4 AM Football

I’m going to have to get used to these 4AM starts over the next month… currently H/T in Arsenal vs. Barca with the gunners one goal up and one man down. Come. On.

52 Mins: Ridiculously tense… Henry just picked up an entirely unwarranted yellow.

56 mins: Ronaldinho not smiling much at the mo… I have this sinking feeling about van Bronckhorst for some reason though, looks like he’s got a vendetta thing going on with some of the older Arsenal players. Still in there but.

62 mins: Almunia is having a corker. Larsson comes on.

70 mins: Ljungberg, Henry and Hleb are causing plenty of problems hassling Barca up the pitch, Eboue is having a pretty heroic game too. Am I coming across as at all one-sided ;) Am wondering if / when they’ll use Bergkamp… I wouldn’t unless they concede.

75 mins: But then I’m just some jumped up blogger :) Cole turns well with Ronaldinho, Deco seems ridiculously cool (he’s another one I reckon that’s got a jinx on).

76 mins: Goal – Eto’o bugger

81 mins: Goal – Belletti bugger x2

86 mins: Yeh, Arsenal have had it… Reyes for Hleb isn’t going to make any difference. Having said that it’s a deserved victory for Barca, they should have had a goal in the first half and have applied more than enough pressure to deserve a coupe of goals… yeh, it could have been different if Henry had finished a couple of chances, but there you go.

Counting down (or up) – guess the 10,000th edublogs.org blog creation time and get a free domain and hosting :)

It’s a big week at the edublogs.org mansion as we’re currently at 9,854 edublogs…

Here’s a mini technorati competition, heh, if you can predict the closest time and date – GMT +11 – that the 10,000th edublogs.org blog is created then I’ll buy you a free domain, and chuck in some hosting too… all you have to do is to post to your blog the time you guess at, link to this post, and I’ll furnish you with the domain of your choice and hosting for a year.

And if you don’t already have a blog then… get an edublog :D

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Snarky, moi?

webby awardsObviously edublogs.org is waaaay below the standard of something like The Webbys but at the same time there are plenty of sites and tools which, from an educational perspective, are certainly not (for example, elgg springs to mind)… and it seems a great shame that a peak awards body like The Webbys- and lets face it, with debatable tangible results awards matter a great deal in education – should be so utterly content obsessed as to include almost nothing but ‘material’, ‘spark’ and ‘resource’ sites in this years offering.

It’s like when it comes to these things real learning flys out the window to be replaced by flash / worksheet based paraphernalia. The Barbicans Can I have a word? site is a classic example, great snazzy resources and worksheets – woohoo. The NASA site doesn’t, thankfully, use Flash but might as well for the amount of stuff on it – sigh. BioEd is at least targeted at teachers (more of that needs to happen) but it’s level of authentic engagement is limited to a bloody poll on the front page – sheesh. And the library of congress – well – it’s a library site… deserving of a separate category in my view.

The one standout, almost, is Teenwire which allows kids to discuss, share stories and ask questions related to sexuality and relationships… but needless to say that didn’t win the judges or the peoples voice awards, and more to the point, while it’s a great individual project (and should be recognised as such) it ‘aint gonna change the way we teach and learn through this medium to any significant degree – which, IMO, should be a clear category in an area which needs a lot of change.

Now I’m not saying there’s no need for these sites as resources, worksheets and more are very very important, especially in a K-12 environment, but I am saying that I think elearning 2.0 is starting to recognise that the most important aspect of learning is authentic communication and interaction, it’s social didn’t you know. How long it’ll take ‘the establishment’ to catch up with this (if it ever will) I don’t know, but in the meantime you know where not to look for sites and tools that are progressing teaching and learning online beyond the multi-million $ production models.

An Almighty Bloglines Server Stuff Up

bloglinesAm feeling like seriously eating my words about centralised RSS aggregation systems as Bloglines has just decided not to accept feeds from any site hosted on my servers… seriously, doesn’t matter whether you’re on WPMU or WP or the URL… it just isn’t updating anything at all!!!

Have no idea why either, no updates or upgrades have been made at my end whatsoever… it’s like being IP banned or something, very very odd :( Have pinged them with some very concerned support requests but it says they will take up to two days to get to them… so am hoping that someone out there – who isn’t reading this by bloglines – might be able to hurry stuff up, get things going… we’re talking of tens of thousands of blogs across all the sites and it needs fixing now!

Update: Sigh, the tech team thought bloglines was some sort of spambot and blocked it… all back to normal now… v impressed at the response time from Bloglines though, a comment by a Bloglines engineer within 3 hours of this post – I’m back in love again :)

Keep your OPML

opmlI have a web 2.0 sin to admit to, I just don’t get OPML.

Sure, there are cool things you can do with it – importing / exporting reading lists and the other capacities Steve Rubel mentions including seeing who subscribes to what on a group level. Heck, back in March 2004 I spent a fair bit of time getting excited about possible applications in libraries!

What I didn’t get then though (heady days of netopianism) was that it was (and is), IMO, fundamentally flawed logic. People don’t really do anything, let alone share, unless they’ve got a very good reason for doing it. Sure you might help out the community, sure you might be able to serendipitously find loadsa cool blogs, sure it’s another kind of glue that binds us (hypertext and undertext anyone?)… but why the heck would I bother? Answer: Not many people did, nice experiment, things moved on.

But now of course a very high percentage of people are using web based aggregators and with the online desktop on the tip of everything I’d be pretty comfortable in suggesting that within 10 years 99%+ of aggregation will be something that we technically do ‘online’. This means we won’t have to ‘share’ any more, we’ll just have to do our thing and the system will share and compare and do all those funky things for us, which is great.

But what do you need to happen for this to become a reality in the first place and what will you get out of it in the end if it does? Well, I – for one – am not entirely convinced that we’re gonna see MSN, Yahoo, Ask, Google etc. etc. saying ‘For sure Dave, we’ve got all this great data (which naturally we all agree on standards for) and we’re just itching to share it with everyone else’, and then (I imagine) there would have to be someone who hosts / runs this great feed-house, and get something reasonable out of it – like Automatic with Akismet – you can have a go at wiping out comment spam because there’s a great business model there… but with OPML?

I mean there’d be some great data on who’s most read – but haven’t we got fairly good ways of estimating or showing that already? And you’d be able to see who reads the same kind of stuff to you – perhaps some value in a Uni department but across the web… hmmm – and there’d be another way of looking at a very particular number of blog stats… but where’s the killer attention ap here?

Maybe it’s just me but I can’t seem to see it.

England at World Cup 2006

world cup 2006 imageWell this is probably only of interest to about 1 reader (hi Peter!) of incorporated subversion and certainly somewhat, um, off-topic but what the heck.

For those of you still wondering what an offside rule is here’s the run down. England, the country that arguably invented the modern game, has had a pretty awful experience of doing well in on at the highest stage. There was 1966… but that was at home and, as I’m sure many Germans might argue, largely down to a Wembleytor (search for it here)… but apart form that, a painful exit in 1990 at the semi finals – ahh Waddle and the post – has been as good as it has got. In 2002, for example, we limped out weakly in the quarters despite going a goal up and playing half of the game with an extra man.

So, come 2006 and our surprisingly early qualification (we usually leave it to the last game, away to Italy or something equally awful), expectations have (as always) been seriously and unsubstantiatedly high – mine included – especially given boy wonder Wayne Rooney’s international and domestic form – until the inevitable, and horrible, happened last week. Which puts us in an interesting situation… usually so hopelessly optimistic there’s a feeling of gloom and doom – even a kind of avoidance of the subject – given that all we now have to rely on is a bunch of pretty ordinary players, none of whom are particularly good at providing that brilliance required to win the big games and pretty much all of whom have performed so averagely at significant stages of previous tournaments.

Which, surprisingly (or perhaps less so given ridiculous optimism previously mentioned) gives me a strange sense of hope regarding this time round.. you see, going into 2002 we had the miracle of Beckham and the maturing Owen and everyone got excited, the same went for 2004 with Rooney coming through (until he didn’t) and, to be honest, I’m kinda getting the feeling that I’d prefer ‘steady-sure’ to ‘one man reliance’ and ‘underdogs’ to ‘potential winners’. Think Germany 2002 and you’ll see where I’m coming from.

Basically Robinson is a very solid keeper (no more Seaman to worry about – yes, we had a goalkeeper called Seaman, whatofit!) Ashley Cole, Neville, Ferdinand and Terry are great defenders with plenty of experience and Campbell to cover. Beckham, Lampard, Gerrard and Joe Cole are all pretty accomplished midfielders, all with good medals under there belts and are pretty much aligned in terms of position, although admittedly less so in terms of gelling and Owen, providing he’s fit, is a guaranteed 0.5 goalscorer.

What I reckon Rooney missing gives us is an opportunity to do two things. First up there’s the potential there for a Schillachi-esque performance from Crouch or Bent or Defoe (I’m not that hopeful though) but more to the point there’s that underdog aspect added to (if he can make it) that ‘get Wayne to the final’ dream… and to be honest, I’d rather they crash out trying bloody hard against a better team than capitulate weakly to the first decent side they meet, although under Sven I’m less than sure of that… roll on Portugal in the quarters I reckon, even our Swede will be able to get fired up for that one ;)

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Hey Bloggers!

Finally, a decent blog satire ;)

Unedited! Raw! Straight from my mind to yours! Blog On!

Hi there! And welcome one and all to my brand-new blog! Isn’t it great? How do you like it so far? Is this cool, or what? You bet!!!

The first thing I should do is come up with a really coolsounding name for my blog. Can you think of any? I was thinking of Blogsworld or Blogospace or Blogsmire, something with blog in it. Or Hunk O’Blog. Ha ha! I love that last one!!! If you’ve got any suggestions, post them to me. I’d love to hear them…

I think a few more emoticons, chunky paragraphs and …s could’ve improved it. The odd w00t might have gone down nicely too.