Registrations are now open for Blogtalk… and you’re not going to believe how much it won’t cost you for two of the best darn bloggin’ days you’ll ever have :D

The new issue of The Journal of Community Informatics is out now and full of very interesting articles… but, with no full text (just abstracts) sadly… so I’ll be unsubscribing.

I really think that this is a bit messed up, if you’re going to send out email updates of new issues you should at the very least provide some full papers, or don’t send it out until all the papers are available. Also, I’m convinced that the coverage, support, interest and citations which would come with an immediate full-text release would make economic sense. Dontchareckon?

I’m totally hugely flattered and chuffed that Stephen chose IncSub and this blog as the first destination of his first ‘Places to Go’ slot at Innovate, here’s the article [serious blushing].

If you’re reading this coming along from Innovate, welcome aboard, have a look around and please feel free to join in!

Enjoyed an excellent chat with Ian Grove-Stephensen of Chalkface (a company which publishes online courses, lesson plans etc.) over Jabber today (using psi, which I’m swinging towards, explain more soon). All sorts of stuff came up but what particularly resonated for me was this age old approach of storing and sharing plans / materials and alike.

One of the first things I ever did with education technology was to try and construct on an internal directory a hyperlinked selection of Word .docs that the teachers where I was working could open (via the index.doc :o), review, add to and save for interesting websites / web lesson plans / ideas about how to use them in a class. Of course now I’d just set up a wiki, but I didn’t know that then….

So, not thinking about putting Ian out of business, but I’m sure that people will have attempted a kind of open source lesson-plan / resource wiki kind of thing, but they can’t have been that successful because otherwise, I guess, I’d know about. Am I right? Do you reckon there’s wikipedia-esque potential for this kind of work?

I tried, a bit back, to publish a chunk of lesson plans through the old blog but that kinda ran out of steam. Perhaps plans could be tracked back, or aggregated rather than wikid?

I know that most people cringe at plans but for me when I was starting out teaching stuff like Rinvolucri’s Grammar Games and Penny Ur stuff was absolutely invaluable. I’d take their plans and ideas and play with them , reshape them to fit the class, mix them up etc. etc. I would have been in a heck of a mess without them.

For Alan, no wonder they didn’t come to you, too busy doing donuts in their jaguars????

“Sam – let’s call our interviewee Sam, it’s suitably anonymous – lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But “it’s not not all rock and roll and big money”, says Sam. What isn’t? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that’s what.” [the register]

Y’know… usually yacht clubs get me down a bit, all that opulence, greed, class-associated stuff, big boats sitting there and never going anywhere etc. etc.

But when it comes to us hosting Blogtalk Downunder at the best damn location possible in Sydney, well…. I can put my prejudices aside for a minute, forget my roots, and run around like a madman with a great big banner saying that we’re hosting it at the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia 5 minutes from the CBD and on the harbour (obviously!) and it’s going to be abso-bloody-lutely fantastic. Hurrah!

Also, today’s the last day for abstracts so send ’em in now to Anne.Bartlett-Bragg [at] uts.edu.au (and if you’ve just decided “hell yes, I want to go there” (and believe me, you do!) then drop us an email and I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out :o)

Luke Razzell (of weaverluke) has published two very interesting articles on Phase behaviour in human communities and the evolving social internet, part 1 & part 2 and part 3 (to come).

Phase behaviour is, as far as I can gather, essentially the development and then rapid dissolution / change evident in human communities and these explore how this might be happening and facilitated through the web, especially in the forthcoming this instalment through weblogs and wikis.

It’s an interesting read and while I’m not sure that I agree with Luke that wikis have so much of a part to play in this, concerned as he and I are with the nature of identity in the web, I’m looking forward to part 3.

A cool quote from the first instalment:

“Individuals and communities must be free within the boundaries of a respect for the choices and integrity of others.What might this freedom entail? Freedom for individuals and communities:

—to express themselves
—to relate to, interact and co-create with others
—to participate in multiple communities*
—to determine their own boundaries with respect to their relationship with others

*communities themselves may participate in other communities”

Cool, elearning design challenge is back with a new one and it’s a bit off the wall this time:

“Your water utility company has invited you to design something for its website or a public-access kiosk to convince people to conserve water and abide by the restrictions.”

More eCommunications challenge I think but well worth a visit, my contribution is at comment 4 if anyone thinks they can out do me ;D

Thanks to everyone who suggested different multi-id IM tools (for XP) yesterday, have had a chance (in between regular Saturday stuff :o) to play around with a few of them and have some initial thoughts on the four different possibilities: , Jabber (using psi as a client), Miranda and Gaim.

Trillian (which I mentioned yesterday) has definitely been the smoothest & slickest of the bunch, also the simplest (along with Miranda to get my user IDs working with (here AIM, ICQ, Yahoo & MSN). I can understand the attraction with this one although there are two fairly major problems… firstly there is ‘limited’ (to a degree) functionality here… you have to pay for any video as far as I can tell… but that just reminds you of how much you’re in the hands of a proprietary tool and that might not suit the context I’ve got in my head for this (more on that in a minute). Secondly you can’t (I think) use a Jabber ID through it… which could also be a problem.

However, if I had to choose a system for simply personal use which I felt good about straightaway I reckon this would win hands down (bear in mind I haven’t really used it yet though!)

Jabber (using psi as a client was certainly a little more tricky to set up with all my accounts but started rolling pretty successfully after that. Certainly not as slick as Trillian but seemingly robust and effective. The big bonus for this of course is that it’s based around Jabber which allows you your own IM server (behind firewall if appropriate) and like Jabber, the psi client is completely open, free and will be yours… so if you’ve got, say, a University where you want to have each employee set-up with IM that can be auto-populated with their work group through secure connections as well as allowing for connections outside the Uni and through other IM applications (other than the Uni’s official ones)… you get where I’m coming from no, perhaps :o)

But while Jabber is immensely appealing for that purpose I don’t think you necessarily need a dedicated Jabber client running on desktops and in many ways the ease of use that I got through Miranda in setting up accounts had me sold from the start. Like the Jabber client psi this is open source released, under the GPL license and links into Jabber (so that could be your secure connections I guess). Looks worth a good look!

Finally had a look at Gaim which while being a bit swishier than psi and Miranda doesn’t seem to be much different to them. I’ve had a few problems logging in with this one too but that could well be down to me having tested all the others first and my various IM accounts getting a little suspicious of the fact that I keep logging in and out (and hence blocking me hmmm…) However, looks like it’s worth a shot too.

So where to from here? Well, what I’d really like to do is, over the next week or two, try out each of these a bit more thoroughly (features, operations etc. etc. etc.) and also continue exploring the secure Jabber server option to see how much potential there is there and what the relevant costs / issues might be. I’m going to try and rope a load of colleagues into this with me but you could really help by adding me as a contact and joining in for the odd chat / mess around, please do… I’ll publish what comes up in a few weeks.

So, if you could add me as a ‘buddy’ or whatever then that’d be really cool (you can always tell me to bugger off as soon as I’m done with this :D Here are my details:

MSN : jamesnfarmer@REMOVETHIShotmail.com
ICQ: 226997956
Yahoo: jamesnfarmer
AIM: jamesnifarmer
Jabber: jamesnfarmer@im.flosoft.biz

Speak to ya soon!

The blindingly obvious occurred to me today when I figured out that I should use one of these multi-IM devices rather than running Yahoo, MSN, ICQ etc. etc. all at the same time.

I’d really like to just use Skype but as my Uni won’t allow it (something to do with security, well.. the security of the Skype Answering Service, which isn’t a set-Skype thing but nevermind…) I figure I’ll have to run with the others while online here.

So, having a look at Trillian which looks OK, does anyone use it? Are there any other half decent ones?