The Edublog Awards 2005!!!

Josie has been kind enough to take over the edublog awards this year and has gone into overdrive with the nominations, these are the categories:

* Most innovative edublogging project, service or programme
* Best newcomer
* Most influential post, resource or presentation
* Best designed/most beautiful edublog
* Best library/librarian blog
* Best teacher blog
* Best audio and/or visual blog
* Best example/ case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning
* Best group blog
* Best individual blog

There will also be a Best of the Best award, which will be open to all winners of the 2005 Edublog Award Categories.

What I love about this so far is that Josie is taking a completely different tack to me… nominations are not to be public this year so you’ve got to email them to 2005awards@googlemail.com
… so get cracking, you’ve not got long.

That is, unless, you’re not an edublogger in which case you can’t nominate (which is interesting!)… need I mention that of course, if you want to be an edublogger… just step on over to edublogs.org and you can become one in less than a minute :)

So, go on, get nominating… and if you can post about it then that’d be v. cool too, the more people we get nominating the more representative the results will be! This is the link to the 2005 category.

Developing Online Communities the Centred Way

All communities start with individuals. The individual is the core constituent and what everything revolves around (this is kinda what I tried to say in centred communication).

However, we frequently ignore this and IMO the number one problem that we have in designing and developing online communities is that we tend to try to develop communities around things other than people. Yes, communities must have an ‘object’ at the centre of them, a common area, but the people are more important. Think about yourself for example, you’ll have a vast array of interests, likes, hobbies etc. etc. but you would *never* end up being in a community for each and every one of those things… you might meet people in an ad hoc way who share similar interests, you might form friendships and develop communities around them but that’s far more likely *not* to happen.

So, when we try to develop a community round this and a community round that in our online environments we’re trying to do something artificial, yes people should be able to establish their own communities but through independent (and, dare I say subversive ;) means rather than automated action (i.e. “I like beer” – ping you’re in the beer community – not good). Successful communities need energy, participation and commitment… so if you have a lot of automatically generated communities without much fire in them then you start to get the broken window thing rolling.

So what I’m getting at in a very convoluted way is that ‘designed’ communities need to be focused, energized and purposeful. In the educational context there are many great examples of successful community ‘themes’ around, for example, research, discipline, faculty, politics etc. We shouldn’t over look these. Also, the communities we create need to be focused around individuals rather than separate from them.

I think that while intelligent aggregation to central areas through tools like tags has its purposes, far more valid is the capacity for ‘participation’ through blogs with these functioning as the absolute core representation of a person rather than just another application or resource.

From a users perspective I’d see people having a posting area / dashboard (similar to WP) where they are able to select (and suggest… once 5 people have suggested then it gets put up) global categories that they are then added too as a member and are able to post to by their blog. They are also able to visit that categories ‘aggregation’ page by clicking on the category name and grab a general category ‘feed’. Different social software tools operate using the same global categories database and are linked into the blogging backend. Stuff like Technorati etc. is just aggregated in.

The point is that the individual is always at the centre of the experience, nothing more is needed than to log in to his or her blog – which will hopefully also have an aggregator… that’s something Winer has always been spot on with – and then participate in (as an individual) or travel from there too the communities. The WP dashboard even has a real capacity for becoming a display of different communities within the blogging tool.

I had a great thought as I was going to sleep last night about how I was going to start the next presentation I’ve got coming up at ASCILITE… it’s going to be a few slides on how life exists at the bottom of oceans, under intense radioactivity, even, perhaps, on comets and in volcanoes. And community can exist in discussion boards, learning management systems, wikis and other third party abstract environments too.

Learning the hosting ropes!

Well, I’ve had a fun weekend, um, not.

What with the growth of edublogs.org and the funny bandwidth deals going on here I figured I had to do something about it and after a bit of research came upon Surpass hosting. Four days later of trying trying trying to get some simple accounts transferred, bugger all customer service (waiting hours and hours) and them getting arsey with me when I dared complain (apparently I was opening too many tickets.. eh?) I was kinda ready to find out (from various sources) that they’re absolutely awful.

But in the end that hasn’t mattered as the great folks (well, folk.. it’s kinda homely and nice there) at pSek.com (who I’ve been with happily ever since starting out down this road… not the biggest space / bandwidth but the BEST support and response times and supporting newbies going down this path) have cut me some slack so I’m feeling a lot more chilled and all yer blogs are in good hands :)

No referral involved BTW, pSek are just a really worthwhile provider.

Gonzo Academia

“In Gonzo Academia there is no room for format. No space for formula. No writing to any guidelines. You basically have to consume whatever information you need as fast as you can before stuffing yourself into a pressure cooker and hoping some form of genius to percolate onto the page.” [The adventures of the 14 day Thesis]

Put that in your academic blogging pipe ;)

How is blogging going to influence my academic career?

It’s a good question, and one I find myself asking a fair bit these days… and in that vein via Brian this article is well worth a read.

It goes over the old ground of non-seriousness, subversive tendencies and that awful article from the chronicle about how bloggers need not apply and then says:

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university’s ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called “The Conversation of Mankind”—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture.

Which naturally I agree with more :)

Before going on to something that Adrian Miles has talked a lot about:

So, how might a blog be peer-reviewed?… One can imagine a rating system in which visitors to a blog evaluate what they read and leave feedback—the significance of which is weighted according to what kind of reputation and background they have. A physicist’s views would carry more heft on a physicist’s blog than on a sociologist’s (and vice versa). Someone who has a reputation for leaving serious, informative comments will be ranked higher than the Web surfer who just glances at a few lines before jetting off to the next site.

Now I guess i don’t need to say why that wouldn’t work (if you do need an explanation just ask a digital native about it and watch their brow crinkle ;) but I think there are ways, Adrian has some great ideas.

Anyway, it begs the question… what impact might this have on, for example, my future job prospects. I doubt if there’s a whole heap of Profs out there reading this but would my blogging deter you from hiring me? Or would it be a bonus… or would it not matter at all.

It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it, to know that someone could get a damn good profile off you without much legwork… that in fact I’m forever in the process of constructing that profile for them, never really thought about it much.

Except for one thing… if they didn’t want be because of my blog(s) then begorrah I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near them either… so that’s OK I reckon :D

Bandwidth solution & Things you should NEVER do in Elluminate Live!

Well, the solution to bandwidth problems is fairly simple… I’m moving to a host that’ll give me a lot more!

Bear with me though, especially if you’re an edu, uni or learner blogs user… to compensate all you guys I’ll be adding 50% more storage to your file upload space!

And you’re not going to believe what just happened… have just been live in this learningtimes event, featuring Curtis Bonk, and Fang logged in… he said “Hi” I [privately] said “Hi” back and then added that I thought that the session was a bit ‘wishy’… which it was from where I was sitting… too much generalisable stuff with fairly generic stats and the whole ‘blended’ learning thing (in my book we’ve ALWAYS been blended learners so I don’t hold a lot of stock in the word).

Now I did this all privately… just to him… so when Prof. Bonk remarked “Oh, James thinks this is a bit wishy…” I was a little bit surprised… checked with an Elluminate user here and found that generally admin can see all the private messages…. WHAT THE F*#$ ???… ooooooo, I hate these admin driven systems, what a crap crap environment and there’s NOTHING there that tells you about this. Bastards.

Anyway, you should try to pop over and enjoy any one of the great list of speakers at this webheads conference “Bridges across cyberspace”, it’s running for the next few days. Just, um, be careful about what you say!!!

The gravatar is dead, long live the gravatar!

Well that was a short lived experiment.

The research, ahem, would suggest that unless you’re a certified geek you generally don’t seem to have a gravatar and the odds are that you’re not going to bother either.

I kinda suspected this would be the case, reckon that it’s tied into the whole digital identity stuff, we’re still a generation away from systems and approaches that’ll make this kind of thing work well.

The adventures of the 14 day Thesis

Someone who is obviously completely off their rocker but doing it in a damn stylish manner has set up a blog at uniblogs.org entitled: “The adventures of the 14 day Thesis”. The premise being that they’re going to write a thesis in, um, 14 days.

Well, it’s almost time but to be frank I don’t want it to be over (or perhaps for the, um, title to change a little), a sample:

“My legs are cramped, my ankles swollen. I feel like an overweight and pregnant Bovine Creature stuck herded up behind this iridescent screen all day.

My skin is pale and my nose bright red, itching and running from the constant irritation of pollens, dust and cheap perfume that is recycled by this air-conditioned in this climate controlled hell hole.

All around me people are in the throws of celebration as I type myself into a hunchbacked frenzy. The university is silent every night when I leave the library except for the feint sounds of celebration that echo somewhere beyond the horizon of my vision and mock me from the darkness….”

Excellent.

subverted links