Blackboard Weblog

I’m probably the last person to post about this but hey, Blackboard has a weblog.

Now… what we need is Greg Ritter as Scoble!

Seriously though, good on ya BB, there are comments, a feed, some reassuringly honest writing (god, please never never go back to those press releases… pleeeeeeeease), some sneaks into new products and even their PR person not sounding like a total scmuck.

I hope it goes on and extends beyond the current scope: “established for the 2005 Blackboard Users Conference, April 12-14, in Baltimore, MD.”

Expect WebCT to start competing for authentic voice now!

Update: We’ll have Thomas there to keep em honest though!

The Augmented Social Network & Smallness

Finally got round to having a re-scan through all 63 pages of The Augmented Social Network over my salami & feta foccacia (’tis not all barbies down here :o) and had rather a lot of ‘bings’ (moire than your average lunchful).

For example, the assertion that ‘the software and systems we choose for our communications carry with them, in subtle ways, the values we care to achieve as a society’ rings truer than ever and makes me cringe all the more when I hear, which I frequently do, people on high determining that ‘it’s the pedagogy that should push the technology’ and so on.

Also, and this fits in with a wonderful email Charlie sent me about the values of smallness, that when the online community started out ‘early users of the internet could, with some assurance, feel they shared affinities with others they met online… “Back then we knew who everybody was. We knew who to trust”‘.

Which of course links in with the ASNs primary goal, to provide ‘Persistent [& Interoperable] Identity’:

“Enabling individuals online to maintain a persistent identity as they move between different Internet communities, and to have personal control over that identity. This identity should be multifarious and ambiguous (as identity is in life itself), capable of reflecting an endless variety of interests, needs, desires, and relationships. It should not be reduced to a recitation of our purchase preferences, since who we are can not be reduced to what we buy.”

Now I’m not so keen on the concepts of brokered relationships or of public interest matching technologies… in my view that’s what we do as people when we have persistent & interoperable identities… but there’s a lot here which ties in very nicely with the centered communication angle, and of course takes it out of the organisation and deposits into the world (which is funny as I feel like sometimes I’m doing the opposite).

A quick google brought up a pointer to an interview with Ken Jordan via Seb at Many2Many in which even more interestingly he points out the shortcomings of social network systems like Friendster (see the seb post for a good summary of these points). I feel an affinity coming on :o)

So, I guess I’m wondering now… what happened? There’s a site with (ironically) a collaborative blog (with nothing published to it). Something tells me that the idea of everyone having an online presence controlled by one centralised area seems to have passed on now, but don’t we actually have something like the interoperability considered there in RSS?

Where’s the ASN gone? Why?

The Participatory Education Revolution

Here’s an interesting bit of a presentation from Educause entitled The Participatory Education Revolution (abstract). Kinda like that cluetrain for education meme that Scott Adams was playing with a bit ago.

“Education is a conversation. A conversation between teacher and student. A conversation amongst students, educators and industry. A conversation with the communities in which they exist. Education has long embraced the need for conversations to occur in order for effective learning to take place. But technology has limited the ability for expansive and inclusive conversations to occur across time and space.

Social Networking Technologies, underpinned by Network Computing, are driving a revolution in the way conversations – and education – take place. Education will change forever, based on more participatory modes of teaching and sharing knowledge. Blogs, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Wikis, and Podcasting are a few of the earliest manifestations of this revolution. As are the underpinnings of the revolution – open sourcing of ideas and intellectual property, collaborative knowledge development and research, and the emergence of powerful communities of influence….

…Educators must harness the power of this network while applying Social Networking technology to education itself. Network Effects will advantage the early movers who will have created the connections and conversations. This will be the Participatory Education Revolution.” [Andrew Lark]

Andy has also posted the presentation which accompanies it although he’s done so through some bizarre document storage system called xdrive which has utterly stopped me from accessing it… very odd indeed.

It’s now hosted at IncSub, here, so go get it!

Anyway, the best thing about this is what the very significant person sending it to me commented:

“What does it all mean though for the design of organisations? For the leadership and management of organisations? Particularly for organisations like universities committed to e-learning?”

Sweeeeet :o)

Folk Conceptions

Been reading a bit and hearing a lot about Wagner of late… I know that the folksonomy thing has died down a bit now but this seems pretty relevant to the semilattice thing as well :o)

“Folk conceptions of the social order are frequently more complex and sophisticated than the matrices by which members of individual social science disciplines organize their work”[Ignorance in Educational Research, 1993]

Might I add organisations and learning management systems to that!

PR Hits, misses & close calls

Fantastic new PR blog: PR Hits, misses & close calls

Nice tagline too :o)

“An educational Blog for my students. It’s my view of public relations hits, misses and close calls. Encouraged by my students; inspired by my colleagues; shocked by the world. Let’s just call this a nexus of drivel.”

Ross is an absolute legend in the taking up interesting technologies field round these parts and comes as a highly recommended nexus of drivel!

Any LAMS?

Hmmm… just got, via email, an invitation to “a cocktail reception to celebrate the worldwide launch of the revolutionary new e-learning system – LAMS.”

It goes on to say that “LAMS is being released as a freely available open source software.”

Which is all good as it currently isn’t… so has anyone used this, does anyone have an opinion on it’s value, possible roles and stuff… I have to say that anything that advertises itself as requiring:

“complex user interaction including drag-and drop and visualization of complex data.’

Doesn’t exactly fill me with joy… but I’m open to persuasion :o)