Beautiful, WordPress 1.5 is out, those of you who have set up incsub WPMU blogs will have a fair idea of how nice this is but let assure you… it just gets better!

Am currently working on getting some alternate themes together for incsub WPMU (it’s an arduous process if you’re as bad at this kind of stuff as I am!) in the meantime it looks like you can edit your own template / html (it just says that you haven’t) through the manage > files function.

Am looking forward to the next WPMU release… with “Strayhorn” too I hope!

Steve Chesno on the pain caused by blackberry… something I think I’m gonna hear a lot about in years to come down here:

“There should be a law: Every Blackberry or similar device should automatically build in a tagline to go with every e-mail it sends. It should read:

“This message was sent by a wireless device with tiny little baby keys, which makes it very hard to type anything of substance. The sender should probably be listening to whatever is happening in the meeting, or having dinner with his family, or reading a novel, but is instead doing his best to manipulate these tiny little keys because it is SO important that he be connected to work every single minute of every day. So please excuse the jerky message. Thank you.””

Heh :D via NevOn.

Following on from this post, Stephen submits that the system we need to create is:

“a complex construction that enables, first, a wide variety of experiences akin to (and possibly extending upon) our experiences of the natural world: things to see, touch, do, and otherwise sense; and second, a mechanism for interpreting and comprehending this experience, a syntax, putting it into a structure, a semantics, which assigns it meaning, and a pragmatics, that gives it a context and use”

Which makes my head hurt a little but which resonates well with Ulises’s comments in OSN05 (hence you have to login) that the wise thing to do is to steer away from social or technological deterministic ways and think instead of ‘affordances’:

“which Paul Dourish (based on Norman’s work) defines as a 3-way relationship between the environment, the actor, and the activity.” [he also points to this transcribed(!) discussion on the subject]

So, trying to conceptualise this myself I guess I’d contend that every ‘constructed’ online environment (in the sense of specific rather than generalised principles of design) I have participated in has been established with the following principles in mind:

-The ‘natural world’ Stephen refers to is able to be constructed within a bounded – in terms of space and ‘hackability’ – environment.

-The ‘mechanism’ he also brings up and which mediates the 3-way relationship described by Ulises is something that exists away from the individual, requiring remote / projected participation (as it is with person a, person b existing in quite a different, latticed relationship).

Again, I feel like blogs and RSS, or most certainly elements of these two practices and technologies in am enabled context, have a large role to play in approaching these environments and relationships anew (person b-esquely) but I want to read some more (especially Ulises Online Discourse and Distributed Textual Discourse and besides I’ve gotta get a podcasting blog up and running for tomorrow morning… eek.

Edugadget:

“Question: Is it possible to turn the trend of cell phone usage amongst teenagers in school into a positive?

The Opportunity: The distribution of important information in school is an extremely resource intensive effort. If you were to calculate the straight labor cost, let alone the missed opportunity (more teaching) costs, it would be staggering. Furthermore, the system is error-prone because it usually uses brute force people-power, bits of paper, and phone calls. “

Fascinating stuff and a real ‘nail on the head’ approach to technology in schools… don’t fight it use it.

I was having a chat with Lindon the other day about telcos / costs of hooking up cell phones / ubiquitous wireless net and alike and I wonder if there is any capacity for, say, a school to have a wireless network which interacts with it’s (registered) students mobiles and allows the affordable and widespread use of mobile apps in an educational setting. Interesting stuff.

Here are a couple of interesting articles for ASCILITE last year on SMS and learning which can probably add a bit to this discussion.

Hey, good work by Mick & Cameron, checkout The Podcast Network.

“The Podcast Network will be the best collection of podcasts available anywhere that are managed and aggregated under the one roof.”

I reckon this is going to be cool, I wonder if anyone is doing anything similar with music? Goodonya guys!

I’m watching a fascinating (and well put together) presentation from Lisa Kimball on “Producing Social Network Environments” as part of OSN05.

Am not sure if you can get it, I think you can , try here. (need Realplayer). If you can I’d encourage you to watch it, it’s v. good!

What I’m not entirely comfortable with though is her insistence on metaphors, on environments which people are comfortable with. I get the feeling after much attendance and observation of a whole heap of different environments, that this insistence on the notion of ‘environment’ as all encompassing / our goal is in fact our no. 1 problem.

People don’t exist in environments, they exist in themselves and their semilattice-esque relationships with other actors (communities, individuals, spaces, inanimate objects…) and we can use whatever media we want and whatever metaphors we choose but this will not facilitate the development of successful online networks.

I reckon LinkedIn, Orkut etc. etc. DO NOT work… Neither do our Learning / Courseware Management Systems or, for that matter, 90% of Intranets and portals. (Dating sites do but that’s another matter, a bit like the way we buy our airline tickets online but not our clothes… perhaps) The problem, I’m convinced, lies with the misconception that it’s the environments that are important… granted, if you have a nice town square people will probably use it but you’ve gotta have the people first.

Stigmergic: “So I went to blackboard’s site (nope – no link, I’m not going to up their page rating), and I found it tainted with the miasma of corporate culture that is threatening to choke the learning out of the education system.”

NevOn, my new favourite communications blog posts a good run-down on the Mark Jen ‘getting fired for blogging by Google’ event quoting some great sources and wrapping it up nicely with:

“Employees – Use your own common sense on what you say about your employer and issues in your workplace in your public blog. The responsibility for this is yours, as are the consequences if you don’t use your common sense.”

Which I agree with wholeheartedly. I visited Mark Jen’s site a while back and couldn’t help but think “Wow, he’s just started there and he’s really getting into them!” and it made me think of my own experience a few months back when I felt compelled to blog about something that was happening to me at my workplace (and which, too this day, the support you guys gave me blows me away so much I can hardly read the comments, 100 with this pingback!)

I wrestled with that decision for at least a week. I mean crikey, I had a .pdf of the memo, ready to be posted, I was seriously stressed out and pretty angry too… but in the end I figured that what this basically came down to was insecurity and paranoia (in certain areas of management) and, to a fair extent, probably a clash of ideas and personalities. Also, I work for a pretty cool institution, and regardless of their choice CMS-wise, there are amazing teachers here, wonderful (and often long suffering :o) people who love their students and their jobs. Add to that the fact that the main protagonist didn’t really get the idea of ‘academic freedom’ (he/she’s not one) and me lashing out at my organisation, or ‘lashing out’ at all = probably not a good idea.

But I felt like I couldn’t go on with writing here, or even working as I do, if I didn’t say something about it. I guess once you’ve been doing this kind of thing for a bit (about a year and a half when all of that happened) you can’t write happy when you’re not or avoid saying how you feel / recounting professional experiences and keep on going. Add to that the fact that the people reading this are by far the most important professional community I’ve ever had and I felt I had to write something. I couldn’t have gone on without doing so I think.

So, I figured that the only way I could do this was by making myself institutionally-anonymous, by not going into the arguments (too much) and by talking about my stress rather than thrashing out angrily. I think I managed that and in doing so I didn’t hurt my organisation unfairly or unnecessarily, I didn’t fight fire with fire (not a good idea with paranoia and insecurity!) and I was able to express myself honestly to my community.

I even had a chance to reconsider a month or two back when I was approached by a major national paper to run a story on it (I guess it’s not too hard to find out where I work, oops) … but that didn’t happen for the same reasons.

So, the way I see it is that you’re stoopid and a bit ethically unsound to start slagging of the organisation you work for in a public forum, certainly in an unconstructive / unbalanced way, as if you really are that unhappy you should probably take it up with your union / H&S / police force / get a new job (in the first instance at least). I’d love to be able to blog about my workplace, about the many things that I love doing (as well as a balanced opinion of the things I don’t), and maybe I will be able to one day… but in the meantime nobody gains from stuff that it makes ‘common sense’ not to say.

So the main thing to do is to figure out what ‘common sense’ is in a policy sense, as Neville says:

“Employers – You must establish the framework under which employees can blog in their workplace, creating the guidelines that make it clear what the ground rules are, and then communicating them to your employees in a way that they clearly understand. The responsibility for this is yours, as are the consequences if you don’t have clear guidelines.”

And I think that’s something I’d really like to work on, if anyone out there is interested. Perhaps there’s the opportunity for a kind of standard ‘approach’ that you can tell your boss you adhere to, an opt-in ‘code of conduct’. With lots of signatories. That’d be useful. It’d give me something to bring up when the question of me blogging comes up in a job interview, wouldn’t it? A bit like Creative Commons solves all my licensing issues easily.

Or would it be an annoying, unnecessary, dangerously ‘norming’ and a waste of time?

I ‘ve always liked the Ten Reasons Why Editorial Policy (& part 1 with comments) but that is definitely steered more towards the technical / flat rights.

Here are some other examples of codes of ethics:

Blogging policy examples – Charlene Li (and on a wiki: ethics / sample policies)
A much earlier reflection by Ray Ozzie

Here’s the Sun Policy – an interesting read
Richard Giles with an interesting corporate blogging presentation that touches on this (from the Perth Blognite)

Anyone know any others, is there a Cluetrain-esque ‘blogging constitution’ out there?

Interesting, via Adrian, ANT looks a lot like a rather funky video aggregator, Mac only at the mo but working ‘feverishly’ on a Windows version…

” * ANT helps you download and watch video published on the Internet.
* ANT allows you to organize and manage video playlists
* ANT is a video aggregator that allows you to subscribe to RSS 2.0 feeds with video enclosures
* ANT seeks to build opensource software tools to enable an emergent, grassroots, bottom-up, video distribution network based on existing technology such as weblogs and RSS.
* ANT is about FREE VIDEO — not free as in price, but free as in freedom.”