Montag, 10. Februar 2003

Is it Me. ...or does anyone else see the potential (or is it irony?) in Dave Winer leaving Userland to go to Harvard and introduce America's most prestigious educational institution to Web logs? (And BTW, can you believe he just wrote: "Now that I'm working with Manila again, I'm remembering all the things that infuriate me about Manila." Well, how about fixing it?) Listen to some of this: But now, thanks to John Palfrey & the Berkman Center, we have a bona fide initiative afoot to explore how weblogs can serve the aims of education. And it will be led by none other than Dave Winer, whom I recall linking to back when the word "weblog" was assaultingly fresh to my ears...It's time for some radical approaches to teaching and learning. I don't mean radical as in "cutting edge technology." I mean radical as in "to-the-root." Largely self-driven, apprentice-style. With everyone able to join the conversation, a built-in incentive to participate and (a few) natural filtering mechanisms. --Donna Wentworth (Emphasis mine.) Hmmm...is eBN "bona fide?" Anyone else hear "disruptive" in that? And how about this: We're convinced that blogging, evangelized by Dave and others here, can help spread the wealth of knowledge from school to school; from student to student; and from elsewhere into Harvard and vice-versa. The Web, e-mail and other basic Net-based apps generally have had this effect to some extent. But not in a wholly satisfying manner. I wouldn't bet again[st] blogs making the next big step forward. --John Palfrey (Emphasis mine.) Can I get an AMEN brothers and sisters? And more... Another sign of Web logs going mainstream came last month when one of the movement's champions, Dave Winer, quit his California start-up to take a fellowship at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Winer, creator of the popular Radio UserLand blogging software, said he plans to help the academic community share information online more efficiently. "I hope to get a lot of blogs going at Harvard," Winer added. --Leslie Walker, Washington Post (Emphaisis mine.) Add a few degrees to the tipping angle...[Will Richardson] Another voice on the Harvard and Winer topic... [Sebastian Fiedler] 11:38:28 PM

It's Saturday.... ...but my kids are posting away. I've seen about 20 messages come through today from my various class and student Web logs. How cool is that? Discussion stuff, not assigned. HOW COOL IS THAT? This post is what it's all about for me. Thinking in writing. Writing for audience. Publishing. Digital paper. Really, how cool is this? [Will Richardson] Sounds like Will has established a working model in his environment. Encouraging to see how his students are taking off on their own. [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:41 PM

The wave itself has moved on. Weblog popularity, Power laws & priorities [dive into mark] Quote: "The ridiculously low barrier to entry of starting your own weblog is invariably held up as a prime reason why personal publishing will lead us into an egalitarian utopia. But all it really means is that anyone can get in on the long tail of the power law distribution, where you (voluntarily) spend all your time linking to Glenn Reynolds or Dave Winer, and never get read by more than 3 people." Comment: I haven't checked my stats in a long while.  I'm sure they're not very impressive. Actually, I'm thinking a little more about links and the like.  Since I started using Amphetadesk, I've been paying more attention to my headlines, but that aside, it's pretty clear to me that what gets readers is original content, not links and quotation.  I fall into that trap often and wonder why I bother sometimes with my links. Anyway, weblogs and education are getting some pushes now.  The attention is on Dave Winer and Harvard, but I think it's fair to say that the action has been in San Francisco.  It would be disappointing to see all the kudos and attention going east when some really interesting things are happening elsewhere.  I feel that way sometimes about my own meagre efforts too.  I've been doing this weblog longer than most, but now that momentum has gathered, I feel like the foam on a wave that's been left behind as the wave itself has moved on.  I guess that relates back to this power law distribution.  When I knew all the educational webloggers, there really weren't very many of us.  Now that there are many more, I'm discomforted when credit isn't given to the pioneers or when I feel that credit is mistakenly given in some directions and not others.  It's a natural reaction (witness Dave Winer's repeated attempts to get the record set straight on various issues, including weblogs, but also XML-RPC and RSS).  While it's inevitable that history will get reinterpreted, our reaction to such interpretations is also inevitable. So I'm self-obsessed...what did you expect?  This is a weblog after all. ["David Carter-Tod"] David's sentiments are probably shared by a number of other people who have been exploring educational applications of Weblogs. What really suprises me is the fact that the folks who are now celebrating the Harvard initiative obviously never used "google" to take a look who is already out there. Is it so hard to string together a search request with a combination of "weblogs", "learning", "education", etc.? [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:40 PM

Userland, we need a roadmap. 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. [Albert Delgado] Albert seems equally surprised (or even irritated?) by Dave Winer's recent comment. Yes, Sir! Where IS the road map? What's happening with Manila development? Anybody interested in some improvement ideas? [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:38 PM

Working with Manila. 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 With 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. Like all software, it's great when it fades into the background and you can forget about it. It's shitty when it's in your way. Postscript. Found the problem. I had to enable the XML-RPC interfaces at the server level. Once they were enabled, the buttons appeared. It's hard to imagine that a user who is not well-versed in the Manila at the source level would be able to figure this out without asking for support. On the other hand, it's probably right that the XML-RPC interfaces are disabled by default. [Dave Winer] Oh great! Now Dave Winer the turned-to-education Weblog preacher and chief tool-maker of Userland re-discovers his own application... So, Dave is getting Weblogs started at Harvard Uni? Well, how about listening to the people who are trying to apply these technologies for learning and education for quite some time now? I guess we could point Dave (or anybody else who cared to listen) to a good number of interface and functionality problems in Manila... [Sebastian Fiedler] 10:32:37 PM

Academic Publishing. One of the things I like best about blogging is the instant gratification: I think, I blog, I publish, I rethink, I blog, etc. In my "real" work, the rewards are so much slower. On Friday, I got a copy in the mail of a book, Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, ed. Lucinda Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, in which an article I'd written was published. From start to finish, this 20 page article (10 pages in the book because the print is so small) has taken almost 10 years to see its way into print. Here's the history... ["Deborah Gussmann"] 8:38:33 PM

About news aggregators. I've posted about news aggregators before, including NetNewsWire, the "lite" sibling of NetNewsWire Pro, currently in beta. While the "lite" version is primarilly a news reading front end for various Mac sites, NetNewsWire Pro from Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software is a full featured Mas OS X 10.2.3 news aggreator and web blog editor. Subscribing to an .rss based news feed couldn't be simpler; either you select them from the generous (and multilingual) collection included in the Sites Drawer, or you can copy the .rss URL from a site, click the Subscribe icon, and paste the URL into a simple dialog. Reading is simpler still, with easily understandable naviagation commends and menu options (though I think "Mark Others Read" would be a useful addition). NetNewsWIre Pro also lets you post to web logs, principally Blogger, Userland Radio, Bloxom, MoveableType and Manilla blogs, among others. The tools you'd want are all there—including autmatically generating a post from a news item, Post and Preview (the Live Preview is a nifty feature), and you needn't know HTML. There are simple tools for creating links and setting text style, and if you do know HTML, there's even a configurable pop-down menu for custom tags. Best of all though (at least to my way of thinking) is you can spell check your posts. There's even a convenient Notepad for copying bits of text to turn into a post, complete with basic but very functional outlining tools (the Notepad very cleverly saves automatically). It's still beta, but already I'm doing almost all my web blog reading in NetNewsWire Pro, and I'm going to keep trying it for posting as well. I've two blogs, this one built with Radio Userland, and this one built with Blogger. This post was made using NetNewsWire Pro, and it really is an elegant example of a good Mac OS X Cocoa-based tool. It makes excellent use of the underlying frameworks to provide niceties like spell check and interface elements, and Simmons has even made some of his code available to other developers. This is one of those applications that seems deceptively simple, but that actually does rather a lot. It has enormous potential for teaching; I hope I have an opportunity to use it with a class. ["Lisa Spangenberg"] Time to try an OS X installation in the coming months. Reading all the good reviews of NetNewsWire makes me want to play with it. [Sebastian Fiedler] 7:38:57 PM

"Greensboro Connects" meeting. I attended the last Greensboro Connects meeting--a group of individuals brought together to rally around and connect the community. Although they've been meeting for several months, you'd think it was their first.  They want to "gather data and distribute information so that people would have a better sense of community and stronger connections."  I along with my friends from Hyperbolic Communications suggested a website.  I thought they should initiate a web campaign--invite the community to have a place on the web and request content and input.  The organization would have launch date with the community fired up through their own involvement.   It would be a great celebration---everyone contributing in one place, hyped up about the connection--and enough non-for-profit cash to pull it off. The response was, "We don't have anything to put on the site.  We want  information for people to use.  No one is going to come to a site they don't even know about."  These people lack the vision needed to lead a 21st century community initiative.  A website can do all  they need--gather, distribute, organize and network--connect.  By making it a community project, they could have all the support in the world and a more complete inclusion of the people in our area.  When people come to Greensboro and want to know where to go, they go online!  When folks need a professional, they connect online!  Anything Greensboro could be found in an organized data warehouse.  Instead of sifting through guides, phone books, and surfing for information about this community, one could find it all in one place--connecting through the big green door. After rejecting our idea, they decided to start working the telephone to gather information.  I'm not surprised.  The website is the most simple, most logical step--Why would they want to do something simple or logical?  Greensboro Connects?  To what?  Telephone operators?  Where's the vision? ["Tara Sue Grubb"][via "Jason Lefkowitz"] Tara's story could have taken place in any educational institution, too. The availability of technologies is one issue... but breaking up old habits and patterns of work is usually the harder part of any change project. Which brings me back to the question: How do you introduce people to the "two-way-web" and its potential for learning and teaching? [Sebastian Fiedler] 6:38:35 PM

Badabing, badabang - go figure how I got into this. Dear colleague, Congratulations! We are pleased to notify that the poster proposal you submitted has been accepted for POSTER presentation at the 10th EARLI conference in Padova, Italy. Please inform all your co-authors. Details about the length and schedule of the sessions will appear later on the website:  http://earli2003.psy.unipd.it.  The final programme of the conference will be available on-line in June. With our warmest regards Pietro Boscolo Lucia Mason (on behalf of the local organising committee)       Lucia Mason, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology (Conference Management, Local Committee) [Pat Delaney] Congratulations, Pat. I hope we will be as lucky as you. Would be a nice to meet in Padua this summer. [Sebastian Fiedler] 6:38:34 PM

This must be a conspiracy of some sort. As soon as I closed shop at home to get on this trip to the US the output level has been considerably raised on a good number of my favorite Weblogs. How should I ever get back on track with that much going on? Come on people... slow down a little... ;-) Well, as a sort of compensation I had the pleasure to spend some time on the phone with "Will Richardson". And I hope I will finally get to talk to "Pat Delaney" in real time, too. Pat was kind enough to keep his chat channel wide open for me today... and I managed to miss him again. $%#@$^! The face-to-face conversations that I am having here with my friend and collaborator Priya convince me more than ever that we really need to create some opportunities for meetings... Ok, I am off to more conversational encounters. I hope I will get some time to blog tomorrow... ["Sebastian Fiedler"] 6:38:33 PM