May 2003
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Reflections on WebCT.

Interesting reflections by Emily at Filament on using WebCT:

"My big complaint about WebCT is that it cuts students off from the real internet. I especially hate that the messaging system is not real email and doesn't allow you to email outside of the program. It creates these little communities and then abruptly disbands them at the end of the semester instead of allowing the continued networking of real internet communities." [Filament]

Absolutely! Knock down the walls says I!

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Imagine an educator who has her or his students having a great debate or discussion online during a course and then..... where does this great conversation of ideas, thoughts, and notions go after the course is over... does it get "thrown out" like so many things these days? After you get into weblogging, you see where something like webct may be coming short and has the potential to be better than it is. or not?

I have been thinking about that myself when some of our staff have classes at the local university. I say.. why not blog your cousework as an option.. some are willing.. but the professor is another story. I do not get emails back from professors on this. If work for a class is to be authentic as it can be, the journey to one's answers and conclusions should be posted. Teachers can take the knowledge they have gained and extend and refine their thinking and practice as they work though the year. This is heavy.... Why am I, a elementary school techie thinking over a challenge that people who make a lot more money than I do at the university level, should be seriously looking at.  

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WIRED: BLOG SPACE.

"Ever since the Web entered the popular consciousness, observers have noted that it puts information at your fingertips but tends to keep wisdom out of reach. In a space organized around connected minds, however, the search for wisdom becomes more promising." [elearningpost]

Another good quote: "What happens when you start seeing the Web as a matrix of minds, not documents?"

Good question!

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Had to post this for the quotes! 

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Started a Praxis weblog on using Manila. A space to plan, take note and get a better handle on Manila use in my school community 

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MetaMap - Graphical Map of Metadata and other Standards Initiatives.

"The MetaMap is a pedagogical graphic which takes the form of a subway map. Its aim is to help the information science community to understand metadata standards, sets, and initiatives of interest in this area."

Now this is extremely cool and helpful - this map shows both what issues particular standards and initiatives try to address (the 'lines' they reside on), the media types they apply to (the colours of the subway 'lines')  and also the interrelation of various standards and initiatives (where the lines have shared 'stops'). Cooler still is that it seems to run off of (or at least have a connection to) a structured directory that catalogues these standards and initiatives. Does require the SVG plugin, and they explain why they have chosen this format. - SWL 

- via David Mattison's [TenThousandYearBlog] which I subscribe to, yet only found this by chance as his main RSS feed seems to be broken. Still, dig further into his categories as he is still blogging and finding great stuff.

[EdTechPost]

Ride this train. The end product of a university course. Nice to see where we have been.  

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Dave Winer wants to get Harvard blogging.

In fact, Winer is a software developer; as founder and CEO of UserLand Software, he created software that facilitates Weblogs. Not coincidentally, it's the wonder of Weblogs - simple personal Web sites that authors frequently update - that Winer is preaching as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School (HLS).

Not only are Weblogs ("blogs" to those in the know) getting a buzz as the Internet's next big thing, but Winer and the Berkman Center think blogging might change pedagogical practices at the University and create community on Harvard's famously decentralized campus... [Beth Potier]

Dave Winer says in this article: "The idea of having a laboratory like Harvard University for learning about this technology is incredible."

I would rather say: "the idea of having a laboratory like the World Wide Web for learning about this technology is incredible."

To my knowledge none of the educational and pedagogical pioneers in "Blogland" can be found at Harvard... and if there are some, they are really trying hard not to connect with the folks that George Siemens recently indentified as Current Edu-bloggers. [Sebastian Fiedler]

[Seblogging News]

Right on Seb! Dave should know bettern than anyone regarding bootstrapping. Bootstrapping in regards to blogging crosses most boundaries. Getting and giving help does not stop at ones institutional doors. Quite the contrary.  

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Knowledge management and weblogs. Knowledge management has been premised on the notion that the knowledge to be managed already exists and simply needs to be collected and organized to obtain the promised benefits.

One reason that so many of us find weblogs exciting in the realm of knowledge management is that weblogs reveal that the most important knowledge needs to be created before it can be collected and organized.

This is similar to the argument about the important split between tacit and explicit knowledge but much simpler. There is a category of knowledge that lies between explicit and tacit--what a colleague of mine, Jeanie Egmon, labels as "implicit." This is knowledge that is actually fairly simple to write down once you decide that it's worth doing so and once you have tools that make it easy to do so. It's the knowledge of context and the whys behind the whats. It's the knowledge that's obvious at the time and on site, but mysterious even to its creators six months and six hundred miles later.

In the knowledge economy that we all live in, even if we keep trying to stay comfortably ensconced in the industrial economy that used to make so much sense, we need to reflect on and learn from experience on a daily basis in order to maintain any sort of edge. That reflection and learning depends on having high quality raw material to work with. That's what weblogs provide.

[McGee's Musings]

It is called Praxis, which deals with the construction of knowledge in the here and now. That cyclical endeavor of making sense of our endeavors in light of new insights and information. It is lifelong learning in the concrete. If anything, this is the stuff that we need to be passing on to our students. We need to model this behavior. As a faculty, we need to practice this behavior as a group. If a faculty is not about focusing on practice and refining it, then there is no praxis on an organizational level, and most likely lacking at the classroom level. That is why I think that weblogs may be one tool to expose our practice. School districts should honor teaching professionals with time in the day or at least during the week to reflect alone and with ones co-workers so that looking at the practice and student work is a meaningful ritual.  

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New feature: Creative Commons, RSS and Manila. [Scripting News]

Manila admins... another update .. another feature. 

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I like the Swim Fan theme because not only is up to standard but also has a easy edit button for adding html links a la blogrolling. That is something that I have been waiting for. When we migrated to the new server this year, I have not touched the theme question. I want to keep things as simple as possible for teachers and have them maintain their own site. The newer default theme provides Managing Editors with easy edit buttons on the home page. Bryan Bell told us in Chicago, that the newer default theme was a "one trick pony". No other theme had easy to edit site buttons like that one. So now, one can have a sharp website but also an easy way to add links to the homepage. Thank You, Bryan! 

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Joi on RSS. Joi Ito likes my book is his experiments with RSS this weekend. His summary of the situation regarding the two... [Ben Hammersley.com]

Ben Hammersley's "RSS Hacks" book by O'Reilly came out this week. I am now itiching to buy it.  

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Exploring topics in RSS2.0.

I've been doing some thinking about how to encode topic information into RSS2.0 feeds.  As a simple test of the Radio callback facility I have implemented a very simplistic protocol.  Within each <item> is a tag

<topic id="topic_id" type="topic-type" source="url">topic name</topic>

for each topic associated with the item (post).  A concrete example (using the rsstopics namespace):

<rsstopics:topic rsstopics:id="the_state" rsstopics:source="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/topicsT.html#the_state" rsstopics:type="generic">the state</rsstopics:topic>

Whilst this does have the advantage that it's simple and direct it's also a bit silly to invent a new format for topic information when we have two standard culprits available already:

• Resource Description Framework (RDF) 
• XML Topic Maps (XTM)

RDF is a general format for describing resources.  A resource in RDF terms is anything which can be uniquely identified by a URI.  An RDF statement (utilizing Dublin Core metadata) that asserts me as the owner of my weblog might look something like:

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://matt.blogs.it">
    <dc:Creator>Matt Mower</dc:Creator>
</rdf:Description>

If you cut away the syntactic fluff what this says is:

Matt Mower is the Creator of http://matt.blogs.it

Referring back to the problem at hand, describing what a post (expressed as an RSS item) is about we could come up with something like:

<item rdf:about="permalink">
    <topic id="topic_id" type="topic-type" source="url">topic name</topic>
</item>

Which is more or less exactly where we started -- using RDF hasn't altered the solution but it has added some framework around it (in this case adding rdf:about to signal the presence of RDF data within the item).  However we can go a step further.  A useful article by Eric van der Vlist discusses this very subject and refers to the RSS1.0 taxonomy module.

Somewhat counter to what you would expect RSS2.0 does not follow on from RSS1.0, nor does RSS1.0 follow on from the popular RSS0.9x formats.  RSS1.0 is, depending upon your point of view, a step forward or an aberation.  RSS1.0 uses a modular set of RDF based tags to describe items in the RSS feed.  One such module is the Taxonomy module which is intended to allow classification of RSS channels & items.

Using the taxonomy module you create something like:

<item rdf:about="permalink">
    <taxo:topics>
        <rdf:Bag>
            <rdf:li resource="topic-uri-1"/>
            <rdf:li resource="topic-uri-2"/>
        </rdf:Bag>
    </taxo:topics>
</item>

Here the <topics> element contains a list (using the RDF defined Bag - or unorderer list - container element) of resources indicating topics that describe the item.  Each resource then has a <topic> element that describes the topic.  It  might look something like:

<taxo:topic rdf:about="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/topicsT.html#the_state">
    <taxo:link>http://matt.blogs.it/topics/topicsT.html#the_state<taxo:link>
    <rsstopics:type>generic</rsstopics:type>
    <dc:title>The State</dc:title>
</taxo:topic>

Although it's a jumble of RDF, the RSS1.0 taxonomy module, Dublic Core, and, a custom rsstopics schema this says exactly the same thing as the original:

<topic id="topic_id" type="topic-type" source="url">topic name</topic>

But do we have to deal with such an ugly mess?  Perhaps not.  Our original choices included the XML Topic Maps format.  This is a complete specification for exchanging topic information.  An example of a topic in XTM format might look something like:

<topic id="the_state">
    <instanceOf>
        <topicRef xlink:href="http://www.purl.org/rss-topics/rss-topics#generic">
    </instanceOf>
    <baseName>
        <baseNameString>The State</baseNameString>
    <occurence id="the-state-item">
        <instanceOf>
            <topicRef xlink:href="http://www.purl.org/rss-topics/rss-topics#story">
        </instanceOf>
        <resourceRef xlink:href="<permalink-uri>">
    </occurence>
</topic>

Again this encodes the same information, using a standard format and only one required namespace (that of XTM itself).  A URI such as http://www.purl.org/rss-topics/rss-topics#generic points at a topic in another map (in this case a topic describing the topic-type generic).

The use of XTM comes with a number of advantages with the main one being that there are an increasing number of tools available to process & manipulate it (for example, see topicmap.com).  However there also a number of problems with this representation when you attempt to embed it within another XML format such as RSS.

• It's not clear whether an XTM fragment such as this is valid when used in this way
• Each time a topic is used we will be duplicating it's details, bloating the markup & potentially creating invalid entries
• The <occurence> relation within the <topic> element is technically redundant.  The enclosing <item> indicates the occurrence. 

One way to avoid these problems would be to embed the topics within the RSS <channel> definition and refer to them from each <item>.  However we still need a way to refer to the topic and XTM doesn't provide this.  If we had a good way to reference topics then we could either embed mini topic map within the RSS file, or just have the <topicmap> in an external file and point to it.  What could we use?  One possibility is RDF.

Using a combination of RDF and XTM would mean something like:

<item rdf:about="<permalink-uri>">
    <rsstopics:topic>http://www.example.org/myTopicMap.xtm#topic-id</rsstopics:topic>    <!-- XTM in an external map -->
</item>

or

<item rdf:about="<permalink-uri>">
    <rsstopics:topic>#topic-id</rsstopics:topic>  <!-- XTM element inline in the RSS -->
</item>

In this example the item now refers to an XTM defined topic either elsewhere in the RSS feed (contained within a valid <topicmap> element) or within an external topic map.  The referenced <topic> element can further describe the topic (names, types and so on) using all the expressiveness of XTM.  It's also efficient since there is no duplicated information within the feed.

I have described approaches using RDF, XTM and a hybrid of the two.  Each has advantages and disadvantages although I believe the hybrid makes the best use of both formats.

I'd welcome comments and or opinions from interested parties.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 

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Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars. Great article on using wikis as both a PIM and collaborative content tool (and in fact on all things wiki, though there is so much here you almost have to know quite a bit about this before it starts to make any sense). By David Mattison, Access Services Archivist British Columbia Archives, Canand (GO Canada!!) Also has a great sidebar comparing wikis and blogs. Be warned though: if you haven't played with wikis and you thought blogs were addictive, be prepared to get sucked into a massively intertwined universe in which you can spend days! Think 'surfing the web' to the nth degree! - SWL [EdTechPost]

A good overall description of what is out there in Wiki and Zope Land. Prepare to take a good half hour just visiting the resource links. A decent comparison between wikis and blogs with example sites. A very good place to start your adventure. I have to say that there were some resources that I did not know of in wikiland. Do visit, even if it is only for self knowledge.  

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Mixing, tinkering - digital age. Mixing, Tinkering and Reusing in the Digital Age Comment: Short, point-form post of a John Seely Brown presentation. Quotables: "The... [elearnspace blog]

What I got out of this is that there is a new digital ball game and educational paradigms from which I work out of is behind the times. 

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Uses of media. I think we'll see much more of this: Digital Resume (via Ben Hammersley)...as our society stops thinking traditional, and starts... [elearnspace blog]

This is such a cool resume! Now we all will not be able to do that Flash magic..yet.. but like I told the staff where I work, a blog can be your resume. Damn better than a traditional resume. 

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I agree with Doc.  Trackback is way too technical and prone to inevitable abuse.  There is a better way to do this. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

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Seems to be a disconnect between what trackback can do according to Movable Type creators and others. Seems the Trotts wowed them at Seabury , just on this point. I think the Trotts should write more as promised on Trackback and its usefulness and potential. 

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The DGI Conference Just Keeps Getting Better. How unbelievably psyched am I about the Digital Genres Conference in may? The list of participants is growing bigger and... [Golublog] 

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Come to the Digital Genres Conference!. It's official, 30-31 May 2003 in Chicago will be a special, me-organized conference: Digital Genres: Semiotic Technologies This Side of... [Golublog] 

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Chicago Bloggers Yahoo Group

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chicagobloggers/ ;

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Trott Report. Ben and Mena Trott are here, visiting Seabury as part of our technology lecture series. They gave a spectacular workshop talk this afternoon for a gathering of students, stimulating their imaginations about the potential of personal publishing beyond anything they’d dreamed before. They joined Trevor and Margaret (and Pippa) and me for dinner at Cozy Noodle, and now are beginning... [AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

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Good post which touches on the conversation with the creators of Movable Type in Evanston, Illinois. I found the conversation around virtual communities and blogging the most interesting. There are two schools in San Fran. that use MT and have great looking sites. A hint at what the new MT Pro. features, such as a photo gallery module. 

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Weblogs and passion.

I had an opportunity to listen to Mena and Ben Trott talk about Moveable Type last night courtesy of AKMA at Seabury Western. They sparked a good discussion around the role of weblogs in creating and sustaining community (two good live blogged accounts from AKMA and Gabe Bridger by way of Mike Marusin).

At least some of the power and energy behind the weblog phenomenon has to come from passion of the creators of weblog tools. All of the products supporting weblogs are labors of love; all grew out of individual efforts to scratch personal itches--Blogger, Moveable Type, Radio.

This is why weblogs will become important to knowledge management and knowledge sharing in organizations and why the big software players haven't been a significant factor yet.

Organizations have recognized that knowledge is an essential part of the value that they create. Knowledge management efforts on the other hand have largely been a disappointment because they have tried to force knowledge into a product metaphor; trying to force what is fundamentally a product of craft into an industrial model of reusable parts (see knowledge work as craft work).

Discussions about knowledge management in organizations always raise the issue of sharing with the argument that people will be reluctant to share out of fear that their efforts will be appropriated by others. This is rooted in a industrial product metaphor of knowledge. See knowledge work as craft, however, and the sharing issue dissolves. Craft workers exist to share the fruits of their creating. A true knowledge craft product embodies something of the soul and personality of its creator. You share it with others not so they can copy it but so that they can find inspiration in using it in their own craft.

Weblogs hold so much promise in the organizational realm precisely because they amplify this connection between craft and creator. Your record is there to be seen and to be shared.

This is also why weblogs are so confusing in the organizational realm. You have to move beyond the notion of reusable and reproducible product as the putative goal.

I had a conversation with Alan Kay a while back about Smalltalk and object-oriented programming that I now finally think I understand (conversations with Alan can be that way for those of us who are mere mortals). He was disappointed that the early commercialization efforts around Smalltalk and OO emphasized the idea of reuse. His goal had always been (and still is, take a look at Squeak and SqueakLand) to make it possible for developers to express what they were trying to do faster and more effectively. He was trying to make computers a medium for expressing certain kinds of thinking.

Weblogs accomplish something similar for knowledge workers. They lower the barriers to sharing ideas far enough that it becomes possible for nearly all of us to do so. Bring that inside organizations and you have a powerful tool for being effective as opposed to merely productive. Scary to the established order? Sure. But if value does truly depend on how well and how fast organizations can create and share new knowledge, then the winners will emerge from those who commit to making it work.

[McGee's Musings]

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I have three points. The first is that bloggers are passionate about blogging. Second, this event was held in a major graduate school for training pastoral workers. Just like educators, a group that needs to get connected are the pastoral workers. Caregivers need support, too! I wonder if web based tools like blogs, may help pastoral workers. I think so. Sometimes a mission, be it in an urban area or rural, can be very isolating for any number of reaons. One needs to share about one's experiences and dialogue about the 'practice', especially if the folks one is working with would rather gab than get down to "business" .

Three, I love McGee's critique of business looking at knowledge making as a a reusable tool instead of as a craft. Knowledge as craft.. that is inspirational.

Amen! 

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KM and technical trends. Technical trends bode well for KM Quote: "The challenge was and is to make more of the routine communication flowing... [elearnspace blog]

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I think George again hits the nail on the head, on his commentary on the KM article in Infoworld. Blogging is organic.... or is the best blogging is organic... hmmmm. I do believe that a person needs a good personal motive to blog. 

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Architecting online communities.

Joel Spolsky's very well-written piece titled "Building Communities with Software" provides insightful perspectives on what makes online communities work. Spolsky makes a good case for simplicity in design; he has paid attention to the tradeoffs inherent in many implementation details. The key idea:

In software, as in architecture, design decisions are just as important to the type of community that develops or fails to develop. When you make something easy, people do it more often. When you make something hard, people do it less often. In this way you can gently encourage people to behave in certain ways which determine the character and quality of the community.

More on building communities here, and in chromatic's piece here.

[Seb's Open Research]

Right on... ! 

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Making room for disruptive and emergent technologies.

The Digerati are a dispersed tribe, found on all campuses and recognized by burning zeal for the latest developments in emergent and disruptive technologies, many of which are viewed with suspicion --or at least with caution-- by their colleagues. These early adopters are tinkerers and evangelists. They can be found in many places on campuses, exploring innovations that have potentially transformative influence upon teaching and learning. They pay heed to conduits of information that others may not see the point of. They develop and exercise extramural links that are essential to their sanity and productivity, and that ensure a continual flow of inspiration. Individually, they often feel that they are working in a vacuum, that most of their colleagues don't understand their motivations or what they do. They (well, we) desperately need to be better connected to what's happening in similar institutions... [Hugh Blackmer]

I read this as a pretty good description of what the cluster of Webloggers who work in the field of education and learning is doing for me. The educational Blogger Network could really serve the "need to be better connected". Bringing together people who would otherwise "feel that they are working in a vacuum" should be one of our priorities. [Sebastian Fiedler]

[Seblogging News]

AMEN! Lets see what comes out of the Bloggin Chicago with Erin Clerico and Bryan Bell at the National Writing Project's Blog Design Team training today and tomorrow. I can't believe it. Today the training is at Whittier School, where I work, in the heart of the Latino barrio of Pilsen in Chicago. We will be blogging the sessions at the EBN Manila site. http://www.bayareawritingproject.org/eBn/ ;

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Now that I'm working with Manila again, I'm remembering all the things that infuriate me about Manila. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get my new site to show me the Edit In Radio buttons so I can use the outliner to edit my templates. I refuse to edit the template in a web form. I will not do it! ;-> Anyway, I have gone to my own personal membership page and told the software that I have Radio and that it's running on port 5335. I've been to the prefs page for the site (I'm a managing editor) and made sure the pref is on there too. I look everywhere for the stinkin button, but it's nowhere to be found. I guess I'll have to resort to looking at the source code to figure out what I'm not doing that I need to do. [Scripting News]

BAM! What happens when the big cheese doesn't work or play with his own product...... SebF,Will R, PatD and others have been asking for better features of Manila for tighter integration between Radio and Manila and just better and newer tools to help in collaboration. Userland, we need a roadmap, a sketch on where you are taking Manila. 

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