I had the chance to work on a presentation for the K12 Online 2007 conference. Alan, Brian and I started by thinking of doing an updated “Small Pieces” piece, and we wound up creating a 53 minute video presentation touching on 9 trends in successful online tools, and how they might be used effectively.
The trends are, in no real order:
embed
connect
socialize
collaborate
share
remix
filter
liberate
disrupt
Here’s the presentation, hosted in chunky Google Video transcoded format. There are links to higher (and lower) res versions on the K12 conference page for the presentation.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but haven’t taken the time to put it into words. Most recently, a post by Jennifer Jones nicely sums up why Twitter is important, and I think it goes even further than that.
Twitter is important because it makes many of the intangible human connections more readily available to people who are separated by distance. I often feel more closely integrated with the people on my Twitter stream than I do with people who work in my department. Why is that? I see those people every day. But - the people on Twitter are constantly reinforcing my connection with them, and vice versa, through the unceasing flow of status updates.
It’s still not officially released, and I’m still in the early stages of putting together a funding proposal to turn it into a supported service, but if you’re willing to live life on the edge and risk a little beta goodness, UCalgaryBlogs.ca is kinda on the air.
All you need is a valid @ucalgary.ca email address, and you’re off and running. You can create as many blogs as you like, and can select from a bajillion available themes.
When I upgraded to 2.3, I left my 500+ categories in place. I used categories as tags, so didn’t see the need to convert them over to the native tag format. I’ve thought about it some more, and just bit the bullet. All of my categories have been converted over to tags (I think), and now I’ll use categories and tags in slightly different ways.
Categories will be used to define the “type” of post - work, personal, fun, etc…
We’ve been using Moodle to build a bunch of courses for our local health region, and it’s been technically working pretty well. Some of the feedback we’ve received about the UI has been less than stellar. For geeks and techies, it’s not too bad, but non-technical students get lost easily. Much of the complexity can be managed, but I’ve been struggling with how to simplify the intra-course navigation system.
By default, Moodle gives a previous/JumpTo…/next widget at the top of the page while viewing course content.
Lots of great stuff. This set of faves covers the last couple of weeks or so. I wish Anne Archambault was publishing to Flickr, since she’s done some awesome work lately.
I’m not going to write up a summary or wrap-up of the conference. Others havedone that better, and faster, than I. But I do just want to throw some thoughts out there on my Open Ed experience.
First, it was an amazing conference. There aren’t many events that bring together such a vastly diverse group of people - from widely different technical, cultural, geographical and economic backgrounds. Many of the conferences I have been to have felt largely homogeneous. A strong feeling of “sameness” that, while comforting on one level, is diametrically opposed to the real value of these conferences. What a conference can add, above a similarly structured online event, is the serendipitous exposure to people, ideas, philosophies, strategies, and techniques that one wouldn’t ordinarily be associated with. A cosmopolitan conference adds so much more value than one that is simply bringing together like-minded individuals. The irony is, this small conference in rural Utah felt more cosmopolitan than some large conferences I’ve attended in major urban centres.
Our Out of Print session went off pretty well (I think) this morning. Jim worked his usual Bavamagic, weaving early American history, WordPress, wikis, and student conversations into a pretty cool demo. Then, I showed some of the OpenContentDIY resource site, and rambled unexplicably for about 25 minutes. From what I remember, I either sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown, or somehow managed to touch on empowerment of students, open content and reuse as a moral imperative, communities (both in content and open source).
David suggested in his opening comments yesterday that “content is infrastructure.” He was (I think) meaning to imply that content is an enabling platform, and that if a robust library of open content is available, that individuals and groups will be able to build new things from that library. Things that can’t be predicted by the librarians and publishers. Things that are evolutionary and revolutionary. I completely agree that having freely available and reusable content is an extremely important factor in promoting education and community programs, especially in regions without the resources to build all content from scratch.
The Edtech krëw just wrapped up an epic day of travel to make the pilgrimage to Logan, Utah for the Open Education 2007 conference. So far, Utah’s been interesting. The people are all very nice, and the scenery is great. Unfortunately, most of the scenery we had the chance to actually spend time enjoying was the inside of SLC, and the almost-dark-moonlit-mountains on the drive north to Logan. The Good Reverend was decidedly quiet, and Scott was gracious enough to drag our freeloading carcasses along in his gigantor rented van. I tried to talk him into renting a Hummer, but nooooo, he got all “dude, that’s just wrong” on me. Whatever, dude. What’s the environment ever done for me? Let’s ride in STYLE! Yeah. Whatever. He didn’t go for it either.
Seems to have worked, so far. The “Similar Posts” plugin borked, so I had to disable that. Everything else Just Seems To Work™.
So, what’s the difference between Categories and Tags now? I used to use Categories as tags. Are they both interfaces to the same table in the database? One way to find out…
Update: oh. they’re separate things. well, that’s silly. so, now all of my old /tag/tagname links that used to point to category pages now point to empty “tag” pages because none of my posts have actual tags. That’ll be fun to clean up…
I’m preparing a series of screencasts as part of the session at the Open Education 2007 Conference (with my co-conspirator, Rev. Jim Groom). We’re doing a two-fold presentation.
Creation of an open education resource on early American history.
Documentation of the processes used to build said resource, using freely available applications and services.
We gave ourselves a very simple constraint. Use only tools that don’t require access to a server, and don’t require any money. The idea being that we would be able to come up with a process that didn’t require a great deal of technical skillz, and wouldn’t require a budget to implement.
David suggested in his opening comments yesterday that “content is infrastructure.” He was (I think) meaning to imply that content is an enabling platform, and that if a robust library of open content is available, that individuals and groups will be able to build new things from that library. Things that can’t be predicted by the librarians and publishers. Things that are evolutionary and revolutionary. I completely agree that having freely available and reusable content is an extremely important factor in promoting education and community programs, especially in regions without the resources to build all content from scratch.