What is on TV tonight February 28, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, UK , add a commentHow many times do you ask yourself - Is there anything on the telly? And no, the answer isn’t “a penguin”
Frankie Roberto has launched a “micro service” called “On TV tonight” which isn’t another listings site, it’s a highly individual review of one or two programmes - or none - which are on TV tonight, delivered by RSS at 4.00am each morning. Obviously it’s aimed at the UK only and you may be wondering “why should I take any notice of what this Roberto person thinks is worth watching?”
So all I can say is to try it. Don’t spend hardly any time on it, just subscribe to the RSS and let the daily post pop up in your reader along with everything else. Then after a week or two, see if it might just have been useful on occasion.
frankie roberto blog - Introducing… ‘on TV tonight’
On ‘Micropublishing’:
Another reason I’ve done this is as an experiment into a concept I’ve been thinking about which I’ve called ‘micropublishing’. The idea is to focus on publishing concentrated amounts of highly relevant content which fills a specific need of a time-poor audience. By being rich but small, the content can be aggregated and transferred across platforms to be consumed in any way that’s useful.
You may also be interrested in the page on Microformats.
Frankie himself told me :
I built a really lightweight website over the holidays, which I’m asking for feedback on. It’s basically a low-maintenance blog where I write short comments about what I think is worth watching on tv each night. If nothing’s on it will just say “nothing on tv tonight”. I can queue up entries in advance, and then it’s published each morning via RSS and on the site. My personal aim was to a) see if I can write valuable, well-written content on a regular basis and b) produce another small Ruby on Rails website.
The novelty of blogs is wearing off February 28, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : edublog , add a commentAccording to jill/txt, the novelty of blogs is wearing off…. in formal education:
this is in a course where the topic of the first half of the course is blogging, where they have to include two blog posts in their portfolios
Possibly formalising the informal a little too far there, but you can only work with what you are given…
Basically they just ignore it all. And they’re smart interested students. Who are bizarrely enough writing papers about blogging while saying they don’t really understand blogging. Because you’ve only posted three posts to your own blog, I tell them, tearing my hair out.
Some useful insights in the comments there as well.
Action Research to develop Wikiversity February 26, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, edublog, Action Research, Wiki , 1 comment so farMy friend Gordon just alerted me to an Action Research project to develop Wikiversity, which is pretty exciting for me being so close to my own research interests on the application of action research methodology in a distributed environment.
Developing Wikiversity through action research
This is a series of steps that correspond to an action research methodology for facilitating and assessing the development of Wikiversity.
What is Action_research according to Wikiversity:
Action research is essentially a collaborative activity in which people enter into a progressive cycle of reflecting in/on their own practice (or environment) and changing/improving this practice/environment.
What is Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a learning community
Who:
Anyone can participate.
One intended outcome of this project is a PhD thesis. (Comment from Cormaggio: I want to make this explicit from the beginning, however I don’t want to lay personal claim to the research process, as it is genuinely meant to be a fundamentally collaborative activity - see User:Cormaggio/My? research.)
Wiki Patterns February 24, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wikiwed, distributed research, Wiki , 3commentsVia Enterprise irregulars, Wikipatterns.com
This was quite an exciting discovery, a group of people trying to put together a pattern language about wiki adoption. This is quite similar in many ways to what I have been developing on the DARwiki’s wiki facilitation page, which gets referred to by some bloggers. Wikipatterns.com launches with a group of people already involved, so I’ll join them and see what I can contribute. My initial thoughts are slightly troubled by the idea that the patterns may be applicable in some contexts but not in others, in particular the difference between enterprise wikis and public ones. Can the two quite different endeavors be described within the same pattern language ? We shall see. There’s another paradox in using a wiki engine which appears to encourage thread-mode, which is listed there as one of the anti-patterns. But at least these kind of contradictions stand a better chance of being negotiated on a wiki than anywhere else.
Wiki Wednesday and Forest Friday February 19, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, wikiwed, folksonomy, online facilitation, Music, London , add a commentI’ve got two evening appointments to write about this week. London Wiki Wednesday is the first since last March, when I spoke about my online exhibition and barn raising.
It’s at 29/30 Fitzroy Square, in the shadow of the BT Tower - nearest tube Warren Street. The format for the evening is this: lots of speakers get 5 minutes each, a short time for networking and some food and wine. For my turn, I shall be talking about Wiki Facilitation, Taxonomy development from Folksonomy tagging and then introduce the concepts behind pajamanation.
Then on Friday I’m down on the list of performers for the monthly Forest Roots club in Forest Gate, East London.
I’ll probably sing my latest song, “The Wreckers Prayer” and one other. Not Gernika though, that would take up the entire slot by itself and is better saved for April.
The Art of Threading February 17, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : online facilitation, listservs , add a comment
On a listserv, mailing list or similar, have you ever been accused of hijacking somebody else’s thread and wondered what on earth they are talking about?
One possibility is a side effect of systems which bridge between email and web based forums. Yahoogroups and googlegroups are popular examples but not the only ones. People who use email to read groups will sometimes start a new thread in the same way that they might initiate a new conversation with an old contact - by finding the last message that person sent to them, hitting reply, deleting the old message and composing a new one complete with new subject header. That’s generally a good idea because it vastly reduces the chances of getting their email address wrong.
But if you do this with a threaded discussion list there’s a chance that somebody reading the group via the web interface will wonder why on earth you have suddenly started talking about a completely different subject in “their” thread.
( As an aside, I remember in the past such complainants being mocked for some time afterwards by being referred to as “Oh Threadmaster”, but that’s probably a different set of circumstances )
There’s a pertinent problem here of how best to deal with this potential conflict between two slightly different sets of users of the same discussion group - the email list users and the web forum readers.
This is how I decided to tackle it when a mild complaint was raised on one of the groups I facilitate:
I noted your comment about threads earlier, and it might be worth trying to clear up some possible misunderstandings about the way the
discussions are presented to people when we read this group.
I believe a lot of people, probably most and including myself are
reading the messages as they arrive in our email inboxes. In this
case, it all depends what kind of email reading software or webmail
sevice you are using, and how it is set up , as to how the topics and
messages are displayed. Many will simply sort by message subject or by
date. There is also the option of reading the group directly from the
archives at eg http://groups.google.com where it appears a bit like a
web forum. I’ve just looked and it is true that the new subjects can appear as
continuations of older topics where people have simply hit the reply
button in their email and then changed the subject.I’m not saying that we need to have any specific rules or even
guidelines necessarily about how to post or start new subjects, just
to try and be aware that other people may have a different experience
or view of the concept of what is a thread and where it starts.If you wanted to be sure of starting a new thread by email, compose a
new mail rather than a reply. Set the To: or recipient to
somegroup@yagoogroups.com ( you should be able to get that pasted in
from your address book ) and type in a new subject and message.If in doubt, it’s nearly always better to send in any information,
questions, ideas or opinions in any old way you can rather than not
bother.
Bernard Mathews food scare February 17, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Bird Flu, UK , 2commentsA local pub, The Golden Fleece has a new sign up behind the bar which reassures restaurant customers that no Bernard Mathews products are used in their kitchen.
Funny how a couple of weeks ago the giant turkey factory was being praised for its tight biosecurity, but now the facts are coming out and the damage limitation excercise is looking very shaky.
Incredibly, it now seems that the company had been importing turkey meat from nearby the bird flu outbreak in Hungary, and then leaving bits of it around in the open air, right next to the largest concentration of turkey rearing sheds in Europe.
TimesOnline
Matthews could be prosecuted over hygiene at bird flu factory
Bernard Matthews could face prosecution over sloppy biosecurity at the Holton factory in Suffolk where the avian flu virus infected turkey chicks and 160,000 birds had to be destroyed.
…
Problems with gulls feeding from open waste bins was first raised with Bernard Matthews management last year by its own firm of pest controllers. They had also identified holes and openings in rearing sheds that could easily allow a bird or a rodent to mix with chicks and for water or bird droppings to get into enclosed units.Meat Hygiene Service records also reveal that inspectors issued warnings about a range of “deficiencies and noncompliance”. Though not specified, they are also related to possible breaches of animal byproduct regulations.
Bernard Matthews was served another warning last month about problems on the site. Pest control reports on January 10 and January 24 noted that gulls were carrying meat scraps half a kilometre away and then roosting on the top of the farm sheds. Poly-thene bags containing meat products and residual liquids were also thrown into the open bins and were easily blown across the site. Birds or rats may also have infected wood shavings that are stored outdoors and used to refresh bedding inside the sheds.
Bernard Matthews loses sales | Telegraph
One of the biggest ongoing surveys of consumer confidence yesterday revealed that Bernard Matthews was now the least respected and trusted brand in Britain.
Whilst extending sympathy for the plight of portuguese TGWU members in East Anglia, it really couldn’t have happened to a nicer brand - Bernard Mathews - the people who created the market for feeding schoolchildren with disgusting cheap junk food in the shape of golden drummers, turkey dinosaurs, and twizzlers.
The same old lock February 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , 1 comment so far 
Flatbed scanner photography forums February 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, Flickr , 4comments
Posted by Vincent de Groot to the Scanned Objects Flickr goup forum yesterday, a link to his article on flatbed scanner photography.
The article is a good one, as an introduction to the concept of scanner photography, but it does become specific to one particular piece of scanner software, called VueScan. Also it makes no mention at all of the same Flickr group where over 1,600 examples of scanned objects can be browsed by tag, contributed by 417 members, founded on 1/1/2005. Instead there are 4 links to his own PHPbb forum, so I might have to sign up there and post a reciprocal advert, or not bother. I see this kind of promoting of other forums happening quite a bit on other groups as well so let me throw out the question:
Are established flickr groups, or any other forum with a substantial membership, considered fair game for trying to recruit members from? Would the use of the word “poaching” be too emotive a description for such activity?
Unanswered Question February 14, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research , 2commentsI attended some of the Online Connectivism Conference - OCC2007 last week, organised and facilitated by George Siemens. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to thow myself fully into it in the way I would normally approach something like this, which I consider to be important and worthwhile. The timing just didn’t work out so well for me, but I did manage to hear most of about three elluminate sessions with George himself, Will Richardson, Bill Kerr, and Stephen Downes speaking, missing two others entirely. I really should have kept a copy of the survey-monkey questionnaire I filled in afterwards, because I wrote some comments on the use of simultaneous text chat, with slideshow and audio presentation on that. Never mind - that’s something to try and remember in future.
Stephen Downes spoke in depth about what is known about the nature of networks, but I missed the beginning so I may go find the archive recording and listen again.
Bill Kerr stuck up for constructionism and Logo - so good for him.
George Siemens ran the show with great skill, keeping people informed of what was happening when, and encouraging a high standard of discussion.
There were constant chatterings going on in the text converation area, sometimes related to the presentation as it happened, and sometimes not. I was easily lured in to get involved with those, sometimes to the detriment of concentrating on the prepared content being delivered by the knowlegeable speakers, so I covered up that half of the screen on occasion in order to listen better.
At the end, it was decided to break the conference moodle space wide open so that it is now a publicly accessible web resource - no need to register to read - great move.
There’s a thread called “Biggest unanswered questions” and I’ve posted this one:
My biggest unanswered question is about the politics of connectivism. I’m not convinced that neutrality is an option, that the theory of connectvism merely describes a phenomenon that has been observed, that it explains a way in which learning happens. If we embrace the theory and refer to it in our own practice then we are helping to spread an idea, a perspective, which has implications and consequences.
I’d like to explore what those implications and consequences might be.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
