StigmergicWeb

Earlier this week I wrote about building a school website one blog at a time, and some thoughts on the merits of not building a monolithic site, but as a series of small inter-related pieces. I’m happy to report that things have already started to move in that direction. You can see the main school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School, and right in the middle of it is a set of links with the title NBCHS Happenings. (See screenshot below) (Dang - the screenshot got automagically reduced when I uploaded it. Someone must know how to get the full size image up there - D’Arcy, any ideas? Yay - D’Arcy knew what to do! See comments for details.)

The NBCHS Happenings links are actually all harvested, using feed2js, from the NBCHS Happenings blog. We had done something like this before using a Blogger powered blog to generate the feed. The improvement in this system is that the entire system resides on our own server. Its also going to be very easy to put new dynamic content via RSS feeds from our blogs on the main web page, or any other page that we’d like. Of course, this doesn’t preclude anyone from choosing to use a different tool - wordpress.com, for example - as long as it generates an RSS feed from its content.

The next step - some really good discussions with the teacher librarian (Hi Donna!) and others to start defining what information belongs on the front page of the website and what information can be enfolded elsewhere in the website. Then we figure out how that information gets entered, sorted and displayed where we want it. But at least we have step one taken care of! Not bad for one week worth of effort, which included other distractions such as teaching! ;^D

Jeffrey Zeldman has pronounced his judgement on the Web 2.0 hype in A List Apart: Web 3.0. Much of his discontent seems to spring from an incident with a Web 2.0 boor:

“Web 1.0 was not disruptive. You understand? Web 2.0 is totally disruptive. You know what XML is? You’ve heard about well-formedness? Okay. So anyway—” And on it ran, like a dentist’s drill in the Gulag.

His comparison to the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall is amusing enough to make it worth the read. But there are boors in any profession or industry. You don’t give up on something good - and I think that despite the hype, some of the so-called Web 2.0 applications (think Flickr, del.icio.us, bloglines and many others that I don’t even know about yet) are very good because they give anybody with access to a computer the chance to be connected that no one in history ever has before. I can enjoy fruitful collaborations with people from around the world because of some of these technologies. Zeldman’s discomfort with the Web 2.0 hype, and I share this, is that the good stuff will be obscured by the noise of the hype. This seems to be heightened by a sensitization to hype that was earned by living through the Web bubble of the late ’90s:

I hated the bubble. I hated it when Vanity Fair or New York Magazine treated web agency founders like celebrities. I hated that mainstream media and the society it informs either ignored the web or mistook it for a high-stakes electronic version of the fashion industry.

True enough - there are so few media outlets that really get the whole web thing. And what we’re seeing now isn’t really Web 2.0, its more like Web 0.9 - this is just a preview candidate of what the real thing will be like. There is definitely more functionality than we’ve seen before, but the best stuff is yet to come. Those who are easily distracted by the hype may get misdirected for a while, but there will also be those who continue to work and refine and improve the web for the benefit of all. Zeldman concludes with a word of encouragement to these people:

To you who feel like failures because you spent last year honing your web skills and serving clients, or running a business, or perhaps publishing content, you are special and lovely, so hold that pretty head high, and never let them see the tears. As for me, I’m cutting out the middleman and jumping right to Web 3.0. Why wait?

Web 3.0, Jeffrey? I’m still waiting for 1.0!

Aren’t comment spammers just the best?

I’ve been writing on this and other previous blogs for about 3 and a half years (which I think is about 25 internet years), and during that time I have forgotten a lot of the great posts I wrote.

But tonight, as I was tossing out the spam, I checked a couple of the links to the posts that had been spammed, like this one - David Wiley on technology in schools - an oldie but still a goodie. If not for the spammers trying to clog my blog with their crap postings, I would never have thought to go and re-read it.

So thank you once again, spammers. I hope that my sincere appreciation helps to make you feel like a good person with a useful role in society despite the fact that you are being paid by the profits of pill-pushers, online casinos, and pornographers. If not for your ineffective attempts to leave comments (which need my approval before they actually get placed on the blog), I would not have had that chance to take a look at some of the content, humble as it may be, that I actually took the time to write and share with the world! You rock, dude!

This came in my inbox today from a colleague:

I am looking for some way to organize my life - I am thinking through the web so that I can access it at home or at school.

Whew - that is certainly no small goal. I actually find it somewhat ironic, although the implicit misguided faith in my abilities is nice, that someone would be asking me! All kidding aside, I think this is worthy of consideration since my experience talking to many teachers is that they see learning new kinds of computer technology as just another thing to add to the infinite heap of things I must do. So, I in turn pass this thought on to you - what online tool(s) (and I’ll refrain from using the you-know-what-two-point-oh meme) could someone use to organize their life?

Hot off the press from slashdot - Google is demonstrating the Google RSS reader at the Web 2.0 conference. I don’t know if I’ll be giving up on Bloglines, but I will certainly give this a good try. There’s a tour of Google Reader if you are interested.

UPDATE - One of the important features that this does support is the ability to import/export subscription lists as an OPML file. One of the reasons I like the services that Google offers is that they play well with other apps, and Google has opened up their APIs for programmers to extend and add on to the functionality they offer. In contrast, other companies (cough - microsoft - cough) lock my information up so that I don’t have full access to my own information. Is Google taking the place of Microsoft as the big monopoly that controls everything in the computer industry? I’m not so sure, but I do know that they seem to respect the intelligence of their end-users a whole lot more.

I am giving a presentation tomorrow entitled eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined at the LORNET research symposium as part of eLearn 101 at the University of Saskatchewan. My basic idea is inspired by Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined wiki-blog-presentation-jam-session that they put together and presented from NMC 2004. There are a lot of robust and fully featured eLearning systems from a variety of vendors or other sources, but all the components of these eLearning systems are readily and often freely available (as in beer and speech). I gloss over a couple of examples using blogs and wikis that I have been involved with as a teacher.

I’m throwing the presentation online early just to see if anyone wants to comment on it. I’m due to give the presentation just before lunch tomorrow; if you leave any comments before then, I’ll try to work them into the presentation. Or if you are going to be at the presentation, you can judge for yourself if its worth staying, or taking off early for lunch (and if you do, save me a spot) ;^D

I’m also excited because of the tools used to prepare the presentation. I figure if I’m going to be evangelizing open source, I had better walk the walk as well as talk the talk. I used Dave Winer’s recently released (under GPL) OPML Editor to prepare the content as an outline. Luca Mearelli released a brilliant hack that allows the OPML file to be exported as XOXO outline format which, with a little XSL magic, can be used by Eric Meyer’s ubercool s5 presentation system for web browsers (think powerpoint but it runs natively in any modern browser). All these tools are free which means that my PowerPoint dependency is nearly gone!

If you have been grievously stunned by the overuse of geekronyms in the previous paragraph, I do apologize. If not, go get these tools now and start outlining and presenting. And don’t forget to check out my presentation on DIY eLearning systems.

Thanks to Brian Lamb for his post on this (Abject Learning: Now, if only someone could help me to visualise the change in my frontal lobe…). I just installed and tried out the wikipedia-animate script for the greasemonkey plugin in firefox. The plugin allows you to animate the changes on a wiki that is powered by the wikimedia wiki engine - wikipedia is the best example, but it also worked successfully on the WordPress Codex.

John Udell has a screencast about wikipedia-animate, as well as some thoughtful reflections on why this is important.

BTW - can you tell from the number of blog postings that its (almost) summer vacation? I’m planning on being on blog-overdrive!

That is how Alan Levine describes a project he is relucantly invovled in (CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » I am a Reluctant, Invisible Participant in a Wretched Project). And he has my sympathy - anyone involved in educational technology has been dragged into a project because someone (usually of the pointy haired boss variety) had a brilliant vision of how everything could work together in one glorious monolithic system.

Ugh! My tendency, and perhaps you agree, is that such systems tend to collapse under their own weight. But now, thanks to Alan, I have a better description - they fly with the grace of an iron pigeon. Hmm - I can think of a couple right off the top of my head (and if you read the blog regularly, you can probably guess). Leave a comment with your favourite iron pigeon stories.

One project I’ve been working on for the last little bit is the Generic High School site. It uses Drupal to run the site, and I’ve been able to do pretty much everything I want using it. The goal is to have a web site for a high school (or other similiar organization) that, once it is set up, can be maintained collectively by everyone in the organization. Another goal is to have information on the site that is only available to authenticated users (or a specific group of the authenticated users). Drupal has achieved these goals, and I’ve only scraped the surface of what it can do. I am now officially a Drupal convert (although for single author sites like this blog, WordPress still rocks).

I’m hoping to continue to develop this project, but if you are interested in checking it out, the generic username and password is teacher/teacher. Let me know what you think!

Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia::I’ve seen links to this in a few places, and I just wanted to do my part to increasing the page rank for when someone Googles for “Adobe Macromedia acquisition“. Call it Google-bombing if you will - I just can’t resist someone who translates Adobe’s corporate double-speak about why they acquired Macromedia into:

Dude, we just bought the only significant competitor to several of our flagship applications. We didn’t buy Macromedia, we bought the market.

Read for yourself - it just gets better!