Funny. So if you were born, say, sometime in the early to mid 70s in the UK you probably remember Rainbow, right? I reckon some of this clip (’bout 2MB) has been dubbed, has to be, but it takes me back! Via my Dad who probably remembers sitting through it with me :o)

[Advisory: Enormous ‘ooo er’ ‘fnar fnar’ and ‘guk guk’ potential (if anybody remembers Finbar Saunders as well)]

Just some quick stuff, via NevOn here’s how you can optimise your Firefox experience simply with Firetune… annoying download page but seems to be working well!

Rob at sexy new-look Stigmergic points to an article on the effect of texting and literacy and pulls out a good quote:

“In Europe, where teens have been texting for years, researchers report that claims that texting leads to illiteracy are unfounded.”

So can we get over that now.

And finally I quite like the Feedster blogging policy, adapted from the commonsense Groove one… I could work with that, perhaps I should draft one for my employer ;o)

Absolutely top drawer list of business blog texts and links from Lee. Furl this!

Harold is looking at open source Portals and posts some useful links, ‘specially like this translation from Wybo:

“Acquisition costs for open source are about half the costs of the cheapest proprietary solution, even when taking into account any system migration costs”

Now… I could go on about the utterly useless portal implementation in certain educational organisations (but I won’t, at least not yet) but I do wonder if there are any good portal stories out there or reconceptualisations of what a portal actually is and does?

Michael posts a coupla interesting thoughts on the Scoble & Tony Chang discussion about whether Google’s 20% of time to explore areas of interest (which Tony likes & thinks works for various reasons) that are of benefit to Google and the MS alternative favoured by Scoble – ‘work on what you actually want to work on’).

Well, the tech industry might be surprised to know that they’re not the first to have this revolutionary idea ;o) In fact, us in ol’ academia have been working on the 40:40:20 rule for some time now where 40% is teaching, 40% research and 20% admin… hence I get to spend 40% of my time doing exactly this as it’s my research field (believe me, if I was General staff I think I would’ve been sunk a looooooong time ago!!!)

“But that’s a Uni”… I hear you but in fact we’ve always been and are becoming more obviously so a knowledge industry, just like, say, Google… or MS… that is we spend this whopping great portion of time thinking, studying, writing and talking about stuff that interests us & consequently our employer gets work, students, publicity and cold hard $s , we get consultancy, recognition and to be relatively happy despite the fact that we work somewhere that pays us peanuts (believe me, it’s close to being an even smaller nut) and the world gets to be a better place (perhaps).

Now how you implement that in other organisations is another thing. Personally I reckon that you already do or don’t have innovative, interesting people working on stuff they think is really cool so that’s not so much a problem… what you want to do is to give them some security to play (please don’t mention ROI), some respect for their playing and a technical and physical environment in which they can play… that is you just need to incorporate some subversion into your workplace!

Was asked by email what I thought of Moodle, this is my very very quick answer from a ‘kinda’ user perspective, am I off the mark?

Pros:

-Open source thus hacks & hackable / add ons / community / good vibes etc.
-Good standards stuff (like RSS for example)
-Incorporates email!
-Very ‘comfortable’ graphically… also very simple operation

Cons:

-Made around the traditional ‘LMS’ model and strongly in that vein
-Am not sure if it has as powerful content management tools established vendors do (and naturally doesn’t meet their huge lists of features… most of which are pointless / never work or are so badly designed that they are useless (ahem)
-Interface can get a bit too cutesy

Having said that I’d lean heavily towards Moodle over WebCT or BB if only because I could employ, for half the amount I’d pay in vendors fees, a good sized team to make it do whatever I want for my organisation… and once I was there I could halve that team and keep on going at great guns (bear in mind I’m talking about a 30k student organisation here).

Via Matt, here’s a fully fledged audio interview with an ex-spammer who compliments WordPress 5 minutes in!

Alan, I’m starting to think that the answer to your problems might lie on the other side of the fence…

The Pedagogy and Practice Group is a Melbourne based teaching and learning forum… from our about page:

“The Pedagogy & Practice group was founded in 2004 as a forum for sharing and discussing contemporary education design issues, developing pedagogies and experiences in teaching and learning.

Attended by education designers, teaching academics and researchers, the group meets monthly at different University campuses in Melbourne. We invite membership from across the Victorian higher education sector and encourage a diversity of perspectives and approaches.”

We’re a pretty small group at the moment with about 10 or so people coming to each session (out of 30 or so members) but we’d like to expand a bit, especially outside of the two Universities which now form the core. We’re interested in all sorts of discussion, sparked by experiences and experts. For example, our next session is on April 13th, here, and will be kicked off by Peter Haeusler (a brilliant researcher) looking at student perceptions of learning… read more.

If you’d like to join the group or follow what we’re doing there are a few ways you can go about it… you can subscribe to the listserv (how very 1990s :o) we use for sharing resources / info / the odd bit of stuff, you can aggregate the RSS feed or you can just get in touch with me to have a chat about it: james[at]incsub[dot]org

We’re very relaxed in a ‘come whenever you can and want to’ kinda way and unaffiliated to any institution, so if you’re interested in tertiary teaching and learning and based in or around Melbourne do think about it or share this with colleagues you think might be interested.

A bunch of my most recent subscriptions (see currently reading down the right) have been to ‘communications’ blogs (PR, business communications, advertising & stuff like that…) and I be telling you there’s some great stuff there:

NevOn who is obviously far more popular than me posts a link to People where you can find out how popular your name is… I’m not sure how reliable it is as I rank at 53,600 and Stephen comes in at 128,000… hmmm…. It’s pretty and fun though so go give it a whirl!

Shel Holtz (also more popular :o) posts an interesting bit on getting podcasts onto cell phones, I was in a forum for mobile technologies in the University yesterday and guess what came up as the biggest hitter (after simply sending your students sms announcements – costs us 13c an announcement… gah!), that’s right, podcasting lectures to mobiles… and with something like 2 million people doing tertiary study of some form in Australia alone (pop 19mil, I think) that’s something that the telcos would be well advised to explore!

Finally from Chris Abraham here’s a straightforward list of ways to view the blogosphere, not sure if I could add that many, perhaps Blogshares & Pubsub?

Wow, via Stephen this is a great article on implementing blogs in a tertiary learning environment: A Learning Blogosphere (Part 1) (Part 2).

Just a few thoughts first up… it’s a real shame that they didn’t use Bloglines as I’d’ve liked to know how that went. Instead though they used a kinda Drupal-esque group aggregator of the type favoured by Dave Winer. Personally I like both the folders and the river but most of all the personal control so I’m a little surprised and kinda pleased that:

“The aggregator held four days of information. Through the end of the class, about 80% of students used this option for keeping up with the class.”

The discussion of trackbacks and the large amount of value they add in part 1 is pretty interesting too, I guess the problem there is that spam is about to kill trackbacks (perhaps?), are pingbacks any safer?

Part 2 introduces itself pretty well, sell this to the ‘it’ll be more work’ lobby:

“Over the course of the term, there were 1,078 posts in the blogosphere. The number of posts represents a doubling in online communication over when interaction in the course occurred principally in email. Student posts accounted for 78% of this volume and determined the content of the discussion. The group leader (professor) level of involvement represents a halving of moderator effort relative to the email method. Thus, the use of blogging tools, specifically RSS, appears to have led to a quadrupling of moderator productivity over email.”

Following this is what I long for, statistical, hard-nosed evidence of learner centred online learning facilitated, it would seem, in many ways by the tools and environments that were used. Can’t wait for the third instalment. These are an absolute must-read-and-share-with-the-world coupla posts!