Will Quits – Yay!

Enormous congratulations to Will who has taken the plunge, put his money where his mouth is, leapt from the parapet and done what I think many of us would like to do.

What’s that I hear you say, “Oi!” perhaps :)

Seriously though… a significant day for edublogging and one which bodes well all over.

Quite emotional really…

The other day I set up sitewide feeds for edublogs.org [feed], learnerblogs.org [feed] and uniblogs.org [feed] partly out of interest, partly as a splog-swatting measure and partly so I could use feed2js to produce a page like this.

But to be honest, c.15 hours later checking out the edublogs.org feed and finding 176 posts… a heck of a lot of which are *up there* in terms of interest / quality / value makes me get all dewy eyed! Tame huh :) This week has been an absolute stormer on the WPMU front so far… long may it continue!

A lot can happen in a year (or three)

I’m usually terrible with dates / anniversaries and so figure that it’s probably best to do two at once… one that I’ve already missed and one that I’ll probably miss too.

First up I missed that just over a year ago (on January 18th 05 to be precise) I installed my first working version of WPMU and got rather excited about it. Who’d have thunk it eh! I still owe Donncha that beer :)

Second up the 27th of this month will see my 3rd year since my first (real) post … still seriously youthful in this big ‘ol blogging world but thinking about the changes in my life, in every way, since that time really drums home the kind of amazing things that can happen in such a short space of time.

Having said that I’m still prattling on about the same stuff that I was 3 years ago :D

Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours…

Anyone who grew up in the UK (never mind Australia) would be familiar with the show Neighbours and the laid back, friendly suburban life that it portrays, here in good old Melbourne.

Funny that, however, when I went to talk to one of our neighbours for the first time today (well the second, he’d told me to move my car once before, but that wasn’t really ‘talk’ per se) to ask about a strip of land behind our house that he might consider selling the conversation concluded with him, saying, and I quote:

F**k off you Pommie bast**d

Rough equivalent of “go away you immigrant”.

Nice :)

The upside is that I’ve just managed to finish installing an upgrade to edublogs.org in order to forget about it. Tralala.

WebCT Attempts to Outdo BlackBoard on Blogging System!

This just in :)

Today Mark Hallam from WebCT spoke at the Annual Teaching & Learning Forum held at the University of Western Australia. Mark previewed a number of WebCT’s next steps including ePortfolio tools and blogs. However, on close questioning, Mark admitted that WebCT’s blogs aren’t really blogs at all because…

1. They are locked behind WebCT’s password protection.
2. They cannot be made publicly visible (there is a complex workaround whereby students could copy there WebCT-blog entries to their ePortfolio and then allow anonymous access via a guest password, but WebCT cannot bypass the password stage).
3. Comments can only be made by internal WebCT users using the same installation of WebCT.
4. The “blogs” don’t have RSS feeds.

Mark actually admitted that blogs are already doing everything that bloggers want, and that WebCT was not providing a blogging tool, but rather a tool which usurped the name for something “blog-like” because that’s what many universities are asking for….< []

Ah, and so it begins…………………….