I was writing an “essay” that referenced and quoted from other entries on this same site. I decided to call this sort of entry an excursion, since it provided a guided tour through a selected part of the topography of this site.
There is no clear standard for judging what constitutes a virtual learning environment. The term has been used to brand everything from a set of collaborative desktop tools to a fully immersive virtual world. Perhaps, then, we should choose a different starting point, and concentrate on asking questions that will allow us to decide whether a specific self-described VLE will be suitable for our needs or not.
Recently Ralf pointed me towards the idea of barcamps, which have their own web site and their own online rules. This has the great merit of providing a reference point for what we have been doing in an unlabelled way.
Today is my birthday, and I have been surprised by a bombardment of Skype messages, emails and writings on my Facebook wall. An interesting and very pleasant experience.
While I was at Zoho recently, Arvind showed me something in passing that has already completely changed the way I work: Bloglines. This is simply an service that enables you to store RSS feeds, sort them into folders and then view them online. Described like this it sounds like nothing special. But it really is.
I have had a Box.net account for some time now. It hasn’t been very useful really. Not that there is anything specific wrong with it. I just haven’t ever really for a purpose for it. Now, with the new OpenBox system, I think that I have…
I followed my own advice and decided that Clipmarks would be most useful to me at the moment as a way of grabbing short facts (statistics, quotes, predictions, announcements) that I might want to remember later.
I have now got a framework for this site up and running. The logic traps appear to be sorted out. Wikkawiki is working well.
Crabgrass advertises itself as “a software libre web application designed for group and network organizing, and tailored to the needs of the global justice movement. Crabgrass is the next generation of social software”.
I found an article online that detailed how Kevin Potts invented, designed, tested and marketed a new product in less than twenty four hours, for an outlay of $150. I found it on his site Make Money Online. The product is called the Magic Article Creator, and you can follow all the steps he took in the article.
Some sources of sounds licensed through Creative Commons, and thus available for varying degrees of reuse.
Some sources of images that can be licensed under a Creative Commons agreement, which sometimes (but not always) means that they are free to use!
Three text libraries that make their contents available under various Creative Commons licences.
Boston.com posted an article on Tuesday 19 April 2005 which looked at the reason the open source software movement has been successful. The reason, it argues, is because it taps into the power of user innovation.
Identity on the web is an issue in many different ways: can he be trusted; will she misuse my details; is YahooBob the same person as YB_google; and so on. Once there was widespread celebration of the fact that anyone could be whoever they chose. Today there is widespread concern about authenticity and verification.
Edmodo is a new micro-blogging system designed specifially by educators for educators.
A four-day seminar in Helsinki, for students on the European epedagogy masters course.
There is an additional navigational need for this site. It concerns the question of how a set of linked pages can be seen to form a larger piece.
Charlene Li at Forrester Research has written a report with Josh Bernoff, Remy Fiorentino, Sarah Glass entitled Social Technographics® Mapping Participation In Activities Forms The Foundation Of A Social Strategy.
I have spent a good deal of time in the last couple of months searching for the kind of online scheduling tools that I wanted; and I think that I have finally found them. Or, more specifically, I think that I have found a set of tools that will form the basis of what I need: AirSet.
Yesterday I saw that Yahoo have two applications directly related to geographical tagging. I mentioned these to Alex thirty minutes ago, and his response was, “Do you use Plazes?” Well, I don’t but I might do by lunchtime.
Some preliminary thoughts on combining the functionality of blogs and wikis, that attempts to look the question “why would you do it?” in the eyes without blinking.
This is the outline for a project for the course ePedagogy: Issues Management / Strategic Specialisation. It was written by Owen Kelly & Camie Lindeberg in June 2006, and revised in August 2006.
Is ownership the same as access, and if there is a clear difference then which is more important? This is a question that has been bothering my for weeks. It is concerned with what we can mean when we say that we “have” something. When we say, for example: “I have the information you need right here.”
John Connell has written an interesting piece about the relationship between pedagogy and technology. He posits the existence of something called Learning 2.0, which he decides is “an inadequate term in many ways, but useful shorthand nonetheless”.
Arguably games of one sort or another are at the heart of most social networks. Sometimes the games are explicit, like the ma.ny games available on Facebook. Sometimes they are implicit in the social interaction. Feeling smug about having the most friends on Facebook of anyone you actually know would be an example of an implicit game. The one thing all these have in commons is that they are pieces of a larger puzzle. They are party games, not the party itself. From this perspective Kongregate is an interesting experiment.
Google doesn’t have a social networking site, and there has been a lot of talk recently about what they would do about this. Yesterday Google announced their intentions, and it was a swerve of astounding cleverness.
This morning I attempted to put this site online at a GoDaddy address. It all worked perfectly, except for the parts that didn’t.
Two themes emerged at the LoW conference last week. Neither had been planned in advance, although some people who attended suspected otherwise. The first theme was Second Life as an educational tool. The second was identity.
This is the thesis, published directly from Scribd. It is an example of the kind of distributed publishing that I have written about in and around the thesis.
This is the thesis, published directly from Zoho. It is an example of the kind of distributed publishing that I have written about in and around the thesis.
This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.
This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.
This is the part of the final report of an eighteen month research project.
This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.
My thesis – Memi: a tool for cultural democracy – was “finished” last month, which is to say that it arrived at a point where I felt I could show it to people without leaving the room. It was accepted, and last Friday I walked on stage at LUME and received my MA certificate. You can read the thesis here, courtesy of Scribd or Zoho. You can also download a copy from Box.net.
This is a trail through entries in this web site that, taken together, constitute the core elements of a thesis for an MA in epedagogy at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland.
The Microlearning Page on Wikipedia is a good starting point for understanding what this emergent concept is actually being used for. Here are some other links too.
Mozilla Labs have a simple starting point: “a virtual lab where people come together to create, experiment, and play with new Web innovations and technologies”. They have a number of active projects, designed to improve the web. One of these is Prism.
Broadly speaking there are two approaches to navigating through a large store of information. I have deliberately used both strategies on this site.
Some passing thoughts about the choices we have made to use social software as the basis of our own administration.
In February, when I was in Chennai visiting Zoho Arvind showed me Bloglines, which I subsequently explored and wrote about. It is essentially a reworking of a traditional RSS reader as an online service. Like Remember The Milk it does one thing, and it does it very well.
News travels slow round these parts. I have only just found out that there was an Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year.
Eeva Melvasalo sent me a list of online resources about blikis, including definitions, discussions and examples.
As part of my ongoing project to move everything into the cloud, I have been looking for powerful and reliable online financial organisers and password protectors.
The OpenID scheme is something that I need to consider incorporating into the mimi specification that will become my MA thesis.
Many people have a fear about “where” their data is. The questions that they should be worried about, in my opinion, are not about who currently owns the physical machines where the zeroes and ones that represent their data are stored, but rather who has control over the right to look at, or distribute that data.
Google is free and so Google is wonderful. Camie and I have began using Writely a year or so ago, and it worked very well indeed. We could both access each other’s files, and we could both work on the same report at the same time. Oddly, the idea of the memi militates against this in a subtle manner.
According to The Register the Pirate Bay is making moves to raise sixty five million pounds to buy Sealand, the independent fortress off the British coast.
Jutta and I have been talking with Pluti and others recently about the idea of moving some of the technical teaching we do from face-to-face lessons to podcasts. Now Neulio has appeared, offering us both a wide range of existing material and a publishing platform for our own.
This morning Reidar Wasenius is back on Facebook. The management has apparently become convinced that it is better with him in than out.
Aki shows me FeedYes and I am interested. As a result of this the RSS here almost begins to work.
My decision the other day to investigate the applicability of software as a service for the memi project has had some interesting preliminary results. Zoho, Omnidrive, and Adobe Remix are just some of them…
Observers such as Nicholas Carr believe the move from PC-based computing to Web-based computing will be one of the most important technology trends.
While catching up with the weekend’s backlog this morning I found a link that led me to the website and blog of the Second Life Liberation Army.
A step-by-step guide to getting a Second Life account and then finding, and getting to, Rosario.
Smallworlds is a “casual virtual world” that has been designed and developed in New Zealand, using Flex. This means that it will run in any browser that supports Flash Player 9. It “integrates YouTube, Flickr, and a number of other Web 2.0 services”.
Ralf has posted to the epedagogy blog∞ in response to my posts about this site. He suggested that perhaps SnipSnap∞ might be an off-the-shelf solution to our bliki needs.
There are crucial differences between MySpace and Bebo on the one hand, and Facebook on the other. Although the three are often lumped together, I have come to think that Facebook has very different possibilities – ones which could be usefully used in educational contexts, and particularly as a background platform for immersive learning.
Sometime after the sauna last night I found myself thinking about the navigation system that I had cheerfully announced yesterday as finished. And suddenly it seemed obvious that it was very, very wrong. Working out why it was wrong, though, was not easy.
I have just added the structured blogging plug-in to this site. It is available from StructuredBlogging and I am in two minds about it, even before I have used it. The idea is impeccable and important, but it feels as though the crew may be preparing to abandon ship.
On Sunday evening I got my first chance to look inside the Structured Blogging plug-in, and so I started to poke around. In this kind of situation my technique is usually task-based. In this case the process was made easy because there were at least three features that I really did want to change from the moment I installed the plug-in.
Having spent some time evaluating the Structured Blogging plug-in, and discussing it at length with students, I have become less and less certain that what it offers is worth the price. At first sight the ideas behind it, and its implementation, are impressive and thought-provoking. The fact, however, is that in fifteen months the plug-in has signally failed to set the world on fire.
Over the weekend I found out about Tabblo, a service from HP. Although it is advertised as “a place to make cool stuff with your photos”, they have something much more interesting in the back room.
I looked at the TikiWiki documentation yesterday and realised that I had been right to stay with WikkaWiki! Not that there was anything wrong with TikiWiki. Indeed it looks like a magnificient piece of software.
is at Arcada again, building and writing
has just seen Bianca’s very, very clever solution to the XML problem!
has the new GMail/RTM plan up and running now
decides he likes the new mail arrangements, and will fine tune them tomorrow
is home alone with his friend Stomach Flu, while the gang go boating in Pellinki for a few days
@arvindnatarajan Have you see www.hellotxt.com? Its neat and simple and VERY useful!
thinks that this is the darkest, wettest midsummer he can remember (but at least he won’t crash a boat this year)
just watched an enlightening – and hilarious – lecture by Osho at http://hellotxt.com/l/R2zV
waves goodbye to Conference Woman
has waved goodbye to the dentist (for another six months or so…)
is experimenting with www.syncplicity.com – which should be indispensible if it is as good as it claims to be
is in the school yard thirty minutes early hoping it won’t rain
is making a Web 2.0 toolkit for the new students. So far it contains Airset, Box.net, Hellotxt, RTM, Zoho & some Firefox plug-ins.
It all started with Prince, who gave away one million copies of his album Planet Earth cover-mounted to the Mail on Sunday in Britain on July 24th, but now that this strategy has apparently spread like wildfire, it is worth stopping to consider what the strategy actually is.
This week I have added two services to this site and one to Firefox. What they have in common is an alleged ability to make my life simpler by linking things together and saving me work.
Tim O’Reilly talks to Wired magazine, just before the Web 2.0 Expo.
Ralf A posited ELGG as an interesting alternative to VLEs, in answer to a point that I raised about whether VLEs should be replaced by VLNs (where the N stands for network).
I have just spent a week at the 21st Annual WCET conference, where Steve Bronack and I did an afternoon workshop on virtual worlds and education. The workshop was co-sponsored by Innovate, which sadly closed its doors to…
These statistics about Web 2.0 participation have implications for citizen media, too. Are we truly erasing the barriers between citizen and media, or are we just replacing one set of gatekeepers with another?
I decided a week or so ago that the experiment with my so-called WeeMe in the sidebar had gone on long enough. Accessing my WeeWorld account had proved less interesting than turning my computer off.
…
This is an almost impossible question to answer, if only because the term was created by Tim O’Reilly as a way of reaching out towards a cluster of phenomena and pointing out their links. In other words it was originally a rallying cry rather than a definable term.
Stefan mentioned the ideas behind wikimap this afternoon, and I had to confess that I had never heard of it.
The process of constructing this bliki, or knowledge-base, or whatever I am calling it this week, is both frustrating and illuminating. As I have explained elsewhere this is deliberate, and I was reminded of why I am doing it this way when I reread an old article about Jeff Hawkins that talks about his famous wooden blocks.
It has taken me a lot longer than I planned to get a version of my personal infohub thingy online in a version powered by WordPress. This is not because WordPress is difficult to work with, but rather the opposite. There are so many plug-ins and options that I have been some time deciding what paths would be best to walk down.
I spent the morning up to my knees in php, because I had realised that the navigation inside this site was nowhere near flexible enough to demonstrate what I am talking about…
In a comment on a blog that commented on Zoho’s recent successes I found a link to Wrike, which offers free or paid-for online project management software. I looked through their site, although I have not tried the software yet.
I had been discussing our uses of Zoho with Arvind, and he (and various blog postings) had been offering glimpses of an all-new, all-shiny future at Zoho. They had promised that they were introducing two new services called Zoho Business and Zoho Education, and both seemed to be applicable to what we have been doing at Arcada. I wanted to see them in action.
