Game so far by the Age… wish I was in Fed square! Hasn’t happened in my life time but if they can add another or make it to penalties Australia could be on the way to the World Cup… come on!

Gah, 1-0 at FT… Kewell should have scored, plenty of other opportunities but the sub they brought on for Recoba looks pretty dangerous.

Extra-time, fret etc.

Half-time in extra-time, Uruguay have been on top, trying to punt everything to a damn tricky winger they’ve just brought on. The ref is blowing for absolutely anything. Kewell is actually giving something which is amazing. It’s seriously tense stuff.

Ohhhhhhh lucky to be here too, Morales should have got 2 … penalties. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeessssss!

Australia in the World Cup!!!! 31 years waiting!!! This one’s for you Johnny Warren.

England vs. Australia in the final please!

A couple of very interesting articles that I haven’t had time to really get into yet but which I think, from first glance, might prove valuable to consider for anyone who’s thinking about social networking and communities:

Community Networking and Public Benefits

In general, healthy networks seem to result in improved community welfare i.e., they are characteristic of public benefits. The converse is true of unhealthy networks. This paper explores if healthy networks are where limited government funding should be focused in order to get the greatest social payback, or if these funds should be spent helping to improve the strength of less healthy networks and communities, in order to improve the well-being of the country as a whole. It will do so by examining if community networks, both virtual and place-based, create public benefits on both the macro and micro levels.

Free internet as an agent of community transformation

Does the internet empower communities or perpetuate the status quo? Can universal internet access resolve education, employment, and other social gaps? We report on our longitudinal assessment of low income community access to free internet in New Zealand, in terms of new internet users’ (1) community belonging, (2) internet connectedness, and (3) civic engagement. Findings show internet connectedness may have only a minimal impact on community capacity due to constraints such as family transience, difficult domestic circumstances, inadequate project resourcing, and poor literacy. Internet ubiquity may not be a strategically useful social objective unless contextual limitations are recognised and addressed.

This is a great find from someone who’s also getting stuck into edublogs.org and learnerblogs.org.

Fundamentally TILT TV is a broadcast (or vidcast) of funky tools and teachers doing cool stuff with technology (sort of like edugadget just with moving pictures)

From the site:

The vidcast that is created by teachers for teachers. Do you have a great idea, learning resource, skill, advice, or experience you feel could help other teachers using technology to enhance their students’ learning experiences? Send your text, photo, audio recording, video recording, link, or any other medium you’d like and it will become a part of a future TILT broadcast!

Tres cool!

Alan totally totally gets it, nails it on a board and wags at it. Several times.

What I hope to get at by the end of this ramble is how, to me, in my opinion, this is not a universal rule… the power and enticement of blogging is the sense of ownership of a place of your own making. You own it, it is a reflection, sometimes fun house mirror distorted, of yourself. It is what the storytellers refer to as “finding your voice” (and using it). You are an editorial board of one, and the review process is instantaneous…

Absolutely, yes, thrice yes… this is why it’s centred communication, this is why group blogs suck in education, this is why he is totally totally right in that “we should not overlook the value and power of ownership of personal spaces” and this is the whole frickin’ point of the matter: PERSONAL PRESENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!

The funny thing is that, the more I write, the more I come back to what I’ve written… this is the first post I ever posted, and guess what… it’s going on about the same thing!

Oh, and I should add that nobody… *nobody*… has ever asked me to guest blog… :(

And Many2Many has been crap ever since Clay stopped writing, just sub to Ross Mayfield instead.

Unless they want me of course, I have the quasi-academic leanings… the social softwareology… the booming project… the crowd pleasing antics… the… oh, sod it ;)

Sometimes think that in terms of food, general bodily abuse, I operate a bit too much like a pendulum.

Since Friday evening, for example, it’s basically been no alcohol, no sugar, no bread, no rice, no potatoes… essentially no sugars or carbs. Which apparently is sending me into ketosis. From which, ahem, I quote:

Because long periods of ketosis are dangerous to your kidneys and liver, ketogenic diets are never recommended by health professionals for more than short-term use, typically no longer than 14 days.

Added to that I haven’t had a smoke since Sunday… gah… I mean it’s all very good in terms of weight loss / health etc. but WHERE IS ALL THE FUN? Two squares of 85% cocoa Lint is nice but it’s no way to live ones life. Much pen chewing ahoy!

Spent some of this afternoon at a rally in Geelong (along with about a quarter of a million others Aus-wide) protesting against the obnoxious IR reforms that the Liberal (read opposite of ‘Liberal’ – conservative) party are pushing through with their majority in both houses. Hopefully this might work out well in the end as it could galvanise Australian workers behind unions a bit more.

For the last howevermany years Enterprise Bargaining Agreements have meant that Unions have fought hard and collectively for decent working conditions which have then applied across the sector. A whole lot of people who either haven’t been involved with or have actively *whinged* about the Unions have benefited a great deal from this… and now they’re gonna realise just how much they gained from the system and how much they’re about to lose.

So y’never know… silver lining perhaps?

I’m very very happy that I’m able to spring Tama’s new blog (at edublogs.org: “I’ve been trying out tama.wordpress.com… I felt that edublogs was probably a better home for an eLearning blog anyway”)

Not only because it’s great to be able to help out some familiar, um, faces… but also because of stuff like this abstract…. good stuff… go grab the feed:

iTeach, iLearn: Student Podcasting

Keywords: podcasting, assessment, active learning

The term podcasting is a combination of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’ and describes type of syndicated digital audio that results in automatically downloadable files which are playable in portable media devices, such as (but not limited to) the iPod. Australian universities have been making lectures available as streaming audio for some years now, but with learners anchored to a computer in order to listen. Podcasting has allowed students to take lectures and other audio wherever they go, but this model still relies on the top-down structure of lectures as academic content for student’s to consume. However, in the University of Western Australia’s Communication Studies honours course ‘iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture’ the tables have been turned somewhat and now students are making podcasts, too. For their major assignments, students were asked to create an innovative audio podcast which engaged with the notion of participatory culture and the results ranged from a ‘pod play’ in the style 1930s RKO radio theatre to an alternative commentary for a Simpsons episode focusing on consumer culture and intertextuality. These podcasts are also cultural output themselves – they will remain downloadable indefinitely, allowing students to use them in future online portfolios and also providing a resource (or entertainment) for others. Moreover, the same system which supports lectures in streaming and podcast form, the iLecture system, also facilitates the students’ podcasts, in effect allowing them to take a turn at using the digital podium. With students podcasting, teaching and learning is clearly a two-way street. In this paper, I will outline the way in which podcasting was used in the iGeneration course; the setup in terms of technology and philosophy driving it; the podcasts themselves; students’ responses to podcasting (both informally and from a short survey); and the initial lessons learnt from student podcasting at a tertiary level.

It certainly is conference season and I’m going to be in Brissie going to ASCILITE from the evening of Sat 3rd until Wednesday 7th.

So is anyone up for a bloggin meetup with drinks on the Saturday or Sunday night?

Well, that was one heck of a conference, rarely if ever have I encountered such a high ratio of PPEE (Professors Per Everyone Else) and there was conversation to match too!

Met and enjoyed the company of a huge crowd of people (all of whom *should* but *don’t* have blogs), I’ve already mentioned Terry Anderson, Paul McKey and the one and only Tony Bates but add to that Jon Baggaley, another Tony who’s surname I’ve totally forgotten, Allan Herrmann, Alan Smith (I want a uni website that does that for me!!!), David Murphy, Mark Keough (of the interesting new elearning provider Archer College), Ian MacDonald and… it wasn’t just a boys club… Robin Mason (yes, the Robin Mason, howabout that!)

So I haven’t got the faintest idea of what was presented on but I do have a flipping *great* list of people to continue conversations with ;)

OK, honestly there were some really excellent papers there as well. In particular I’d recommend having a look at the following (.pdf) :

Distance learning – Social software’s killer ap? – Terry Anderson (Terry Anderson is using Elgg and loving it… communities of inquiry ahoy!)

Resource sharing in an open source course management environment – Wolfgang Bauer and Gerd Kortemeyer (have you seen LON-CAPA… whooooooah, I think you should. Whatever your personal opinions about assessment driven teaching this is a fascinating project)

Exploring pre-existing factors and instructor actions influencing community development in online settings – Chris Brook and Ron Oliver (This is an absolutely excellent follow up to some of their earlier work on communities – especially this AJET article ‘Online learning communities: Investigating a design framework‘ which is well worth a read – and should be compulsory for anyone who’s examining teaching and learning online…. won the research award… deservedly!)

‘Just link and leave’ a recipe for disaster for online discussions – Marie T Williams and Dale Wache (good example of how screwed up discussion boards are… have to say though that there aren’t that many people ‘getting it’ that online communication DOES NOT MEAN bulletin boards!!!!!)

Anyway, great conference, one of the best I’ve been to actually, circumstances permitting I’ll definitely be going back in 2007.

Reading Will today (congrats on the forthcoming book btw!) reminded me of a couple of ‘blogging in schools’ providers to and even more interestingly:

“I’ve been sworn to secrecy about a couple of other entrants soon to be coming forth that I think will take classroom blogging to an even higher level”

So is this hip or something?

As Will said there’s blogmeister and there’s ePals and there’s also 21Publish and a heap of other possibilities for the more tech savvy institution.

And of course… for the connoisseur… there’s learnerblogs.org and uniblogs.org :o)

Basically it seems like there’s three camps; the ‘start a blog’ service, the ‘let us set up a community of blogs for you’ service and the ‘use me to set up your own community of blogs’ service. The start a blog service (such as learnerblogs.org) is obviously ‘free’ as quite simply you’re not going to do well as any blog service if you charge, the ‘set up for you’ guys are obviously the ones who charge (as that’s what they charge for) and the set-your-own-up are mostly also free (although there are some ‘premium’ solutions it’d be a bit silly to use them if you’re able to host your own).

So wossup? What’s with all the excitement?

I mean, didn’t Peter Ford do this in 2000 with Manila? Schoolblogs anyone? I’d love to have your take on all of this Peter of you’re out there?

Maybe it’s culture catching up with technology? Maybe it’s the fact that this is a whole lot easier to do now (i.e. better tools)? Who knows? And more interestingly, who’s going to win ;)

Personally I’d like learnerblogs to be a kind of ‘start a blog’ but also ‘start your own community’ site down the line… so that a teacher could easily set up a community of bloggers (once they’d got their blogs) through the .org and roll from there. In terms of ‘safety’ / ‘security’ etc. I’ve also been thinking about how it would be great to have an Elgg farm also running out of there… so people can easily create their own secure communities which they can then use to support existing learnerblog blogs or to run on it’s own as a ‘secure’ blogging site.

I reckon the ‘provider’ who sells to departments / big unis etc. has a chance (a slim one given the OS opportunities available), the one that sends to individual schools a pretty limited future and the non-profit ones (like learnerblogs), a scramble to get some sort of sponsorship / funding to keep them relevant and worthwhile.

Perhaps?

Update: Surfing around this I found this excellent OLDaily article/review on weblogging in education that predates me by about 7 months back in ’02 and from that I got to hear some of what Peter thinks whether he’s reading this or not (oh sod it, I’ll just email him the link):

“The perfect all-embracing edublogging software does not exist and probably never will. No software can satisfy the multi-facetted desires and needs of the colourful and varied educational stage. Tweaking software will ‘please some of the the people some of the time’ but pleasing all of the people all of the time is another matter altogether. Ease of use is also important in software adoption but what one finds easy is another’s challenge. Software alone will never produce a ‘blogtastic’ revolution in our schools. In fact, blogging software choice is not the crux of the matter. There are no fatal mistakes to be made in that area as long as we realise that all ‘software sucks’. Pioneering, mentoring educators are far more crucial to the whole edublogging process. Let’s concentrate our ‘hot air production’ on that subject

If SchoolBlogs has shown anything, it is that fledgling webloggers need to fall under a more experienced webloggers sphere of influence. The 800 or so blogs created at SchoolBlogs.com and BsaBlogs.com fall into three very general categories. Firstly those who have caught the ‘blogging bug’ make up the smallest group. They just blog on with their lives, exploring and problem-solving as they go along. The stars of the edublogging world fall into this category;-)

Secondly, a slightly larger group of blogggers have been introduced to blogging by a colleague or at a conference or training event. The success of these blogs (measured in how regularly and effectively they are used in the classroom afterwards) depends not really on the quality of the course or introduction because blogging software is relatively easy to understand if anyone shows how it is done. Far more important is the aftercare or ‘sphere of influence’ exerted on the new blogger. If he or she has personal contact with more experienced bloggers then success is more likely. This is very much at the heart of blogging success at my school.

Lastly, the largest group of blogs at SchoolBlogs are created and left empty. This is not a software issue. I could easily have stumbled across another piece of blogging software 18 months ago and created the same kind of SB set-up. All weblogging software offers the motivation of publishing quickly and easily to the enormous stage that is the internet. I fell into Manila but methinks the results would have been similar with other software.” [Schoolblogs – The Holy Grail]