http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/05/testing-out-write-

On a tip from Alan, testing out the writetomyblog.com site .

- SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/09/montastic-free-web

http://www.montastic.com/

I am responsible for a few web servers in addition to this blog, but in all of these cases they are servers that I don’t own or have root access to (nor any particular pull with the sys admins). For a while we kept having server outtages on one of them that would go unnoticed both by me and the sys admins until it was too late and users would get effected. So I started looking for a site monitoring service that didn’t require a software install nor the cooperation of any sys admins, and a few months ago came across this one, Montastic . It is very straightforward - after creating an account based on your email address, you simply give it a website and address and … that’s it. It will send you notifications either by email, RSS or ‘widget’ if that server stops responding so you can start appropriate actions. Perfect for your average instructor or blogger who does not necessarily have control over their server environment and yet feels responsible for the quality of their users’ experience. In an ideal world this is a service any web host should be able to offer you by default, active notification of server outtages, but until then, this is worth a try. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/12/first-canadian-moo

http://moodlemoot.ca/moodle/index.php

Hopefully all the Moodlers out there will already know about this through their regular Moodle forums, but I thought I’d give a shout out to the upcoming Canadian Moodle Moot being hosted May 3 - 5, 2007 in Edmonton, Alberta by Athabasca University and my own organization, BCcampus, amongst others. There looks to be still time to submit both F2F and Online presentation proposals (the Moot will have both a f2f and online component) and early bird registration ends in April. While I’d love to attend I regret this may not be in the cards, though hopefully I can still sign up for the virtual component. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/12/blackboard-proving

So I just got an email from someone at http://www.fleishman.com/, a PR and Marketing firm apparently doing some work for Blackboard. The email was to alert me to the existence of their new social bookmarking service, Scholarly. As actual readers of EdTechPost know, I posted news of that service well over a month ago, which prompted a spate of posts by others across the edublogosphere on the topic.

So, should I expect Blackboard (or its representatives) to read this blog if they want to send me news releases to write about here? Well, first off, blogging on demand is just not something I do. But I will take a look at links that people send me, and if it seems on topic and not simply an obvious ploy to create traffic I will write about it.

On the other hand, if people try to use me, not only will I not generate traffic to their site, I’ll likely write something like this that isn’t particularly flattering. Worse for them, if they’ve indiscriminately emailed this out to other edubloggers then they run the risk of exposing any shills for who they really are.

The blogosphere is A CONVERSATION, albeit a distributed one, not a marketing channel for your news releases. I have written hundreds of posts pointing EdTechPost readers towards interesting and useful educational technology services. On par, I try to post on applications I feel positively about and think will be helpful instead of trashing all the things I don’t like. I’ve received lots of email back from services thanking me for the positive attention and have helped a few of them in my own small way get some decent traction.

So marketers, by all means, join the conversation, listen to what people are talking about and try to offer something of value. But if you barge in waving your press release about, don’t expect me to treat you any different than I would the vacuum cleaner sales guy who rings my doorbell during a dinner party. Please, it’s 2007 - get a clue. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/15/first-monday-trage

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_2/schweik/

First Monday can be a frustrating read some times, but I find almost every issue has at least one real gem like this.

Charles Schweik and Robert English have published this important look at the role of “institutions” in the sustainability of FOSS projects. It’s critical to note their notion of “institution” which in this context refers to the rules, norms and governance structures of a project. Kind of unsurprisingly, at least to me, they find that they fewer the hurdles to participation, the more contributions you get, but that projects do evolve additional “institutions” as they grow, though not as many as you might suspect.

Another small piece of the study is the report on the size (in developers) of projects hosted on sourceforge (cf. Table 1) whose data presumably came from the FLOSSmole project. Of the 93,702 total projects (as of April 2005) only 224 had greater than 25 developers, and only 1800 or so had more than 10. I say “only” which sounds dismissive but it’s not meant that way. Just that many of the smaller ones might leave you a bit risk exposed if you were to adopt them without one’s own development capabilities already identified. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/15/wikipatterns-wiki-

http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/

Brilliant idea. Hopefully the cogdog won’t mind me scooping this from his del.icio.us feed, but it was too delectable to pass up. Wikipatterns are exactly that, identified patterns of users and adoption to help guide new wiki builders towards success. Each of the patterns cites numerous illustrations from well known wikis. And…it’s a wiki, so after getting an account you can add to the patterns. I notice wikispammer seems to be missing from the oddly named ‘people anti-patterns.’ - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/16/martin-weller-on-t

http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/02/stringle_almost.html and http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php

Martin Weller and Tony Hirst have joined Marc Eisenstadt as bloggers from the UK’s Open University whose posts I now eagerly await, so it’s a distinct pleasure to find Martin posting about Tony’s project, Stringle.

I can almost hear the chorus now about how “a PLE is not an application” and yes, but whatever. Tony has assembled a really useful demonstration of how, using feeds, services like grazer and OPML manager and many of the free web 2.0 applications out there (this demonstration uses Google docs, PBWiki, ELGG and Gliffy to name a few), a fairly comprehensive environment can be aggregated together for learners. I don’t think this precludes all of the great learning resources out on the open web at all, in fact it rather welcomes them, and tools and services like Dappit, OpenKapow and ScreenScrapper are now making it easy for anyone to create RSS feeds for web content where previously there were none. It’s not hard for me to see how with something like OpenID implemented on many of these services all of a sudden you can have your safe password protected areas for student work and eat your open web 2.0 cake too. Take some time and play around with what Tony has assembled and see if it doesn’t jog your imagination. Is it going to replace your CMS tomorrow. Probably not if you are wedded to how that’s working for you. But darn if it doesn’t beckon to a day when making use of a new Web 2,0 app in your course in a way that works for you, for students AND your administration isn’t as easy as … rip, mix, feed. - SWL

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http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/16/my-search-is-over-

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/zhmqsw_52xG4gUz8e_gC8A/

Wouldn’t you know it, a few seconds after I finish commenting on Tony Hirst’s blog that my personal quest has been a way to dynamically constrain a search to only those pages linked on any webpage, I actually read the entire post and learn that he had already done this! A simultaneous ‘Doh!’ and ‘Hooray!’

From a usability perspective what I’ve always wanted to see was this as a bookmarklet that passes the link the URL from whatever link containing page you’re on, so I’ll look into that, but Tony has demonstrated how this is seemingly quite straightforward with Yahoo Pipes.

Why is this important to me? Think of all of the collections of links out there, people who have painstakingly vetted links on a particular subject, collected only those they felt were important. With one click you can search just those linked sites. It can definitely be argued that this always runs the risk of missing stuff outside of those constrianed sites, but there’s times when limiting the context is useful and important. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/23/mashups-for-non-pr

So, we were one of the sessions first up at this morning’s Moosecamp. At the last minute we decided to change the format; originally we had wanted to try and stay true to the ‘camp’ ethos and do very little presenting and a lot of co-creating with the audience. But competition is fierce for attention at Northern Voice, and there are too many good sessions that I wanted to attend too, so we cut it down from theh originally planned 1 1/2 to 2 hour we had hoped for to a quick 45 minute show and tell, with the hope that anyone who got really inspired would meet us latter to get hands-on with the tools.

D’Arcy kicked it off and his set of examples worked pretty well, but right at the end, Pipes failed. Hard to tell if it was the Pipes app itself or an overloaded network conneection. I was up next, and even though I had a few Pipes-based examples to show, I luckily had a few others too in my bag. Unfortunately, one of the service, OpenKapow, seemed to not respond at the same moment, and Dapper, which I was using to illustrate how to create data sources where none exist, was sooo slooow that we had to move on. Oh demoitis, you cruel beast.

We at least tried to seize the moment and turn it into a teachable moment, illustrating that while there has been a true explosion of services, as “non-programmers” we are largely subject to their availability whims. 

Brian followed on with a parable of his efforts over the years with Aggrssive, which while I know he is hard on the results I still think was and is a valiant effort to create a software package to allow us to host our own feed mashups, something many of us at institutions require if we want to introduce these techniques into production.

And finally, Chris Lott brought a rock-solid performance, with hhis various experiments in Ning and Google Co-op working great.

I don’t noticed how many people we convinced that the potential for non-programmers to mashup content are there; that wasn’t so much our goal. For me the session was meant as an experiment on how far non-programmers could in fact go, and hopefully there were at least a few in the crowd who were inspired to push on further. If you are interested, the wiki page that twe used to organize the session is chock full of additional examples and technologies to start creating your own mashups. Good luck! - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/02/26/the-most-important

If Northern Voice was only to be measured by the quality of its sessions, that would be enough. Hopefully they will post the recordings soon so that people who weren’t there can hear some of them, but it’s rare to go to a conference with so few duds.

If Northern Voice was only to be measured by the quality of the conversations had with others, friends old and new, that would be enough. It was so easy to ignore the A-listers, the B-listers and all the silly internecine drama they bring with them because the number of deep, engaging conversations to be had was simply astonishing.

But when a conference presents you with the chance for epiphany, all these other considerations seem to fade.

Sitting in a session on the Saturday morning, admittedly still slightly raw from the previous evenings’ festivities chez Casa Lamb-McPhee, I was browsing the conference aggregator page when I came across the first of a number of posts that triggered something in me (in the interests of these people’s privacy, I am not going to link directly to their sites; while they are on the open web, time and again at NV stories came up of people from different contexts linking to personal conversations and upsetting the blog owners. If you’re that interested, dig them out of my del.icio.us links).

The first was a woman who had endured much personal tragedy in her life over the last year and was using her blog as a space for recovery. The second was a site created by a husband and wife to document their love for each other and their children. It was this second that really set me off; maybe it’s because I also cry at weddings, but I found myself sitting in a room full of a hundred people with tears streaming down my face. Must have been odd if anyone was watching - typically wikis (the topic of the session) don’t evoke that kind of reaction. But I wasn’t in that space; instead, these pages had set off a landslide of emotion.

I’ve long been an advocate for blogs and social software, argued that they allow people more authentic expressions of self and engagement. But that’s still largely been in the realm of the edublogoshpere and teaching and learning; I rarely read blogs for non-work reasons and while I feel I’ve made many social connections in addition to the intellectual ones, very few of them are what I would call deep emotional ones. It has always been a somewhat intellectual endeavor for me. Reading these pages blew that apart in a way little else had done; the love this couple felt for each other was tangible, palpable, visceral, and honest in a way that could not be denied. The other woman’s struggle to recover was honest and true, you could see how putting it on a blog was helping her to bypass the traps of self-deception. Any lingering doubts I had harbored about the potential depths of authentic expression held by blogs and the social web in general were blown to pieces.Even now, writing this, I am intellectualizing it when the truth is this caused me to feel in a way few things on the net ever had.

At this point I tried to pull myself together, but I fear I didn’t do much of a job; seeing the couple who had authored one of the sites sitting right in front of me I felt compelled to share with them how much it had moved me, which of course I wasn’t able to do without being overcome again! Hopefully I didn’t freak them out too much, though I won’t be too surprised when the restraining order barring me from future NV conferences shows up

Lunch, immediately after this, brought a long walk to the restaurant during which I was lucky to talk this through with Keira, who helped me to process this “opening of my heart” as she called it, that had just occurred. Her help, along with another of many deep talks with Chris Lott, led me back in time for Nancy White’s afternoon session on communities, which in my newly “opened” state seemed to offer gift after gift. I will write more on this latter.

But it’s also the exact moment I got sick. Yes, I am now home with another bad cold. But are you surprised? I am not. There are no shortcuts to satori, and temporary awakenings, unearned, inevitably lead the pendulum to swing back, hard, the other way. There is no way to do the work without doing the work. But receiving these glimpses can’t hurt, and has left me (although fighting a cold) recharged and renewed both for my personal “work” and to integrating it further and further into my “job.” (Having now written this, I am trying hard not to imagine the sound of ‘unsubscribe’ buttons clicking in aggregators everywhere, but honesty is as honesty does.) - SWL