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Mo’ Facebook
Richard Scoble has a good post on Why Facebook, why now? After noting some of the criticisms (and his follow on post about a lot of the apps simply not working in Facebook is right also, but we’ll pretend they do for now), he argues that Facebook is successful over LinkedIn because it’s personal. He also points to the quality of the people and the applications (if they worked). AJ suggests that the reason Facebook has stickability is Skinnerian conditioning and Tony Hirst suggests ways in which a status like function could be mined to aid learning and networking. I think Scoble is right about the social aspect of FB…
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An everyday, modern learning experience
I had a modest, but telling, learning experience the other day. It isn’t remarkable in any way, but it hints at what might be achievable and how learning will occur more often in the future. John Connell is one of my Facebook friends, although we have never met face to face, but we read and comment on each other’s blogs. I have added the virtual bookshelf application to my Facebook profile, and it displays Everything is Miscellaneous as the book I am currently reading. John saw this (I think this is what happened anyway), and posted a message on my wall suggesting I look at the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen face…
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Clay Shirky and the use of metaphor
This has been all over the web (I picked it up via John Connell) – Clay Shirky talking at the Supernova conference. He talks about a shinto shrine that was regulalry reconstructed from wood, and so UNESCO wouldn’t recognise it as being historical, because what they recognise is presence, whereas the Shinto shrine was about permanence of process. He argues that the latter is more significant. It’s a good metaphor for the open source community, he talks about PERL, and how the process, the community has proved far more endurable than the bricks and mortar of an organisation such as AT & T. You see this bias towards stuff over…
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Thoughts on LAMS conference
I was at the LAMS 07 conference in Greenwich last week. I was presenting about the learning design project at the OU, see slideshare presentation below. As well as giving an overview of the project, I raised a couple of points. The first of these was that there is a continuum at the heart of pedagogic planners, (ie tools that are aimed at helping educators plan activities), which goes from open to structured. Some users want help and to be stepped through, while others want to do what they want and only have the tool as a canvas on which they work. The second point was that learning design represents…
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The RAE – time to make a stand?
I had to do some admin today for my RAE submission (Research Assessment Exercise – the formal process for judging an individuals and institutions research output in the UK). As well as being tedious, the sheer futility of it depressed me. In some areas I’m sure the traditional academic journal is useful, but it is almost entirely irrelevant in educational technology (see my previous rants on this: here and here). I do read academic research articles (if they’re available online – I never trawl through print ones), but they represent only one part of what constitutes my scholarly network, and an ever-decreasing one at that. The debate, articles, opinions, experiments,…
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Live Earth – wrong medium, right message
I’m sure a lot of people thought it was great, but for me Live Earth was a disaster. It’s not that getting the message across isn’t an admirable thing, I’m not a global warming denier or anything, but the format was all wrong. Here’s why: It’s a complex issue. Rock stars and comedians don’t do complex. When we are told that the groups are being briefed backstage on being green you can’t help wonder what right they’ve got to be supporting a cause they don’t practice. I know we’re obsessed by celebrity, but some things are better left to others. It seemed to undermine itself. I’m sure they recycled, did…
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Learning design and the miscellaneous
I was at the LAMS 07 conference on Thursday, and then at a follow up session on pedagogical planners at the London Knowledge Lab on Friday. I was showing how we have been using Compendium to aid the design process, and there was presentations from Oxford’s Phoebe and the London Planner as well as LAMS. Like a lot of people I’ve read Everything Is Miscellaneous recently, and it is one of those books where you see its implications everywhere. I have had this uneasy feeling that my learning design work may not sit comfortably with the web 2.0 work. There is something perhaps a bit rigid in a lot of…
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And the winner is ….. Facebook
About two months ago I had accounts in Facebook, Academici.net and LinkedIn. I didn’t use any of them much and was waiting to see which one would be of interest, if any. My money was on LinkedIn, it was the one for professionals, whereas Facebook seemed to be for under 25s who wanted to gossip and date each other. Two months on and Facebook is the clear winner. It has reached the tipping point in my particular circle, with a friend request coming in once a day almost (okay, once a week, I’m not that popular). The reason is that Facebook has won is that it has cracked stickability, or…
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Why you shouldn’t follow the Apple example
Now Richard Scoble knows more about this stuff than I ever will, but I disagree with his suggestion that Microsoft and other companies should learn from, and follow, the Steve Jobs approach to openness. Scoble is talking about PR, not technology so much, but I think that openness in the former follows from its adoption in the latter. Now I’m not going to argue that the iPhone has had great publicity, and that it looks very cool, but that doesn’t make Apple an example to follow. In fact, I think it proves they are the exception to the rule. Apple are the last great closed IT company. Look at the…
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FLOSScom summer school is go!
As part of the FLOSScom project I’m involved with we are running a FLOSScom Summer University. The idea is that we want to recreate some of the characteristics found in open source communities in an educational context. Participants will create resources around FLOSS topics and then create a ‘toolkit’. This is meant to be a guide for anyone who comes afterwards and wants to adapt or create a course (in any subject area) that uses FLOSS principles. Having created the resources the participants will have the experience and the knowledge to do this, we hope. Like participation in FLOSS communities the idea is that anyone can join at any time.…
