Michele Martin has a set of very useful points about using blogging for learning .
As she points out, most of the sites that offer to help you improve your blog, assume that you want to reach a wide audience, sell something or whatever.
In fact, many of the principles of blogging that apply to selling yourself may, in fact, impede your progress if your primary goal is to blog for learning.
It’s *my* learning blog. Not yours. That said, her blog does offer some useful points from which I can learn.
To me, the most useful point she makes is:
Think about process, not product. …. Don’t be afraid to write about questions and half-formed thoughts and ideas. .
That’s also something that can be difficult to get across to students - that it’s OK to have half formed ideas; that seeing how an idea develops is much more valuable to a lecturer than seeing the end result.
MySpace are opening up a DeveloperPlatform using Google’s Open Social tools. While the BBC comment that nearly 15,000 Facebook applications have been written, and thus they expect a similar level of interest for MySpace apps (particularly given that Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use Open Social, thus meaning application developers only have to develop the tool once for all sites), Josh Gadstone reports that Facebook apps may be losing popularity. Gadstone also comments that while some had hailed Open Social as a way of enabling dataportability between platforms, it’s really only widget (or, in Google speak) gadget portability.
Had you asked me about half an hour ago what a “Pubcast” was, I’d have thought it was a blurry YouTube video recorded down at the Dog & Duck.
However, I’ve just found SciVee, which Stephen Downes and Jane Hart describe as a useful resource for Scientists. It is, but what I think is more useful is the way that they’ve combined a video, publication, references, comments, tags etc., into the “Pubcast”.
I’ve been watching Multipolar Representation of Protein Structure (not sure that I really understand it), which includes links to the references where possible, figures from the paper, and even the ability to add notes.
Videos that aren’t related to a particular publication are listed as “videos”.
As with so many sites, it’s also possible to join communities, though like many other sites, most of the communities that I browsed, while some had associated pubcasts/ videos, didn’t seem to have anything in their discussion boards.
Issuu is another document sharing site. Like Scribd it’s for sharing published documents, rather than providing a service to enable creating the document, as Think Free or Zoho do.
Issuu at the moment only allows pdf files, but it’s got an interesting way of viewing them - just like a book. The interface rather reminded me of some of the options in the International Children’s Digital Library.
I’ve been using Google Reader for some time now as an RSS feed reader. I’ve just started getting feeds from “feral cat news”, a blog that I don’t subscribe to.
I’ve had a look in my list of feeds, and it’s not there, but I’m getting feeds from it. As it’s a blogspot blog, I’ve checked my old student URLs from several years back, just in case “feral cat news” somehow took over an abandoned blog, altered the name and yet kept the original RSS feed. But I have nothing that has “feral” in the URL, in the name or anything.
Just to test it; I’ve exported my existing subscriptions, deleted them all; and so I’ll see if I get any more news about cats (I’ve searched the OPML file - again, no mention of feral cats)
Anyone have any ideas??
OK. I’ve solved it. I’d subscribed to someone’s shared feed. And she’s into cats. I guess I’d have expected a shared feed to be differentiated from my own in some way.
I’ve been reading (and will comment on later) Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur”. What struck me is that Keen is seeing bloggers as taking over the journalism arena. I’ve tended to see bloggers as more of a continuation of/ return to the rich oral traditions we had, and still exists in areas such as Papua New Guinea and many others. Dave Snowden puts this nicely:
One of the really interesting things when you start to deal with fragmented narrative (of which blogs are a subset) is the realisation that you are returning to an older oral tradition in which stories evolved in their retelling.
The difference is the size of the audience; rather than just the local village and passing story tellers, we can reach a much bigger audience. Yes, far more of it is the unknown passing story teller but, with time, some get to be known and trusted.
It all started with a post on Stephen’s blog about WordPress.Com As OpenCourseWare. That took me to EduGlu, with a very nice diagram of an Open Content and Open Learning environment (seems to be a good diagram of a PLE as well).
Joining EduGlu was fine, trying to add my blog and then to make a comment on the feedback page was a bit more fiddly - and I made a bit of a mess. It’s useful having lots of shared editing buttons. Until drongoes like me make a mistake. (You can’t see it without logging in!)
What had really interested me, though, was the idea of using WordPress for OpenCourseware (or, indeed, any form of Courseware!) Stephen’s post, and the subsequent links to Jim Grooms BavaTuesday (at least, I think it’s his; hard to tell!) answered a question I’ve had for ages. How to use RSS to create posts in a WordPress blog as you can with Elgg. (It was one of the selling points of Elgg for me). I’d not realised that I need to have a spammers mentality. I rather liked Stephen’s reworking of Spam …
Self Propelled Academic Messages
Oh, and David Wiley’s course looks pretty useful too! (I think that it’s a rework of the material on Utah State’s Open Courseware that I pointed students to before)
Which, of course is in total opposition to the cultural myth called ‘education and learning’. How many parents (and the Daily Telegraph and Chris Woodward) be-moan the fact that ‘can’t get their children to pick up a book’ or ‘they never read nowdays’ or restrict access times to computers ‘because it’s bad for them’ and they ‘should be doing their homework’ and ‘you can’t tear them away from their screens’? Hmmm! When I was a kid it was ‘ Could you get out head out of that book and do something useful.’
Tony Hirst has a rather neat bookmarklet generator for iPaper; though I’m still trying to get it to work. I’ve got as far as creating a publisher reference on scribd, but can’t seem to persuade it to work.
I’ve not been into Facebook for some time, and so have only just found the Friends list; which I know has been discussed for some time.
It’s easy to add people to, potentially easier than Elgg; and, like Elgg, the same person can be in more than one list. I’m not quite sure what a list does, other than the fact you can message a list, rather than selecting friends individually; and you can invite lists to particular events. I’m not sure if other things - such as news items - can be filtered just to particular lists.
Dan Zarrella has a tool that will take a blog post title, and look at words to see if they’re words that generally increase or decrease the popularity on Digg. Jose Quesada first pointed it out, suggesting that “academic” wasn’t a particularly useful word to have in a title. I’ve tried with a few variants on “Successful blogging in the … world”
(Click for larger version on Flickr)
It seems that “hackers” are what I should be targetting, if I want greater interest from Digg fans. (Do I?)
The annual Horizon Report (pdf) has been published. They’ve produced a rather nice “Megatrends” diagram - looking at the main predictions from all the earlier reports (2004 - 2008).ng
I’ve skim read the current report - I think that the idea of “Social Operating Systems” will be worth watching; it seems to me to be a logical extension of where we currently are with things like Facebook; but data will be portable between systems, rather than tied to a system. They suggest that more professional information will come in, though I’d like to think that it will be possible to separate the two! I’d not really like it all tied together. I wonder how Sugar will tie into this…
Jude O’Connell has a link to a rather neat depiction of the technologies involved (and some of the people) created by Information Architects of Japan.
