http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/226918410/

The main organization I work with uses Confluence as its internal wiki platform (and possibly for blogs too, we’ll see how that progresses). I have never been in love with it as a platform but on the principle that with social software, who is using it is often more important than what they are using, I’m trying to get behind it.

But it is frustrating the heck out of me for a number of reasons. We’ve CAS‘ified Confluence, which is great for single sign-on, but it means that any ‘protected’ space now requires authentication to get the RSS feed. And honestly, a wiki without RSS feeds is a non-starter for me.

Enter Google Reader. I made the switch about a year ago and now it is fairly entrenched in my workflow. Except…Google Reader doesn’t do authenticated feeds. So now I’m faced with either switching RSS readers again (ugh) or getting daily wiki updates via email (are you serious? At least Greader could support the email-to-RSS feature like Bloglines used to, and no, the Gmail to RSS hack wouldn’t work in this case).

Frustrating. Added to that, Confluence as a blogging platform leaves a bit to be desired, and to deal it’s inelegant posting workflow (10 clicks compared to my 1 or 2 now) I am trying out some XML-RPC based clients (because it does, at least, support that through a plugin). Hence, really, the reason for this post, to see if the ScribeFire (formally Performancing) plugin for Firefox will do the trick and provide a simply, free way of posting between both my WP blog and Confluence. Wish me luck. So far the experience hasn’t been stellar, with a memory leak and other bugs plaguing what should be a simple process. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/227474570/

http://solr.bccampus.ca/wiki/index.php/Weaving_Your_Social_Bookmarking_Knowledge_Network

As part of my perennial quest to foment change, I’m trying to initiate a series of grassroots “brown bag lunch online presentations” within BCcampus. We are a distributed organization of 20+ people spread across over a half-dozen locations, so building community and sharing our practices and knowledge informally can be very hard. This is one small effort on my part to improve this.

To kick it off I delivered the above presentation, on using social bookmarking to help build your knowledge network, to about a dozen of my fellow staff today. We used Elluminate to run the session, and aside from the normal hiccups with sound cards and missing mics, it seemed to run pretty well and I’m hoping was well received. The real proof will be if anyone else starts to use this technqiue to start sharing their attention and knowledge, and also whether it inspires anyone else to stand up and run a session of their own. I hope it does. I built the original presentation within our Confluence wiki (partly to walk the talk with that tool) but posted it here in a mediawiki instance in the hopes that it might be of more general interest. It’s formatted to work ok with the Greasemonkey Mediaiwiki Presentation script as well. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/229826730/

http://nettskolen.nki.no/in_english/megatrends/

Via the sporadic but often interesting e-learning reviews site comes a note about this large-scale study of, well, large-scale European e-learning providers (or “megaproviders” as the report calls them.)

Of most interest is perhaps the “Analyses of European megaproviders of e-learning” and the “Recommendations for robust and sustainable large-scale e-learning”.

Me, I’m not so sure I’m even keen on the notion of “megaproviders” any more, if I ever was. Some of the recommendations seem a bit obvious (”Recommendation 13: Robust, sustainable and large-scale e-learning initiatives should make sure to receive support from their top management” - uh huh) while others (”Recommendation 6: Use standard and widely-used technologies; widely-used technologies enable students to apply the software and hardware they have at their

disposal with little need to buy and install additional equipment.”) don’t seem to me to go far enough in decrying errors we continue to make.

Still, the report authors and funders are to be commended for having the courage to examine the host of failed projects to date and try to learn from these. There is a lot of material here and much good stuff to be digested over the next week as I dig through it. Enjoy! - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/231183352/

http://event.dare2bdigital.ca/

The folks at BCcampus (and this may be logrolling but let me be clear up front, while I work for the folks who have produced Dare2bdigital, I had nothing to do with the project) have come up with an interesting experiment to promote online learning in the province.

Dare2BDigital is a six-week “event” in which student teams compete for prizes by performing various challenges around existing online learing resources in the province, documenting their experience in team blogs that allow the “audience” to follow along, “root” for them, and also participate through blogs and forums (and end up eligible for their own prizes.)

So for instance, the first challenge involves the students interacting with the Tatla Online Observatory and conceiving a “game” that would take place in zero-gravity.

This is definitely not traditional marketing. It really is an experiment to try and expose more people to the really wide range of possibilities for (admittedly, but that’s our bailiwick) formal online education in British Columbia. It has just started, so we will see how it goes. Check it out. Depending on how well it does they may make it a regular thing, but it is definitely worth a least a look as an experiment in alternative marketing. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/234426422/

http://www.giuntilabs.com/info.php?vvu=15&pud=450

Increasingly I am focusing on things other than repositories (Amen!) but it still occupies some of my attention, so this news (even 3 months after the fact) still caught my eye. Apparently Harvest Road, an Australian learning object repository/learning content management system vendor, has been acquired by the Italian-based elearning product vendor Giunti Labs.

Harvest Road was a publicly listed company on the Australian exchange that has now been de-listed (presumably because of this acquisition.) They were extremely aggressive in trying to market their product around the world over the past 4-5 years. You can draw your own conclusions, both about what this says about Harvest Road and what it says about that market. From where I’m sitting, though, it would be hard to spin this in a positive way. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/236746842/

http://www.justonemorebook.com/

Email to me asking me to blog a site almost inevitably end up in the round file, but I’ll make an exception for the playful Just One More Book!! site for a few reasons.

One is simply it’s subject, reviews of childrens books. As a parent of young kids I can never get enough good tips on new books the kids might like. Another is the design of the site, which is simple, playful and easy to use (I really love the categories they offer, a nice way to approach kids books). And finally for a reason that is both an attraction and detraction to the site - they record all of their podcasts in their local coffeeshop. As I longtime coffeeshop afficiando this immediately attracted me, and the ambiance on the recordings *can* give them a nice feel, but for the most part really they just make them a bit harder to understand. Anyways, fun site, and once in a while you gotta give a little google love when someone asks. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/240018330/

http://wiki.northernvoice.ca/f/nv-feeds-subscriptions.xml

I hate technorati. It doesn’t freakin’ work. And this year, for whatever reasons, there seems to be a reluctance to provide a “Planet Northern Voice” aggregator like in past years. So my solutions was to cull all of the “blog” feed URLs from the attendees pages. I’m using this directly in my Google reading - I had not realized that Google Readers let’s you constrain your search to a folder of feeds, so by simply searching on “Northern Voice” in this folder of feeds, I’ve got my own aggregator of just NV posts that in my opinion provides way more depth of coverage than technorati (and without all the cruft of the Jaiku feed someone put together which includes all the flickr and twitter feeds as well). Hope it is of help - you are of course free to use it yourself and add  other feeds if you feel it isn’t comprehensive enough. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/241678903/

I am not certain enough time has passed yet to have fully digested the last few days (heck I haven’t even left Vancouver and still get one more culinary delight before I go in the form of Dim Sum with the crew). (Sheesh this post has taken a while to write and it is still rushed and not very clear…) This year was different than last; the learning was more in the form of themes that emerged from numerous conversations rather than thunderous emotional epiphany. Anyways, here it goes, what (I hope) I learned this year at Northern Voice:

The Importance of Stories and Narrative

I am a former English major. So I will forgive you if you ignore me from here on out as a perennial dimwit when I tell you that it took me this long to ‘get’ how crucial narrative and storytelling are to everything we are doing, be it learning online, connecting, weaving one’s online presence, blogging… From cogdog’s masterful 50 Ways performance, to Nancy White’s drawing party, from seeing the Wordpress hotshots demonstrate the myriad ways it can be used to tell different stories, to a comment from Keira that “living online is like being in a movie,” to my own little story of blog love that dared speak its name, at each step there seemed to be another story, or someone urging me to re-approach all my convoluted configurations through the simpler (and as some convincingly argued, innate) frame of “storytelling.” Like I said, slow learner.

People deserve simple tools that give them control and choice

Another important theme that emerged for me is that it’s not the specific tool itself that is critical but instead the motivation to use the tool, the problem that is trying to be solved, the itch scratched, that largely determines success or failure. Human instrumentality is such that we will find a way to connect, to work, to change, even if it means using smoke signals or rocks to do the trick.

Sure, ‘bad’ tools get in the way of motivated people, and ‘good’ tools help them work even better. But when people are motivated to connect, to collaborate, to communicate, to learn, they will find a way, make the tools at hand bend to their purpose.

Our job, then, as tool markers is in part to make tools that they can bend to their needs, that are useful because of the uses they can be put to and not only because of the intentions of their designer. Twitter is a great example of this that came up time and again. The many disguises that Wordpress can wear another.

But place this alongside Brian’s usability demonstration of checking discussion threads in WebCT (25 clicks that told a 1000 words), that usability, simpleness, is not a simply a “nice to have.” I wish we had video of it. Instead I would just urge all campus decision makers be forced to monitor a discussion thread in a CMS, like their instructors have to do, for a few weeks. I think we could get the revolution started overnight this way.

The welcoming heart

Now that I think of it, I guess there is some commonality with the revelations of last year. Last year I had my heart opened to the impactful, authentic ways in which people were using blogs, in strong contrast to the often intellectual exercise they can be for me. This year it was my assumptions on the social/network skills and fluency that I require people to bring to participate in the form of connected, networked learning and community that were challenged and hopefully opened my heart a bit more.

It happened a few times, but the most notable was during the “Blogging is Dead - Long Live Bloggers” when (I will blame it on my somewhat addled Saturday morning state) I made some obnoxious assertions about online identity that were really exclusionary. I didn’t mean them that way, but they were.

Yet as the Reverend Jim helped remind me later that day “People call me on my bullshit…and I like it.” I got a bit defensive in the session when it was called to my attention, but because of one of the people doing the calling (and her inimitable, gentle way of doing so), I tried to hear past my defensiveness. And I came to see that while one can be ‘open’ and available on the web with one’s writing & one’s work, that is different than being open and having a ‘welcoming heart.’ That is, a (I’m struggling for a word here - stance? posture? feeling? revealing?) well, an “open heart” that welcomes those you come across, who come across you, instead of an egoful one always needing to be regarded. I don’t think I am expressing this well. Maybe that simply belies that I have not learnt it well yet. Like I said, slow learner.

There’s more. So much more. But I can’t get it out of me right now. (Plus I’m off for a hike with the cogdog, so that struggle will have to wait). But like others, I did not come away from NV unchallenged or (hopefully) unchanged. - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/243012378/

http://mfeldstein.com/an-eye-witness-account-of-the-trial/

Through a combination of resignation towards what seemed a pre-determined outcome and pre-occupation with Northern Voice when it was announced, I managed to miss most of the recent hair-pulling that the ridiculous finding in Blackboard’s favour prompted. And thank goodness too, my hair couldn’t have stood it

But I did go read Jim Farmer’s extended eyewitness account of the trial which Michael Feldstein graciously posted over at e-Literate, and I thoroughly advise you too as well, as much for what it portends for the future of high tech patents as what it says about this particular judgement.

It is not difficult to see a picture here (and I want to be clear here, because I think Jim did a fine job being as impartial as possible, that these are my interpretations) of not just “Justice for Sale” but “Patent Law Judgements as Economic Diversification Program.” It’s bad enough to have to read this about Blackboard’s (god how I even cringe to write that name) expert witness:

“Expert witnesses always are asked about their fees. When asked how much he had earned, Mark Jones was unable to give an answer. He said he had spent “hundreds of hours” and gave his rate as $325 per hour. (I thought he said $375, but court documents have the lower amount). He also said he had received $170,000 in fees from Blackboard before the end of 2007 as his [IRS Form] 1099 showed. It is likely he will have been paid more than $300,000 for his testimony when the trial is complete.”

But the picutre of an economically challenged town with a propensity to trust the government (in this case the Patent Office) gearing up to become a high tech patent rocket docket should send shivers up your spine (well, at least unless you are totally jaded about the state of justice in the land, which I can’t say I’d blame you for being.)

Go read for yourself. But all I can help thinking is - did we honestly think it was going to go any other way? And how far along are you on your open source CMS? (or even better, on your loosely coupled teaching platform?) - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/243496084/

Just now a silly argument broke out in twitter concerning the acronym “PLE” that I wanted to follow up on. I say “silly” because it was the classic “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 turn their backs rather than learning to surf (to borrow metaphors from a bunch of people whom regular readers and blogosphere denizens will recognize on their own).

And I’m not proposing to re-open this debate here (but maybe I am), instead I have a question for you.

What are the various “postures” by which you understand your own orientation/embeddeness to/in your own personal learning environment (network, whatever!)?

Let me explain a little more of what I mean. I broadly collect my own actions on my learning network, the tools I use, the uses I make of them, and the people that comprise it as well, into three broad “postures”, or ways of relating. For me these are, at a high level,

1. reading/consuming information, content, reflection, etc,


2. producing/creating information, content, reflection, etc,


3. weaving together components, people and conversations on the network, and activity that surely encompasses the former two but also has some distinct aspects to it in and of itself.

Now I don’t think these are exhaustive nor even particularly well conceived, but they are the buckets into which I sub-consciously find myself putting my various activities. And what I am interested in finding out from all of you is, at this high level, what “postures” you see yourself as having in relationship to your learning network, your networked learning, your practice. Are there others you would add to this list or do you have a totally different way of conceptualizing this?

I believe, again without a lot to substantiate it, that you all do indeed have many other ways of organizing and conceptualizing  this. But are these all entirely idiosyncratic? Well, to the extent to which we can still talk about “categories” and to the extent to which ideas like “learning styles” still have any meaning, my sense is that we can tease out a number of different “postures,” and a number of different ways to relate these postures, and use these as the entree with which to orient newcomers to weaving their own “personal” learning environments. Certainly these will be personal in the sense of being oriented around them, and certainly be personal in the sense of including different tools, content sources and conversations than mine or yours might. But to argue that we cannot evolve some ways of talking about generally how we orient ourselves to our own PLEs is I think to embark on a solipsistic road that doesn’t resemble the one I find myself on.

So what do you think? Is there a sense in which we can use this notion of “postures” (again, feel free to suggest a better term) as a conceptual entree to helping new people weave their own PLEs, or is this already to reify it. Will it always only be a case of each of us modelling our individual practices, with whatever pieces and conceptions of them resonating individually with each person who sees them. - SWL

(P.S. I am certain this post belies my thoroughly amateur status, that there is lots of nomenclature in the learning sciences that better describes what I am fumbling with here. Please feel free to educate me on it. I do not need tot invent terms where better ones already exist. Like I keep telling you, I am a slow learner).