Category: socialware-online

I've been reading Dan Saffer blog about his experience on the MA Interaction design course in Carnegie Mellon for a while now. And I just caught his post about his interview by elearningpost.com.

Anyway I wanted to write a comment to Dan, but felt I had lots more to say and should bother him too much about it all. Oh its also good to see he now provides his rss feed in complete form. Wish more moveable type users would do this. Anyhow I'm going to pick through a few things in the interview.

Why do you blog your course?
In a way, it's about justifying the personal and actual expense of leaving work and going back to school: something I could point to and say, see, that's why I'm doing this, this is what I learned. This is why it was worth it. – Exactly…I really believe students are empowered by blogs because it not only gives them a voice but allows them to compare experiences with others in simular situations. See it would be great to have my interaction students commenting back all the time while Dan and others commented on the interaction blog. I know Dan's doing a MA and my students are doing BA but that shouldnt make a difference. In broader aspects blogs are great for justifing work to yourself. I look back through my blog and cant believe the amount of projects I have running and I can always check up on there progress even years later.

Didnt know Dan's class had a project blog. He finds it more useful than email, but I wonder if he finds instant messager useful too? I see lots of equals with my students wanting to setup there own website. For any of my students reading, read between the lines…

Has blogging helped you increase your learning network?
Dan brings up some healthy problems with blogging generally. The whole problem with quoting and citing is one so difficult to solve. I tend to say who dropped the idea or quote, but not too much because yes it can get really stupid. Only a couple of times in the interaction blog have students quoted me, and they tend to be Ian said today. As a open lecturer, I'm not that worred about students taking a little credit for something I suggest but it all depends on the situation. On the RSS comment thing, its a problem but I feel the barrier to entry is just right. Someone needs to change from RSS reader to web browser so they can write a comment. Most wankers wont be bothered to comment, while those who do really wanted to, and will leave something interesting to read.

I'm starting to question the reasons why I decided to give each year group I teach a blog. If you check out the 1st year interaction blog you can clearly see lots of useful information and ideas. Its also been used as a general notice board at the moment for arrangements and planning. Which is fine, just interesting to see happening. Those who dont blog are either not that bothered and usually dont turn up to my lessons too much or dont have a easily available blogger.
Have a look at the 2nd year interaction blog and its windy city. Very few posts and little in the way of interest, no offense to HarryT or Paulo of course. So i'm thinking join them up. It would be trivial to do, as all blogs are stored on the filesystem as text files. The hardest part would be arranging categories and telling everyone the new xmlrpc address. I could redirect everything else though. Or even with the intiative of people.rave.ac.uk – I could finally offload the blogs to a real place?

Ok I'm sorry but sometimes I read about the progress of mobblogging and i'm not exactly as thrilled as I when I first heard about it. But this is a whole different matter. I'm loving the idea. Instead of mobblogging yourself, why not let your robot dog do the hard work. And it makes so much sense, cant believe people havent thought about it before. Whuffie takes most of the photos.

welcome to the world's first and only “roblog”. currently, a sony aibo robot dog and a er1 / tablet pc based robot post automatically to this site throughout the day, and once and awhile a human (phillip m. torrone) does as well. roomba to be added this weekend.

Blojsom uses the Atom API – which has caused a huge divide in the community. Alongside the older blogger and metaweblog API's. So its pretty much forward looking. I havent spent enough time looking at it but there seems to be a few good applications already, even if there only demos.

People have started writing plugins – Yeah its not exactly the moveabletype community but you know what its the start of things? By the way, has every mac user gone nuts for ecto? And I need to try out NetNewsWire's Atom beta.

Ah ha, I knew I was right, blojsim is broken in Blojsom 2.xx. I tried and tried to get it working a while back for myself and my students. So I'm also assuming that pop2blog is also broken too?
Anyway, I'm holding my breath for blissim?

I need an alternative to blogger apps, because one of the interaction blogs is going great but I think the other one would get going if there was a simple way to blog without owning a laptop, going home or the obvious webadmin thingy. So I've been playing with pop2blog and blojsim again…But I believe none of them work in the multiuser backdrop of Blojsom 2. Which is a shame because I really need to keep the momentium going. Which reminds me I need to transfer Blojsom to a college server at some point in the near future. Mines fine for now, but I can not offer any backup or promises that things will stay up… Users use at there own risk basicly.

Serving more as a note for myself. I really need to make changes to blojsom because the new features are something else. If I do a upgrade on my blog I will do one on the interaction blog too. so fear not my students. Webbased blogging is coming to you all soon…

Plus a load of permas to check out sometime soon from my feeds…

Blog on Blogs- excellent educational example of weblog use (ebnWL News)

Blogtalk 2004 – July 2004
Who needs a phone? Infosync
Can You Sell More WiFi With Content? (Techdirt Corporate Intelligence

Flicked through my feeds today, and found Slashdot had banned me from accessing there feeds. Which is odd because my aggeragater goes and gets feeds only once every hour unless its told by the feed to get it quicker than that – example being the bbc feeds. Anyway, didnt think much of it till I poped into my bloglines account, which has also been banned. Now I know bloglines only gets feeds a minimum of once a hour no matter what.

Your Headline Reader Has Been Banned
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will Be Lifted
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

So what is up with slashdot? Did anyone else get simular messages to me? If there so worried about bandwidth they should consider the standards complient layout.

Just checked over the students bloglines aggeragater. And they are actually using it which is great news. I just need to sort out there blogs now. At the same time I found some other good feeds while searching for the interaction one.
Also found news.com's rss feeds which is very useful. And at the same time I've updated my own bloglines account so it will be the same as my feeds. Lots of work early in the morning…!

I was reading this on wired.com the other day and a good heads up on the state of play for personal publishing.

I had never heard of Wallop, but to be fair to microsoft it looks really good and backing it though the instant messager door is a good move. This is exactly what we've been trying to do with blogs and instant messager for a while now. Give students flexablitiy but depth when they publish. And theres little wrong with bundling already well known features into one packages, this is what makes apple popular. But on the other hand you know as well as I do, its going to be all propitery and propitery plus propitery does not equal fun at all. As wired says, it would be great to see Microsoft adding effort to the Atom spec.

At the same time though, some companys like Nokia are not so sure about user generated content. Sony Ericsson and Nokia have both launched initiatives to encourage people to use their multimedia handsets — one to take and share images, the other to just watch. Seems criminal that Nokia are not embracing the personal publishing idea, well it will be there lost in the end when sonyericsson, microsoft, apple, etc will dominate in this area. Maybe Nokia's Ngage says it all…