Ever since I managed to get the ‘subscribe to comments by email’ function going on this blog I’ve loved it more than any other feature I’ve installed, especially as I get to have good discussions like this one with the mysterious ‘N’ on the subject of audio-streaming, universities, podcasting and research and development in technology. Please join in if you’ve got any thoughts on the topic!

Ulises A. Mejias is one heck of a thinker when it comes to communication and the online. I’ve been waiting to go through my note-riddled copies of Online Discourse (.pdf) and Distributed Textual Discourse (.pdf) for some time now, perhaps not putting anything here because I don’t feel like a blog post would do it justice or perhaps because I know the amount of time I could put into it would definitely ‘get in the way of other things’.

Hopefully I’ll actually make it to my view on DTD sometime soon but in the meantime I’ve gotta note the publication in First Monday of his article Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in Praxis.

Swerving from personal experience to Bhola’s ‘ontological reintegration’ to Habermas and Freire this article (or should I say Ulises – or neither as this is definitely ‘about’ – a publication I guess) looks at the tensions and alignments between communication ‘about’ and communication ‘with’. What comes to the fore with me is the interactions and symbiotic relationships between the two, the impact that the online is thought to have in terms of nearness and farness (and it’s actual relationship) and the relationship between reflection, interaction and action as demonstrated in the diagram in this post that I nick from the article!

Of particular interest in a practical sense (and that’s another thing I love about Ulises’ writing, there’s always practical application in mind, action I guess ;o) to those who think about this sort of thing are his thoughts on learning systems:

“I believe that by designing learning systems that take a holistic praxis into account, technology can spark a desire for nearness. This in spite of the fact that most current systems, by their mere failure to ask questions such as the ones above, are oriented towards using technology to decrease the importance of the near.” [Ulises A. Mejias]

But what comes across must is the simplicity of this idea, that what this boils down to is a need for us ‘to bring the epistemologically far near to us, and make the physically near relevant again’. Reminds me of my teaching days, DOGME and a pedagogy of the bare essentials, the need I think we all have of (re)discovering ourselves and, likewise, each other and the way in which technology is in many ways the cause of and can help or hinder how that goes.

There’s even a prequel / sequel if you’ve got the mental capacity left: Movable Distance: Technology, Nearness and Farness

Via Full-Circle, I ran into this (Kubrick at Blogspot!) introduction and overview to Technorati tags which is nothing if not comprehensive.

Problem is that I still don’t get it… even with photo / audio / video stuff all you really need is for them to be titled well and in context and you’ve got tags-a-plenty, when it comes to blog posts, well… isn’t it fairly obvious?

I mean, I can’t help but notice that some blogs I really like have introduced TTs and I read the post, look at the tags and go ‘well, duh, you’ve already used all those words in your post’. OK, so I can go to the Technorati tag page and look at postings by tag but so what, why don’t I just run a search through Feedster or Bloglines?

Plus, and this comes for a recent odd experience subscribing to a watchlists too, they’re all totally out of date / mixed up. For example I looked at the ‘Blog’ tag today (March 10th) and just down the list is this:

Which leads to this article which is obviously from February 19th… eh?

Don’t get me wrong I think that Technorati is a great idea and playing around with tags and stuff is well worth it for the experimenting but if the basic system doesn’t work then you can be as good an idea as you want!

Desperate last measure as it seems I can’t find this out any other way…. are there any applications out there which will let me see how many MB is stored in each of my web directories, i.e. incsub.org/association/ or incsub.org/wpmu/? Lordy, I’d even pay! Any help much grovilingly appreciated….

OK, so you’ve got the best streaming lecture system up and running in the country: every theatre is equipped with simple recording devices, lecturers have easy access to handheld recorders to pop in their top pockets when they’re speaking, it all feeds into a beautiful seamless system that stores & streams an emails you the link which you can then insert, with ease, into your WebCT or Blackboard course.

And then slowly you start to realise that you’ve just wasted hundreds of thousands of $s, because:

-A lecture delivered to a theatre is utterly and totally different to the kind of thing you’d broadcast as just audio (if it’s any good it’ll be interactive & unbroadcastable!)

-It has become painfully obvious that even the most diligent of learners is not going to sit for 60 mins or more at his or her PC listening and focussing on what you produce

-The streaming server is great but the files are so large that it just doesn’t work for anyone without a huge pipe, what you really want is quick ‘n dirty .mp3s

And you come to understand that all you need to do is give each lecturer a decent mic to plug into their PC, pop a simple .mp3 recording device on their desktops (which they can use to edit if they like), ask them to record max 20-30 min talks on particular subjects and then get them to pop it in as an enclosure to the course blog (which is, of course, also framed in the WebCT or Blackboard course and on the open web so available for podcasts as required). That way you have:

-A recording made for straightforward audio and of far better quality than anything captured ‘in the wild’

-A recording that can be simply aggregated or downloaded to .mp3 players and hence actually listened to at some point!

-Damn small files

And it’s set you back a few thou for the mics and the .mp3 recorder (you could always use Audacity for free!) , a few weeks work for the course blogs, some ongoing on-call support (say 0.4 for 500 lecturers) for uploading / enclosures and a small consultants fee for me :D

Soulsoup is one and to celebrate Anol publishes an about page and (My) 7 Guidelines for corporate elearning.

Here are the subheadings, it’s well worth a read:

1. The business world is not about learning, it’s about doing business.
2. First collaboration, then learning
3. Off-the Shelf content is so yesterday, Courseware is dead.
4. It’s not about Technology – it’s about effectiveness and culture
5. LMS / big rollouts are out – embrace small pieces loosely coupled
6. e Learning is not only for internal learning
7. Measure what really matters

Via Ian comes Steve Margetts WikiTextbook ‘The free textbook anyone can edit’.

Waycool, I like the idea, I’m not usually a fan of the ol’ textbook but this has got a lot of potential. It’s pretty much British curriculum at the moment (GCHEs, ‘A’ Levels & alike… ahhh I remember the days anyone wanna know my grades ;o) which is an interesting choice, given, I guess, the wider potential for subject area plans… but then focussing on this not inconsiderable niche might work well too.

What’s the betting that my Pops (who doesn’t seem to read this despite it being his blinkin’ field) tells me about this on the phone in a few months time ;o>

Dave Tosh says in the comments:

“We are planning to release the system as Open Source – hopefully by the end of this week, fingers crossed!”

To which I say that is fan-bloody-tastic! For those of you who don’t know Elgg is a kind of authenticated blog / FOAF tool that might just be the answer you’re looking for when it comes to protecting the kiddies while reaping the rewards of the social networking & communication possibilities for blogging… one to keep an eye on!

Dave, have you considered some sort of developer / user community, a la WPMU, that might seriously enhance some development?

I think my memory is going, only when I read Judith’s post about Apcala did I realise that I’d probably been asked not to invite people to Elgg, whoops!

Either way the good news is that you don’t need an invite… you can go to Apcala and register yourself (and make sure you add me as a friend :o)

Either way this is worth exploring… I don’t think it’s open source though which is a shame as I reckon there are a lot of possible K12 uses going on, more on that later.

The relentless march of WPMU and IncSub blogs continues apace with all blogs now having Kittens Spaminator automatically installed (bye bye spam!) and also a stats tool (it’s a tab on the ‘Dashboard’… haven’t used it yet so tell me what you think.

Looks like I’ll be able to set a limit on the MB available to each blog too. Obviously I’m not going to be picky and say ‘no more than this’ but it might be useful to avoid any abuse (and people who want more can just ask and I can get it for them), how does 10MB sound as a start?