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Meme: Passion Quilt
The Web is Agreement by PSD http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1805709102/in/set-72157602805227511/ I’d like to begin this post with the obligatory sentence for starting any posting on a meme, which goes something like ‘I don’t usually respond to memes, but I thought I’d do this one.’ Except this is the first time I’ve ever been memed, (by John Connell), so I can’t. In the passion quilt you are meant to state what you are passionate about teaching I think. I work at the Open University, and back in 1998 I developed their first fully online course, called You, your computer and the Net. It was an introduction to how computers and the internet worked and…
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Second OU Facebook app – My OU Story
As you may know a while ago a small Facebook team started up at the OU, to develop some apps and just learn about how you operate in this social networking space for the benefit of students. The Facebook team is Tony with the ideas, Stuart with the user testing, Liam with the coding, me with the… erm, yeah, well it’s too complicated to go in to now. The first app was Course Profiles. This allowed OU students to declare which course they were studying, had studied and were going to study. The interesting thing about this app was the way it could be used to drive other uses, e.g.…
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CogDog’s Twitter lifecyle
At the risk of sounding mildly obsessive about Twitter, it was good to see George Siemens blog about his conversion. Alan Levine has created a wiki (back in April 07) where people can plot their Twitter lifecycle which goes from ‘that’s the dumbest thing’ to ‘I cannot stop!’, complete with a lovely Kathy Sierra homage image. I’ve added myself in naturally.
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More Twitter types
I find the different uses of Twitter fascinating. The complexity of its use derives from its simplicity, people can take it and find their own mode of communication, rather than a specific usage being prescribed by it. So, if we take the over-used (by me anyway) metaphor of an ecosystem of technologies, Twitter is successful because it is highly adaptable, it can occupy different niches in the ecosystem. In my last post I asked the question whether someone who had lots of followers but didn’t follow many was ‘misusing’ Twitter. I accept ‘misuse’ was the wrong word, since it implies there is a ‘correct’ use of Twitter, and of course…
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It’s just you
(via MLx) I love this – one of the founders of Twitter has created a service that allows you to check whether a service is down. It asks the simple question ‘Is X down for everyone or just me?’ And then let’s you know: This saves you asking the question on Twitter, and often of, Twitter.
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Twitter etiquette
My general practice in twitter is to follow someone if they follow me, although not if they appear to be a bot, spammer, non-poster or nutter. So I have around 140 people following me, and I follow 136. There may come a time when I have to revisit this policy – I couldn’t follow 1000 people say, or rather if I did, the value of Twitter would start to diminish for me because I would miss too much from the people I like. But people use Twitter differently, and I noticed one person I follow has over 1,000 followers but only follows around 35. So, I asked the question, is…
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Everything is Miscellaneous workshop
I did a session at the OU yesterday on Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. Below is the slidecast. The audio is a bit quiet, I know I should redo it, but time presses on, so apologies if you have to turn it up loud. | View | Upload your own
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Aristocracy, leaders and communities
Ewan started something of a ding dong with his post on why bottom up alone doesn’t work in communities. The comments (building on my previous post) are worth reading here, so take a look. I appreciate Ewan’s thinking out in the open approach, my instinct is for bottom-up approaches, but I’ve had a mild rethink after reading this piece. Firstly, let’s get the A word out of the way. Ewan talked of an aristocracy, using Jimmy Wales’ term. Stephen Downes took umbrage with this. I accept that Ewan wasn’t defending the ‘real’ aristocracy, but rather arguing that communities require a degree of top-down input to form. Nevertheless, I still think…
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CoComment – I want to be a good blogger
I confess, I am not a good blogizen – I don’t link enough, and I definitely don’t comment enough. The latter is partly based on maximum return on investment – I have so little to say, if I do have anything worth writing I need it for a blog post, not to be hidden away on someone’s comments. But I recognise how much I like getting comments (apart from the snarky ones – you know who you are;) so I should do more of it. Alan Levine has an annual week of no-blogging, just commenting, in recognition of the value commenting adds. He used CoComment, which Sue Waters picked up…
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Moving from being a provider to a meaner
Question: What have librarians, IT services and academics got in common (apart from occassionally questionable dress sense)? Answer: All have one key element of their role undermined or removed by the web, which can be loosely described as provision of content or service. Back around 1999 when the likes of David Noble were bemoaning that the internet would make academics redundant (he was the Andrew Keen of his day), us e-learning advocates would argue that merely providing content is not all that educators did. Which led to the oft-quoted move from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. Librarians have also faced a similar challenge from…
