Edu Wikis Gain Cred

Tim Stahmer has a good introduction to wikis in the newest issue of Technology and Learning magazine, titled “Think Outside the Blog.” (login or ttjo54@netscape.net and bugmenot via BugMeNot.com)

A couple of particularly interesting points from the article include:

Wiki power is described in the positive – a wiki is something that lets authorized users contribute content. I think focusing on contribution instead of changability when opening the conversation could be a good first step.
On Wikipedia: “The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia…Although Wikipedia’s success has been tarnished a little by vandalism, some misinformation, and fights over certain controversial topics, the wiki concept – an open site maintained by its users – has been a hit.”
Highlighted benefits include: the ability to write and research collaboratively and concurrently without the limitation of having to always schedule face-to-face time, the presence of the content in the larger context of the web – thus enabling participation and visibility via parents, other schools and the general public.
The article says that wikis are currently in use for school planning and interaction with parents, offering updates more continuously than printed newsletters and in some cases serving as a school’s entire web site.

The article then presents three options for schools interested in setting up a wiki:

Hosting your wiki on a wiki farm, examples provided include Wikicities, Wikispaces and PBWiki – all 3 great recomendations. I’m especially excited that PBWiki, the wonderful host of BlogSafer.org (anonymous blogging guides for people living under repressive governments) got a mention here.
Installing wiki software on your own server space, or asking your Internet Service Provider if they have wiki software ready to run (the article says wikis are popular enough that many ISPs now offer this).
Setting up a wiki behind the school’s firewall for security reasons. The author points to a narrative of his own set up of MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia and Wikicties, on a Mac with OS X. Other good options to look at include PMWiki and Kwiki, though those may be less user friendly for absolute newbies.

I am really happy to see this article appear in print. It’s a whole lot better than the episode of CSI I saw last night about a blogger involved in a murder! In order for these powerful new tools to be used to their potential, they need to be taken seriously and be discussed in detail in a variety of settings.

TagCentral Tags: wikis, education, introductions, Web2.0, collaboration, nptech

Interview with Blogger Trish Snyder

Over at Net Squared I just posted an interesting interview I did with Trish Snyder, whose Bloggingforacause.com is one of my favorite topic-specific, non-tech blogs. Trish is a networker amongst bloggers and blog readers fighting cancer. As I’m sure everyone knows but may not think about right away, cancer comes in many forms and there’s a large community of people relating to the issue from different vantage points. Trish’s blog is very well done and she has some interesting advice for new bloggers.

TagCentral Tags: blogging, networking, cancer, interviews

The Mapspace Takes on Podcasts Plus Upgrade Updates All Around

Podcastdirectory.com is a new discovery for me and looks quite good. Via ProgrammableWeb/mashups I discovered that this directory has a feature that the otherwise excellent Podcast Alley and Podcast Pickle don’t appear to offer: a Google Map of podcasters’ locations! Both of these other big directories have good forums and interesting classification systems, but the combination of local connection and visualization offered by PodcastDirecotry.com is really nice.

I like the idea of knowing what podcasts are produced in my area, I don’t want to lose all connection to my bioregion for goodness sake. Other purposes I can imagine using this map for include knowing who’s podcasting in a city you’re going to visit if you want to try and meet them, finding another mulitmedia source for research on a local issue anywhere and finding good promo possibilities for geographically inclined campaigns.

Call me a web-goober, but I had no idea that there were several podcasts produced right here in my home town. I like it.

Related: The very nice google maps tool Community Walk has undergone its much awaited site redesign, performed by IdeaCodes (half of which is Emily Chang of eHub fame.) The site looks great and appears to have many new features.

Furthermore: The awesome RSS to IM service immedi.at has also upgraded its site and it looks great. I wrote about Peter Brown’s tool as the bleeding edge of RSS awhile ago and I stand by that opinion. It’s a great way to either impress or horrify your friends by consistently knowing right away when they add new content to their sites. There’s also lots of important things you could do with this system, of course. I interviewed Brown some time ago as well. I would put immedi.at on my top 5 list of tools I’d tell anybody about who really wanted to leverage the heck out of Web2.0. (ooh, there’s a blog post waiting to happen, huh?)

TagCentral Tags: GoogleMaps, podcasts, directories, visualization, local, RSS, IM, mashups, Web2.0

Interview with John Smith on Learning and Communities of Practice

John Smith is the community liaison for CPSquare, a community of practice about communities of practice. The group brings people together from around the world through online, telephone and face to face meetings to share their knowledge and learn together about how communities of practice can best function and learn in any field.

The following is a summary with key excerpts from a recent interview we did together. Discussion included John’s thoughts on group learning and new technologies and those are what I’ve focused on here. You can click the "excerpt" link next to any of the summary points to hear John in his own words.

Click here to go to the interview or continue below for discussion of technical struggles I had with this interview, specifically using the Gizmo Project VOIP system.
Continue reading →

Proposed Mashup Presentation

So next week I’m going to facilitate a discussion over at CPSquare‘s Web 2.0 online conference about mashups. CPSquared is a community of practice about communities of practice.

I’m not going to pretend that mashups are something I know a whole lot about, but degrees of knowledge are relative and I think I’ll be able to show some people some things they hadn’t seen before and inspire them to do some things they might not have done otherwise. That’s the plan anyway.

I wanted to post an outline of my intro here and get some feedback. Plus I imagine there are readers here who would enjoy seeing these resources as well. So let me know what you think:
Continue reading →

Web Readers Act Fast; Design Key

A new study described in Nature magazine indicates that web readers may be more fickle than some of us would like to think. Key findings:

Site quality impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
“Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny. “
“People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to ‘prove’ to themselves that they made a good initial decision.”
These days, enlightened web users want to see a “puritan” approach, Caudron adds. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that’s where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.

This article has made me look over my site again; some changes will be appearing over the next couple of days.

Related: I go back and forth all the time about whether sidebars look and work best on the left of right hand side of a blog. This “visual attention heat map” from Eyetools Research indicates that blog viewers tend to ignore content in the middle of the right hand side. But it’s hard to know whether that’s indication that the pictured blog is mistaken to put its advertising there or whether the location is ignored because that’s where the advertising is!

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
site_design, design, visualization, judgement, traffic, stickyness, attention

Interview with Barb Dybwad

I just posted an interview with Barb Dybwad over at Net Squared. Barb is the associate editor of Weblogs Inc. and blogs on the Social Software Weblog there. We had a long conversation about everything from Flickr to future applications she’s dreaming of to tips for new bloggers and blog readers. It’s such a long interview (done via IM) that I created a tag cloud to let readers skip around. The larger the text, the more accessible/less technical the section of the interview.