Nice piece of advice from Clay that really shouldn't be private. Are there any pieces that describe the dynamics of LiveJournal communities out there somewhere? Or will I also have to get a LiveJournal account?
Friendster notes. [...] (Private to J. Abrams: Get a Livejournal account, and watch how they handle interests and communities, then note that communities are first-class members of the system. Keep at it til it makes sense to you, because LiveJournal figured out how to create connectivity between people and ideas first, and, as far as I can tell, best.) [Corante: Social Software]
There's also a link to a sample session of a leadership game (pdf) designed by Aldrich. The notion of simulating interpersonal behavior strikes me as quite ambitious. You play a boss and your goal is to direct an employee's behavior towards a specific course of action, given that he himself has something else in mind; interestingly, changing your own agenda doesn't appear to be a possible path through the session.
More brilliant stuff from Don. Less expensive than printing t-shirts.
Virtual Protest Ring Tone. [...] If I was organizing it, I would create a Virtual Protest Ring Tone, something that say something about the protest, a jingle or a chant, whatever. Let people show their support by downloading it and installing it on their cellphones so people around the supporters will notice and ask
Why does your phone say STOP RFID instead of ringing?
Then every phonecall received turns into an opportunity to further the cause. Charge for the ring tone if the cause is worthy and in need of money. For TextAmerica, it would generate publicity and encourage meaningful use of ring tones.
An obvious variation is "Howard Dean for President" ring tone. Oh, well. I am sure Howard has plenty of helpers to tell him about it. [Don Park's Daily Habit]
Tom Munnecke does mind-blowing stuff. His overall approach is to take opportunities, rather than problems, as starting points for action. I sure wish I saw more of that. Here's his latest initiative.
September12.org and FlashMobs. September12.org is a wiki set up by Tom Munnecke to coordinate actions that will "...create a cascade of positive emotions on the 12th." The thing that caught my eye is that they are attempting to press the idea of FlashMobs into service for a larger cause.
As I predicted a while ago "If the [mob] pattern catches on, it's plainly going to be adopted by both pranksters and political activists." This set of FlashMobs may end up with both patterns. Because September12.org is simultaneously politically active and politically mute -- it references September 11th, but without noting that it was the opening attack in at least one current conflict -- it may generate some sort of counter-protest. (I can hardly imagine the warbloggers setting up a FlashMob, but who knows...) Should be interesting to watch, anyway. [Corante: Social Software]
This is a new (at least to me) resource site on the use of Weblogs in teaching. [Seblogging News]
Resource sites like this are popping up more and more frequently. Each offers a different view of the proverbial elephant that is edublogging. I feel the community is now reaching critical mass, where coverage seems to overlap enough that consensus emerges, and duplication of effort begins to be noticeable.
Here's a quick sketch of an idea. It doesn't make sense to maintain dozens of separate lists of resources. Maybe we ought to build a pool of primarily public domain or Creative Commons-licensed chunks of content. Some might have a single editor, others might not.
Now think transclusion (hi Chris!). The ability to recombine these chunks might allow us to more easily build the ultimate resource. Or build any number of guides that compete for the crown or are geared towards different sets of people. I'm thinking about a web-based distributed collaboration process that embraces the spectrum between the strict individual ownership and control of weblogs and the free-for-all of wikis.
Dave has been trying to push distributed directories in that general direction, but I'm not sure that's exactly what I want. For one thing, when I browse OPML directories I feel like I'm walking around a skeleton. I'd like to have a little meat around the bones. (Sorry if the metaphor feels obscure - I'm not sure how to be more precise at this point.)
Surely something else like this has been proposed or done somewhere? Let me know.
Sebastian offers an interesting questioning on how the constraints of formal education settings make it difficult to fruitfully integrate personal webpublishing in student activities. Time is one of the key issues.
From my experience it does seem hard to reap the benefits of personal webpublishing within a short timeframe. It easily took me four months to integrate myself into the network - and I spent a lot of that time in the blogosphere, something a time-pressured student is unlikely to be able or willing do.
[...] The way we interpret a problem has many implications on how we will go about solving it. It seems obvious that we have to get away from the mere delivery of neatly packaged, gift-wrapped recipies and tool boxes if our teaching and learning activities are supposed to result in a personally relevant construction of applicable skills and concepts.
I think that personal Webpublishing can play a vital role in transforming formal instructional settings in a way that allows for more uncertainty and evolutionary growth instead of micro-managed instructional events and interventions.
On of the most critical issues is, of course, time. In most course settings we try to simplify, condense, and accelerate processes and workflows that would often take more time to carry out under "normal" conditions. This creates a difficult environment for the integration of personal Webpublishing practices from my perspective.
Most people who kept personal Webpublishing projects (Weblogs, Wikis, etc.) running for months and years can report how certain qualities and benefits only emerged over time. They remember how they were basically talking to themselves at the beginning, how they found a small circle of like -minded authors, how this circle grew through chance meetings and focused search, how their readership grew and got more diverse, and so on.
Now, my question is: what parts of this evolutionary growth model could we hope to seed and watch unfold over the period of a semester? ... or will we never be able to touch the "real potential" of personal and collaborative Webpublishing in formal instructional settings because of the usual constraints on time, pace and structure? [Seblogging News]
