Technology

information & communication technology

Into the Blogosphere

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Hosted by the University of Minnesota’s libraries, is this collection of essays, Into the Blogosphere, looking at blogging from multiple perspectives. It is all under a Creative Commons license as well.

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others. We encourage you to post your responses to the essays …

This site should be a valuable resource for anyone studying the blog medium.

Blogs & Information Literacy

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Will Richardson has a good post on how many of the competencies required for information literacy can be addressed through blogging. Will’s quote from the American Library Association:

The information literate student validates understanding and interpretation of the information through discourse with other individuals, subject-area experts, and/or practitioners.

This is the kind of educational outcome, based on a process, that makes more sense than mastery of subject-based content. The content discussed in blogs is not as important as the skills developed through the process of blogging. The content is just grist for the cognitive mill.


Do It Yourself (DIY)

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After to listening to an interview with Doc Searls, Jay Cross expands on the analogy of open source software as the material for DIY’ers of information technology.


The DIY crowd just want to build things. The closest analogy is to the construction industry. They share a common language ("builds,""tools,""builders"). Linux is the DIYers’ lumber, a raw material for virtually any job. Neither software construction nor building houses locks you in to a particular supplier. The housebuilder doesn’t say, "We’re building this house on a Weyerhauser platform…."
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The fact that Open Source code is free delegates decision-making lower in the organization. You don’t need a purchase order — or official approval — to use it.

As IT becomes ubiquitous, many of us just want to build things that will address our issues, and open source gives us the material to start with. No, open source is not perfect, but without it we couldn’t afford to test out many of our ideas. Open source lowers the barriers to innovation, because you have free building material, and only have to supply the labour.

Cycling and KM

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Denham Grey has the perfect presentation for my tastes, but I won’t be able to get to Cincinnati to see it. Denham is using cycling as the metaphor for knowledge management (The only sport I love more than cycling is cross-country skiing) .

Having cycled across France & Belgium, as well as climbing three passes in the Alps in the same day, I must admit that cycling is a passion, and Denham is going to link it to my business – great!

Ever had that sinking feeling you are being dropped from the peleton as new technology decends?, looking for new ways to collaborate on a strategy or coordinating to chase down a break-away?, is your team self-organizing or do you rely on command and control?, do you have the agility and the shared mindset to react to a sudden event?

I hope he posts his notes. Allez-y!

Networks Replace Hierarchies

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Jay Cross has synthesized many of the same themes discussed in my previous post on the The Dummies Guide to Change. There are also some good links on his post, which covers some previous material because Jay has been having problems with comment Spammers.

I am certain that we are about to experience a tipping point in business organisations as well as organisational learning. Observations made in The Cluetrain Manifesto are becoming obvious to the Early Majority. Informal learning is the huge growth area (not online courses), and will prove John Chambers (who said that e-learning will make e-mail look like a rounding error) correct. We are also seeing the rise of connected natural enterprises, as Jay says:

Networks are the next step in computing, business organizations, and more. As internodal communication costs drop, networks replace hierarchies.

The world is a different place because [almost] everyone can talk to everyone else. That changes business as well as learning.

 

Sakai 1.0 to be Released Today

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The Sakai Project will be releasing the first version of its open source learning management system today:

The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, and the uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools. This will yield three big wins for sustainable economics and innovation in higher education:


* A framework that builds on the recently ratified JSR 168 portlet standard and the OKI open service interface definitions to create a services-based, enterprise portal for tool delivery

* A re-factored set of educational software tools that blends the best of features from the participants?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ disparate software (e.g., course management systems, assessment tools, workflow, etc.)

* A synchronization of the institutional clocks of these schools in developing, adopting and using a common set of open source software.

It will be interesting to see if this changes the balance in the higher education marketplace.

Update: More information and related links are available at ICTlogy.

Furl helps to create the personal web

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Via Weblogg-ed is a good overview of Furl, and how it differs from the usual bookmark managers. Greg Ritter goes into detail on how you can use Furl. It seems especially useful for students and researchers. I use Furl (see Home Page) when I’m too lazy to blog or if a want to share a series of web pages on a single topic. It’s a great tool for collaborative web research. I think that the use of tools like Furl may surpass blogs in the near future – they’re too easy.

The LMS Industry

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Scott Leslie discussed the increase in LMS vendors in the marketplace in a recent newsletter, something that most analysts did not predict:

While it’s definitely true that a few of the 50 seemed to have slowed down their release cycles (no bad thing in a sector that at one point seemed to be averaging close to 2 major releases a year), none of them have actually closed shop. Add to these all of the small open source projects popping up (and some of the bigger ones too), as well as a seemingly neverending supply of elearning startups from India, and one could get the impression that this marketplace is somehow expanding, not consolidating.

Scott goes on to say that organisations should ensure that any system they purchase have the ability to export content in a standards-compliant format, and that this should be proven prior to purchase. This is good advice, as there are numerous purchasers who are locked-in to their sub-optimal systems because they cannot export their content to any other system.

The Utility of Learning Objects

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Stephen Downe’s post about the value of LO’s reflects my own consternation – are they of any utility? (My emphasis added)

In the world of e-learning, meanwhile, the systems and protocols look more and more like jibberish each passing day as every possible requirement from every possible system – whether it makes sense or not – is piled into that tangle of 24-character variable names called Java (none of which will work at all unless you have exactly the right configuration, somewhat like my database). Again, maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that if you need an advanced degree to make this stuff work (and of course it have to be exactly the right kind of degree) then it’s just not going to work. It won’t, it can’t. Because learning, above all, must be a populist enterprise. Now I’m not proposing that we go back to the world of stone tools and chalk. But the last time I looked people weren’t using learning objects in any great number, either in the classroom or (even more so) to support home learning. Gosh, make sure you can float before building a battleship.

I see a lot more day-to-day value for learning in the use of simple technologies like blogs, RSS and trackbacks. Not all of the blog systems are compatible and you will find technical hurdles, but my blog is becoming a valuable learning tool, and it is very learner-centric. It’s also standards compliant, cheap and easy to use.