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Offsetting some of the dangers of outsourcing
Niall Sclater raises some issues around potential dangers of outsourcing your IT services, picking up on my recent decision to go all things Google. Niall is referring to a talk by Alan Bell and the two particular potential problems he raises are: 1. You tell your students to use a system hosted externally, maybe one which downloads client software to the learners’ machine. A student’s system gets corrupted and they claim that your institution is liable. 2. You use a free externally hosted collaboration system for audio conferencing for a tutorial and a student tells you during the session that they can’t complete an assignment due to a bereavement. You…
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Whither the blogosphere?
A few prominent bloggers have, of late, been talking about the move away from the blogosphere. For instance, Stowe Boyd says that: Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social. So, what are blogs going to be when the conversation moves away? They will be the place where we archive our posts, so that people can find them when they…
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Tweetclouds
I love tag clouds – I quite often type notes in a meeting and then pass them through a tag cloud generator and show them back to people. ‘This is what we’ve been talking about apparently’. I’m never entirely sure whether they offer some profound insight or are just a fun thing to do. So I was intrigued when I saw (via D’Arcy) that John Krutsch and Jared Stein had developed a clouder for Twitter. Simply enter your twitter name and it generates a tag cloud of the terms. Here is mine: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/mweller.html What does it tell you? Well that Tony is probably the person I do most replies to,…
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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
