Saturday, February 22, 2003

MailEdit is a Mail-to-Weblog callback tool "that allows remote posting of entries to your Radio-managed weblog." [Scripting News] 7:24:37 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

[Mathemagenic]     what can we do to make blogs stick?. Spike Hall about the need for edublogs critical mass: Now it's moved to evangelism, to a greater commitment. We're all writing, speaking, selling, thinking, convening. And wondering. The early returns aren't great. As George Siemens says "...it is frustrating to stay in unrealized potentialities too long." Everyone loves the idea, but relatively few have put it into practice. In a response to George, Sebastien Paquet notes that Sociological change is slow... I'm skeptical that such a big change will take place on a large scale in educational settings before significant pressure is exerted from the outside (i.e. blogging students learn more from blogging than from school, come to class knowing more than their professors, stop going to class...) And I tend to agree that change is slow. But I don't agree that it will take such drastic measures to bring this mainstream. I think it's incumbent on teachers and professors to bring the technology to students, not vice versa. (And that list of Educator Web loggers is growing, by the way.) It has to come from inside, from us. And since we're the ones who realize the potential, we need to hasten the tipping point by making sure we have at the ready resources and support for the converts we bring into the fold. I'm working on the BlogTalk paper and I'm targetting the same question: what can we do to make blogs stick? I'm thinking of running a short questionnaire for it, so I'll be back for your help. How comes that Spike and me are thinking in the same direction so many times? :))) 10:02:22 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

[Mathemagenic]       Blogs and innovation. Interview: Maish - elearningpost [Learning Circuits Blog] Maish: I guess the aspect of highlighting trends is built into the fabric of blogs. Let me explain. There is this wonderful article in Harvard Business Review titled "Building an Innovation Factory" by Andrew Hargadon and Rob Sutton (June-July 2000). This article describes the innovation process as analyzed in many industries: 1) Constantly Capture ideas 2) Keep these alive 3) Explore new uses for them 4) Build prototypes to test them out These four steps highlight the implicit relationship between a blog and its authors/readers. From my experience, a blog captures ideas and keeps it alive (steps 1 & 2). But the blog also gives the authors/readers something back--a fertile ground to explore new uses and opportunities to build and experiment with prototypes. 9:52:46 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

[Jeremy Zawodny's blog] The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers. For a long time I've known that some things have bugged me about certain blogs and/or bloggers. This is my attempt to collect them in a top-10 list. I was going to write a paragraph for each one, but I... 9:09:32 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Are we not ants?. In my paper and throughout the "happening" I have argued that we are similar to ants in that blogs are exhibiting a emergent intelligence beyond that of the individual blogs. This is one of the few points that people seem to feel strongly divided about. Liz Lawley blogs Liz Lawley But I did still manage to extract key concepts from what we discussed. Key among them was the rallying cry among several participants that "We are not ants!" What does that mean? Well, we were discussing Steven Johnson's book Emergence , in which he discusses the emergent behavior/intelligence in environments like ant colonies. The problem, several of us noted, is that ants do not have much self-awareness, while people do. (Yes, I know, that can be argued on many levels. Let's take it as a given for now.) Steven Johnson describes the ant-like aspect of blogging much better than me in his blog. Steven Johnson The objection revolves around the fact that humans are both more nuanced than ants in their assessments of the world and their decision-making capacity, and that they're capable of understanding the dynamics of the larger system in ways that ants cannot. As Adina Levin says, "The atoms of ant action are simple: pick up crumb, bring crumb to ant colony. The atoms of human action are more complicated: identify people and groups interested in opposing Total Information Act, encourage people to persuade local congressperson." I think there's a lot of validity to the distinction, but I still think there's value in thinking about ants in this context. To me, when you're talking about emergent democracy in the online world, the equivalent of the ant is not the individual human, it's the software. The atoms of human action are indeed incredibly sophisticated ones, but the atoms of software that enables those actions to connect in new ways are much simpler. It's more like: "follow this link, connect this page to other pages that share links, look for patterns in the links." The decision-making process that leads one human to link to another person's page is indeed more complex than the instinctual actions of ants following pheromones, but the decision of the software to manipulate those links, and learn from them, is much more like the way ants behave ---- or at least it could be, if we choose to build it that way. In my comments section of the emergent democracy paper, Howard Rheingold says to think about he public sphere, Ashley Benigno, says "Instead of being viewed as enablers, the tools come across as drivers of a process. Ultimately, the human experience is missing from the picture." and she blogs about it on her weblog. So there are two very important but separate issues here: the will of the people and the social aspect of what's going on and what it means and what we can do and the tools, architecture and the way the tools interact with each other to create a feedback mechanism that increases the signal to noise ratio and encourages intelligence. They relate to each other, but the tools for thinking about these two aspects come from different disciplines and the key will be to try to allow these two disciplines to cross-pollinate and add value to each other, rather than scaring each other away. [Joi Ito's Web] 9:01:03 AM    trackback []     Articulate []