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Do you need to love a tool for it to be useful?
A recent survey over at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (via John Dale) had responses from elearning professionals, asking them their favourite tools for learning. Can you guess the top 5? Here they are: Firefox Delicious Skype Google Powerpoint Now, given our recent VLE debates, on to the interesting bit. Where do you think Moodle came? Answer, a respectable 12th. And Blackboard? It didn’t make the top 100. Now, there are several things to consider here. Firstly, these were e-learning professionals that were surveyed, and their responses may well be different from the vast majority of other educators. The point being that Blackboard isn’t aimed at elearning professionals…
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Who needs money in the blogosphere?
Over at Read/Write web there is a piece on why there is no money in the long tail of the blogosphere. I wouldn’t necessarily argue with the conclusions, but my reaction was similar to Hugh MacLeod’s twitter response ‘duh… Hello 2003’. The author concludes by asking whether the long tail of blogging is stable. The implication being that people are only blogging to make money and as soon as they realise they can’t they’ll go elsewhere (presumably they’ll think pyramid selling schemes are a neat idea). I rather thought we’d gone beyond all this. People making money from blogging are obviously in the minority – but so are people whose…
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Wealth of Networks session
On Friday John Naughton ran an interesting session around Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. It was particularly welcome as I feel rather guilty that I’ve never actually finished Benkler’s magnum opus. John first set the context for the book, talking about the semiotics of the title and borrowed Castell’s term about informed bewilderment to describe our current state when we look at the changes around us. That is, we have no shortage of data about what’s happening, but we are still unsure as to what it all means. Benkler’s book can be seen as an attempt to cast a scholarly light on this state of bewilderment. Part of the reason for…
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LAMS presentation as slidecast
The world’s least engaging voice returns with another slidecast. This is the presentation I gave to the LAMS conference (via Skype). It looks at the differences between web 2.0 and higher ed and how learning design can help bridge the gap. I’ve covered this in previous posts, but just in case you want the semi-live version. | View | Upload your own
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I’m an Edublog finalist!
I have been nominated (after dropping some hints) in the Edublog awards and am a finalist in the Ed Tech Support category (not sure that’s where I fit, but not going to argue). It’s difficult to relate how chuffed I am about this! I’m pleased to see Tony is also nominated. Anyway, it looks like Mobile Technology in TAFE is running away with it, so purely in the interest of making a competition of it, if you fancy swinging by and casting a vote for me, that’d be great. Many thanks to those who nominated me – I now get to have a cool badge for my site:
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Gordon Brown is the Steve McLaren of politics
I don’t ‘do politics’ in this blog usually, but really, the analogy is too good to pass up. Look at the similarities: Both were second in commands Both took over from someone who had been in post for a long time. Both of their predecessors left on a wave of unpopularity Both enjoyed brief periods of (unexpected) success. Both then made a series of strategic errors I think the foot and mouth outbreak was Gordon’s draw with Macedonia, the election that never was his away defeat to Croatia, and this week’s armed forces attack his away defeat to Russia. If the analogy is to be played out in full, that…
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Filesharing and the attrition of centralised systems
I’m a dog with a bone now… Following on from my previous post about the annoyance of mailbox size limits, this post from Judy O’Connell caught my eye – Fileurls just lets you upload and share files for up to 9 days, which can be password protected. So if anyone is planning on sending me an email with an attachment, can they just use this instead please (or Google docs is fine too)? Which got me thinking – in our recent debate around loosely coupled systems one of the arguments against them was that educators wouldn’t want to do it. But I think the way it happens is that we…
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What Mailbox limits reveal
Grainne posted recently about the frustration of continually getting the ‘Your mailbox is over its size limit’ in our OU email accounts. I can’t tell you how annoying this – sometimes I am just trying to send a quick response to someone before I have to dash out of the door, but it won’t let me because I have to find and delete any attachment over 2K to free up space. Grrrr. This isn’t OU bashing, I’ve heard the same from people at other universities and also people not in higher education (I know, they do exist apparently). It’s a small thing but it reveals a number of more important…
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Why ‘will Radiohead make money?’ is the wrong question
Ed Felten has a good piece on how the Radiohead experiment can mean they make more money by selling more at a lower price. While I agree with his analysis I think this focus on how the ‘you choose the price’ model will work misses the point. This is a step along the path to free content so all those who think it’s a failure if some people don’t pay are looking at it the wrong way – some might pay this time, but next time? Or the time after? Radiohead have a reasonably devoted fanbase who will opt to pay, but for lots of artists that isn’t the case…
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Kindle inches towards the free content scenario
Amazon’s Kindle received a lot of positive and negative attention this week. The positives seem to be that people like the device, it goes some way to capturing the tactile and emotional element of book reading, and the connectivity adds another dimension. The negatives seem to be that the DRM and pricing model. To me though it represents another small step towards the scenario of digital content becoming free. Quoting yourself is bad form I know, but in my post on the Future of content I said "let us consider what would happen if digital paper really arrived (despite several proclamations digital ink and paper have been stubbornly difficult to…
