Wiki - and bliki, bloki etc June 29, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : meta-blog , comments closedOn Contentious Weblog, some links to articles about blog / wiki fusion.
I would have got around to looking at bloki again, I’ve heard more reports that it’s looking good since I wrote about it here
But now the Ultraversity Wiki is up and running, and starting to take form already. I noticed some people asking “what can this do for me?” rather than “how can we use this as a tool for collaboration and storing knowlege” but it’s early days yet, I’m sure they’ll soon catch on.
Forums vs Threaded discussions June 27, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , comments closedForums vs Threaded discussions
terminology:
I use ‘Forums’ here in the modern specific sense to mean a particular type of online public discussion space where the entries are displayed together on one page rather than in separate windows. The vulgarised Latin plural doesn’t
bother me. ‘Threaded Discussions’ means presenting each post as an individual item, read sequentially through time rather than space e.g. email discussion lists, usenet newsgroups, FirstClass community ware.
Some experience is starting to suggest that when forums are used as opposed to threaded discussions, you get better quality conversations . Indeed, Stephen Powell seems to be sure of it. “The fragmented nature of FC conversations is in stark contrast to the rich flow of ideas possible where contributions are displayed sequentially on the same page…. ….The advantages are the ability to quickly scan up and down as one might when trying to understand a complex section in a book. This helps not just with reading and understanding, but also with the composing of contributions and replies. Indeed, this seems to be such an obvious difference that I wonder why anyone would through choice build software that didn’t have this facility!”
I’m going to try and answer that while my own preference is still somewhat undecided.
In response to Nancy White’s 1st question in the current ultraversity hotseat : “The use of Online community and interaction for discussion and debate - in other words, for learning! How do we do this well online?”
I wrote:
“I think discussion and debate work best in an online many-to-many asynchronous community space when respondents take the trouble to quote previous messages, interspersing their comments point for point amongst the separate strands of thought. In this way, a focussed conversation can be continued, thrashing out ideas though exposure to multiple peers as a continuing critical dialogue.”
Now that is a method which can, but often isn’t, used in email and newsgroup discussions - Firstclass included, but doesn’t apply in forums. I’ve seen lots of extremely good and bad examples of this method being employed over the years. In threaded discussions, you can choose which contribution you wish to reply to, and your reply will appear appended to it. This is done properly through a “references” header containing the message-ID of the message which is being replied to so that the software can automatically organise threads for you.
Typically people will choose to read threaded discussions in a number of ways.
1) They may “catch up” with a busy threaded discussion group by using a single key “display next unread message” function to read through all the new messages, thread by thread, composing replies as they go along. In practice, this can construct a convincing illusion of synchronicity - “I read something you appear to have just said, and I respond straight away”.
2) They may sort the group into date order and read through the latest messages in date order rather than by thread. This suits the “hungry” reader, anxious to keep in touch with the latest developments.
3) They may look back at the tree structure of a thread and dip in to individual messages at appropriate points, retracing the history of the discourse in order to establish who said what in response to whom, tracing the flow of ideas.
4) etc….
In a forum, on the other hand, the user normally has little or no flexibility over how the discourse can be presented.
Threaded discussions can, if necessary, cope well with long and deep exchanges of information ideas and opinion stretching into many hundreds of posts and over weeks or months of time. Whereas Forums bump into a ceiling quite early on.
The apparent success of the format employed for the hotseat ( a customised kind of form-driven forum ) could be attributed to a number of things ( The sense of occasion, Nancy’s specific skills in engagement, ennui in FC, use of photos? ) but the format itself must be a contributory factor, I would agree.
Advantages
of forums
* the ability to see a number of contributions while composing a reply.
* hardly any “Me too” or “thankyou” posts - more signal less noise.
* easy to read in retrospect, for people coming along later
Disadvantages of forums
* awkward for the people engaged in the discussion at at the time.
* no flexibility to suit readers preferences
* scrolling is a pain
* looking for new responses to older questions is a pain, so difficult to catch up
* no off-line reader ( for people who can’t be connected all the time for whatever reason, e.g. travel, other family members )
* later responses have to be posted further down, away from what they refer to.
* the format discourages extended conversations
What would I like to see?
Nested discussion forums are an improvement over flat ones, these allow you to attach your reply to any of the previous ones and then display it indented underneath instead of at the end of the thread. Because of screen space limitations, these normally only nest and indent up to 5 levels. These are particularly easy to follow for visitors reading back through an exiting discussion and not too bad for people in the throw of it.
The forum should also have an option to enable the reader to quickly view only the latest few posts in reverse date order.
And an option to subscribe via RSS and/or email
to complete the bridge, subscribers should be able to reply right there and then from their own preferred news / mail / RSS reader
Interim conclusions
tools do affect conversation
Forums occupy a sort of middle ground. They are better than bad threaded discussions, but not as good as good ones.
Horses for courses.
The discussion has only just begun.
Breaking news… June 24, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , 1 comment so farCentral London is deserted, traffic is the quietest since diana’s funeral. Trains are empty too.
Then, as I leave Manor Park Station, I see a huge celebration spilling out from the Portuguese caf
Docklands Light Railway June 22, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : transport, movie clips, London , comments closed
I quite like the Docklands Light Railway for the way it gets me to Greenwich from Stratford without a driver. There is sometimes a problem with rocking from side to side so you wouldn’t really want to spend too much time on it regularly, but it strikes me that rather than build a tube line into Hackney, which will take years and years, you could relativley quickly and cheaply just continue extending the DLR all over the place instead.
Being a light railway it can take tight bends and sharp inclines, so the infrastructure is much easier to build. Instead of building tunnels and taking over lots of land you just put up a few stilts and build up above street level.
The strange cartoon on the left is from Transport for London’s bodysnatchers website - a guide of suggested places to go using the DLR. Hmm, I like the sound of Bar Mus
blogging and Usenet - bridging June 21, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : meta-blog , comments closedIn this discussion Peter Kleiweg responds to a tentative theory of mine, with some initial suggestions about how blogging and usenet may relate to each other.
Read the thread in europa.linguas
Peter’s blog is written in Interlingua
About europa.* newsgroups
Online Learning Communities June 21, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , comments closedMore on online learning communities and a discussion about facilitation on Pete Bradshaw’s blog.
Search Strings - 1.618 June 20, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , comments closedThe website hosting which I use, courtesy of frankie roberto, provides some comprehensive statistical analysis. Some of it is pointless, but there is one section which reveals the search strings people have used to get to the sites.
Reading the table of search strings gives a feeling of how weird the internet can be sometimes. It seems the most popular way by far to stumble across my site is to enter “1.618” into google and then read all the way through to the bottom of page 4 of the results. Can this be right? And how many people are disappointed not to find a comprehensive review of Gibbs Reflective cycle or Wenger’s address book. Some of the searches link to Frankie’s linguistics degree, can you guess which ones?
For the month of June to date it looks like this:
| Top 20 of 49 Total Search Strings | ||
|---|---|---|
| # | Hits | Search String |
| 1 | 25 | 1.618 |
| 2 | 13 | gibbs reflective cycle |
| 3 | 5 | reflective cycle(gibbs 1988) |
| 4 | 3 | gibbs reflective model |
| 5 | 3 | tautology pragmatics |
| 6 | 3 | ultrastudents |
| 7 | 2 | drawback of critical incident technique |
| 8 | 2 | frankie roberto |
| 9 | 2 | gibbs’ reflective writing |
| 10 | 2 | reflective cycle (gibbs) |
| 11 | 2 | ultraversity |
| 12 | 1 | /pd/pegasus/creating1.htm |
| 13 | 1 | 2004 email address and guestbook of wenger |
| 14 | 1 | actionresearch project writing |
| 15 | 1 | alternatives to a toothbrush |
| 16 | 1 | blogdrive rss |
| 17 | 1 | carageen uk |
| 18 | 1 | comparing semantic pragmatic meaning |
| 19 | 1 | cooperative principles pragmatic |
| 20 | 1 | discrete versus cross curricular ict |
Urban Seabirds June 17, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : soundvideo, wildlife, London , comments closedlarge
medium
Urban foxes are well known these days, there’s probably one in every street and they seem to be getting more and more casual about walking around in broad daylight. This little film is about urban seabirds. Since living in London I’ve started to notice more kinds of birds making themselves at home in the city, birds which would normally be associated with the ocean, countryside or other environments. Kingfishers on the canal in Hackney, increasing numbers of Heron too. Sparrowhawks circle the tower blocks and Terns swoop down to fish the waterways. 
I first saw Cormorants as a child around the Isles of Scilly, way out at sea or sitting on inaccessible rocks drying their wings. So I didn’t associate them with inner city estuaries like the Thames. Around London Bridge they can be seen most days, flying past, bobbing about in the waves or diving for fish. Just before sunset seems to be good time to catch them doing this, on my way home from the evening sessions but I sometimes spot one flying over from my morning journey too. It makes me feel good and smile whenever I spot one, I don’t know why. I even wrote a few verses about them, on an airoplane bound for Bilbao. It’s one of the batch waiting for another clear week in order to compose the music. The video is realtively lengthy at just under 3 minutes with sound, so I’ve made two versions available, one at 6.2Mb and one at 9.5Mb for broadband users.
Building Bridges June 13, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, meta-blog , comments closedNancy White comments on my previous article “facilitators and blogs” saying:
“I hope we can move more towards bridges because I am of the belief that
there is no one tool based solution,
that its how we use the tools that matter and, finally,
that tools are designed for groups, but experienced by individuals.
We need to find a way to negotiate, when appropriate, between the individual and group experiences.”
So I’m considering some of the ideas which have been posted recently in the online facilitators group and the ongoing discussion about approprite use of online tools within ultraversity.
I’m reasonably convinced by the view that some people prefer one tool while others prefer another and that these personal preferences are strong enough to have an effect on participation in different forums. Whether it’s just familiarity or some more inherent preference is not important, since writers will vote with their keyboards anyway. The effect of this can lead to isolated pockets of communities, perhaps with a common interest and knowlege but each sticking to their own partial view of the online world.
We can either accept this as “each to his own”, disregard the dilution problem “there’s always plenty more where they came from”, we could try to force everybody to move over to the one perfect tool (which doesn’t and in all probability never will exist ), or we can indeed try to build bridges.
As an ideal to work towards I quite like the vision of One Big Soup
I’m also taken with small pieces loosely joined
The only thing that slightly worries me is like, isn’t this what we started off with in the first place anyway?
The internet was designed to host a number of protocols such as POP3 and SMTP for email, NNTP for newsgroups, IRC for chat, FTP for file transfer, http for hypertext and a couple of others like finger, archie and gopher which we don’t use anymore. And it all fitted quite neatly together, so that you could reply to newsgroup posting directly to someone’s email address if you wanted, put a mailto: link on your web homepage, advertise a collaborative FAQ in your sig. You had a wide choice of software which fitted in with this scheme - email clients, newsreaders, web browsers, ftp clients and HTML editors so you could take your pick.
Then what seemd to happen was that two seperate pressures came to bear on the situation. Commercial interests wanting to engineer fenced off areas to keep their own users locked in started the trend to privatise chunks of internet communications through pasword protected website communications, proprietary services and broken standards. Alongside this there was a perceived need to simplify access for a wider public, replacing the ever so slightly ‘techie’ nature of the tools with push button clicky webby stuff that trades off ease of initial familiarty for a restricted functionality. Webmail instead of proper email, bulletin boards in place of proper newsgroups. Java chat instead of IRC. Incidentally I still maintain that one of the most critical developments was the change from pay-per-minute dial-up access to always-on flat rate internet deals.
So now here we are trying to put it all back together again using groups, Blogs, Wikis and incompatible webfeeds. And as fast as we are innovating and trying to keep it out of control you can bet there are powerful interests beavering away at developing ways to stifle, contain, segregate, corporatise it all.
So there, in a sense, we have it.
damselflies June 12, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wildlife , comments closed |
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As promised, some pictures of the damselflies around my pond last Sunday.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
