Just came across a really old video (1999) featuring a guy I just about remember who put on something called a POTS party (Plain Old Telephone Service) from Canada in about 1998, that I listen to live through the slow 56k modem we had back then (Wales). I remember that it gave me access to music that would have otherwise been out of my reach. The same year myself and my dad put on a video webcast from a music festival (hence the interest in webcasts etc.) it felt at that time like a new wave of kind of audiovisual pioneers playing with a new medium. It's funny how things have developed into ondemand rather than live.

Below is the link to the video in situ with comments, below that is a track that I remember getting played (and written by the host on Fasttracker).

MENTAL FLOSS - TORONTO INTERNET TELEVISION on Video.ca

http://www.mentalfloss.ca/blog/_archives/2009/9/21/4328392.html

Yahoo Pipes

As I mentioned on a comment somewhere in the wiki, I have a favourite article about RSS newsfeeds (http://tinyurl.com/5vactlc) that describes the lots of things you can do with them. Like combine them, or using searchterms to filter the estuary into a river of information. It mentions one service www.mysyndicaat.com as a way of doing that, and taking a look it does look like it can do the job well with minimal fuss or advertisements. But ?I have heard of Yahoo Pipes for some time and I thought it might be fun to take a look. This article describes the process involved. I wanted to combine all of fellow student's blogs into the one feed rather than using Cormac's odpl file which gives seperate feeds for each in Google Reader - I'm going to compare both and see which is nicest to use.

http://howtotechtips.blogspot.com/2008/06/combine-feeds-with-yahoo-pipes.html

The trickyest bit was finding the real RSS feeds from each blog (the home page for a blog doesn't always work). Wordpress blogs often seem to hide the RSS/Atom link but adding '/feed/' to the url seems to go to the right place.

Anyway, here's the resultant RSS feed for everybody's blogs under the one feed (no comments - you'll need to click on the post title to be taken to the post in situ to see these):

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=0450109b84dc434ed904fe4b58e060f9&_render=rss

Encyclopedias

I had some friends over last night(still paying the price) and conversation went at one point to my course and we got talking about wikis (they knew Wikipedia). One of my friends reflected that she used to love the Encyclopedia Britannica. I book that she would quite happily read for hours on the search for some specific information and getting way-layed by lots of other different stuff (as now happens in Wikipedia). I remember that we had a set at my primary school and my grandparents may have had them. I think that at one point that there were door to door salesmen who used to sell you a set (it reminds me recently of US Amazon seller printing books of popular wikipedia articles) and you were proud to have these at your disposal on a shelf in your living room. I'm not sure how they fit into other reference type books. Did people used to use them to look for information much in the same way we now use Google? Henry Jenkins (What Wikipedia can teach us about the new media literacies (part one)) says that it is a powerful word with connotations of reliability. Who certifies that knowledge, is it something like peer review? I think he also says that most Encyclopedia are out of date. Aparently (according to Wikipedia) the first encylopedia dates from about 2000 years ago written by Pliny the Elder and the word Encyclopedia means something like recurrent or general knowledge. I'm interested to find more about these Encyclopedias
.
As for Wiki's apparently that word comes from the Wiki Wiki shuttle bus from Honolulu airport to the city centre. I went there last year and say these buses but I'm kicking myself because we got herded onto a different plush coach or I didn't even get a picture. (This picture from the Wikipedia article on wikis, by Andrew Laing)

Also really useful site for the Wayback machine: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

anywhere, anytime...(other than blackboard)

Stephen Downes Educational Blogging

Blogs @ anywhere: High fidelity online communication, James Farmer, Anne Bartlett-Bragg

In the new version of blackboard that the university is implementing ('Bb9') there is a good inbuilt blogging tool. I have felt for sometime on talking with staff particulalrly from Education that they are often reticent about talking about their favourite wiki or blogging tool - almost as though they are defensive about their right to choose a tool. The job I have is often interesting and there is often a fine balance of beating the Blackboard drum, and respecting and promoting and kindling educational intellegence. I can't hap hoever see that Blackboard will recognise a feature and want to take ownership of it and encorporate it into their system. Blogging is a particluarly web2.0 thing - open readership, rss subscription, commenting. And Blackboard isn't. In fact with Blackboard's 'mash-up' tool they are trying to give some access to youtube/flickr/slideshare content.


Blackboard 9 Blogging tool

• No method of subscription in third party aggregator (RSS/Atom etc.)
• Firewalled - Not available outside of Blackboard 9 course (not publicly accessible)
• No customisation (background pic etc.)

Downes qoutes one source "I can't let them do it passionately due to the inherent censorship that a high school served Weblog carried with it." He argues that this leads to 'contrived blogging'. This tutor uses a school hosted server but I would imagine that any task that has been set by a school which produces some sort of inflamatory text would lead to embarrassment to that school. Therefore is a non-public, walled-garden VLE hosted blog better? I am guessing that Blackboard is presenting this as the safe option for faculties. But aren't students missing out by not allowing external networks to engage with their posting? This could also teach an important lesson that anybody can contribute in this new world order, and the importance of considering your digital footprint.

Another thing that Blackboard makes it easy to do is start blogging. They have used quite an easy (and cut back) interface. The tool fits very nicely into the rest of Blackboard's stable of tools and assessment. However there are so many good hosted blogging options out there, I think it could be argued that any one is easy to use for the learner, whereas Blackboard makes it easier for the instructor.

Farmer and Bartlet-Bragg, highlight the importance fo students to be able customise the look and feel of their blogging spaces in order to express themselves. This is something that Blackboard does not do. I think that you can change font in indivisual posts, but can't make a consistant change, and forget choosing a theme or changing a background pic. By looking at look and feel students are able to get to know each other better.

Blackboard 9 doesn't do RSS. Because it's hosted behind a firewall with no public access, therefore no rss functionality built-in. If you did have an RSS feed, your agregator (Reader etc.) would have to be able to log into Blackboard for you, which isn't very nice. So this means that you can't build up a collection of subscribers who are able to consume your posts on their own way - they HAVE to log into Blackboard to go out of their way to catch up. Farmer and Bartlet-Bragg point to successful trials of Blogging who use individual posted blogs that are aggregated into one feed.

A major point for me is that Blackboard 9 doesn't have the features that make it appealing for me which I could enjoy from other web2.0 hosting options. For example Blogger allows me to send it emails which it converts to posts. So that makes it easy to do my blogging from the train on my qwerty mobile. Blackboard, as O'Reilly says, will never have a similar release cycle as web2.0 sites. So by giving students the option to find their own solutions and for a teacher to make an over all feed offers benefits.

The one argument that I think seals the fate for BB9's blogging tool from the way that we on this course would want to use such a tool is that your blog contributions are locked into Blackboard and once the year is out you lose those reflections. Who's going to put the time in?


Other stuff:
Course blogs seem really interesting. In Bb9 it's possible to change over time the page that students see first once they log into the course unit, and many of the users we've had so far like it to open at the Announcments page (reverse chronological) which is kind of the same thing as a blog. Indeed this blog could contain every type of resource that the students might need that they could then digest and use and reorder in their own spaces. PLE (Personal) over VLE.

What is Web 2.0

I really liked O'Reilly's 'What is web 2.0'. I guess I'm a bit of a geek - I enjoy learning about internet history, particularly the seedy underworld of 'web services' (advertising), and Spyware such as doubleclick. It's interesting that those incremental steps towards monitisation of the Internet may have heralded the first use of web2 tools.

O'Reilly stresses that without the data these appliations (Google Maps, Facebook, Google search) are useless. The applications themselves almost enjoy a symbiotic existance with the data, learning new ways to twist and interpret the data to drive new things. There's news about now that Microsoft Bing is stealing Google's search results - apparently Google has 'reused' lots of other bits of people code for it's applications but draws a line at borrowing the data.

It's interesting to hear that blogs were initially used to share links to other like minded folk. How often these days do you see a Links page on a website? Never? I rememeber whan I was a student setting out my website for the first time (I wonder if it's still out there?) the most important thing was to set up a Links page to set out who you were, to hope that you would help make a connection easier for someone else. I guess for people who were working at that time a chronological ordering would be a natural next step.

Bak to O'Reailly. He writes: "Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by an web user, and edited by any other, is a radical experiment in trust". How often do you remember showing someone (or being shown) Wikipedia for the first time and shocking the person (or being shocked) that you can delete the whole article on dogs if you so choose. That sort of scepticism seems to stay with users.

I think this article must have been written sometime ago. for one thing Google Maps is now a heavily used system.

If you rely upon advertising your not web2.0 - like university's?

Back to hype cycles - for sometime I was sceptical of blogging. There were articles in newspapers suggesting the Blogosphere was to collapse. But somehow, I don't know when, blogging seems a lot stronger to me now. I guess I check them out just as part of my Google searches to find usually the most useful dynamic up to date information (along with bulletin boards). I like the way this article describes the media not taking on just one blogger but the whole blogospehere.

I was interested to hear in class one of the other students from China who used a diary until highschool and then moved to a blog since ~2008, and now uses a microblog. She uses a blog because she can share her experiences with her friends (presumably now worldwide). I wonder if the move from a private diary to a blog, was a conscious one. Presumably a diary is only readable by your self. Will writing to an audience kill off the form of a diary?

Reflection on George Veletsianos - 'A Definition of Emerging Technologies for Education'

Veletsianos presented an introduction to a book of articles on the topic of emerging technologies, where he had originally intended very briefly to define the term 'emerging technologies' but on research he found that on the surface there appeared to be a common understanding, in vocalising the meaning there was a lot of varience.

This is a critical view of the ubiquitious but differently interpretted term Emerging Technologies. The clauses he sets out on how we can explore ETs are useful and succinct. This paper reinforced some of the ideas we talked about in week1:

• That emerging does not necessarily mean new - new uses I guess is a better term.
• That in terms of the product lifecycle, Veletsianos further defines as the period in which a technology has not yet become a 'must-have'.
• That emerging Technologies within education sector are not necessrily still in this phase within other areas.
• That beyond initial evalenst papers there will not have been much research - he exaplins that there is likely to have been analysis of benefits/drawbacks, but not work put into understanding the affordances of said ET to teaching & learning (I find this diffuclt to understand this distinction, is there any examples of this). He goes onto qualify this research as under case study and formative approaches (Dede, 1996) which might be worth looking for further direction.

He describes the classification of emerging technologies by the Horizon Project, and in particular I was interested in their year by year softening in tone about the affect ET have: Very important; increasingly significant; significant impact; impact; will enter mainstream use. This kind of gives a taste of the dot com boom in that people/proponents could not imagine a future where this technology is not pervasive into everybodies lives, but when that ET eventually arrives it is present but not that you can live without. Is the same thing true of the Internet or computers? Of course you can live without these but certainly are the mainstream, but we haven't stopped going to shops to buy newspapers, but it has a significant impact and social effects.

I like the terms: Hype cycle and that people often argue that ETs are 'new iterations of the media' seems a lovely way to express how we intially get technologies to do the things we always did in a newer way (PowerPoint:Lectures)

Gypt

With the shutting down of Egypt's internet, the following maifesto comes to mind

http://www.darkcarnival.com/DCOLarchive/barlow.html:

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."

Teaching & Learning with Emerging Technologies

This is the new course unit we are working on for the MA DTCE. The first lecture raised some interesting points.

What exactly is an emerging technology? It's hard to define. Cormac told us of one idea of it as in terms of a product life cycle the point at which a technology starts to be accepted into the mainstream (I think I got that right), just at that jumping point at which it becomes actually useful.

There has been a few things I wonder about whether they fall into this category in t&l. Take podcasting; did it ever really take off? Even with entertainment spheres self-produced 'Podcast shows' I wonder whether it was a dot.com bubble, people flooding to it it for a time and then perhaps finding something else to do with their time. One man Adam Curry was a proponent of podcasting and eventually bought out a lot of the popular tech broadcasts himself an 80's MTV DJ. However people use it for different things - a major benefit of podcasts are that they allow you to listen (or watch) things in new ways - media that has found a new distribution, such as the Beeb and it's radio shows that have found wider audiences listening on the move. In eduction how has it faired? We now have thinks like iTunes U Berkley (I guess so-called open education), but in uni's I've been at it doesn't seem to be massively popular or continued.

One of the other students drew attention to the inception of emerging ideas, inherent creativity often in the fusion of existing objects to do something new. I think that's a good idea. Take something like all the applications outthere that use Google Maps API to do new things or Clink that maps something new onto something old in Wikipedia.

But once we have identified what Emerging means we also need to apply afilter to define those that have an impact upon Teaching & Learning, and at the point a technology is grasped for those reasons, and I think that this practical subject may pose interesting questions.