StigmergicWeb

Life is now in post project mode, meaning I get to re-acquaint myself with some long forgotten activities such as doing housework/yardwork, sleeping for more than 5 hours a night and the ever popular wasting my time online. My first distraction from WISBD (”what I should be doing” which in this case is marking some Biology 20 assignments) is Twitter. If you are interested in how I am wasting time, here’s my twitter page

So far, I am at Alan Levine’s second stage of the twitter life cycle. I still don’t get it. But after two entries, I’m not in a position to make a thoughtful reflection. So far, it seems like a kind of web-based social Skinner box - keep tapping at those keys and checking on your friends, and you will be occasionally rewarded. I expect it is a random schedule of reinforcement, like slot machines, so infrequent small reinforcement produces a behaviour that extinguishes very slowly. It is, in other words, designed to be addictive. Well, it’s too late - I’m already in. I’m just worried that twitter is a gateway social networking tool that eventually leads to harder stuff like MySpace. I promise to restrict myself to being an occasional twitterer - just a few tweets on weekends to relax with friends!

It’s a great feeling when something you’ve done is so interesting to spammers, that they contact you personally. I received a comment to moderate in my e-mail this morning from Roger (I’m not giving a last name, and I’m definitely not going to put an URL up here) asking about my scuttle spam-proofing hack. Here’s the comment that Roger tried to leave:

I tried this with one of my scuttle sites, and I don’t see any difference. I must be doing somthing wrong. After I made the change what should I see when I log in as user with id 1? I checked sc_users and the Id I am using to log in is the user ID 1. Plus if you can help me limit the max tags per post. I am getting spammed to death…

The irony here is almost too much. Really, Roger, did you think I’d allow a comment - even an inocuous one before checking up on the commenter? Leaving the link to the web site - an installation of scuttle that is used for “internet marketing” was enough to mark you as a newbie, but to give your e-mail address so I can check the site for your “internet marketing company”. That’s just not thinking, buddy.

I was happy to see that you are up to date on all the latest social software, though. At least you’re staying on top of the latest web trends. Nice to see that you are offering advice on using social bookmarking and RSS to market a product. The software you offer sounds really interesting:

If you want to learn more about social bookmarking, or need a tool to automate the posting to many social bookmarking sites visit one of my other sites called XXXXXXXXXXX and learn more about social bookmarking and automation software…

Wow - you wanted me to give you more info on my hack so you could incorporate it into the next version of your software. I’m touched - really, there’s a small teardrop running down my cheek, I’m so overcome with emotion. But the irony of a spammer asking me advice for stopping spam - ROTFLMAO!!! Stop, Roger, my ribs are hurting.

The other irony here is that my hack is no longer effective against spammers, so the site has been shut down. Roger, you sly dog - were you the one who figured out how to spam my school’s bookmarking site? Or were you jealous that someone else figured out how to do it first? Sadly my hack is no longer effective - school’s get kinda touchy about someone leaving the kind of links that you left, Roger (or some other sleaze-ball spammer, whoever you are).

I’m not going to leave Roger’s full name here, or any mention of his site, or his “automation” software - sorry, Roger, I’m not going to give you any of my google-juice. But if anyone else in the edu-blogospere wants the above information, I’d be happy to let you know via e-mail. I’m at robwall@gmail.com (sorry, Roger, the gmail filters are pretty darn good at keeping you away from me). If I know of you, or you pass my scrutiny, I’ll send you the info.

And Roger, one more thing - spam this, buddy:

..|..(’_') ..|..

and give this a big smooch:

( )x( )

Today I heard the funniest (and best) definition I’ve heard for Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is any web page that can be spammed. As Homer Simpson would say, its funny cuz its true. Thanks to Donna (who needs to blog more) for telling me this one.

I just read about this via Dean:

K12 Online 2006 Conference…

Announcing the first annual “K12 Online 2006? convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme “Unleashing the Potential.”

Holy cool idea, Batman! There are so many conferences that I’ve had to miss because of scheduling or being too far away, but this, as Dean points out, could be good. I’d even say this could be great! Big salute to Will, Darren and Sheryl for organizing this.

The organization of this conference is brilliant in its simplicity:

There will be four “conference strands”– two each week. Two presentations will be published in each strand each day, Monday - Friday, so four new presentations will be available each day over the course of the two-weeks. Each presentation will be given in podcast or screencast format and released via the conference blog (URL: TBA) and archived for posterity.

I think that limiting the length of time of the conference and selecting the presenters will help to limit the cognitive load on conference attendees and prevent repetitive presentations. How many conferences have you been to where two (or more) presenters are talking about the same thing? There are some terrific affordances that become apparent when a conference gets changed from a physical, synchronous event to a virtual, asynchronous one!

If you are interested in presenting, and who wouldn’t be, you can get further information at Will’s blog post about K12online 2006. I’d love to contribute something - anyone want to co-present? How about an EdTech Posse presentation? Anyone else interesting in co-operating to put something together? I am pumped!

YouTube - Day of the Longtail :: I just saw this after Stephen mentioned it in OLDaily today. The message reminds me vaguely of the tagline for V for Vendetta - “People shouldn’t feel threatened by the media, the media should feel threatened by people.”

Two thoughts struck me as I was watching this. First, what happens when we start to see an educational long-tail effect? Can students used to infinite choice and variety, and expecting that they are able to communicate, interact and critique freely going to be satisfied by a course of studies that they have no voice in creating? Obviously I think not, but are schools ready for this kind of student? What happens when not just markets but curricula are conversations? (Wow - that’s an entire paragraph with only one declarative sentence in it.)

The second thought is that this is exactly the sort of thing that I mean when I call this blog (and all the blogs I connect to, and that they connect to, and … well, you get the point) a stigmergic web. We are in the midst of a sort of global networked consciousness, analagous to the way ants communicate by leaving scent trails for each other. The ants may never meet each other face to face, but they transfer information exactly like neurons transfer information to each other.

Neurons and bloggers actually have a lot in common, now that I think about it. Both are receiving information from other individuals in their network. Both can establish new connections - we do this whenever we read a new blog or find some other information source that we will return to. When neurons do this in our brains, we call it learning (at least for the changes that we are conscious of). What do we call it when a network of minds, capable of rewiring itself, extended throughout the world is established?

I used to read a lot of sci-fi as a kid and teen ager. One of the themes that was written about over and over and over was the possibility of humanity creating a computer, or later a network of computers, that became conscious. The mistake that the science fiction writers made was they assumed that the computers were the neurons in the global intellect. It seems clear that in fact the computers and the internet are the synapses - the spaces between neurons where signals are transferred from one neuron to the next. Each neuron “decides” (not really, but its a close enough approximation for now) whether it will process and pass along the signal or ignore it. The old sci-fi writers might be relieved to know that the neurons, reassuringly, are us. The web is one great big stigmergic communicaton system!

Stigmergic? Relax - you’re soaking in it! Or should that be “Relax - you’re soaking it in!”

I’ve got too many interesting stories in front of me on Digg to read them all right now. I could just digg them, but I thought I’d share them with you.

• Commodore 64 emulated in flash - ah, this brings back some happy memories. Some of my earliest computer hacking involved playing around with sprite graphics on the C64.
• Is Windows on a Mac really drawing in new users? - Probably, and along with some great new software, it is luring some old users like me back. (Details to follow).
• Student faces expulsion for Web post - Apparently, the school district is no longer including Voltaire in their curriculum; y’know - the guy who said I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. I guess ideas like this don’t count any more.
• Ringtone for teenage ears only - Considering the above link, this is a perfectly appropriate action. Looks like the kids are allright.
  

A grade 11 biology class that I teach has been involved in an interesting project that I’ve meant to pass along to you. The course objectives include a study of classification of organisms and a study of some basic ecological principles. I wanted to combine these two into a long term project for the course on the study of species at risk, a topic that I think is only going to be of increasing concern as the effects of climate change begin to manifest in increasingly dramatic ways.

But I didn’t want to do the standard go-to-the-library-and-research-then-hand-in-a-report sort of project. I want to concentrate more on the process of the research than the product. To be honest, I still don’t know what I want to do as a final product. My students find this vaguely disorienting since they seem to be very focused on whatever that final product is. To be completely honest, I also hate marking essays, so if I will avoid it if I can.

In consultation with Donna DesRoches, teacher-librarian extraordinaire, we came upon the idea of having the students create a pathfinder - a sort of expert guide for a topic - to document their research process. We’re using a couple of tools for doing this:

• Wikka Wiki - a very robust, easy to use, easy to install wiki engine. One of the most important features of it is that it can easily integrate an RSS feed so that as the feed is updated, updates are automagically made on the wiki. It also provides RSS feeds for pages so that changes can be monitored and wiki-spammers can be thwarted. Wiki-spam actually hasn’t been a problem (we’ll see how it holds up once the URL to the project is posted). A pathfinder template page was created so that students can paste it into the pages for their species at risk.
• Scuttle - a free (beer and speech) social bookmarking tool. Similar to del.icio.us in many ways such as tagging, but we have the luxury of being able to resrict access to the school community so that there is no tag-poisoning by spammers. Scuttle can, like del.icio.us, create an RSS feed for a tag, so that it can be integrated into the student’s pathfinder on the wiki. You can download Scuttle and install it on your own server, and there is a small but growing Scuttle documentation wiki.

The students have each picked a species at risk from a list I posted on the Pathfinder wiki. They registered on the wiki to be able to edit it (take that, wiki spammers!), copied the student Pathfinder template to their species page, and started the research process. I had them focus on reference resources, especially print resources, for the first two days. After about a week back in the class, we went back to the library and I showed them how to bookmark, tag and comment web resources using Scuttle. The next session, I showed them how to integrate the RSS feed into their wiki page.

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll have them do as a final product for the project. Right now I’m leaning towards having the work in pairs to prepare and present to an elementary classroom on one of the species they have researched, but I’m open to suggestions.

Links:

• Species at Risk Pathfinder research wiki assignment page
• Pathfinder template (thanks to Donna for putting this together)
• Species at Risk pathfinder list - links to students work. Some notable ones are:
  • Nilgiri Tahr
  • Peregrine Falcon

I’ve told my students I would publicize their research. If you have any comments, you could leave them here, or on the wiki pages.

More cool stuff from our Google-y overlords. Make your own (slightly tacky looking) web page!! Users are restricted to 100MB of pages and uploaded files.

Of course, I had to try it out - see the results for yourself: Rob Wall’s Google Page

It seems like Google is taking this read-write web thing pretty seriously. But I am left wondering what their game plan for Google Pages. Or maybe this was just somebody’s Friday project.

On Monday morning, Donna and I are putting on a presentation entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose, a read/write web presentation-demonstration-recreation hoedown (in the tradition of the presentation mashups created by the three amigos), for the teachers and other invited guests at the school. I think the title is a pretty good analogy for how some teachers feel about some of the newer social technologies built on the world wide web. We decided that it wasn’t enough for us to do a standard talk while we click through some slides kind of presentation - we need to eat our own dogfood, as the saying goes. The main body of the presentation notes are on a wiki. I’ve put up a blog post on my school blog for viewing and commenting during the presentation. I’ll be taking some photos and adding them to Flickr during the presentation if the opportunity presents itself. If I can find a moment to record some audio, I might even put up a 3 minute podcast for the presentation. After the main presentation, which will be about 80 minutes, we’re going to give the teachers time to play with some of the tools - blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and RSS aggregation.

You are cordially invited to come play with us. Leave comments on the here, on the wiki or on my school blog. You can add to any of the presentation notes (you must be a registered user on the wiki in order to edit). Send me an e-mail to robwall AT gmail DOT com. If you want to blog some ideas, leave a link to your post on the wiki for the teachers to follow.

A List Apart: Articles: Home Page Goals

Derek Powazek shares some ideas about the craft of designing home pages for web sites. I like his emphasis on the other pages, the atomic elements, of a web site. These are the important pages and looking at the traffic on a web site will confirm this. The home pages, however, are the cause of much more stress:

Home pages are anxiety-inducing for companies. The home page is your first impression. And like the old saying goes, you only get one chance. So home pages themselves have a unique set of design goals.

Derek describes 4 simple goals to keep in mind when designing the home page (as well as sharing his advice to design the home page last):

1. Answer the question “What is this place?”
2. Don’t get in the repeat visitor’s way.
3. Show what’s new
4. Provide consistent, reliable navigation