I’ve been posting to my blog far less frequently than ever before, in the entire history of this blog. Why is that? I’m still busy doing stuff. I’m still active in all the same places. The only shift lately is that I’ve also been much more active in social networking sites, specifically Twitter and Facebook.
Now, both Twitter and Facebook are essentially social networking systems. They are about forming and building connections between people, rather than publishing content. So, that shouldn’t have an impact on my posts here.
I didn’t think Calgary was ready for this, but apparently I was wrong. Thanks to an email from Sami, I see that the first ever BarCamp Calgary is scheduled to take place on May 26, 2007, at the University of Calgary main campus. This is a type of event I’ve REALLY wanted to have here in Calgary, and it’s great to see there are a whole bunch of people interested in making it happen. Looking at the list of Campers on the event page, I only recognize a couple of the names. Maybe the Calgary blogosphere is more robust than Ive been guessing?
Apparently Sitemeter, one of the services I use to track stats about visitors and activity here, recently started inserting cookies for an advertising company. These cookies are essentially spyware, used to track visitors across the internet by matching up that cookie on each site that is visited.
I’ve disabled Sitemeter, and won’t be going back. I’ve been very happy with them for the last few years, but sneaking spyware onto visitors is not cool. StatCounter has pledged to not do that, so I’ll be using them, alongside Google Analytics. (it could be argued that Google could be tracking visitors in a similar pattern of spyware cookies - not sure how I feel about that, but at least they’re relatively up front about it, being an online ad company. Sitemeter just silently changed the rules…)
I was asked a while back if I was interested in giving a presentation to the MacLearningEnvironments.org group. At first, my reaction was “sure, but what on earth would I talk about?” After some thought, an initial plan was to do an updated version of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined presentation I had the pleasure of doing way back in 2004 (with Brian and Alan). What would that have looked like if it was done in 2007? How would the changes in those long 3 years have affected things?
I’ve been using eXe for some project work lately, and thought it might be handy to do a quick and dirty screencast of what it’s like to author content using eXe. It’s an open source, cross platform website authoring tool that uses some of the same patterns that Pachyderm does - structured content with pedagogical templates. Except it generates plain vanilla html (and SCORM, and IMS CP, etc…)
The screencast is just over 19 minutes (sorry for going on so long) and weighs in as a 27MB file.
I’ve been forcing myself to keep thinking about (and rethinking) the concept of EduGlu - a set of tools and/or practices that would more effectively support distributed online publishing while maintaining the sense of group and community needed to make this stuff more meaningful in an educational context. I waver back and forth, between building The One True �berapp To Aggregate Them All, and a more freeform, organic, barebones directory.
You have a head for ideas - and you are good at improving systems. Logical and strategic, you prefer for everything in your life to be organized. You tend to be a bit skeptical. You're both critical of yourself and of others. Independent and stubborn, you tend to only befriend those who are a lot like you.
This morning, while riding toward campus on a nicely packed bus, with Arcade Fire cranked up and my notebook open in front of me, I had a thought about EduGlu. I was thinking about something completely unrelated, when it just popped into my head, crystal clear.
The solution to the problem of distributed, decentralized, heterogeneous online publishing tools used by students is not to build a monolithic überapp to aggregate them all. There is no One Ring to bind them all. If the problem is “how do faculty and students keep track of content published by people (students, each other, etc…) that they care about?”, the answer is “We already do that. With RSS and feedreeders.”
You’d never know it by looking out the window, but it feels like a whole bunch of changes are in the works this season. Personally, professionally, and more broadly. Some quick backstory - after co-unkeynoting at the BCEdOnline 2006 conference with Brian and Stephen, we wound up at a local pub to debrief and just hang out. It sounds corny, but that conversation became one of the cornerstones I keep coming back to when thinking about what I’m doing, and where I’m going. (oddly enough, Dave Matthews just came on my iPod with “Where are you going?” Man, how I love the uncanny psychic shuffle mode…)
I just read a post on the O’Reilly Digital Media Blog about a prolific photographer named Gary Winogrand. I hadn’t heard of him before, but the guy shot well over 300,000 photos during his career, all on film.
“You don’t learn anything from repeating what you know, in affect, so I keep trying to make (the process) uncertain. The nature of the photographic process - it is about failure. Most everything I do doesn’t quite make it. The failures can be intelligent; nothing ventured nothing gained. Hopefully you’re risking failing every time you make a frame.”
I just found out via a Twitter post that Kathy Sierra, the author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, which I read religiously, has been receiving a series of threats. Cyberbullying, even death threats. Threats of violence. To the point that she had to back out of presenting a session at the ETech conference, and is canceling all public engagements.
[ED - I removed a paragraph that could be perceived as inflammatory. I wasn’t trying to imply that any specific individual(s) made a death threat, only that some had been named in Kathy’s post.]
