May 2007 Archives

I have been working along with Tim Perry and Chris Stubbs on a Hot Team to produce a white paper on twitter similar to the "7 things you need to know about collaborative editing" paper. We were struggling to articulate how twitter is different than existing services in a concise manner when we had the idea of making the table below.

One thing that bothers me is that rows all correspond to a certain class of communication except for twitter, which is a specific service. I don't know what term to use for the service that twitter (and similar sites, like jaiku) provide. Any Ideas? Am I missing something? Is there anything you think we might be missing from the table?

I was scheduled to participate on a Web 2.0 in education panel discussion this past Thursday. Allan was to be managing the session, but he got stuck in the airport coming back from the ANGEL user conference. So Thursday morning I got together with Chris Millet, another scheduled panelist, and we began to work out what we were going to do for the ninety minute session. I started a document in Google Docs and shared it with Millet. We started brainstorming ideas and capturing them on the doc.  Soon we dragged another colleague, Tim Perry, into the mix. Each of us sat around the table fleshing out the outline more and more. I have to say, this was probably the best collaborative editing experience I have ever had. By brainstorming face to face while capturing it simultaneously, we had a usable document in about 60 minutes.

We printed out a copy for each of us to use as a guide during our discussion. I think the session went pretty well. I don't think it would have been possible without Google Docs or a similar tool.

On the latest ETS Talk, we talk about the concept of rss and content re-use I talk about in my previous post.

I still feel like I am not able to express properly why I think this is so cool. I will need to work on it.  

We also talk about facebook's new offering of classified ads.

Just had a conversation with Cole that blew my mind. It is really so simple that at first it may not seem like a revelation. Or it may make you slap your forehead for not truly seeing something that was right in front of your face all along.

When you blog, bookmark with del.icio.us, upload or tag a photo with flickr you are creating a piece of content that can be repurposed, republished, and mashed up.

This is not a new concept to the scads of people embedding youtube videos on their myspace pages or their most recent flickr pictures on the sidebar of their blog.

We can use this at the University.

Learning materials can be authored using a blog tool and an embed code could be provided to include it in the LMS.  Ever changing lists of online resources can be managed using a blog or del.iciou.us. Embed code could place it right within the course materials. Change the content at the source and change the content everywhere.

Combine blog posts from students to make a class blog. Mashup blogs of individuals to make department-wide blogs. Combine various tags from various systems to make one meta-resource.

This is partly the eduGlu concept, but another part is the re-usability factor from a content management perspective. One piece of content can be used by another content management system. An instructor's grading policy can be authored in movable type, then displayed on the syllabi of her various courses in Angel.  Information about her research can be created on her blog, but then also displayed on her department's website as well in any of her classes to which it may be pertinent.

What we need now are a set of tools to enable the sharing and combination of all the content that exists out there. Google reader has a nice feature (hat tip to Cole for showing me this) that allows users to create a meta-blog of sorts, mashing together a collection of feeds. Cole and I were imagining a plugin for movable type that will provide an embed code for any piece of content or collection of pieces of content to enable its reuse.

This past Friday the ETS talk crew talked about the PSU blogs pilot.

We have started to let pilot users into the system. We'll be adding more every week. I am looking forward to see how the tool will be used.

The Background: The templates that control the html output of movable type for the PSU blogs are controlled from one central location. The upside of this is that as new features are added, blog users don't have to worry about changing their templates. The downside of this is that bloggers no longer have total control of their blogs. This was a tricky decision, and I'll probably write more about all the factors that went into it at some point in the future. I believe that we will be able to provide users with the tools to customize their blogs to meet their needs.

The Problem: Some blog users want to use Google Analytics to track the activity on their blogs. Existing Google Analytics plugins for movable type required your google tracking number to be added to a template file, so this wouldn't work for our setup.

The Solution: I wrote a plugin that stores the tracking code separately for each blog. All we have to do now is add the output from the plugin to the templates that everyone is using. If the user doesn't enter a tracking code, then the plugin doesn't output anything.

This plugin is currently not installed on the PSU blogs server, but I hope to have it made available sometime in the next month.

You can download a copy of the plugin.