All posts in Social Learning

LiveBlog of Matt Mullenweg Keynote -- Northern Voice

Posted February 23rd, 2008 by Bill

LiveBlog of Matt Mullenweg's Keynote --

Streamed at http://ustream.tv/channel/nv08 (at least some of it)

Note: This liveblog is rough -- just notes, no editing

Beginning blog platforms --
Open Diary -- 1998
LiveJournal -- 1999

5 years ago -- based on B2

Over 7 million downloads

MM on what Bloggers want -- "Bloggers hierarchy of needs"

1. Expression
The most important tab on the WP blog is the Presentation tab -- allows people to change the theme

A lot of successful web 2.0 companies are successful because they protect users from spam communication

Incremental Changes

Posted February 18th, 2008 by Bill

From my comment on Gardner Campbell's blog:

Hello, Gardner,

As a few people have already pointed out, these are incremental moves -- Open Content has been around for a while, as have blog-based classes. I think most of us are in agreement that, in general terms, these are Good Things, and that these shifts are improvements over expensive textbooks and cumbersome, expensive, proprietary LMS's.

The incremental shifts, however, become more meaningful when considered together.

Pulling content from a closed repository isn't all that big a deal -- we've had rss for a while. But, putting high quality content into a container where it can be readily remixed and reused is an incremental step in the right direction.

OER's: Publishing is the Easy Part; Now, Let's Make Them More Usable

Posted February 17th, 2008 by Bill

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I've been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php

RSS Redux

Posted February 8th, 2008 by Bill

9:30 -- Re-read Brian Lamb's blog post.

9:33 -- Poked around Stephen Downes' site, reading over some of the documentation on Edu_Rss. Really, I'm hoping to find an OPML file. Bingo.

9:40 -- Create a database on educon20.org.

9:42 -- Go to Drupal.org -- grap a copy of the 5.7 codebase, and the following modules: FeedAPI, FeedElement Mapper, Views, Views Bonus, Tagadelic, and CCK. At a later point, if nothing blows up, I'll probably add in Similar Content.

Interesting Happenings at BYU

Posted February 2nd, 2008 by Bill

I saw this earlier today over at groups.drupal.org --

Kyle Matthews and Clint Rogers built a Drupal site in suppport of a web analytics class. The site aggregates student blogs and expert blogs; this way, everyone blogs from their chosen blogging platform, and their feed gets imported into the course site. In other words, people use whatever blogging tool they are currently using, and the software running the course (in this case, Drupal) adapts to the participant. This is a nice contrast to the usual approach, where all participants must adapt to the structure required by the LMS.

Hiring Questions

Posted January 7th, 2008 by Bill

Over at the Thinking Stick, Jeff Utecht has posted a series of questions and answers related to the hiring process.

At the outset, Jeff states:

You will notice that my list says absolutely nothing about integrating technology or how the teacher uses technology in his/her classroom. No, this list focuses directly on the skill set and the tools these teachers use for their own learning.

My immediate question, of course, is: why? But we'll get to this in more detail later.

The hiring process has always fascinated me, as it is a frequently overlooked element of maintaining the strength and vitality of an organization. I thought I knew something about hiring until, a few years back, I had the good fortune to be hired by -- and work for -- Trish King. Trish has since gone on to become the head of The Island School, and if you're reading this you know what happened to me, but much of what I describe in this post is influenced by what I learned from Trish. My experience working with her helped me become aware of the potential to have the hiring process accomplish more than just hiring great people. Hiring is an opportunity for a school to refine and revisit its priorities; thus, the hiring process, if done well, can serve as a reality check for how well a school is accomplishing its mission.

Thoughts on Sharing Lessons

Posted December 17th, 2007 by Bill

I'm writing these ideas out quickly -- there are sure to be holes in this, and gaps in this reasoning -- please point them out in the comments.

For some context on this post, see these two threads on Dan Meyer's blog.

Users working with online lessons will generally fall into at least one of the following categories:

People searching for lesson ideas (probably the majority)
People already creating content on their own blogs (a growing number of folks, but still a very small percentage, compared to people in category 1, or even teacher-bloggers)

Yeah. Schools Really Need To Ban Cell Phones

Posted December 8th, 2007 by Bill

In an article from the Sydney Morning Herald (which I found via, of all places, Techcrunch), "half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed ... on the tiny handset of a mobile phone."

Yes, you read that correctly. Novels written on cell phones.

As noted in the article, the cell phone tales often lack complex scene and character development.

Students 2.0

Posted December 7th, 2007 by Bill

Coming soon to a tube near you:

I'm looking forward to seeing what develops on this blog. From their site:

Administered, designed, edited, and written by a global mix of students of varying ages, interests, voices, and points of view, Students 2.0 will feature content written by both staff writers and guest contributors. From Hawaii and Washington, from St. Louis and Chicago, from Vermont, New York, Scotland, Korea, and other points on the globe, these writings will be united in one central aspect: quality student writing, full-voiced and engaging, about education.

Getting Social in Vegas -- CASE Conference

Posted December 4th, 2007 by Bill

I presented earlier today at the Case District VII and VIII conference in Las Vegas. One of the things that struck me as I was getting my notes together for this talk is how using the current/upcoming tools require that organizations staff themselves differently. For example, you can't really write an OpenSocial app without coding skills, and while programmers are easy to hire, writing a good app requires a connection between spotting a need and writing code that addresses it. One of the other differences between where we are now and where we were as recently as a year ago is that people are beginning to understand the value of leveraging their existing community, as opposed to building everything new from scratch. Perhaps online forays, like Kaplan's into MySpace, have been a suitable object lesson in how not to use the social web.