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If you’re not technically minded, it can take a while to catch up - what are the related technologies here? Learning objects, repositories, syndication, interoperability, mo-blogging, wikis, e-portfolios, stylish satin sheets and more. Another round of new jargon items to deal with, and who’s got a handle on the old set anyway?
‘Blogs are now solidly mainstream ,’ says Stephen Downes, noting that the practice has made its way into the corporate world. There are so many good articles at the moment giving good introductions to the field - including one recent piece by Anne Bartlett-Bragg in this Knowledge Tree journal, and another in the Australian Flexible Learning Community. Blogging is about keeping a public journal, and syndication (RSS) is one way that people are learning to share information, and develop widespread conversations across multiple sites.
So many people around the world, in all areas and fields, including journalism, technology, sport, education and more. Blogging has become one of the major new ways to publish information and build web sites - because you don’t need web editing software to adjust individual pages.
Syndicated online journalling is a popular way to share information - for many reasons:
Alan Levine is one of those busy bloggers - you wonder how he gets the time to be so investigative, always finding new things online, trying them out and reporting on it to the rest of the world. He’s the man behind ‘CogDogBlog’, a frequently updated journal, which covers every topic from learning to technology. Alan is also part of the community in Maricopa - where they’ve been building a new LearningXchange.
Another big name in this area is Stephen Downes of course - an individual who carries a strong capacity to inform thousands of others and whose website I’m sure would be as popular as the merlot site itself. In fact I’ve heard he’s one of the top ten Stephens at google! You can receive his daily or weekly posts via either email or RSS. He’s built his own RSS feeder because he wanted a system that would categorise all the links into a database as he went - very sensible.
Last year Stephen ran an RSS feed of all the bloggers from the merlot conference. In the words of Darcy Norman from Calgary, ‘a metric busload of educational bloggers’ was there.
Anyone familiar with Michael Coghlan’s work will know that if there is any future in online voice blogging - he will find it! The Learning Times network site provides members with access to a voice blogging system, which many educators are now using to report back from conferences around the world. For example Jonathon Finklestein’s report from the New Orleans Museums and Learning conference - lots of images, interviews, text and voice reports.
Not only voice, but also photos and even video. The latest ideas are the photo blog and the ‘m-/moblog’ - send image, voice or text, direct from your mobile phone to your web site.
Here’s a new idea that has been sweeping the world lately. Alan Levine recently delivered an engaging and very thorough presentation at the 2004 Online Conference for ‘Teaching in the Community Colleges’
Photoblogging is a way of sharing your photo galleries with more information and interaction than you might do via just a gallery at Yahoo! or a simple web gallery. Uploading photos one by one, from your computer, or your mobile phone, a person can add - and invite - comments into his/her individual space within the photoblogging community.
Now here’s one activity that could be useful in an adult language or literacy group! Start with the visual – eg. describe your excursion via the shots you took on a digital camera. One blogging area per group, and different groups can add comments to each photograph.
How do these technologies fit together? Take one web site for example, glutnix.com - ‘chicken soup for the pixellated soul’. A young guy, from NZ, working in information technology, he’s obviously very technically capable - uses all the latest technologies, has a sense of humour, and links to all his friends who also blog regularly. He has a photo blog, and has begun to experiment with moblogging too. There’s discussion between his site, and his friends’ sites.
Then there’s Chaising Daisy - a woman who’s reading the same book I mentioned in the first paragraph, also works in IT, lives in London, rarely uses her own name on the internet, and whose site is filled with links to other bloggers. She’s also funny, and her site is beautifully designed. You can see how her writing interweaves with that of her blogging colleagues on other sites.
We could contrast these with ‘The Spin Starts Here’, a Melbourne group using blog software to build a (sometimes offensive) commentary on pop culture. ‘The Spin’ have no RSS, no mo-blogging, and they write as a collaborative group on the one site. The site comes across more like a collection of essays than the usual short, reflective postings from an individual.
Is syndication like joining a group to buy a Tatts ticket? No. And aggregation is not the feeling you get when you lose, either.
According to Stephen Downes, RSS is now ‘the transport mechanism of choice’ . The best way to shift information about, in highly targeted ways. RSS comes in two parts - Syndication (sending your stuff out), and Aggregation (gathering other people’s feeds).
Because RSS is based in the open standard of XML, it can also be more easily read by many different ‘user agents’ - including your web browser, news feeder, and the current crop of hand-held devices (mobile phone, personal assistant, electric mixer, etc). (One guy reckons we need to stop calling it syndication, because it’s ‘about to hit the big time’.)
Okay, RSS - news feeding - is a sub-set of XML, which is a computer language. Many people say XML is the best way to describe, harvest, store and search ‘metadata’. Metadata is information about information. Yes, I know, it’s not that clear - but you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the future.
As Stephen points out in his introduction to RSS for Educators, RSS is part of a bigger picture - Metadata Harvesting. Fields of metadata rippling in the sun waiting for the onset of a virtual combine harvester. Don't search the web, search the harvester.
Our online Dame EdNA represents one of the world’s finest examples of metadata at work. The EdNA people have combed the web searching for interesting and useful educational information - and they have carefully sorted that information according to the ‘metadata’ - the information about the information. They’ve done this with their harvesting software.
Again, I must admit the technical details are beyond me here. It’s like getting on an aeroplane isn’t it - I don’t need to know how it works, as long as I survive and learn something from the experience.
Really if you're looking for metadata, it's behind the scenes. It's what will make search work better in the future. It's a way of categorising everything in fine structural detail, so that ideally even a dumb computer knows what the social, linguistic and educational implications are - and can report back to you more easily.
When you write something - and most bloggers write a lot - you can allow many people to re-publish your work instantly. You get your computer program to use XML code to ‘mark up’ (or, describe) every bit of your online text (diary / e-zine / class project / excursion report) in a meaningful way - so that other computers will ‘understand’ the social and linguistic implications of each component on the page.
RSS software can inform other computers about your text, relating, ‘Here is the author’s name, the date of writing, the headings, sub-headings, titles and descriptions’. These other computers send a quick summary to interested people, who don’t have to visit your web page, unless your headlines are sufficiently juicy.
Put it another way: when you visit EdNA.edu.au, as I’m sure many of you do regularly, you can request a combined list of the latest headlines from BBC Education, or Wired, or the ACE sector, or a custom-built search. You can even set up an account, so that whenever you log in, you find all the lists you asked for, laid out on the page with an up-to-date aesthetic.
You don’t have to rely on EdNA or Stephen, you can build your own set of ‘feeds’ with a news reader / aggregator that lives on your desktop or web server. (Feeds are the lists of headlines that people send out when they Syndicate.)
Now who has the time to go and read articles from the BBC and Wired all day? Isn’t all the information from mailing lists enough! The point is, when you have your carefully selected list of headlines from all these different sites, you only have to look at the one page. If none of the headlines are compelling or relevant - close your browser or news aggregator, and go back to more pressing priorities.
.. and why did they call it a repository, instead of a Storage Place, or a Collection?! People are talking about sending news feeds directly out of the new Storage Places - so that educators get up to the minute information about new resources.
There are some brilliant Storage Places around - places where people join forces to Collect Things. Merlot.org - a place where many teachers from around the world let others know about the ‘LearningObjects’ they've created (Learning Materials, or Resources). Also, the new Maricopa Learning Xchange.
Currently the big web wigs are dreaming of a ‘Semantic Web’, where every piece of data has enough information about its cultural and linguistic meaning, to enable computers to be able to manage data more easily without humans. So they can run the office and we can play beach volleyball.
"The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. " (from the W3C Sematic Web Introduction.)
Blogging cultures have easier access to socially enabling software (thanks to inbuilt comments and ‘trackbacks’), than earlier waves of technology permitted to the first mountains of ‘personal home pages’.
When people started putting home pages on the web, everyone was concerned that there would just be too much information, and that most of it would be useless rubbish. Well the blogging phenomenon hasn’t done anything to counter that - if anything we’re seeing that extreme glut of words continue its exponential rise!
However, because the ways of organising information are improving, thanks to the XML we’ve been raving about, it should become easier to find what you need. So, it becomes easier for writers to find their audience and writers can cross-fertilise ideas more fluently too.
Bill Burnham recently suggested that there are too many blogs and too many news feeds. It’s overwhelming. Also, because blogs tend to be archived by date rather than category, it’s difficult to search via the news feed channels. In the end, you’ll end up going back to the search engines and searching the web.
Stephen countered with his view that the world of syndication benefits from expert filtering. Rather than subscribing directly to 300 channels on your topic, you subscribe to the one expert who picks out the best of those 300, and forwards with an insightful comment. Stephen also points out that such an expert is likely to develop a category system which will enable deeper searching.
I’m not sure that you’d ever use RSS as a way to search - rather to keep track as new information comes in. Some have suggested that RSS is no different from email lists. This got the goat of some other writers, who find it free from junk, clean in its structure, and more efficient for a sender to organise.
A big issue at the moment is the movement of spammers from email onto weblogs and news feed networks - the spammers are using ‘referrer scripts’ to indulge in spamdexing. Alan Levine is having huge problems with people leaving inappropriate comments on his site. Wil Wheaton has posted a bounty, for information leading to arrest, because spammers left links to child porn sites.
There seems to be some clash over standards in RSS at the moment - some people want to use an Atomic standard, while others prefer the classic version. I'm sure they'll work it out.
| [1 - Introduction] . . (= 2 - Exploring blogs & RSS =) ~:~ [3 - Culture & Community] . . [4 - Practical Ideas] . . [5 - Footnotes] . . [(or, word version 141.k)] . . [+ Live Interview at LearningTimes (login req'd)] . . [KnowledgeTree#5] . . | |