"I'm wondering what a sub-community of educators, edBloggers, might look like in a digitally enhanced professional network of any kind, and of the WP kind in particular. More later."

10:59:33 AM    comment []

This page describes how to configure NetNewsWire and Radio UserLand so you can use NetNewsWire to edit your Radio weblog. (There will be similar pages for other weblog systems too, of course.) [Ranchero]

10:56:32 AM    comment []

Interesting read, courtesy of Pat (who is, apparently, my current muse). 

The primary lesson: The more that a company shares its knowledge, the more valuable it becomes.

Companies that Napsterize their knowledge in the marketplace also tend to have the marketplace respond with help and improvements to its intellectual capital.

While the focus of the article is on "napsterizing knowledge" for the purpose of increasing business or a customer base, there are interesting connections between the napsterizing concept and the work of the writing project.  Of particular interest to me is the notion that napsterizing knowledge results in a reciprocal flow of bytes.  The sharers ultimately receive.  The receivers ultimately share.  It's an ongoing system that creates intellectual capital that belongs in the public domain.

Customers love to be part of a community where they share knowledge with like-minded people.

The DTeam is pondering the issue of how to develop and sustain communities online.  While we first have issues in our conceptions of what a community is and how one develops, there are clear indications from the napsterizing article that control and isolationism are not conducive to developing communities.  Additionally, we have made the mistake of assuming that simply because people have the same job title that they are like-minded people.  Worse, we make the mistake of assuming that one writing project is like-minded with another writing project.  This is where the community questions become clearer to me.  Look at the communities that have already developed (the edublog group, for example).  We share freely and we are like-minded in that we are all focused on exploring, pioneering, seeking new ways of teaching and learning with the hope of changing an educational system that many now believe to be broken.

Napsterizing your knowledge widens the information portal to your customers. It can build stronger ownership of your product or service, thereby making it easier for customers to share with colleagues, who eventually become prospective customers.

The notion that ownership of a product or service (such as the services offered by writing project sites) arises out of napsterizing our knowledge is not new to the NWP.  What is new is the notion that ownership is real, not virtual, and that real ownership mandates certain ways of being and doing.  The more we share and share and share the stronger our community becomes.  If the DTeam napsters their knowledge we widen "the information portal" to our colleagues (my choice instead of customers which invokes an image that is disturbing to me but not entirely foreign to people at administrative levels of education).  How do we share?  We go public with our ideas and our thoughts and our writings and our work.  We create spaces for publishing to happen and for individuals to gather for the purpose of sharing. 

10:56:07 AM    comment []

Though I share Will's opinion on some of the Manila user-interface problems, I believe that most of them can be solved by smart template and theme design. In fact, I have just created a Manila/Frontier based Webpublishing environment that basically hides most of the interface clutter and confusing preference options from the user. This is the way to go, I believe.

Manila is a kind of multi-purpose tool box and needs to be tweaked and adabpted to a particular use context. This requires some initial effort but its flexibility for future redesigns and extensions is a great asset in the long run.

I would say that most of the problems that Will has reported so far can be attributed to the lack of appropriate template and overall learning environment design. The free ready-to-go templates that are circulating for Manila were not designed for educational applications. In addition, an implementation approach cannot entirely be modeled in the templates or themes. There is more to a guided tour into blogland than presenting the "perfect tool" right from the start. BTW, this holds true to any Webpublishing tool you want to use in an educational context. [Sebastian Fiedler] [Seblogging News]

10:55:39 AM    comment []