Clay Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups
"To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the interent has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog."
[Via Tomalak's Realm] [Ken Dow & the Tigers of Wrath]

Very good overview that can get a good discussion going on where we have been and where we are now in terms of social software. Worth a few minutes of any bloggers time.
9:24:41 PM  #  comment []

Pure CSS tabs technique. Web maestro Mark Pilgrim is always very generous about documenting his experiments and his solutions. In his Dive into Mark blog he's working on a new design and has posted a discussion of the "pure CSS" technique he's using to produce navigation tabs.

This is something I've been trying to understand for a long time myself. A lot of smart CSS and standards-compliant design gurus have discussed aspects of it online, but not yet in a way that I could fully wrap my head around.

I found one thing Mark wrote oddly reassuring, "This CSS stuff is hard; don't let anybody tell you different." You can either learn this stuff the hard way, by puzzling it all out yourself, or the easy way, by following Mark's memex trails. [Radio Free Blogistan]

Yup... this is the way to go...
9:17:45 PM  #  comment []

Ken Dow ... in search of Open Source Manila ...is it Drupal.... Had lunch with MrG yesterday, mostly to talk about Drupal. I've been looking for a LAMP version of Manila to address some concerns I have. Drupal caught my attention and then it turned out that MrG is heavily involved with it. Anyway, had a great chat and I'll be looking into it further after I install MySQL and PHP on my PowerBook. [Ken Dow & the Tigers of Wrath]

Interesting, Ken Dow moving on to LAMP and looking for some new community plumbing application... Drupal maybe..
9:03:51 PM  #  comment []

Dave Winer... there is a National Convention here in SF in November! The Department of Media Sciences, Anna University, Chennai is hosting a national conference on blogging. [Scripting News]

Interesting that Winer hasn't picked up on the National or International Edublog Convention in SF later this year. Another of those things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
8:24:28 PM  #  comment []

Manila Dev Group forms on Yahoo Groups
ed a mail list for developers working in the Manila content management system from UserLand. [Scripting News]

Great! Should have been done some time ago. Maybe seeing how the open source developers come around a project and offer free mods, themes, add-ons, patches... Interesting to say the least. Some known Manila devleopers are there already, Sam Devore (in addition knows Frontier on OSX) and Marcus Mauller. The site is unmoderated. Interesting that this is done on Yahoo groups and not done with Manila. Any comments?
8:02:09 PM  #  comment []

What is the hook to get teachers blogging? Weblog as Professional E-Portfolio for educators. Our plan at Whittier School is to work grade by grade, teacher by teacher. I am working on helping teachers find that hook for themselves to get into weblogs. We started with documenting an after school event which was a fun camp, whereby teachers and parents taught something that they loved doing, to small groups of children at http://www2.whittier.cps.k12.il.us/funcamp. For Hedy Helfand, the teacher who organized this event over four fridays, she wants to promote this type of interaction between students and teachers. The culminating event was covered by NPR Radiol She has had other schools inquire on the organization of how to do Fun Camp . Students who took a digital photography course took the photos for the site and prepped some of them for the internet. The teacher posted them and wrote the text. I am working with the same teacher on developing a K-Log around Peaceful Classrooms. Hedy Helfand, the third grade teacher, will be developing this site with other teachers who are using classroom meetings to humanize the classroom community http://www2.whittier.cps.k12.il.us/peacefulclassrooms. Let the teacher start moving other teachers.

Kindergarten are interested in weblogs as a professonal e -portfolio/teacher inquiry type of website. Over the next two weeks we will be going over their ideas for the weblog. They, like all the teachers at Whittier , have digital cameras, so they have plenty of digital documentation. The idea is that the teacher in the classroom generate the uses of the website, not me. I can show them options and ways they are used, but utlimately, it is up the teacher to find that hook for themselves.

onward...
6:35:55 AM  #  comment []