Open Education Conference, 2009

August 12th, 2009

To quote Brian Lamb from this comment here:

I’m reminded of something George Siemens said at a symposium on distributed tool strategies: that schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use “syndication buses” or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the “small pieces” approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?

Novak Rogik and Brian Lamb’s  aggRSSive experiment

• http://feeds.openacademic.org
• http://eduglu.learningparty.net

Philipp Schmidt’s Yahoo Pipes mashup “The Wire”

The scattered, more de-centralized system that affords the individual user far more control over their own space seems, to me, more akin to the internet than centralized nodes of control/entry that characterizes most CMSs and LMSs? Think about Wikipedia? Why does that de-centered structure work so well?

Image credit: Pintxomoruno’s “Slovenian Beehive”

WPMu is like a huge beehive with no center, it’s scattered and unruly like the internet. And that is one of its greatest strengths. Think about it, anyone with a blog on the system has their own unique sub-domain that they can enter through, not unlike a cell in a beehive. A system that is both porously open and de-centered suggests a different, almost naturalistic, element of design, loosely joining a series of cells into a honeycomb, not with wax but with RSS glue. So someone using a WPMu blog has the ability to be part of a community, yet at the same time have their own unique space that they control entirely.

Image credit: Bern@t’s Flickr stream.

Image credit: Serenae’s “Hand Gestures”

De-centered, distributed publishing is a flow of information we are not used to, it’s anarchic, somewhat confusing, and difficult to follow unless we are in the “natural” flow of things. Yet, that is the key here, once in the stream (and the idea of a stream here is a much larger aesthetic and design shift that the internet has been undergoing and reflecting more broadly for a number of years now) the trace of the arguments, discussion, and ideas become that much more naturalized to the movement of information within a community while at the same time keeping the power of design (think themes and widgets here) as well as the overall control of the space in the hands of the individual.

Image credit: Freewildebeest’s “Overflowing with bees”

Users: 2,969 | Blogs: 2,394

Link to Gardner Campbell’s Attack of the Summer Miltonauts

What if we didn’t understand what we do in education with blogs as “blogging” but as a quick and easy way to publish online within a learning community? Or a place to feature a portfolio of students’ best work? Or a site where professors and staff track their professional and personal development? What if we understood “campus blogging initiatives” as a community publishing platform to share, learn, and integrate various resources from around the Web into a more specific community?

For a list of possibilities check out 10 Ways to Use UMW Blogs

This site offers visitors the opportunity to see our students’ research on this remarkable city in a format we have referred to as our online exhibit. An actual exhibit on the city of Venice is clearly impossible — one could never transport the Grand Canal or Palazzo Ducale into a museum space. But technology allows us to bring together different aspects of the city, its visual culture, and history in a format where we can discuss the great palazzi along the Grand Canal or the magnificent space in front of San Marco.

Jeff McClurken’s Digital History course positions students to critically consider and engage the implications involved in choosing a particular technology to accomplish their project’s goals. The groups all published their own research using a variety of tools and media that they both experimented with and learned more fully as they were tasked with being information architects of the scholarly resources the created for the community at large. The Fredericsksburg Historical Marker site is one example for this course that remains a persistent resource for both the community and world at large: http://fredmarkers.umwblogs.org.

A new idea in discussion forums. Thinking through threaded discussion forums with a Twitter-like theme, in this case P2.

Blogs will become aggregation points,” the shamefully youthful, soft-spoken Mullenweg explained, as he mapped out the future of blogging for me between bites of Dutch smoked salmon. “They will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.

From Andrew Keen’s “Blogs are Dead, Long Live the Blogs”