- Fedwiki Happening: I Don’t Know How to Start, So Let’s Just Type | Hapgood – Hard? Since when does hard put us off? I read lit theory for breakfast, overthrow six well-won assumptions by lunch, have preconceptions for dinner. Bring it on! "Federated wiki is not hard like setting up a Jekyll instance hard, or the ten steps to embed a YouTube video hard. It’s not hard like “I have to learn to edit video” hard.
It’s hard like Red Pill Hard." – (sfw social_software )
- Reading list for graduate seminar in digital humanities (Fall 2014) | William G. Thomas III – It’s time to work on syllabi for Fall courses, order books, and prepare readings. With the DH2014 Conference in full swing I am thinking about assignments for my graduate seminar:… – (course DH syllabus )
- Home · Introduction to Digital Humanities – January 23, 2014 Thanks for making our first day of class so productive and engaging. Just from listening to our initial discussion, I can tell that we’re going to have a lot of fun this… – (course syllabi DH )
- Odyssey.js · Documentation – Odyssey.js is an open-source tool that allows you to combine maps, narratives, and other multimedia into a beautiful story. Creating new stories is simple, requiring nothing more than a modern web-browser and an idea. You enhance the narrative and multimedia of your stories using Actions (e.g. map movements, video and sound control, or the display or new content) that will let you tell your story in an exciting new way. Use our Templates to control the overall look and feel of your story in beautifully designed layouts. – (curating DH maps curation )
Tag: social_software
A catch-up post while reactivating postalicious.
- 15 Effective Tools for Visual Knowledge Management – – (infographic visualization software )
- Wolfram Alpha – a new kind of Fail – Taking Wolfram and his data processor down a notch. – (newmedia plagiarism google searchengine )
- Commuters asked to write Haikus – Remember the Guardian’s txting poetry contest? – (twitter socialmedia )
- LinkedIn profiles: Avoid the five most common mistakes | Business Center | Macworld – Advice for managing contacts and links – (howto socialnetworking LinkedIn )
- Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites – Chronicle.com – – (dangers socialnetworking socialpractices )
- twistori – Based on wefeelfine, calls on twitter. – (tools twitter mashup )
- Immersive Education Initiative London Summit 2009 : Wonderblog – We ran this session more like a participative workshop (hence the lack of suitable recording) in which we asked the audience members to identify the current issues facing the deployment of Virtual Worlds in education (not just Wonderland).We broke the audience into three user categories: educators, developers and learning technologists and asked them to identify the issues particular to them.
Here’s the Educators’ list of issues: – (SL immersivelearning )
- Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – new models. – (journalism )
- Personal Dashboards | Geekpreneur – Promotional article on using a mindmap as a PLE hub. – (vle ple mindmap )
- fd’s Flickr Toys: Do fun stuff with your photos – Utilities and toys for printing and mashups. – (publicauthoring publishing publishing2.0 print flickr twitter )
- Is Facebook Really Bad for You? » the billblog – How some press gobble up lite research. – (facebook socialnetworking research )
- Wonderblog post – People who are “radically co-located” – working together in the same space – are almost twice as productive as those who are distant. This is due to awareness of others actions, gestures, and gaze, as well as the ability to have impromptu conversations. In real life, we judge how to behave towards others based on the distance they stand from us when talking coupled with other subtle social cues, such as eye gaze. – (wonderland SL virtual_environments )
- Lifehacker – Six Ways You Should Be Using Twitter (that Don’t Involve Breakfast) – Feature – – (twitter socialnetworking howto socialpractices )
- A nation of programmers? BIll Thompson – – (techadvice socialpractices two_cultures literacy )
- Wired Campus: How Social Networking Affects the Student Life Cycle — From Applicant to Graduate – Chronicle.com – This seemed initially pretty tame, but on a second reading, the gatekeeping function of admissions became more ominous. – (social_software socialnetworking socialpractices admissions studentlife )
I spent most of my semester break messing with looking at some social networking apps and how to link them up. I was familiar with a few of them already and had been using them regularly: flickr, delicious, facebook (not so regularly), tumblr, twitter. I added brightkite, friendfeed, and ping.fm. Righ away, brightkite and friendfeed struck me as useful for what I wanted to do, and ping.fm less so. Brightkite fuses image and text and geotags them both. Friendfeed aggregates feeds to a common stream and allows connecting those feeds with others.
On the browser side, I tinkered with Flock for a day, but went back to Firefox and installed add-ons to coordinate some of my feeds; I wanted to put them in the same app if not the same frame. I’m currently working with Flickerfox, Sage-Too for rss feeds, TumblrPost, and Twitbin. I’m watching for a Brighkite add-on, but Sage-too makes it possible to put an rss Friendfeed stream in the sidebar.
I haven’t added browser-based notes, however. I’m still using the browser mainly for access to content and working with other apps like Evernote and DevonThink for collection and text production.
This catalog of web apps, social apps, and plug-ins looks geeky, I know, put there’s a point to it.
Spurred on in part by using an iPhone more and more, I started to get interested in how to pull the apps together in some kind of more or less coherent set. I got interested in creating an informal PLE.
Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to
* set their own learning goals
* manage their learning; managing both content and process
* communicate with others in the process of learning
and thereby achieve learning goals.
A PLE may be composed of one or more subsystems: As such it may be a desktop application, or composed of one or more web-based services.
Roughly, a PLE is a more or less hacked together system or space to work in – and that’s a pretty good idea of it, for me, for right now. My wife has a PLE for her work. It’s her studio. Al Gore has one. It’s called his office.
But PLEs extend beyond office and studio walls to include sites and sources, the devices used to access those sites and sources, and the devices used to manipulate the content of those sites and sources. Desktop computer, laptop, iPhone, mobile, digital camera … You get the idea. Hardware, software, people, content, places.
The memex was an early conception of a PLE. Englebart’s Study for the Development of Human Augmentation Techniques a 1968 overview of the idea. And his mother of all demos is an early demo of one: hardware, software, people, content, and places.
Martin Weller has a lot more to say on the matter than I do right now. Brian Lamb has posted on PLEs recently. And he’s picking up on comments made by Stephen Downes. A Collection of PLE diagrams presents a range of visualizations about PLEs.
To my mind, proboscis.org is experimenting with informal PLEs. In their work, streets and parks and buildings become part of the PLE, which also includes other people, both present and past. Their work emphasizes the material in the environment, where learning takes place by creating and manipulating maps and boxes, and by physically and virtually annotating physical spaces. See Social Tapestries, for instance.
Creating or using a PLE of any complexity is going to demand some fluency in transliteracy.
I made some remarks on PLEs from a side angle in Wikis, Blogs, and eFolio: How wikis and weblogs trump eportfolios and No One Stop Shop. My sense of PLEs is the learner mashup rather than the prepackaged OfficeMax D2L. Having just reread these drafts and notes, it looks like the PLE is a common thread in my thinking, one that might open into a more extensive article.
More notes
I’m a late-comer to the PLE party, so a review is in order:
More later.
Categories
bird *here*
I’m starting to pull things together for the E-Rhetoric course that starts in January, so a twitter from Anne that Brightkite was in open beta came at the right moment.
I’m a latercomer to the service, so much of this has been said before. At root, Brightkite is like Twitter but centered on location information: the where just as much as the what. Less bird here than bird here. When a user checks in, they make their location available to others nearby. And that allows for face to face contact and flash mobbing.
The service also has built-in photo sharing, which opens the message up to more than 160 characters. That visual channel makes a difference.
It’s integrated with Twitter, so that posting to Brightkite will also post a location and a link to the photo to the twitterstream. Need to be careful with that feature; it can create a lot of noise on Twitter. (Of course, Brightkite also has a Twitter account, so you can follow them.)
It has the usual friends network set up, and will send notifications vie email or text.
Some older mentions:
lauren’s library blog » brightkite and twitter
Brightkite: Twitter + Maps + Photos – Joe Lazarus
Matt Thommes / Customize Brightkite-to-Twitter updates
Hands on with Brightkite: real-world social networking
A Peek At Brightkite For the iPhone
and of course
Brightkite Wants to Win the Mobile Social Network Battle
One interesting marketing feature is the Brightkite Wall. It streams Brightkite activity to a browser that can be set as full screen. The persuasive element is the banner encouraging viewers to send text messages that will appear on the wall – without having to register.
But there are some prosaic uses for all this in mobile learning. Students out exploring can trace where they’ve been and where they are, which makes it possible to focus content sent to them. And the wall allows everyone in a cohort see where everyone else is. That says flash mob gorilla theater.
So far, I’m finding Brightkite more interesting to play with than Twitter. Pulling together act, place, and image is pretty compelling. I’ll run it past the E-Rhetoric students and see what they can come up with.
Last week, a picture of one of our cats that I posted to Flickr was selected by Purina PetCharts as one of their top 10 of the day.
We couldn’t be prouder of China, pictured left, who is a year old this month. The title of the image when Purina spotted it was “Cat on lounge.” I changed it later to “Odalisque.” I don’t know if the title would have made a difference in their selection.
It’s an interesting marketing strategy: Crawl picture- and video-sharing sites for images that suit the brand and incorporate the images in a daily popularity contest. I trust the images are either for open use (mine are), or the owners are contacted for permission. Purina left a comment on Flickr, which pointed me, and anyone else finding it, to the image – and to their site, of course.
It’s flattering if handled right, and Purina seems to be handling it right. Your pet (and you must be proud of it to have images posted to share) is discovered, like Norma Jean, and brought into the club, along with similar images of dogs and cats.
The trick is in the selection of images. They can’t be too serious, but they can be as cute as anything from Hallmark. Purina uses the original poster’s title, and not altering the images, just selecting them. The idea is to construct the same happy-go-lucky, insider ethos as the aggregated posters, to become one of the group.
And the real trick is to tone down the marketing on the Pet Charts site and cast the sales in the same spirit of sharing as the image sites it crawls. So they cast the site as “the definitive guide to the best pet stuff online,” and you can almost hear the verbal pause, the hedge in that informal “stuff.” It’s not “information.” It’s not advertising or products; wouldn’t want to say that. It’s “stories, videos and photos.” That’s the “stuff.” The same informal term social aggregators like to use then they are being miscellaneous. Stuff. (There are links to products, ringtones, widgets, and coupons from the Pet Charts site, but they are tucked away in the footer, another smart move in underselling.)
This makes Purina (if not Nestle, who owns the site) one of us, a pet owner, not a pet food producer.
And it really does, too. That’s why this is an interesting marketing strategy. Purina has to live up to the ethos it’s defining on Pet Charts. By taking on the public role of an altruistic social pet aggregator, by providing a free Facebook for kitty and puppy, by using their web resources and expertise, Purina is committing themselves to continue to perform good deeds in public.