Flickr Ideas May 26, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet , add a comment
(also posted to Flickr Ideas group)
Related Groups
I’d like to see a way of linking related groups together, so that when splinter groups are forked off from a main group, they can be kept track of.
Ideally, this would be done by having a Wiki page for each group, which the members can edit to add links to the subgroups and perhaps other information.
Discussions are great, but they are ephemeral. It would be nice to have somewhere linked to a group where persistent information and relationships can be accumulated.
The case I have in mind is the London group, which has now spawned several subgroups. The main group has 550 odd members and people have set up groups for London meetups, for Monthly topics, and now for several of the London Boroughs (districts)[1] ,[2] , [3]. I expect this kind of thing has already happened with large North American city groups, but I haven’t bothered to check.
Without some kind of mechanism for making the relationships between these groups explicit, and linking them together, I think there’s probably a danger that overlapping small and under-used groups could proliferate causing a dilution of the potential conversations and degradation of the flickr communities.
AndyRob May 26, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : hi res photos, meta-blog , add a comment
AndyRob
Originally uploaded by Happy Dave.
Photo by Happy Dave
Tree circle May 23, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : movie clips , add a comment
If the movie ( see below) makes you feel dizzy then just imagine what it did to the poor cameraman.
Googortal May 23, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet , add a commentStephen Powell welcomes Google Personalised and supplies an interesting wishlist.
It looks like a Portal to me.
I don’t want to be locked in to anybody’s portal, not even Google’s. If I really needed to have ‘everything on one page’ then I’d build one myself, and if I didn’t know how to do that I could use a commercial blog or wiki which allowed me to add my own links and incorporate rendered RSS streams. All of this stuff is available now, or very soon, but the thing is, I just don’t get this drive to try and ‘contain’ the whole internet experience within the confines of one particular starting point. As far as I can tell it stems from an advertisment based business model which failed because people preferred to define their own homepages rather than have them imposed.
I’ve shifted quite a lot of my stuff onto web based services in the past year or so, so that I can synchronise between home and various workplaces easily, but I do often miss some of the functionality and efficiency of installed client programs.
I may switch back from Bloglines to a Client RSS reader, and I could really do with a program as powerful as Forte Agent for analysing my mailing list data. Gmail is great, but not as powerful as having the database accessible on your own disk with your own choice of tools.
Stephen’s list of three types of space presents the real challenge. the first and last are easy, but the middle one - “for me and my friends, I can control who has access” is not so well provided for on the net as yet. You could set up a ‘group’ within within a web service such as smartgroups, yahoogroups, googlegroups2 or maybe use something like jotspot but hen you are at the mercy of whichever provider you pick once again. I’m not sure how you can set up a completely independent but also private community without having to have somebody in charge, but then I suppose ‘me and my friends’ fits in with the benevolent dictator managment model so that’s OK.
No Smiling Day May 18, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , add a comment
tagged: ultraversity
Asylum Seeker Contact Point May 18, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : hi res photos, transport, London , add a comment
arofish2
Originally uploaded by Andyrob.
Maman Webcam May 15, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art , comments closedThe University of Ottawa have aquired one of the giant spider scuptures by Louise Bourgeois entitled ‘Maman’ as seen in The Tate Modern London, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao amongst other places.
Below is a picture link to a webcam which actually works and refreshes every 5 seconds so you can watch things go by.
Pictures of Maman from around the world are accumulating in Linda’s Flickr group, which now has 32 members and rising as several members go about advocating the group.
Who would have thought such a narrow and specific topic would form the basis for a growing community. It only goes to show………..er, something.
Could be worse! May 8, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , 1 comment so farLes Perelman via MICHAEL WINERIP quoted on Weblogg-ed
SAT graders are told to read an essay just once and spend two to three minutes per essay, and Dr. Perelman is now adept at rapid-fire SAT grading. This reporter held up a sample essay far enough away so it could not be read, and he was still able to guess the correct grade by its bulk and shape. “That’s a 4,” he said. “It looks like a 4.”
Assessment assessment - part 8 May 7, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ultraversity , add a commentMore questions answered
The comparison of the cider wiki with the Ultraversity wiki. I mentioned this in some feedback to you – it just seems to come from nowhere with no data to back it up. Your conclusions may be correct but there’s no data and what has an Ultraversity wiki have to do with your UK Cider one anyway?
Well “Introducing a WIKI to a Community of Practice” is only the title of the whole investigation, so it can’t be entirely irrelevent can it?
It just gets more and more embarrassing, with these questions sounding like they come from somebody who has hardly bothered to read the report at all. The questionnaire data is included in an appendix, as advised, and as pointed to in the report:
I reflected on the questions posed by peer review partner Eve Thirkle :
and on the data from the Ultrastudents prototype questionnaire (Appendix 3) and came up with the following conclusions.
Is that coming from nowhere? The origin of the idea to compare the fortunes of two wikis for two very different communities is explained quite clearly in the main report under the heading “5. Data Analysis and Reflection“. And there’s a big white box with Eve’s face smiling out from it, how can you miss it? Perhaps by reading backwards from the bottom up, or just dipping in at random, who knows. Maybe there was something interesting happening on the TV at the same time. The relevance of the ultraversity Wiki is that it was the subject of a prototype questionnaire for the planned ukcider one. All of these decisions can be examined in detail if desired, by following the links from the main section 3 “The Plan”. It’s all there, in the list of SMART tasks which track the emergent plan as it changes to adapt to the real circumstances. I was led to believe this was being monitored at the time via RSS as well.
If you wanted to use them as an evaluative comparison, perhaps you’d need another whole assignment to gather the same data for the alternative wiki, and explain why you chose the one you did as a comparison.
That would be a really useful suggestion - if I wanted to spend a whole month or so doing something completely pointless.
Assessment assessment - part 7 May 6, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ultraversity , add a comment
The Questions
You approach ideas about research critically – eg logical positivism (although I thought this could maybe have been explained a bit more?)
I should probably disregard the above question mark. The fact is, I exceeded the word count for just about every section, and it’s pretty much a stock phrase in these assessments to say “I would have liked a bit more about this, you could have explained more about that” but they never say what they want a bit less of in order to make room. My discussion of the differing philosophies which can underpin research is contained in the first part of the Appendix, and continues for 614 words. It’s in the form of a dialogue and if the other person involved had deigned to respond then it may have continued a bit further, which brings me to the related question:
When you discussed your own philosophical stance, you said you may have made some mistakes but no one seemed interested. What do you mean no one? It just doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of your tone.
No one would mean nobody, but that’s another misquote. My actual words in the report in question are:
I tried to make explicit my own philosophical stance and how it differs from anti-positivism through a dialogue in the Ultraversity community (see appendix1). I felt sure I had made one or two mistakes but nobody was interested in exploring the ideas any further at the time so I shall have to return to it later.
“nobody was interested in exploring the ideas any further” means just that, no response, nil reply. Possibly they could have been put off by a reply from the same Learning Facilitator who wants more explanation now, but at the time warned everybody:
A note of caution to anyone reading this thread and thinking they have to know this stuff for their assignment - you don’t!
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean by nobody was interested in the exploring the ideas any further at the time. Next question….
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
