• learndogpup: OpenG African Progression
  After a fine Barossa Mike showed me how to play chords without playing chords… and here’s the vid (thankfully of him demonstrating rather than me crapping up :O)
• Wiki farm – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  I want a secure (read spam free) wikifarm for edublogs.org (and associated sites)… any suggestions?
• PLE Project Summary
  Great to see Oleg Liber involved in a blog, this one will be worth watchig (although am not sure i’d agree with SD about the logo!)
• SuprGlu – Gluing your life together.
  Aw heck, just for the record and because I keep on forgetting what it’s called :)

It’s redesign season! Here’s what seems to happen once every 6 months or so whenever I go for a facelift on this blog:

-I piss around for hours playing with bits and bobs
-Whack a load of time into it without ‘taking it for a test drive’
-Eventually get so tired with messing around that I just shove up any old crap… and then get depressed down the line and want to change it

So, decided to do it differently this time… a quick trip to incorporated subversion in the next month or so will find me playing with functionality, tweaking design and generally seeing how I can work this theme (K2) into something that feels like my own.

Here are some of the new gizmos for yer consideration:

-AJAX powered Livesearch (have a play it’s pretty cool!)
–Gravatars for comments (I think I need a few more of you to sign up to make this work… as well as doing my one a bit better!)
-Gorgeous comment posting tool, just leave any old crap as a comment to this post and see what I mean!
–Related posts on individual posts screens

I think I need to change colours, adapt the incsub logo to fit the blog and figure out a way that I can better highlight the various projects I’m involved in… perhaps.

Let me know what ya think. This is definitely the first step in a process and so I’m really after *critical* feedback!

Gordon Bennett! Quite a morning, down here in Adelaide, just a *little* bit of stimulation!

First up Denise Bradley is exactly the kind of VC that I want, then Terry Anderson… well, he’s Terry Anderson, what more can I say (and he’s using Elgg… talk about a positive convergence of minds!!!)

Follow that with Paul McKey of Redbean (that’s him on the front :) and the one and only Tony Bates and this is about the best first day of a conference that I can remember… the quality of the people here is bloody amazing.

Add that to a fantastic pick up from the airport, great food & wine, hugely interesting conversation (which remembering woke me up at 4.30am and stopped me from going to sleep again – gah) and pre-tuning the guitar to G from Mike Seyfang of LearnDog and I’m having a pretty neat few days.

Lots of stuff peculating, at risk of having some sort of cranial explosion… sod it, will get some more coffee.

For my own record and just in case anyone’s interested here’s the powerpoint (don’t have a heck of a lot of time free!) for my ODLAA gig talking about those cases I mentioned.

BTW, anyone who’s in Adelaide and fancies a drink tonight (Tuesday) or tomorrow (Wednesday) night get in touch (or give me a call on my mobile, details are all on the same page)

There really are some fantastic new edubloggers using edublogs.org and now there are several ways you can discover them!

First up there’s the ‘Featured Edubloggers’ spot which I’m trying to update every fortnight, this particular trio are well worth checking out: Teaching Generation Z, The Server Room & Smelly Knowledge

Then there’s the latest updated blog down the sidebar and now… ALL NEW (and still poorly formatted) latest posts!

So, just roll on by edublogs.org and enjoy some of the great writing and personalities getting stuck in!

Ahhhh… a relaxing weekend spent copying & pasting :)

Net result is a big ‘ol .zip file of 60 odd WPMU themes which all have screenshots and have been edited so that they are WPMU ‘compliant’ (i.e. they don’t contain links in the template that you have to edit manually).

So role over you your edublog now and see how pretty it all looks in the presentation tab, then grab ’em and use ’em yourself!

Or get your students to grab a learnerblog or uniblog and they can tell you instead :)

After a few discussions of the future of edublogs.org and forgetting financial viability etc. for the minute I figured that the best thing I could do at this point is to consider where I’d like it to go in the next 3, 6 and 12 months and that the best place to do that would be here.

So here it is, in the first instance for myself but equally so for comment and discussion.

Overall goals

My goals for edublogs.org over the next 12 months are for it:

-To be the best free blog provider for educational professionals available
-To facilitate the development of useful communities, networks and communication amongst education professionals

This will, I hope, have a positive effect on the lives and work of people who use it (both as bloggers and as readers) – and if that is 10% of what blogging has done for me then I’d be more than happy.

Three Months – Better & More Blogging

While I’m pretty darn happy with WordPress MultiUser I’d like, in the next two months, to make some serious improvements in the blogging system so that (while it’ll always be getting better) I can focus on other areas in the following months. Specifically I’d like:

Better blogging:

-Fix the image upload problems (and hopefully, alongside this, have good uploading of other file types as well)
-Fix up the existing WordPress themes so that they all work well with WPMU
-Develop and publish a clear system for people getting their own themes up via upload & me (if an aspect of editability comes into WPMU then that’d obviously surpass this)
-Figure out how I can incorporate remote blogging into it (mobile phones etc.)

More blogging:

-Get an ‘opt out’ edublogs.org newsletter going, encouraging existing edubloggers to spread the word
-Get a selection of edublogs.org buttons that people can display on their blogs if they want (and which will be on by default in new blogs)
-Maybe get ‘invites’ working if possible
-Get some press (suggestions here are welcome!)

Six Months – Bigger but Smaller

Once the blogging system, themes etc. are well set up and we’re getting lots of people signing up I’m really keen to explore how we could start assisting the development of niche communities and groups of educational professionals on edublogs.org. I really really do believe that without someone listening, you’re not ever really blogging, and I want to assist edublogs.org users to both find and be found in the niches in which they work. To this end I want to try and accomplish at least some of the following:

-A simple yet more sophisticated networking system which will allow self-organisation and group creation which I can hook into the backend of each edublogs.org blog. Something like Elgg would obviously be great here but am a bit worried that the blogs element of that might confuse here… am really just looking for a ‘connections’ tool.
-A tag / global categories based aggregator: “what are edublogs.org users talking about today” kinda thing
-A straightforward river of news aggregator made up of latest posts and excerpts
-[I’m probably dreaming here but…] Some sort of opml / aggregating system where people can create and add their feeds to particular groups which then operate as separate multiple different aggregators and opml ‘packs’ which people can subscribe to through other aggregators
-A discussion tool which allows people to set up and participate in conversations outside of their blogs and meet other edubloggers

Twelve Months – Community, IncSub & Confidence

By the end of the year I’d like to see the tools which have worked well in the ‘bigger but smaller’ stage tried and tested and played with to ensure we’re getting the most out of / going down the right path with them. At this point I’d like to feel that the ‘core functionality’ is in place and that there’s a role for new technologies and effective uses of a group of educational professionals this big.

As a wish-list in terms of technology I’d love to see something like del.icio.us coming into play where people can share, develop and add to resources for particular communities alongside other apps which might really add value to a community like this (photos, for example, aren’t really at the top of my list here).

I’d also like to extend the original idea I had with IncSub to this space, to set up some systems which allowed edubloggers to create and use their own ad free CMS, wiki, social networking and blog applications (Hey, I’d like to give WPMU to edublogs users… edublogs for edubloggers if you will ;)… but this might be a bit of a technical pipe dream… perhaps.

Finally I’d like to do something which can help define, profile and give confidence to the community. I was thinking about an asynchronous / synchronous online conference that’s open to the world but presented at by edublogs.org members.

–

So, perhaps I’m dreaming with the last bit but hey, it helps to be ambitious. It’ll be interesting to see where we are / what’s happened a year from now.

Let me know what you think about it all. Suggestions / Criticism / General Comments are more than welcome!!!

It certainly is connection season down here as Fang aka LearnDog (who started this whole thing by swingin’ over from Adelaide) says.

Had a cracking time on Tuesday talking with ‘im and Cam which then extended to an excellent dinner also organised by Cam in St Kilda where met some very interesting people, especially Phil Mcclusky of Ning (how cool is tit that there’s a Ning dev in Melbourne!) and Ben Barren, from whom I quote:

“REALLY SIMPLY STEALING. THE WEB 2.0 BLOG BRAWL IS ON. 1.0 VS 2.0. EAST COAST VS WEST COAST. TECH CRUNCH VS UNION SQUARE. JOKING. TONY MONTANA. SOME SEE 2.O AS DEVIL INCARNATE OR POST DOT-COM DOT.BOMB SNARK. THERE IS SOMETHING GOING ON THOUGH. ASK WINER, PINCUS + RUPERT. GOOD + BAD IDEAS ARE GETTING FUNDED/BOUGHT. RABBLE SAY BLOGGING ON YOUR PC IS SO 12 MONTHS AGO. BUT THEY’VE SAID IT FOR 6 MONTHS. HI YOU ;)”

Excellent :)

Followed this with a whole day seminar at Waurn Ponds on Playful Pedagogies (and podcasting) and yesterday was at e-works talking with Ulises, Anne and others about tensions in the convergence of pedagogy and technology.

Phew!

An next week it’s ODLAA where I’ll be ‘breaking down boundaries’ like you wouldn’t know. Blimey.

Basically I work day to day in a large concrete box. On a corridor with a view of some leaves obscuring a 6 lane road, in the suburbs… it’s thrilling.

But something really cool is happening down under the box in the carpark (another benefit of smoking is that you get to notice these things). Only 8 feet up or so (the bottom of the box) there are three nests stuffed onto the edge of the steel girders supporting the box. I’d always assumed were left over from way back but if you hang around long enough you realise that they’re actually very very busy and that all the tweeting you can hear is actually coming from them (it’s spring down here).

So yeh, even under the worst structures know to man, in the ‘orriblest darkest carparks, something beautiful is still going on. Nice.

This would be a job posting if we had any money… but we don’t, so it’s a partnership proposal instead.

Basically I’m running a couple of projects that involve mediawiki, and me & the other partner in this need an enthusiastic mediawiki hacker (or someone with good php / MySQL expertise) with a bit of time for a couple of projects that have a fair bit of potential down the line.

It won’t be a huge amount of work and we’re happy to offer a percentage share in the project and ongoing role both dependant on satisfactory completion of the things we need done.

If you’re interested or know anyone who might be please get in touch with me.