Ocotillo, Aggregation & Collaborative Weblogs Alan's done some fantastic stuff at Maricopa and it really comes as little surprise that as soon as some blundering theorist can say 'system' that he's already made it (.pdf)! This post must've somehow slipped the radar (I know I'm busy but I don't usually miss pretty diagrams... perhaps I need a break!) and described how communication is going to be facilitated through technology in their Ocotillo project (I want something local too... howabout a gum tree setup, where bits of it tend to fall on people without any warning on windless days).
Basically, I think, each working group has a weblog, a discussion board and a wiki which all link into a central blog using .. for the techies out there (i.e. not me)... php stuff rather than RSS (which does get over the rather nasty hump of loading up loads of different feeds into one page... no matter how lovely Feed2JS might be). Thus creating a lovely environment for the work group... what'll be even more interesting is how it gets used!
Now, I know nothing about the background to this and uses and stuff (I've had a brief stroll through the site but it's an 18 year old projects ferchristssake... that's over half as old as my institution... which is incidentally is 24 days older than me :o) but in thinking about applying this kind of thing to my context a few 'whoo hoo's and a few '?'s spring to mind:
Giving groups access to fully featured bulletin boards, a collaborative blog and wikis is a a huge 'woo hoo!' and without these tools theres really no point... try to get this happening in a WebCT course (as people are prone to do!) and, well, it's not pretty and quite depressing (for a whole heap of reasons). Getting this stuff aggregated (a bit EDU_RSS ish or Winer esque) is equally cool, it allows for a great deal of presentation, management and organization and is, not surprisingly for Maricopa, an excellent repository.
But I've got a niggling doubt about centralized (or community) RSS aggregators (more detail here and here (a bit)) in that while i reckon they're valuable archives, great for newbies and exactly what your websearcher is looking for (perhaps) I just don't reckon they help people communicate.... I mean, I like EDU_RSS because of the idea, the archive and the news ticker (a way cool look in which can lead to many interesting sites and links!) but I don't go there to read my news... I get it in my aggregator, because, put simply, I don't have enough time / inclination to subscribe to well over half of the sites in it and, perhaps more pertinently, I want to control my input and don't want it sandwiched up by someone else. Now, it's not like I'm saying that this is the case for the stuff that Alan is doing but I do think that the power of aggregation lies in it's individuality and dispersion.
It also jumps up that each group has a blog and by this I figure that means a collaborative blog... but do collaborative weblogs work? Undoubtedly so with Many-to-Many and other 'elite' projects (Crooked Timber for example) and perhaps even so with the sharing that Kairos allows - although there's something not quite right there (for me, that is) but in terms of small groups, probably not I think, in the same way that wikis are great places to collaboratively create but not such hot venues for collaboration. I figure that effective communication is about communication between people and writing to the same site doesn't really do this, however, if everyone had their own weblog and were aggregating each other... then that might be cool... but no so observable or objectively capturable (which is, perhaps, in part where the problem lies). phpBB is an excellent opportunity for discussion (with the 'subscribe for email updates on this thread' option though (but of course without the 'presence' that I think weblogs can provide (and rambled on a bit about before).
But as I said, this is coming from a totally ignorant standpoint on the background f the project and is much more a kind of wandering wondering on how something like this might work in my context as part of a class or a project thing.
3:50:38 PM 
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