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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…
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Feedburner, no Typepad, goes AWOL
[Update – the problem was Typepad’s not Feedburner’s, so I humbly apologise to Feedburner. See Sue Waters post] Got a tweet from Sarah Horrigan today, saying her Feedburner feed for my blog was sending her to a blog on pregnancy called Jumping Monkeys. Sure enough, Google Reader had pulled in that blog’s feed for me also. I checked in Feedburner, everything seemed normal, the feed pointed to my blog, the pages listed were my pages, but my reach had dropped to zero. I tried unsubscribing in GReader and resubscribing, but to no effect. I was now panicking somewhat. Having worked hard to build up around 500 subscribers, they were now…
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A PLE – VLE continuum
There’s been a bit of a PLE flurry of posts, generated by some Twitter discussion. Chris Lott posted that he couldn’t see why people think you can’t teach PLEs, or about PLEs. Scott Leslie argues that some don’t like the acronym: It’s personal, not monolithic” complaint with the term, which I get and agree with. My response is not to defend the “PLE” acronym but instead just say if it bothers you, come up with a different one, or don’t use a moniker at all, but more importantly, model model model it for the 95% of learners (and teachers) who are drowning in the tsunami of information and choosing to…
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An audit on where stand with PLEs
Adblock 1999 A.D. Learningby donaldtheduckie (via Scott Wilson) Back in 2006 I posted some of my reservations about PLEs. At the time I thought these issues were insurmountable, and largely being ignored by the PLE advocates. Now, I’m more convinced of the possibility, and worth of a PLE, I thought it would be good to see where they stood against my original set of reservations. This of course comes with a massive pre-question ‘what do you mean by a PLE?’ (as Alan Levine said in a twitter post, it seems to be a spoke diagram with lots of web 2.0 logos – what can he mean?). And maybe the notion…
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Social:Learn kickabout
Tony has posted about a potential get together to thrash out some issues around the Social:Learn project. To recap, it’s an attempt by the OU to build an open system that helps facilitate social networking for learning. Along the way it may be a VLE killer too, but don’t tell anyone. Tony puts it like this: "Work on the API has already begun – an external development team are scoping it out at the moment over in the US – and the design theme for the site we’re gonna get someone else to build around those APIs are already being put together by an external design agency… …but we all…
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Google up your life
(Keso – http://flickr.com/photos/keso/108805307/) It’s official, my soul belongs to Google. At the risk of winning ‘slowest person on the uptake’ award, I have switched all my tools over to Google now. Inspired by my wife who got frustrated that she can’t save to her own hard disk in her work and her allocated space runs out every month, and my own institutional frustrations, I decided to switch everything over to Google. Here’s what happened: 1) Email – set up a Gmail account if you haven’t already got one. Go to Settings – Accounts – and click Add mail from another account. A pop up window comes up where you need…
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Run me through the Blackboard business model again
So Blackboard has won the initial ruling in Texas, with Desire2Learn ordered to pay $3.1 million compensation. Obviously a stupid and dangerous ruling, but as the excellent Michael Feldstein points out, who’s made money out of it anyway? It strikes me there are three ways to be the market leader in an industry: i) Have such cool products it doesn’t matter how you behave (cf. Apple) ii) Have an average product and bully everyone else out of the market so the customer has no choice (cf. Microsoft) iii) Work with your customers to develop your product and get good will (cf. nearly every other tech company). I don’t have an…
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Top widgets (or why Google runs the world)
(charlessc – http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesc/100343106/) My favourite search tool, Lijit, has a feature on the top widgets. The top two by quite some distance are Google Analytics and Google Syndication (AdSense). Surprisingly mybloglog is third (well above Technorati and Twitter). The post also breaks them down by type, with ‘metrics’ being the most common type of widget people add. They also show the most popular tools within each category, and it’s here you really see the dominance of Google. In the Analytics category Google Analytics scores 39.9% compared with Sitemeter in second place with 16.2%. In Ads, Adsense has a whopping 84.8% share of the market, and in video, YouTube unsurprisingly sweeps…
