jump to navigation

UK edubloggers meetup in February January 4, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 3comments

The UK edublogger scene come of age with the planning of the claimed first UK edublogger conference a first (claimed) conference - but first a meetup on February 4th in London. Details and sign up on Josie’s blog:

EdTechUK: Spring meetup

the next meetup moves south to London, on Saturday 4th February. There will be a later afternoon outing (probably involving art rather than shoes), early evening meal followed by late night drinking in central London. Stephen Downes will be in town as our meetup guest of honor and we will be thrashing out the details of the first UK edublogger con. Come early, stay late, or just pop in.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Web 2.0 Wish for 2006 - Peer 2.0! January 3, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : web2.0, tools , add a comment

J. LeRoy puts his finger on something that has been irking me for three years now. All of these new web services, LMSs, blog tag facilitation, aggregators etc etc are just giving us back something we already had, but under somebody else’s control instead of our own. It won’t hold up in the long run though, because the physical network is primary and the services which run on it are secondary. So as long as the network is freely accessible, then some kind of grassroots peer to peer archicture will keep reappearing as the service of preference. And that’s why people persist with blogging despite all of the difficulties.

Web 2.0 Wish for 2006 - Peer 2.0!:

“It’s a new year and many around the web are making predictions. I don’t know if my Web 2.0 prediction for 2006 is an actual prediction or if it is wishful thinking. I do know I sincerely hope it will happen.

There will be a resurgence of Peer to Peer architectures.

Web 2.0’s rhetoric is that it supports collaboration and communication - yet web 2.0’s main architecture is centralized. It’s all centralized.

The masses are rarely well served by central control.

Your site goes down and your mission critical information is lost. With well developed Peer to Peer application, there’s always a backup. With well developed Peer to Peer, you aren’t held hostage if your company goes down.

RSS, in fact, can be seen as trying to bridge the gap between the flatness of the web and the communication of peer to peer systems.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Blogging with MediaWiki? January 2, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : tools, Wiki , comments closed

When somebody asks how they can bend one tool to the tune of another (Littleton,1984) it’s tempting to skip but the reply from “Sy” interested me.

MediaWiki as a weblog - Sy

I have always believed it possible to duplicate the form and function of a weblog within a wiki’s engine. To a wiki, stepping out into various other kinds of knowledge management isn’t very hard. However, wiki technology is still juvenile at best and it appears that most developers don’t see that a wiki’s technology need not be extended far to absorb other concepts like a weblog.

I have seen content management systems which integrate wiki and weblog concepts, and I have seen weblogs which integrate wiki functionality. I have even seen beautiful hacks forcibly combining these various elements.

I fiddled around, and now it’s possible to weblog in MediaWiki by leveraging its templating.

Hmm, I’m not at all convinced that messing about with lots of templates for differently shaped months is sensible, and it’s pretty obvious to me as well as to others that purpose built software like Wordpress is far superior to clunky exploits in mediawiki BUT - I do have a current project in mind where I want to dump a load of messages from one author out of a COP mailing list and make it available on the Wiki, but looking somethig a bit like a blog and with the capacity to easily copy across and add in new entries from the COP to the Wiki. So some sort of blog-alike templating may well be in order here.

Meanwhile by backing out a level it transpires that Sy has some stories to tell including this :

Many years ago, I started out as a collector of texts. Then I began to write my own texts.

Before the internet was so pervasive, I used collections of textfiles. I learned about HTML and was not impressed.

At one point I developed my own website, and was frustrated at how difficult it was to keep a properly maintained site. All I wanted was to have a website be a synchronized copy of a directory on my hard drive. I would later find the tools to do just that, but it wasn’t enough.

Out on the internet, I saw all kinds of bulletin boards and forums, newsgroup and email solutions.. I hated all of it. What a stupid way to communicate and store information! I wrote lots and lots of notes describing better ways to do things, and eventually I found it.

When I first bumped into the wiki concept, it was very young. The wikis which I found were spectacular failures, and I cannot stress this enough.. failures, complete and thorough.. but the underlying technology had real hope.

I ignored wiki technology for a while, and looked at several content management packages. Back then, blogging was young and a lot of technology was coming to light because of the rising popularity in the web-diary concept. I still find it amusing at how common blogs are, at how wasted the effort is and still how common their reading is. Yes, blogs are a waste of effort. Blog items are categorizable, but not not re-editable into true resources. Oh but they are simple, and now the barrier that diaries are for little girls is one which we have run right past.

from http://jrandomhacker.info/CoWiki

Technorati Tags: , ,

Practitioners versus Academics January 2, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Action Research , add a comment

Rosanna pointed to three blog posts which all relate to the applicability of action research to CoPs

I’ve blogged about it from different perspectives:
http://gionnetto.blogspot.com/2005/07/theory-vs-practice.html
http://gionnetto.blogspot.com/2005/06/idealising-cops.html
http://gionnetto.blogspot.com/2005/07/in-cops.html

The overall theme seems to be to contrast practioners against academics, and then stand outside to see the limitiations of both perspectives, which must be a promising approach to take.

Technorati Tags: ,

SocialSoftwareWiki - Design Patterns of Social Computing January 1, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , comments closed

‘Pattern Language’ is a phrase which crops up on wikis including the original Ward Cunningham one, and Tom Smith’s ecommerce wiki can seem a bit intimidating to the uninitiated. Are these people deliberately using a strange jargon in order to be exclusive and sound more clever than they are perhaps? Specialised jargon often comes in for such criticism but then specialists do need to communicate on their own level sometimes, and jargon is created by specialists in order to communicate more efficiently amongst themsleves, which is crucial for progress and development. All of this is really just a convoluted introduction to a link to a section of the Social Software and Computing Wiki, which Linda pointed out to me because of the Distributed Research section and blog. The section I’m referring to here is called Design Patterns of Social Computing, and exlains the whole concept of pattern language rather well:

Design patterns attempt to describe common, recurring problems. Patterns capture the essence of the problem and illustrate best practices and good designs to tackle them. Pattern languages also provide a common vocabulary that practioners and researches can use to discuss and explore their field. Here we attempt to identify the common patterns of social software.

Explore a little further in and we find a quote from the architect Christopher Alexander:

Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

Technorati Tags: , ,