetheless, I think that the project will at the very least push forward the boundaries considerably, and I hope that Negroponte and colleagues succeed in every way. Here's a piece on the current state of the prototype. Interesting hardware. I want to see a similar One Handheld Per Child initiative one of these days.

Technorati Tags: ict4d

Another year, another PLE page

2007-01-06T15:40:00.000Z

As we roll into 2007 (duh, wake up Mark, we are in 2007 already), I've made a new page for a new year in my PLE wiki pages. The first person to feature on the 2007 page is.... (hey, click the link to find out, I'm not doing it all for you :-D )

Technorati Tags: PLE

Free online connectivism conference

2007-01-03T16:55:00.000Z

I see that there is a free online connectivism conference organised by the University of Manitoba's Institute of Learning Technologies, with confirmed speakers Terry Anderson, Stephen Downes, Bill Kerr, Will Richardson, and George Siemens. The conference is on 2-9 February 2007.

The description here reads:

"The evolution of teaching and learning is accelerated with technology. After several decades of duplicating classroom functionality with technology, new opportunities now exist to alter the spaces and structures of knowledge to align with both needs of learners today, and affordances of new tools and processes.

Yet our understanding of the impact on teaching and learning trails behind rapidly forming trends. What are critical trends? How does technology influence learning? Is learning fundamentally different today than when most prominent views of learning were first formulated (under the broad umbrellas of cognitivism, behaviourism, and constructivsm)? Have the last 15 years of web, technology, and social trends altered the act of learning? How is knowledge itself, in a digital era, related to learning?

Connectivism Online Conference is an open online forum exploring how learning has been impacted by ongoing changes."

Technorati Tags: connectivism, conference

Seven sites in seven days: 25-31 Dec 06

2007-01-03T11:07:00.000Z

Ahh, I'm lagging. A break for Xmas and then too much New Year cheer. Let me quickly hammer out a few sites and pages I have seen during that time.... and let's divide this up into three sections, e-learning (1-2), social networks (3-4), techie stuff (5-7)

e-Learning

1. I was chatting to a colleague recently on the possibilities of using e-learning to educate student nurses on how to interact with patients. Somewhat relatedly, I chanced across an interesting 'game' via Jennie Rothenberg in Altlantic online. The game, Façade, presents an emotional scenario, you play someone interacting with a couple with a failing marriage. However, the piece is about more than Façade; Rothenberg interviews Jonathan Rauch, author of "Sex, Lies, and Video Games," about "innovative and emotionally complex video games".

As an aside, Altlantic Magazine published Vannevar Bush's futuristic "As We May Think" in July 1945, predicting the invention of a personal computing machine, the Memex. This article influenced me heavily in earlier years, when I spent a significant amount of time thinking about hypertext and personal information systems.

2. Maybe, like me, you are interested in tools to support e-learning. A few which have been grabbing my attention for various reasons at the moment are Elgg, Drupal, and Confluence. Elgg is a combination of personal and group spaces, coupled with blogging facilities. To call it an e-portfolio system is perhaps a misnomer, although it started out as such. Drupal is a content management system that friends use in their web business, and that I have written about before, here. An interesting article from IBM on Drupal (and other open source systems) is here. (On the left, an Xmas greeting from drupal.org). Finally (for now), Confluence is an enterprise wiki that uses wysiwyg editing, and is free to open source projects. I installed Confluence over the recent holidays; full of promise for those needing a wysiwig editor and their own wiki installation, Confluence only has a rudimentary blogging facility, and for now I need a blogging facility rather than a wiki. Back to Elgg... or perhaps Drupal with the blogging module installed. Or perhaps you might like a combination of facilities, as here: Elgg, Drupal and Moodle, from Bill Fitzgerald. Incidentally, the Open Academic project seeks to unify these three systems together with Mediawiki.

Social networks

3. What's out there in social network land? The Mashable! Social Networking Awards identify a bunch of interesting social networks in eleven categories under three different headings, "our choice", "the people's' choice" and "hot for 2007". MySpace picks up Mashable!'s number one mainstream place with "We see MySpace as the new MTV, with one crucial difference: the users are the stars." Just pick up on the user centric zeitgeist there guys (see a previous post here about Time magazine's article Time's Person of the Year: You).

Incidentally, Mashable! doesn't do so well on the choice of MySpace Xmas pages, or maybe there's not much out there. On being msg'd a URL to Mashable!'s choice of Xmas pages on MySpace, my 14 year old reviewer dismissed them as "lame", claiming she could do better in ten minutes. Hmmm, better set her a challenge then.... OK, OK, Xmas is over, I'll shut up on this and move on swiftly:

4. Not a social network post per se, but a tool to leverage the power of social networks, in this case del.icio.us: Peter Shank's flickrCC finds photos on flickr with a Creative Commons licence. On the left is an image from Leigh Blackall, found using flickrCC and the tag elearning, with the attribution added using flickrCC's web-based editor. To get a better view of the image, open it in a new tab/window, and, if need be, click on the displayed image to enlarge it.

Techie stuff

5. You hack Javascript but don't use a Javascript debugger? Ease over to the Venkman debugger for Mozilla and ease your life.... Well, Venkman certainly eased my life recently. If you are still using FireFox 1.5 then you need to install Venkman from here.

6. I've been ignorant about Feedburner, and so I started researching what it is. Here are some links: here and here, together with an interview with two of the Feedburner team here. I'm still after Feedburner related material, if you have any good Feedburner related URL's then please pass them on to me.

7. Ohh, its a dry season here at markzspace, too many holidays and I'm running out of bookmarks I want to share. How about a recentish quality review of several 20" to flat panel displays? Being a fussy type I like to see discusrions on panel technology and its inerent quality, so never mind that this review is six months old. Or being techie in a different style, how about a guide to beef cuts, and the recipe I used to cook a hunk of beef to rare perfection on Xmas day? Different cut, but the timings worked perfectly for me. Just for the record here:

"3. Put a heavy-based roasting tray on the hob and when hot, add the beef.
4. Sear the beef quickly on all sides to colour and crisp the outside.
5. Transfer the beef immediately to the oven and leave the oven on its highest setting (about 240C/460F/Gas 8) for 20 minutes.
6. Reduce the heat to 190C/375F/Gas 5 and roast for half an hour per kilo for rare, adding another ten minutes per kilo for medium rare, 20 minutes per kilo for medium, and 30 minutes per kilo for well done."

Catch you next week.

Technorati Tags: facade, drupal, elgg, moodle, mediawiki, socialnetworks, flickrCC, venkman, feedburner, beef, monitors

Seven sites in seven days: 18-24 Dec 06

2006-12-26T11:55:00.000Z

Whoops a bit tardy, today is boxing day, but then I have Xmas excuses. Some interesting pages and sites that I have bookmarked during the 'past' week's browsing are:

1. A spot of zeitgeist: Time magazine Time's Person of the Year: You is a short ode to the web of 2006, user centrality, and user generated content. Dan Farber takes a more cynical take here, but you must admit the read/write web looks to transform things just a little. Of course we are still stuck in early adoption, with the "emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it." [The Guardian] But you ain't seen nothing yet...

Diagram above, not the Time cover, but a web 2.0 diagram by Markus Angemier.

2. Moving from now to the future, I chanced on Delta Scan: The Future of Science and Technology, 2005-2055. This is a part of Stanford's Metamedia Lab. I'll be checking this out over the next few weeks, as tasters: Mobile phone use helps economic growth in developing countries, and the claim that gas is a clean energy source (well as compared to coal), not clearly labelled "will harm the environment" for my liking. But worth an ongoing browse, I think.

3. Techspot: The biggest news, IMHO, in recent weeks comes from this post at Mozilla Labs: "Today Mozilla Labs is releasing Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. Operator demonstrates the usefulness of semantic information on the Web, in real world scenarios." Yes, we'll have more of that, shaken, stirred, whatever.... If you're an elearning type, idling your time away on this site, then perhaps wonder what this might do for elearning. Need to capture something somewhere for a class project? Want to get the next thing to do in a learning design you are following?

5. I sometimes go to the excellent Dorkbot in London, to see things like this exploding guitar string (from the Flickr dorkbot London tag). A site run by some Dorkbot people is and a loosely associated site is Let the People Speak. And one of the sub-projects on that site is Directionless Enquiries, "an open-source community call centre where users take turns being the caller and the call-centre agent. /Make calls from the street and get put through to friends online who can tell you about your location, and receive calls from people who are lost and in need of help in your hometown." A do-it-yourself assistance service! Go do! Well, the software appears to be in the latter stages of development, enough to put up a trial service. It's good stuff.

4. Cheating a bit, I'll throw in two point-by-point e-learning summaries, Seven Steps to Better E-learning by Clark N. Quinn, and the UK's Teaching and Learning Research Programme's Ten Principles of Learning and Teaching.

6. And glancing off the web 2.0 items above, while diametrically opposing the community hactivism of Directionless Enquires, maybe its time to turn to a year end review of web 2.0 in the enterprise = enterprise 2.0. Dion Hinchcliffe gives a round up of the year in enterprise 2.0, and, guess what? He too quotes the 1% rule of thumb, but this time dressed up as the "Social Media Value Creation Pyramid." Talk about value creation...

7. Finally, if Xmas has hit your pockets and you need some free fiction to read over the New Year break you might try FLURB: A webzine of Astonishing Tales edited by Randy Rucker, of cyberpunk fame.

That's it for this week, I'm off to hack a little as Boxing Day relaxation.

Seven sites in seven days: 11-17 Dec 06

2006-12-17T14:39:00.000Z

I thought I'd do a regular highlights of my bookmarking activities, because I do see a lot of sites on the web, and bookmark those that interest me in the spirit of my physical library — I'd rather have something on my bookshelf that I can turn to in a time of need than nothing at all. If you dip into this blog on occasion, you too might be interested in some of the sites I consider worthwhile; this is the start of a hopefully regular series highlighting selected posts. If you want to see all my posts I found a small SupGlu demo that shows my posts (the URL may change and if so will be updated here), or you can use delicious.

In a spirit of reckless abandon I've called this post "Seven sites in seven days" and I'll try to continue this kind of post every Sunday, but I do have doubts about some of my compulsive abilities... What the heck, here goes, it's called that now. Set up a sweepstake to see how long I can maintain this.

You'll find that posts entitled "Seven sites..." are not about sites per se, but rather sites, pages, posts, and/or anything with a URL that takes my fancy. So you might find a wide variety of topics here. This week things are mostly about learning and the web.

In no particular order, seven highlights from my last seven days of bookmarking:

Adam Garry and Parry Graham, Using Study Groups to Disseminate Technology Best Practices. A post from 2004, this provides a how to guide to using collaborative study groups and reflection to improve teacher practice (or any other area of endeavour)> Nice how to guide that has an emphasis on productive work practices, and a couple of example of previously effective study groups.

Nancy Blachman, Google Guide. A bunch of clear explanatory web pages on how Google works, with pages for novices and for experienced users.

Marc Prensky, Writings. PDFs of some of Presnsky's writing. Marc is the author of "Digital Game-Based Learning" and "Don't bother me now Mom - I'm learning". I've bookmarked this to go back to the two part article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (it's second part is Do They REALLY Think Differently?).

Philipp Lenssen Lessons Learned Self-Publishing With Lulu. Seb Schmoller of the fabulous Fortnightly Mailing turned me onto Lulu, which I think I've come across before, but without the shock of realisation. I had an extremely negative experience of publishing with Addison Wesley (although I liked the book that resulted from the experience) and Lulu promises to revolutionise the experience of publishing my next edited monograph. In the link here Phillip Lenssen gives a view of self-publishing with Lulu from the trenches.

Andrew Beacock republishes a handy bookmarklet to associate Technorati tags with posts in Oddiophile's Technorati Tags Bookmarklet. There are several ways to do this, Google around and find a few, or see what you can find in my Technorati bookmarks. Don't know what a Technorati tag is? Try this.

LifeHacker provides Alpha Geek: Video Editing 101, a simple guide to video editing on Windows platforms with Microsoft Movie Maker.

Pew Internet, Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0". I like the Pew Internet site for its evidence based reports on the internet and its development. Here they do the Web2.0 thing, but you may find the site an interesting browse.

Fred Stutzman, Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know. Not so important in my view for the five sites that Stutzman mentions, but rather for the three trends that he identifies towards the end of his post:

Social networking is becoming content-centric
Social networking is in the vanguard of micro-payment
Social networking for the sake of social networking just doesn't cut it.

Technorati Tags:
google
lulu
study+group
prensky
selfpublishing
social+networking
socialsoftware
technorati+tags
video+editing

Problems in building PLEs using web2.0 components

2006-12-13T15:04:00.000Z

I found the following video via Solution Watch.

It's a well-known situation that prevents widespread uptake of web2.0 tools for Personal Learning Environments (PLEs).

There are ways around this problem: I use FireFox's password manager to remember usernames and passwords for sites which only need a low level of security (with backups of my usernames and passwords in a secure place). If any of those sites have a "leave me loged in" or "remember me on this computer" box to check, I check the box before logging in. Together these tactics save a LOT of hassle.

In my view, the other major problem in web2.0 uptake for PLEs is difficulty in linking material between sites. Yes, I know a little configuration, or, worse, HTML hacking, and there you are; Flickr photo's on your favorite site. But it's such a drag for the non-technical amongst us, and it's a surface-level solution that does not achieve the 'deeper' integration of content that that might be achieved in a single integrated application.

Snap previews

2006-12-07T11:54:00.000Z

I've added Snap previews to this blog. Please take a moment to let me know, using the comment feature below, if you find them useful or not, and I'll keep them or remove them accordingly. Thanks.

Using delicious effectively

2006-12-06T07:42:00.000Z

This post is about delicious (read del.icio.us, if you will) , a social bookmarking service. A typical delicious screen appears on the left (click to enlarge).

If you don't know what social bookmarking is try reading this dry Wikipedia article, or, preferably, watch this video. The video is in .wmv format, so you probably need some Microsoft thing to play it. Windows Media Player springs to life when I watch it on my laptop.

I'm doing a demo of some web2.0 systems this afternoon, and I haven't got any material on delicious (read del.icio.us, if you will) for my colleagues to turn to, if they want to, after the demo. So I've been looking around for useful material on the web. I've collated a few sources of guide material, but this post is by no means a full user guide for delicious.

Also, some bits of this post are FireFox specific; I eschew Internet Explorer (IE) in favour of FireFox, a fine open source browser with a useful extension capability and no glaring ActiveX security holes. You can download FireFox version 2 from here. If you are an IE user, look at this, and some of the later material below.

Firstly, when I started using delicious, I used bookmarklets to deal with the business of posting. Confused by bookmarklets? Check out this page to see them used for delicious. Well and good, but each time I posted a bookmark to delicious, the current page that I was bookmarking was replaced by a 'post to delicious' page, and then after I had posted, was replaced by the original page. Bookmarklets were a help, but still I had to wait for two page refreshes, a boringly long time, sometimes.

Moving to toolbar buttons was a fantastic advance (check them out here). Now on using the 'post to delicious' or 'tag' button, a pop-up window appears for delicious tagging information, and closes once the post has been made. Easier and smoother, particularly as text that you select on the page being tagged is copied to the comment field in the tag at delicious window.

But occasionally (and I don't know if its just me or my systems) I can't use a toolbar button to post bookmark for a PDF, so I keep a post to delicious bookmarklet knocking around on my browser's personal toolbar.

A quick tour of using delicious with FireFox is here.

That's it for setting up your FireFox browser. What about general advice? Basic delicious usage is covered in Using Delicious in Education, which boasts " You can see that we’ve quickly taken bookmarking and made it wickedly interesting." Wicked!

Actually, that last reference is to a page on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, a site for collaboratively editing, surprise, documents and spreadsheets. The author of Using Delicious in Education, John Pederson, invites collaborative editing and development of the document. He's just starting a similar document Using Wikipedia in Education, where he makes a similar invitation. If you want to help you'll have to start by finding his email at the end of either document.

What to learn to do next? Well you could develop your skills with David Brunelle's Become a del.icio.us Power User, and similarly with the excellent Slacker Manager's The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users. But beware, in the latter, the inbox has been replaced by 'links for you' and 'subscriptions' (near the top right of your delicious pages once you are logged in).

Or you could browse what has been tagged with delicious or del.icio.us at delicious. These two links return different results.

Incidentally, its worth looking at the syntax of the URLs for the previous links, you can see what is tagged with a particlar tag, e.g., marshmallow, simply by typing del.icio.us/tag/marshmallow directly into your browser's URL field and hitting return. Or you can look at a user's use of a tag, e.g. mvh's use of web2.0, by typing something like del.icio.us/mvh/web2.0 in the URL field and hitting return. Copy and paste to try them... Or be lazy and try these: 1, 2.

Only interested in items taggged with both marshmallow and recipes? Use del.icio.us/tag/marshmallow+recipes, try 3.

There are some third party tools out there for delicious, also here. Personally, I don't get too excited by them, but, ha ha, watch for a later post where I change my tune, particularly if enough people comment below about their favourite third party tool.

Let me get ready to leave you by showing you a third party tool that I do use sometimes; John Vey's very web2.0 del.icio.us director, shown here (click it to enlarge).

And, finally, do please remember to leave yourself logged into delicious all the time. You'll find it a help when posting to delicious.

Using Flickr more effectively...

2006-12-04T08:38:00.000Z

For some time now I've been thinking that there must be more interesting things for me to do with Flickr than use it as an occasional repository for a few digital photos. This week I'm giving a presentation on various sites on the web to some colleagues, and I thought that I'd mosey around and see what I could dig up on Flickr.

First off, I discovered an excellent image on Flickr from cogdog, What Can we do with Flickr. Fantastic! A photo with attached notes that lead to further material. I've captured the image off a flicker page so you can see both a note revealed by a mouse over, and some of the accompanying text.

I particularly like the embedded html tags in the mouseover notes that lead to other pages. If you get stuck on embedding links in you notes, drop me an e-mail, or stick a comment on this page.

The image is well worth a browse on Flickr, clicking on the captured image above will take you to the relevant page on Flickr.

There is all sorts of information to be gleaned from Flickr. For example, I've bumped into Alan Levine's cogdog's blog before and thought, from the blog's header (shown here) that he was a ridgeback owner, but I discover from Flickr that his former dog was a labrador... A very slim labrador, and perhaps even one with some ridgeback blood? Its the ears and nose that do it for me in the shot above, elsewhere in Flickr I can see a labrador nose though. Perhaps cogdog will end up commenting here.

Hmmm, so what's happening to my dog recognition skills? Best post Sam the ridgeback here then, just to get a ridgeback in the frame, so to speak. This picture of Sam is held on Flickr, incidentally, and just pasted into this blog entry. This is Sam doing one of the things he does best, chilling on a sofa. Yes, I know dogs should live outside, and all the rest, but sometimes contingencies intervene. Other things Sam does well are eating, being independent while at the same time pack-dependent, and rough ridgeback play. All too little of that, he's big and while rough play is fun its hardly social if he does it with someone else, so being a responsible dog owner etc....

Back to Flickr then. We've seen that Flickr is a useful presentational aid, particularly with its notes feature. One can make presentations from Flickr slideshows, as we see in a blog post from Beth Kanter. Beth has a handy screencast in the same post that shows just how she went from powerpoint, to jpegs, to flicker slideshow, to embedded the show in her blog post. Sounds complex? Not really: I like her ending "I'm not a techie! I'm really not a techie! No I'm not!"

And finally, Beth has a post on finding Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, with another good screencast.

Back again....

2006-12-03T14:01:00.001Z

So I've been away from this blog for a while, the combined contingencies of speedyfeed dying for a while and putting me out of touch with the clcommunity, and the need to apply for research grants (gotta eat!).

Oh how fragile these things can be, yes I could have used many other mechanisms other than speedyfeed to see what's out there in CLC blogosphere, but do you know what? Like many people when it comes to their computing facilities, I'm plain doggone lazy.

Resonance

2006-10-07T18:11:00.000+01:00

I have been involved in a workshop series with a blog at LKL Social Software, and a post of mine over there may be of interest to some of the Connected Learning Community:

"I chanced upon Online Course Design from a Communities-of-Practice Perspective (John Smith and Beverley Trayner) in eLearn Magazine. (The title is a slight misnomer, in the authors’ practice, there are also face-to-face meetings.) As I was reading the article I found myself picking up on various points that the authors make and on the phases of community development that they describe. To me, these points and phases resonated with what we experienced, both as individuals and as a group, and how we informally evolved our learning practice."

I recommend the CoP article to anyone interested in the formation of learning communities and implications for practice.

Adding a feed to an rssMIX feed

2006-09-16T12:27:00.000+01:00

Previously I had made an RSS feed from all CLC members' feeds. I thought that it might be useful to see how to add to this feed if we get a new member. There are only four simple steps to make a new feed from an existing feed.

Click on any of the images below to see them in more detail.

The steps

Step 1 — Go to the existing mix at rssMIX and see something like this:

Step 2 — Click on "create a new mix from this mix" to obtain:

Step 3 — Add the URL for your new feed to the editable text box containing feed URLs. Here I am adding the URL for the post feed from a blog called LKL SocialSoftware:

Step 4 — Click on the "create!" button to make new feed.
You obtain a new feed at a new URL, shown on the new feed page:

That's it to make a new feed. However, there is one more step to use it....

Step 5 — Presumably you were consuming the old feed somewhere, like the CLC SpeedyFeed page. Presumably you now need to 'wire' the new feed URL into the consumer. Go to the consumer nd make the nescessary changes.

If you want to manipulate the CLC SpeedyFeed page itself, the password is very guessable! If you can't guess please email me for it, or add a comment here and I will be automatically emailed.

A SpeedyFeed page for CLC

2006-09-10T15:35:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd start getting some resources together for the Connected Learning Community. The first of these is a page to aid 'jumping off' to posts or pages that are of interest to us. You can read the rest of this post and find out how I made the resource, or you can just try out the CLC SpeedyFeed page. Be sure to mouse over a few items on the resource page, it has a great pop-up feature which you may come to love (or at least, deeply appreciate). If you like the page, then you may be interested in reading Accessing the page below

The screenshot below shows what is displayed on the page:

Clicking on the screenshot shows it full size

The screen shot is an example of a single page RSS aggregator.

If you want to find out more about RSS, you could watch the Beginners Guide to RSS, Web 2.0 and Networked Learning over on the Network Learning blog. Hey, that's a CLC member's blog! The recording is of a web-based Elluminate session led by Steven Parker, who writes the blog. The recording starts off with just a few seconds of patchy sound, but then shapes up. No need for alarm. If it doesn't work at all then that probably means you need to install a Java interpreter.

What's special about the single page RSS agregator chosen here? Well, as far as I know, the only user-configurable single page aggregators that have previews are SpeedyFeed and BozPages. I first tried SpeedyFeed yesterday evening, thanks to an item in Seb Schmoller's excellent Fortnightly Mailing list (back issues here). SpeedyFeed isn't perfect, I would like to have the ability to add names to displayed feeds, but I'm happy to just have the pop-ups.

In making the CLC page, I thought that these things would be both interesting and useful:

Being able to access posts which come from CLC members' blogs, and which have been specifically written for CLC.

Hopefully all of these will have been tagged with the clcommunity tag over at delicious. Consequently, all I needed to do was hook into the delicious tag feed for clcommunity. If you want to reuse this feed elsewhere, just copy this: http://del.icio.us/RSS/tag/clcommunity (right mouse click and "copy link location" in FireFox).

Being able to look at a quick view of all posts made by CLC members. Why? Having a broad view and noting and acting on similar interests will help us become a cohesive community.

To provide this kind of view of members' posts we need a feed containing both the CLC-specific posts and the non-CLC posts from all CLCers' blogs. The feed is then displayed using SpeedyFeed. The feed was the most sweat to construct because I had to find an RSS and Atom feed mixer that could deal with enough feeds, and time-order the posts while preserving content for the previews in SpeedyFeed. After a bit of messing around I found that RSSMix.com did what was needed. RSSMix provides a feed that contains post entries for all the blogs of all the CLC members. This feed is available at http://www.rssmix.com/u/16103/rss.xml (15 Oct 06: changed from 15279) if you want to reuse it elsewhere.
Because we are interested in trying to make PLEs from blogs and other web 2.0 / social software systems, I thought that some of us might be interested in seeing what is tagged with ple at delicious - there is a small group of PLE-interested folk busy doing social bookmarking there.

To see that we need the corresponding delicious feed, http://del.icio.us/RSS/tag/ple.

Finally as an experiment, I thought I would also try to show blog posts tagged with ple at Technorati.

For this I used another feed, http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/ple. The results from this include posts tagged ple in all languages and the PLE results are not as good as if one does a similar but English-language-only PLE tag search. For this reason I think that the experiment is failing, and may remove that from our SpeedyFeed page soon. However, if f anyone knows how to generate a similar English-only ple tag feed, please comment on this post.

So what if someone else joins CLC? What needs to be done?

That person should add their name and any blog/wiki etc to the CLC members page on the CLC wiki.
If the new member can find out their blog's RSS or Atom feed, they should also add it to the CLC members page page. If they are stuck or don't put in the information then I can help.
It would be cool if the new member added themselves to the CLC Frapper group (this means registering with Frapper) so we have a picture and map entry for the new person.
Someone will need to generate a new RSSMix feed with the new members RSS feed added to the mix feed. That's a slight drag, because we can't just edit an RSSMix feed, we need a brand new one. Luckily we can start the process with the existing feed, mix number 15279, without logging into RSSMix. We can then plug this new feed into our SpeedyFeed page. To manipulate the SpeedyFeed page we do need to login to SpeedyFeed; there's a password for that which we can pass around.
Anyone who uses the old RSSMix feed on their own pages should update to the new feed. We could easily announce changes on the CLC blog.

Accessing the page

If you like this page, then its useful to be able to see it easily. Clicking on a toolbar bookmark is good for doing this.

If you use FireFox, you can make a toolbar bookmark like this: Display the page and drag the URL from the URL field to the bookmark toolbar, dropping it where you want it to appear. Right click over the bookmark and select properties. Then rename the bookmark by changing the name field to something memorable. I used SpeedyCLC. That will probably change to something shorter like sC later, to give me more space on for other bookmarks on my already overflowing toolbar.

I don't generally use Internet Explorer, but from a quick look, this is one way of making a similar facility: display the SpeedyFeed page and drag the URL from the URL field onto the favorites icon. Then to display the link click on favorites, and, in the resulting favorites pane, click on the SpeedyFeed link.

PLE notes

While the four steps above can be done in a relatively short time, in the world of automated systems that's actually quite a lot to do in order to join a learning community. Particularly as we want to facilitate easy engagement with communities, both in joining and in interacting with the community.

One thought is that it would be nice to automate all of this. Not so easy to do, methinks, but nonetheless I will be thinking about it. No promises, though!

I predict that the automation bug-bear will come with are-you-human word-verification fields, and no doubt, with a lack of a compete set of APIs to programmatically invoke essential functionality in remote web servers. Problems like these may be one reason to develop integrated PLE facilities, rather than to totally rely on remixing web 2.0 facilities. However, it would be highly desirable to retain web 2.0 bricolage and remix abilities when making such a PLE implementation strategy choice.

Technorati tags:
communityformation
ple
web 2.0

Why the CLC will die (unless we do something about it)

2006-09-08T12:32:00.000+01:00

A little alarmist perhaps, title-wise, but this post puts my point of view that I think that we need to consider some of Sean's posts on the rather carefully.

I've had a little bit of email interchange with Sean about CLC, in part following on from Sean's observation that CLC is less than vibrantly interconnected; as he puts it: "The network isn't as vibrant as we would have hoped."

I don't want to put anyone off CLC, but I think that Sean's comment is, in the nicest way, a call to arms, and that we need to act to stop the group atrophying and dying. I deliberately set out to try to shock some of us into action with this post's title.

As I see it, this network is worth nurturing and maintaining. But in order to do this we need to do some things (well, at least these things):

Encourage community interactions. Difficult to do in a purely online environment. I was part of an earlier F2F and online network and I found that the regular F2F meetings helped grow group cohesiveness. So I wonder about online events, and am sorry that I missed the recent "Tapping into resources for e-learning", which although not part of this community is closely related to it. Can we organise some online events? Or publicise related events (like Jo's tour of second life) in some central place, perhaps via email too?
Make comments on each other's blogs. I have been trying to do this, but have mostly failed (mea culpa). I shall immediately go and comment on the community blog.
Open the community blog to all community members. This is an example of a community blog for the learning community I mentioned above. There is no need for centralised control of the blog beyond registering new group members to the blog. Maybe we can set up a sub-group that does registrations etc.
Provide a mailing list for transient information with a short lifespan. This is in my view essential to gathering the community. Everyone reads their email (I hope).
Encourage everyone to use a feed reader, to the point of getting volunteers to act as online sources of help for those new to feed readers. Or at least ease people's ability to see what is going on in the group.

I am well aware of the 1% rule that Sean quotes, it has in the past worried me when I have been part of a community. In fact yesterday I was filling out an evaluation form describing my experiences of the LKL Social Software Group, and mentioned that this was one aspect of group participation that plagued me. We need to try to get over this. How? Suggestions please?

And, I also think that we need some kind of help board. For example, how do I get blogger to do automatically do tracebacks and pingbacks? A second blog for help requests?
Make howto posts whenever possible. Jo has made some, I've made one, and I suspect that thee are several wiki-based ones (Sean?). We need some way of centralising posts and pages on tools and techniques (the wiki?). Seeing as I am currently or shortly to be involved in the setup of three other communities, I am desperately keen that the web gets a high quality set of instructions about the mechanics of setting up collaboration mechanisms.

OK, well that's it. I wish I was an anthropologist skilled in community-formation knowledge. Anyone know one?

regards, mark.

Web 2.0 and revolutions in learning, teaching and assessment

2006-09-08T12:12:00.000+01:00

Aficionados of web 2.0 and social software in learning and teaching might be interested in a set of slides from Scott Wilson of CETIS, presented at the recent (finished yesterday) ALT-C conference in Edinburgh.

I wasn't there to witness / take part in the workshop where Scott made his presentation, but I'm sure that it was all excellent stuff. I'm looking forward to someone posting the audio from this talk.

Passingly, I might mention a recent Don Hincliffe post on web 2.0: All we got was Web 1.0 when Tim Berners-Lee actually gave us Web 2.0. The point that Hincliffe is making that web 2.0 is really about us and our use of the Web, rather than just being predicated on technological advances:

"But is Web 2.0 really about the Web, or us? The rise of architectures of participation, which make it easy for users to contribute content, share it -- and then let other users easily discover and enrich it, is central to Web 2.0 sites like MySpace, YouTube, Digg, and Flickr. But this is still just another aspect in the way that we, ourselves, have changed the way we use the Web. Not only have we gained 950 million new Internet users in the last ten years, but a great many of them use the Internet differently now too, with a hundred million of them or more directly shaping the Web by building their own places on the Web with blogs and "spaces", or by contributing content of virtually infinite variety."

Independently, I have been thinking about the consequences of the read-write web (aka web 2.0) for education, particularly in the light of my own experience of trying to reconcile a course which uses massive group participation with an aging degree validation process. There is a faculty constraint that the marks contain a significant assessment of individual student work; sometimes less easy to supply when one is, as I do, teaching a rather unconventional course.

I posit that we are on the verge of a mass rise of architectures of participation in education, such as web 2.0 based PLEs. These in turn will enable a far more social constructivist style of education, and will take aspects of our educational systems to a point where there has to be a revolution in how education views individual achievement and its assessment.

Yet think about this: "Besides being competent, John got a 2.1 for his degree, so let's employ him" Clearly, too much hinges on the accreditation outputs of our education systems to just throw individual accreditation away. But if our educational institutions are to retain their accreditation role there needs to be a revolution in assessment that bridges near-future educational transformations with the demand for individual accreditation.

There are some starts in this direction, including peer assessment of individual contributions to group work. I'm interested in trying this in the next academic year, while running my own assessment system alongside peer assessment.

But individual experiments aside, I can see that a crisis is coming for assessment and accreditation unless we start to seriously consider new directions for assessment.

assessment
learning
ple
web 2.0

Those little traces...

2006-09-03T11:29:00.000+01:00

As a long-time computer scientist, I am aware of just how easy it is to use computers to store personal information, and believe that as educators we need to ensure that our students use of web 2.0 and social software technology does not land the students with future problems. But as we shall see below, sometimes the choices are not so clear-cut.

Background: Once, perhaps five or six years ago, when I was teaching a public class on C++, a programming language, I had a student from a large credit card company. In the course of general chit-chat I found out what he was going to do with the programming language — aggregate thousands of data sources on millions of people to find out their buying preferences and their credit ratings. "And this huge scale activity is going on in a company," I thought, "What other companies are doing this?"

Of course, not wanting an eventual shed-load of (targeted) junk mail coming through my door from UK supermarkets, I have avoided their loyalty cards, only to realise that each time I use a debit card in a store, I am anyway adding to the slow accumulation of purchasing data that the store holds on me. At least one supermarket chain in the UK already classifies customers into groups according to purchasing preferences. I know this because a former colleague's partner helps run that particular operation. I never enquired as to my classification, but I guess it would be somewhere between 'gourmet' and 'base-level minimal-cooking survivalist', with a 'definite caffeine habit'.

OK, the wheels of commerce will turn, and data like my strong interest in drinking coffee will be collected. But what of our students and their use of the intenet?

Recently I have become interested in university students blogging as part of their higher education activities. The University of Warwick, for example, encourages all students to blog (see here).

In passing, some statistics are interesting, each of these 4052 blogs have an average of 18 posts and an average of 2.3 comments per post. I would say that this is a good uptake for a student body, and am particulary impressed by the comment to post ratio. I hypothesise that the comment to post ratio implies that a cohesive student community is starting to form.

We have been considering a similar approach, but just in the School of Computer Science that I sometimes work in, at the University of Manchester. Our conversations have sometimes centered on the problems in getting a community of computer science students to write prose.

In this context, I wondered if blogging that involves more than learning-related posts — for example about the students' social life — might help in encouraging blogging in general. Luckily for them, our students, mostly male, mostly heterosexual, have social events with students from schools that are less male-dominated, and there is a natural social linkage if we can get students in these other schools blogging too.

But there are big and important questions on what is stored where, and on potentially large real-life ramifications. Anything on the internet is fair game to be harvested and stored.

What might stop some employer-advisory service from scraping student blogs looking for key words or phrases? Text like "I drank 17 alcopops on the Friday, was I pissed or what?", or "We went clubbing and got off our faces" (i.e. took drugs). Who knows if this is recurring behaviour or once-off experimentation? Certainly there is room for creative interpretation, probably not in the best light for the person whose actions are being interpreted: An employer-advisory service could provide a paid vetting service to future employers who want to avoid employees who might 'loose it' from time-to-time.

While I'm not encouraging the above behaviours, I do think that we have a duty to make our students aware of the potential conseqences of their actions on the web.

And, in in this vein, every so often I get a salutary example of the power of little bits of self-generated information on the web. Here are some examples:

Today I found out from del.icio.us that there is a member of a particular community who has some interest in activism, hmm that probably should go on a government list somewhere. (Not!)
Not long ago I found out from del.icio.us that one of my colleagues bookmarked a lawyer's site; "What is happening in this person's life?" I wondered, because I knew that this person had already bought a flat and did not need a lawyer for that.
Recently we saw AOL misguidedly dumping some information regarding searches on the web. This information was subsequently removed but not before it had been archived and chewed over by several interested parties. See here, here, here and here.
What does Google do with your search data? Probably every facet of your life is described there; to some level of detail.
And the killer app is still coming, the US government trolling social spaces; check this.
As for the power of social software for self-revalation and unfortunate consequences, what about this?

The last item is scary, what would you do as a teacher if you found out (by any means) the same information that was gleaned from myspace? What if someone is making things that go bang? What if there is a teen who is self-harming? What is your duty as a teacher?

Certainly, in some circumstances, most thinking teachers would spring into action on receiving certain kinds of information. In turn this may have consequences for our view on automated trolling for data in social spaces, maybe some trolling is not so bad after all. But, then, do we trust the trollers and what they might do with the information? What is the cost-benefit equation here?

Food for thought...

ple
privacy
socialsoftware

Toolbar bookmarks and web start pages

2006-09-03T09:17:00.000+01:00

There are many ways to start and keep track of web-based learning activities which are centered around sites out there on the web.

This post discusses FireFox's toolbar and some web start pages (also known as personal portals, resource sharing pages, etc...) for these purposes. Some tail notes to the post include questions of ease of low-level user interaction, pointers for PLE design, and some handy web resources.

Firefox and personal toolbar bookmarks

One easy way to make resources available is to use FireFox to make sites available via the toolbar. Here is an example from the machine I am using at the moment (click on any of the images in this post to see them larger):

On making the above picture showing the toolbar and how its contents have overflowed onto a drop down menu, I realise that I haven't been as neat as I can:

There are old and now unused entries from earlier work researching and building up web-based resources. I can remember wanting to get rid of one, but not wanting to go to the effort of thinking about how and where to refile it, so that bookmark just hangs around.
Last night I also used it for a bit of a dumping ground because I knew that I would be coming back to a couple of sites today and I didn't want to use my general purpose bookmarking service (delicious) for the purpose yet, because I didn't want to work out how to file these entries.

A bit like filing then, we sometimes have a messy filing system, hopefully files and folders get cleaned out in quiet moments...

All well and good, except for the confounded toolbar space problem that you can see above.

Web start pages / personal portals

To get around overflow problem in a browser toolbar, one can start to use web start pages, sometimes called personal portals or web 2.0 portals.

I have tried a couple of these tools. First, the one I use least, provided by Nowsey. It seems to function more as a feed and search aggregator, but can still be classed as a personal portal:

One can open and minimise the 'panes' in the browser window at will. Only one pane is open in the screenshot above.

The next example is the web-start page that I use more, provided by ProtoPage:

The pane on the left contains links to sites that interest me. This pane was populated when I realised that my bookmarks toolbar was full, and when I realised that not all my toolbar links were consistent in toolbars on FireFox in the different machines I used. By using a ProtoPage pane to hold links to other pages I can easily access those pages no matter what computer I am using.

Other panes show feeds and searches. Panes can be opened and minimised.

The third method I use to start learning activities is not from a portal, but rather involves refinding learning materials via del.icio.us. More on that another day....

Mouse button usage in FireFox

It might seem absurd to discuss something as low-level as mouse button usage when discussing the field of elearning, surely there are more important points: pedagogy, learning goals, student control, learning design, assessment, reflection, ..... (make your favorite list here)

Yes, there are more important points, but at a low level we need to aid student interaction with systems in a way that encourages them to stay engaged, and not to wader off muttering "ÃÂ£$#'!@ that system, I'm not going to use it."

Using FireFox with a middle mouse button that I can use to click on a link to open the corresponding page on a new tag in the background. This does a lot for me -- I can look at a page containing links and 'middle mouse' interesting links, stacking up hidden but tab-displayable pages to investigate when I am done with the current page. Because pages open in tabs in the background I don't have to keep flicking between tags and there is no disruption to my reading and investigatory flow.

PLE notes

Navigation aids in a distributed learning environment are essential.
Learners (and teachers) need to be able to update navigation aids easily and rapidly.
Bricolage and personal mutation of tool use is important in the PLE space.
Ease of use is particularly essential with respect to not interrupting the current activity in order to schedule further activities.

Resources

Some interesting pre-configured start pages: THEWEBLIST, popurls, digg view, and originalsignal. The best use AJAX technology to automatically display pop-ups indicating content.
Some compendia with loads of resources for you to try:

Tracking the web using single page aggregators,

Ajax (or Flash) startpages (or Homepages),

Continuing to play around with Webtops and becoming convinced they are the interface of the future (well maybe a bit strong), and

Web 2.0 Companies (see under Portal 2.0).

If the last link above excites you then perhaps try this: web2logo. You should look beyond the home page, search for something, e.g. digg, and see the result. But, to see a search box you need to click on one of the logos on the home page (hmm, bad user interface!).

ple
elearning

Drupal mashups, internet cafes and Korean food

2006-08-28T13:51:00.000+01:00

After coming back home from Manchester last Friday I was just relaxing and checking out what tabs were still open in my laptop's browser from my recent browsing while in Manchester. In one of the tabs I chanced on a Drupal drop in a mile away from home. Drupal is something I've been meaning to check out ever since I discovered that SocialText, a corporate wiki, is powered by Drupal.

It was only 10, and the drop in ended at 11.30. So I hotfooted over to the Be The Reds internet cafe. A little bit of history, the particular cafe was the first internet cafe, Cyberia, established by Eve Pascoe on 1 September, 1994. The subsequent Cyberia chain was sold to Koreans and re-branded Be The Reds -- the support-chant for the Korean national football (soccer) team. I'd been to the original cafe a few times, and even talked about presenting courses in their space, hadn't visited since it became Be The Reds. Time for a visit, and I ended up finding the drop in group in the basement bar/cafeteria.

Robert Castelo, a Drupal developer and drop in organiser ended up chatting to me (thanks) and mentioned the ease of constructing mashups in Drupal, refering me to Zack Rosen 's ten minute mashup of San Fransisco crimes and Google Maps. Here's a shot from the video:

Interesting stuff. I notice however that the source material is coming from a file and not from a web source. Thus this can not be considered a true mashup in the sense of "A mashup is a website or Web 2.0 application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service." [from Wikipedia entry] I need to find out if one could import live from a service or feed. I've sent off a few queries, so I'll add an update to this post.

Update from Robert Castelo by email 28 Aug 06 to the effect of: Not yet but coming soon, work that will allow this is here and, possibly, here.

Conclusion: For Now this provides a handy Google Maps mashup technique for anyone working with relative static file based data.

And as for Be The Reds, well I think it has potential: Beer, and apparently good food, but no internet connections downstairs. Having neither Korean nor any really adventurous eaters in the Drupal group, no one from the group had yet summoned up enough courage to try the chicken intestines. They are looking for a volunteer, so if you live in London, are interested in Drupal and eat chicken intestines, they want feedback on the dish. And I presume that they don't want technicolour feedback! Their regular drop in is on the last Friday of the month.

I like other Korean dishes, so I may be back to try the chicken intestines. Hey, I've never eaten frogs legs, chicken or duck feet, or chicken intestines -- time to get a life!

PLE notes

Here my browser is my PLE, and I am maintaining URL-based context by being able to suspend operations in Manchester (simply shutting my laptop) and resuming them in London (opening my laptop), using precisely the same open tabs.

This brings me back to an idea I had in the development of the Manchester Framework, a now-abandoned project for a relatively heavyweight web-connected desktop PLE: The user should be able to return to his or her previous learning context each time s/he restarted the PLE. This would be an admirable property for any PLE, avoiding the breakdown (Winograd and Flores, 1990) experienced by users when confronted with systems where context has to be manually restored.

I first encountered this marvelous idea when I worked in Smalltalk, and used the wonderful Smalltalk environment which saved its state on shutting down, restoring the state on the subsequent startup.

References

T. Winograd and F. Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Addison-Wesley, 1990.

CLC in Wikipedia and CLC in Australia

2006-08-28T11:50:00.000+01:00

I've been hacking up an entry in Wikipedia to document the History of personal learning environments in response to the blackboard patent and Blackboard's announcement of interest in elearning2.0. See here, in my other blog (not much there yet) for a rationale for the Wikipedia page.

I've entered CLC and one of Leigh's posts into the Wikipedia entry because I believe they are useful expressions of the web2.0 / elearning2.0 strand of PLEs.

Incidentally, I was quietly musing on why CLC had 'broken out' in Oz, rather than anywhere else. Things became a bit clearer for me while I was re-reading a post by James Falmer [Falmer 2004] yesterday evening. James starts the post with a quote:

"Online learning environments (OLEs) are now critical to teaching and learning across Australian higher education. Their influence impacts on the availability of content, the design of courses and, perhaps most pedagogically significantly, the nature of communication. The discussion board is the ubiquitous communication tool within these OLEs and hence significantly shapes the kind of communication that takes place. In light of this, the degree to which a successful community of inquiry can be facilitated through the use of discussion boards is examined and compared to the possibilities afforded by weblogs in the same role. Weblogs, it is argued, offer new opportunities in the development of social, cognitive and teacher presence online and should be considered in the development of or alongside established OLEs." (Falmer's paper at ASCILITE 2004, in Perth )

Enough for me I think, unless someone can give me a better story than this one which seems self-evident to me: Because of distance concerns, Australia has a strong tradition of online communication for education, and the Connected Learning Community is an expression of this tradition.

Comments?

References

James Farmer, Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments, http://incsub.org/blog/index.php?p=3 5 October 2004

James Falmer, Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments, ASCILITE 2004, Perth, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/pdf/farmer.pdf 5-8 December, 2004

Do the last thing first

2006-08-27T11:43:00.000+01:00

Serendipitously I chanced on site offering a random selection of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies today, just before I did a google on wiki like blog.

Oblique strategies is a set of cards with suggestions for musicians searching for inspiration and ways to unblock creative impasses. And the card I drew?

"Do the last thing first".

'Hmm', I thought, 'I wonder if that has anything to say to me.....'

I was actually engaged in hunting down information pertaining to an interesting chunk of text I had found previously: "Some blogs allow the user to store reference pages as part of the blog just as some wikis."

So I did the last thing, googled for wiki like blog, something I should have done before I did the first thing, writing a post on wigi pages, wiki-like pages in a blog. Some interesting results emerged from my search. The best are summarised below. Of course, I should have done this search before, but just didn't have the right search string at the front of my brain. Duh: "Do the last thing first."

So, wiki-like features in blogs have been around, here are two references

Wikipedia on Blikis. I don't agree with the supposition that a true wiki is collaborative -- to me a wiki provides a way of structuring information that is typically collaboratively created and modified, but may be individually created and modified. There are many links to investigate on this page.
Martin Fowler's WhatIsABliki. He's using a homebrew system implemented in Ruby. However, Martin does not have a comment feature... hmmm, not a variant for me then. Incidentally Martin points to the term bliki as being coined by Ward Cunningham, inventor of wiki.

OK, so I haven't seen the bliki that I want to use yet; I'll keep looking. I know a fellow elearning colleague Mike Malloch (over at the KnowNet) wants to move their blogging software in an bliki-like direction later in the year. I'll be trying to supply some future-user input to them if I don't find what I want to support my learning style.

Now I'm off to do the last thing first for another project...

Blogger beta has tags (aka labels)

2006-08-23T10:26:00.000+01:00

Well, as of Aug 14 2006 Blogger has tags in the new beta. Just a ten days after I added them in a bricolage style (see Wot no tags and Posting with tags). Wasted effort, but fun nonetheless. I haven't converted to Blogger beta yet, I'm always a little cautious with betas, but give it a month or so and I'll be there...

Blogger is calling tags labels, which seems less than desirable, seeing as the rest of the web seems to be using tags as the preferred terminology. If you agree, and labels are not renamed, fill in a note on this page for the blogger staff, leaving the top 'blogger beta' radio-button selected.

Tags:

tags

Wigis: Wikis inside blogs

2006-08-05T02:26:00.000+01:00

This post has been superceded (see here), wigis have been around for a few years under the name bliki. However, please keep reading for some rationale for blikis/wigis.

There was formerly a ceative commons licence on the idea of wigis, but the licence is clearly inappropriate and now withdrawn, because prior art is demonstrated elsewhere.

This text deleted: I have no firm idea if wigis have already been proposed or implemented, but an initial survey indicates not. So, given recent and highly inappropriate patent granted to Blackboard, I've taken the precaution of adding a creative commons licence to this page (on 19th August 2000). I am also making the entire blog contents subject to the same creative commons licence (as of 19th August 2000). Click on a Creative Commons Licence symbol to see the particular terms (Including commercial use allowed, attribution needed, and share alike).

Why blikis/wigis in Education?

As per the experiment going on in this blog, one could envision a wigi -- a wiki inside a blog.

You are reading a simulation of a wigi page in a simulated wigi now. These are only simulations because I am adding to the blog template manually to make it appear as though it contains a wigi. As with a wiki page, this simulated wigi page will change over time.

Each wigi page is simply a blog post that appears in the blog as a post (small variation below). A wigi page may be part of network of other wigi pages, just as a wiki page may be part of a network of other pages. As with a wiki page, a wigi page is probably developed over time.

Putting wiki functionality into a blog may provide value for bloggers who want to learn about something over time, documenting what they learn. Or the pages may be suitable for incremental development. The pages appear in the blog, everyone reading can get to see the pages when they are first posted, maintaining blog-like chronological posting functionality and making all wigi users aware of new entries.

One user interface mechanism that could be used is that a wigi page is simply flagged as such before publishing the post. As an extension of that, any blog page could be toggled between being a wigi page or not.

Correspondingly, if a page had wigi status the page would be automatically listed (and clickable) in something like the blog sidebar. This is good for small numbers of pages, as so far in this blog. [Unfortunately, for now, these links only appear in the home-page sidebar. To get to the home page, click on 'markz space' at the top of any page. The sidebar links will later be added to each page.]

For larger wigis, perhaps a set of 'starting-navigation' wigi page links would be displayed on each blog page's sidebar, rather than all wigi page links.

Networks of pages could be created if the page creation and editing facilities accepted wiki-like syntax for other blog pages [[Example page]], even, wiki-like, to the point of allowing pages to be made if they do not exist when their links are clicked. The syntax might include other blogs and their pages [[clcommunity:Example Page]], enabling cross-blog networks of knowledge to be constructed. One would only be able to create a new page if the link being clicked on was in a blog where the user was logged in, or could log in en route to creation.

The pages in the wigi would likely be re-edited by one person (for a personal blog) or many people (for a group blog).

In a sophisticated version perhaps posts would be switchable between blog-displayed or not. The latter for structure pages in the wigi which would convey little in the blog out of the task context in which they are used, when the blog is being read as a chronological or tag structured entity.

Building in too much functionality might affect usability unless carefully presented. I have heard people complaining that wikis appear overcomplicated with respect to all the links around the main text. I sympathsise with them, even though I like wikis.

Tags:

Posting with tags

2006-08-04T22:53:00.000+01:00

Blogger doesn't have tags, but after a short search I found out that one can use technorati or use del.icio.us for this task. Probably there are many different implementations and these are just two of them. The latter solution is the one for me, I use del.icio.us. Handily, the fix also submits the tagged post to technorati, and in my experience so far technorati searches on single and multiple tags work well, even for tags which have been changed.

The implementation involves installing greasemonkey first. Which in turn means you have to be running firefox, and that you are logged into your delicious account.

I was keen to try it out, in an the first version of this post, with two tags. To get the new post to be linked to from delicious I had to press the publish post button, then select link to delicious and then save the resulting delicious entry.

However, the resulting link in delicious didn't work! The url was
... /posting-with-tags_04.html
This had an superflous _04 in it.

I tried a few more posts (now deleted) and they worked, so I simply changed the url for this post in delicious to what it should be
... /posting-with-tags.html

After deleting my test posts from the blog I had to manually remove the corresponding entries in delicious, and now the tagging works.

If you change the tags when you are editing a previously published post, look at how commas are used in the tag field [e.g. 'tags, experiment'] as a guide to using commas in your changes. To propagate the changes to delicious you need to publish post and then link to delicious Duplicate your post's tag changes in the resulting delicious page's tag field (no commas used here) before saving the entry.

I'll keep my eye on the urls in future entries made in delicious, and see if they are right.

I've had to hand edit in the tags to the side column. I guess that it should be possible to interrogate delicious about all markzspace tags and automatically display them in the sidebar, perhaps in a space-saving arrangement.

Tags:

Wot no tags?

2006-08-04T21:18:00.000+01:00

Being able to attach one or more tags to a post is a good method of being able to later to topic search by tags; using them to index into the posts. Blogger doesn't have them. Bummer. We can do a bit of work and fix that, but the solution here is not as seamless blog which has inbuilt tags.

If you haven't seen tags in a blog you could nip over to LKL Social Software to have a look. Click on the categories on the right hand side to see this in action.

Tags:

tags

Persistent Posts to provide accessible developing information

2006-08-04T20:43:00.000+01:00

One thing I'm interested in is developing information over time, and having this information persistently accessible from the blog. This would perhaps satisfy my need to be able to develop information as I learn more about a topic.

So as an experiment with this support for learning, I'll make the links to some posts available via the sidebar. I'll then edit those posts, and develop the topic as I learn more about it. This same mechanism could be used in a collaborative way by a blog team.

This post will be the first of these posts.

The difference from a wiki is that there is

(negatively) no easy interlinking of posts, and
(positively) ability to comment (but there is the talk pane in some wikis, e.g. mediawiki). As I change the page some comments may become superfluous, and maybe can be removed, should that be done?

We'll see what practice develops as commenters (such as there may be) add comments and pages change. We can try different things, maybe discuss different proceedures to accomodate this dynamic change in the CLC group facilities (blog, wiki).

For now I'm calling these persitent posts wigi pages, after wiki and blog. I explore the idea of a wigi here.

Tags: