All I know about Blogging and Microblogging

I've been participating in the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/ EVO session, where I've been helping moderate this past week http://blogging4educators.pbwiki.com/Week3, culminating in a WiZiQ chat recorded here: http://tinyurl.com/39tkth

Someone wrote early in the week asking what they should blog about. My reply seemed to be appreciated by the group, so I thought I'd blog it and tag it in such a way that it would fit in with the experiments the group is conducting on the Writingmatrix model, finding posts created as part of a group by tagging them, in this case b4echallenge, and then finding the posts by searching on the common tag in Technorati.

On the purpose of blogging
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/445

Ideally you should pick as a topic for your blog something that you would like to have an online conversation about. I've heard people (who don't know better) say things like "blogs are just online journals, aren't they?" This implies a one-way information transfer. If that's the case you might as well put up a static web page. Of course blog software can make it a lot EASIER for someone to put up a 'page' somewhere. But thinking of a blog in terms of unidirectional information flow misses the point considerably. A good blog will invite comments. If you turn 'trackback' on in your blog then you can see when other people are linking to you from their blogs. Appropriate use of TAGS (labels or categories in some blog software) will reveal your blog to people who search Technorati or Google Blog Search for blog posts on topics of interest to them.

So, true, the topic of your blog can be anything that interests YOU. But if you think of it in terms of Web 2.0, read-write, many-way conversation opportunities, then this might help you to direct your postings to things that are of interest to others as well.

This interest doesn't have to be popular. Blogs and other web 2.0 tools address the great need lacking in conventional publishing for vehicles for communication on niche issues, what has been called the 'long tail'. It may turn out that what interests you might be of great interest to someone else. A blog is a good way to find that other person, other people, and discover and communicate with a small but dedicated group.

There's more about trackback and pingback in section 4.1 here:
Dieu, Barbara, and Vance Stevens. (2007), Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web. TESL-EJ, Volume 11, Number 1: http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html

On tagging:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/625

Tags are a concept it took me a while to get my mind around, and some have asked 'how do I do it?'. At the bottom of your blog post you'll see a field where you can write in tags for your post. In some blog softwares these are called LABELS or CATEGORIES. Essentially you're meant to write in a few words (or strings in computerese) there that best describe your post.

After a while you'll find that a lot of the words you use repeat themselves in such a way that they develop a classification system, and in aggregate with millions of other people doing the same thing your classification system forms a 'folksonomy' (a word similar to taxonomy, which is a pre-ordained classification system).

Powerful tools have been developed to feret out tags from among the millions of posts created in the blogosphere. We use Technorati but there are 12 more tools listed here: http://mashable.com/2008/02/03/13-tools-for-tracking-discussions-in-the-blogosphere/

We have found that by using a tag unique to a project we can 'aggregate content' (or 'find all the posts on the topic'). This can be used in classrooms as with the writingmatrix project.

You should definitely label, tag, or categorize your posts. This is very important. You can have as many labels as you like except where blogger, for example, limits you to 200 characters. In any event, you should tag ALL posts you create in conjunction with this post by the tag (label or category). Tags are essential, key, to the social nature of blogging. You will see how it works if you start tagging your posts right away.

Pay attention to how to delimit your tags. In blogger you delimit with a comma. This means your tags can be more than one word. But many sites have you delimit with a space (so tags are one word, or one_word like this - if you space delimit in blogger you will end up with one long tag, but you can go back and fix it, don't worry).

Also, you should ensure that your blog is public (unless you want it to be private). In Blogger you go to settings to make your blog public. If it's public it can be found by tag search engines such at http://technorati.com - if it's not public it won't show up on the searches we do.

On Writingmatrix
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/719

This week I'll be talking about the Writingmatrix project, which you can read about here:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dr22kn2_24dpqdgg . At that link, there are links to many recorded presentations and publications already made about this project.

There's a LOT you could read there so I'll briefly explain that teachers in different countries had students blog and tag their posts with a unique key word, 'writingmatrix'. The students in these countries then used http://technorati.com to find other blog posts (with ANY authority) tagged 'writingmatrix'. They browsed the available blogs with intent to find some that interested them and then they left comments in each other's blogs, or tagged them in http://del.icio.us, and/or linked to them from their own blogs (causing the link from their post to appear in the blog they linked to) and writers developed audiences in this way and met online in other ways as well.

The beauty of the project was that it was totally spontaneous, no pre-arrangement with anyone is necessary, and in fact anyone here can do a Google or Technorati search on 'writingmatrix' and see what comes up and/OR tag a blog post 'writingmatrix' and find it in the Technorati listing later. We could do the same with the tag 'blogging4educators' and if you want to double your fun you can tag your posts both ways, plus add any other tag that occurs to you.

I have made some screen casts about Google Reader. One of them shows how you can search on blogging4educators in Technorati (and follow the feed on that SEARCH in Google Reader).
http://213.42.148.233/file.php/83/internetsearch/google_reader_manage_feeds.swf

On Microblogging
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/737

Someone wrote expressing disappointment that it was taking time to develop a following through blogging. I replied:

• Remember that blogs appeal to NICHE interest. Persevere. Blog from the heart.
• Be sure you TAG TAG TAG. People use searches like Technorati and Google Blog Search and others (Google 'blogsearch') to find postings on topics that interest them. Tags are key to their finding your blog.
• Twitter is emerging as a tool for getting you on the map. This is a good article on how Twitter can help drive traffic to your blog:
  http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/23/9-benefits-of-twitter-for-bloggers/
  

I've tagged more perspectives here: http://del.icio.us/vancestevens/twitter

And finally, getting down to the nitty gritty ...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogging4educators/message/805

Someone wrote to ask:

i'm on blogger and i can't find my blog on technorati. i only see it as a link on one of my friend's blog. i can't find it on google either. :( so clearly i haven't checked something properly. do you happen to know what?

I was waiting for this question.

Technorati and http://blogsearch.google.com/ search blogs to help you find ones you you are looking for but don't know about yet. I haven't used blogsearch that much and I don't know whether or not it searches for tags in blog postings.There is information here that says it utilizes blog 'structure' http://www.google.com/help/about_blogsearch.html but I found no mention of tags. A search on blogging4educators only turns up 19 results. I turned the safe filter off, and got the same.

Notice point 5 at the above URL. It points to information about pinging
http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html

Now, how does Google or Technorati know that a blog exists? It has to at some point ping that blog. A ping is like a sonar packet of data that one server sends another, which the receiving server acknowledges and returns a ping to that effect. So to start the process your blog has to ping Google or Technorati and say, yoo hoo, here I am. Normally the search engines troll blog sites and look for blogs, ping them, and once they've found them, follow them, but in case you have to go proactive, there is information on how to do that here:
http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html

I know more about this with Technorati. Technorati searches on TAGS in blogs, but you have to be sure your blog is PUBLIC (somewhere in your settings you can make it so). This will enable it to communicate with blog search engines (i.e. ping them and answer pings). If it still doesn't show on listings, you might have to manually send a ping to the search engine.

David Warlick has some information about how you can do that with Technorati here: http://hitchhikr.com/index.php?mode=faq#2

Also, you can register with Technorati. Once you've done that you can 'claim' your blog. If you follow this procedure you'll eventually reach a point where you can ping Technorati. Yoo hoo, I'm here !!

When we were experimenting with writingmatrix we had a lot of people, including me, who could not get their blogs to show up in Technorati listings despite numerous attempts using all the tricks mentioned so far. I wrote them to ask what was going on. They wrote back that they would look into it. Eventually they came up with a tweak on their interface whereby you can adjust the level of authority you want your blog results to be invested with. If you are researching latest developments on a vexing physics problem you might want to weed out hits where the poster is not known. If you are dealing with first time bloggers (educators, that's us!)
then you want to see posts of blogs of students and colleages with zero 'authority'. So now Technorati have made it possible to search on posts with ANY authority. This is what you want. You can see how to adjust this in my screencast given in the wiki for Week 3:

- Managing Feeds in Google Reader (3.5 mb)
http://213.42.148.233/mod/resource/view.php?id=13029 or
http://213.42.148.233/file.php/83/internetsearch/google_reader_manage_feeds.swf

When I do a search in Technorati on blogging4educators tagged posts with ANY
authority http://technorati.com/search/blogging4educators?authority=n&language=en I get 48 hits. If i change this to 'a little' authority that number reduces to 8 hits.

What is 'authority'? According to Technorati, authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has - from http://support.technorati.com/faq/topic/71

At our level of blogging, use ANY authority in your searches.

This probably sounds more complicated to some of you than you wish it was, but this is the reality as far as my colleagues and I in the Writingmatrix project have been able to work it out over the past several months. On the up side, my posts are now showing up in Technorati listings ;-) So try some of the hints indicated above and let us know if it solves your problem (and if not, that's ok too, because your feedback will help push us to the next level of discovery)

In summary: How to get involved in Writingmatrix

Writingmatrix is a very minimalist project, as Paul Allison says, it's "Using the web as it is".

1. Have your students blog.
2. Have them tag their posts 'writingmatrix' (plus any other tags they want to use)
3. Have them check technorati for posts on writingmatrix with any authority
Just use this link: http://technorati.com/search/writingmatrix?authority=n&language=en
With any luck they'll start seeing their posts in there (oooh there's one of mine!)

4. Have them find posts in there that they like (455 listed at the moment)
5. Have them comment on those posts
6. Have them link to posts they like in their blogs

In reality, the teacher might want to come to grips with the concepts above in order to understand what to do if the students' blogs aren't showing in the listings.

The result should be that your students' blogs appear and that they attract some attention in the form of comments, links back, and so on.

Let us know if it works (or if it doesn't and we'll try to figure out how we can improve the system). And if you already KNOW, been there done that, then we want to hear from YOU.

Ever Inquiringly,
Vance

Teachers as Change Agents: A Conversation with Doris Molero

Doris Molero, one of my WritingMatrix partners in Maracaibo, Venezuela, has invited me to chat with her students in Venezuela about tagging and RSS and using these tools to connect on line as we’ve been doing with the WritingMatrix project: http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/

Me: http://scott-in-vietnam.blogspot.com/2007/10/scotts-trip-to-vietnam.html

I found it when I was looking for blog posts on a conference I recently went to
Its conference tag was GLoCALL
I looked in Technorati at this URL
http://www.technorati.com/search/glocall?authority=n&language=en
That's a search on blogs with the tag GLoCALL
So when I found this blog guess what??

Doris: What happened?
(checks out the blog …) Looking good in that Vietnamese hat!

Me: You guessed it. I found my picture there by surprise - just now
I'm leaving a comment now

Doris: What a small world!!!!

Me: the world has got smaller due to tagging
Are your guys blogging and tagging?

Doris: Yes... adding blogs to reader...
We are not using Technorati...
We are having trouble with internet and Technorati doesn't open
We are aggregating in Google reader

Me: looks like lots of nice posts in Technorati
I think if it were me I would IDENTIFY people whose blogs i like first, using Technorati and then follow THOSE in Google Reader
How are your guys finding blogs to follow?

Doris: but we don't have time for Technorati now... so we are adding and following in Google reader...since everybody is using Blogger... and are familiar with Google things... they have posted in Sasha's students blogs... and they have received some comments... this week we are going to start interacting more... this group is working on podcast for their final project...
they have to put a podcast together and post it in their blogs... as well as interact with the guys in the project.. as you can see it's a lot of internet skills and use of the language as well as critical thinking and all those things...

Me: for some reason none of my posts are coming up in Technorati, only my Slideshare tags, nothing from Blogger, and I’m looking in any authority too

Doris: I don't understand Technorati much... that's way we are using Google reader...you can always find blogs in Google by writing the right tag

Me: Blog Search?

Doris: yes

Me: (trying it out) yes, mine appear here
ok, I like this better

Doris: Yes... but how do you cope with teaching a syllabus and teaching how to work all these tools at the same time...?

Me: try to write the tools into the syllabus
become influential in other words
be a change agent

Doris: it's very demanding...sometimes it's frustrating ... so we got we the flow ... not everybody will be able to ride the wave but things are going to be accomplished ... and the more we use it the better and the more things students will learn...
Did that sound right...

Me: did you hear Konrad Glowgowski's talk at k-12 online?
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=166

Doris: This is going to be the subject of my research.... how we can integrate more techno tools in our learning for life.... but some people just want to learn English... multiliteracies... how do we say that in Spanish...? it's a whole new way of looking at things...

Me: you should look up Glowgowski's talk because he quoted a lot from someone using the metaphor of flow and it was on that topic

Doris: well, It just occurred to me....
I love your F.U.N philosophy, though...
lots of teachers love control... and chaos ...it's something they can't control

Me: that's what's F.U.N. about it
someone said "I love to learn, I just hate to be taught"

Doris: that's what I meant by going with the flow... sometimes we want to control everything and have plans we can to carry out perfectly... we have to learn to relax and go with prior knowledge... trust each other..

Me: I think people learn better that way once they have become mature and responsible
How about your students? Can they learn through self motivation?

Doris: some of them are very nervous... some of them get frustrated... some of them love it... at the end of the level most of them agreed that all they did was worthwhile ...

Me: most people hate to pack and travel, but love where they end up, and have good reflections on the experience

Doris: they are university students and want to graduate in different fields... so English and technology is like something extra they have to worry about... but they say it's better than to have classes in the traditional way

Me: in the future there will NOT be LESS technology, and MODELING that technology is SOOOO important, like what you are doing
We are teaching people to take jobs that have not been invented yet
School no longer prepares you for a predictable future.
Check out David Warlick's K-12 keynote for more in that vein
http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=144
to prepare for your future you need to know HOW to learn
and how to FIND information
and for that you need technology
and you need to know how to use it

Doris: That's the spirit... and that's exactly what I'm writing in my research

Me: and another thing David said: bringing people into school and forcing them to leave their networks behind, to cut them off from their networks, is an insult to them
David's keynote makes the point quite dramatically

Doris: networking... such a new idea for many
Especially in the English classroom, a lot of new things at the same time...

Me: David says that there are two kinds of people:
those who are connected
and those who are not
and those who are have POWER
that the other group has not
so by putting your students in touch with others
to teach them how to connect
is to empower them

Doris: it took me a long time to fully understand it myself
but connecting is more than just connect... it means to be able to do... and to do you have to understand first...

Me: yes, how to USE those connections to learn
or more accurately to know
because according to Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and others
what we 'know' is the sum total of what we can connect to
If you are connected then you theoretically know everything that the network knows
IF you can access that knowledge
and that's what we need to teach today
not facts, connections

Doris: new concept for many people... especially because you have to leave your controlling everything...
now how do we convince teachers of that.....? that's elemental... teachers are change agents

Me: I guess, get people connected
and they will learn it on their own
you can't teach them
there is no such thing
they have to be put in a position where they are willing to learn it

Doris: my guys are working... and they will start demanding more of what they have been using sometime... we have to wait for the right time... so everything runs smoothly...?

Me: speaking of time
I have to go
nice talking to you
connecting with you and your students
will chat later some time

Cogito. Ergo BLOGo

I think; therefore I blog:
Descartian logic for new multiliteracies

I'm starting my fourth rendition of my annual TESOL pp107 course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments. This course has several components, among which:

1. A static Web 1.o page at http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/portal2007.htm
2. A Moodle page at http://www.opensource.idv.tw/moodle/course/view.php?id=23. A big problem with the Moodle this time around is that due to an incompatibility between the most recent versions of Moodle and the SQL dbase running on the server that's graciously hosting us in Taiwan, backup no longer works here, so I'm hesitant to put much effort here until this is resolved.
3. Something new, and interesting, a PageFlakes portal at: http://www.pageflakes.com/vancestevens/13498617 . I find I like working with PageFlakes. It has an easy and intuitive interface - you simply select widgets and embed them in your page. One of these works on RSS feeds, so you can display recent content on your PageFlakes portal of whatever sites you want to follow.

The course is about how new literacies are emerging through increasing digitization of communications media and seeks to inculcate the concepts not through a top down explanation of what multiliteracies is or are, but by empowering participants with a familiarity with the tools and through use of these tools stimulate them into making discoveries about how these tools might be applied to their own social and professional lives. These lives overlap of course, learning being essentially a social phenomenon.

The problem in beginning this course ... and I'm not sure about this, I'm only speculating ... but the problem is that it takes a while for participants to 'get it'. But when they do 'get it' it's transformative. That is, the light comes on, and perception of Internet and how it potentially can be used is indelibly altered.

So what is there to 'get'? The course is only a few weeks long. Therefore, participants have to jump in and use the tools. Traditional courses in the TESOL series are run through a Desire to Learn portal. This structures courses didactically; that is, the 'teacher' will propose material to be absorbed in a certain order, and interaction with students takes place through threaded discussion lists. Some but not all students are familiar with LMS/CMS, learning/courseware management systems. Prior experience with LMS/CMS not withstanding, the instructional model is familiar and intuitive, so most courses plow ahead within this paradigm.

I found the D2L lists to be robust in my first rendition of this course but I had assigned a text to read, and this was a good way to discuss it. Still I wasn't happy that we were truly exercising the concepts that we were scrutinizing. Threaded discussion lists are derivative of print media. They are effective in the exchange of prose discourse. But multiliteracies implies much more than that.

In the years that I have taught this course I have evolved my understanding of what multiliteracies are and how best to learn about them. After the second year facilitating this course I abandoned the printed text (i.e. demoted it to optional reading). The main reason for this was that it was not available to all participants, but also, besides becoming dated, as an instance of print media, it was bogging us into talking around the subject. I felt there was more to be gained from doing not as we said, but doing as we did.

I was meanwhile developing a greater understanding myself about how blogs worked and were organized around folksonomies, and how they could be plumbed for knowledge in a distributed learning network. Last year, my third teaching the course, I had each participant not only keep a blog, but follow each other's blogs through Bloglines. This could almost have replaced the threaded discussion lists in substance though perhaps not in logistics, so we continued to do both. This year however, having gained even more experience through the writingmatrix project, and also having heard a couple of David Weinberger's excellent presentations on how folksonomies can be utilized to draw information from meta-tagged Internet resources, I decided with this year's course to take last year's concept a step further and base the most current syllabus on interactions among participants through aggregation of tagged blog entries.

In order to do this I had to issue each participant with a set of tools. But as facilitators are mere cat herders in distributed learning settings, to issue here means to offer, and not all participants are at first predisposed to appreciate the importance of what is being offered. Here is the rationale behind what I have in mind.

First, I feel it is crucial to the development of community that participants get to know one another, and for every other rendition of this course, I've created a community page with everyone's picture and brief biodata. However this year I decided to set up a wiki for that and encourage the participants to fill in their own spaces. Now several days into the course, some of the participants are starting to do that; e.g.
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/BobbiStevens
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/GwenCary
http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/SimonGibbs
and of course yours truly at http://portfolios2007.wikispaces.com/VanceStevens

In setting this up, one page per participant, I took it upon myself to tag each page pp107tesol (among other things; the complete tag set I used was aggregation, call, folksonomies, multiliteracies, pp107tesol, social networking, tesol, wikis - and participants are welcome to augment and alter this as each feels befits his/her own page).

I also proposed a set of readings to start us off which included my own thoughts on multiliteracies and especially my collaboration this past summer with Barbara Dieu, a colleague with a good understanding of aggregation and tagging and how it can be used in encouraging students to collaborate and enjoy each other's blog postings (see http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html). Bee (as Barbara is known in the online communities she frequents) applies her understanding of how this works to her http://dekita.org/. These readings would allow students to see how my thinking on the topic had evolved and where it was going. I augmented this with an assignment of literature in other media, to view the very interesting debate between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, at http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/09/video-david-weinberger-and-andrew-keen/. Here Weinberger explains how information on the Internet is organized around folksonomies, to which Keen is able to counter that this is all a step in the wrong direction in the organization of repositories of human knowledge and intellect.

I then proposed that each student in the course start a blog and weigh in on this debate in a posting which would be tagged pp107tesol.

Once students start blogs and start tagging their postings relating to this course, then the real F.U.N. begins. We can do many things with these:

1. We can look for postings tagged pp107tesol at Technorati, by searching on http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/pp107tesol. There are ways we might need to fine tune here, and we will explore such considerations as we proceed with this course.
2. We can aggregate each other's postings by subscribing to each other's blogs in a newsreader or aggregator. Last year we used Bloglines. I think that this year I will use Google Reader just to explore its capabilities. I am becoming enamored with the whole range of Google services, and I like the way that Google Reader fits in as an additional tool accessible through one login for Gmail, Blogger etc.)
3. We can comment on each other's postings and see to what degree this kind of conversation can supplant or augment our other threaded discussions.
   
4. We can tag each other's postings in http://del.icio.us and explore together how social bookmarking works. It is interesting for example to tag your own URLs and see who else has read and tagged them as well, and what other tags they are using.

The tools by which this takes place need to be acquired now. The main tool is to have a blog of some kind, and then to tag postings in that blog so that they can be found by others looking for posts tagged pp107tesol.

Secondarily comes the content of this course, which is to understand how this fits into a framework of multiliteracies. It is hoped that reflection on this content will provide the impetus for making numerous postings in participants' blogs, which will give the rest of us something to aggregate. As this system gets under way and is activated for each of us, we can begin to see how classes or other work or study projects can be organized on these principles.

Once this awareness is achieved, participants in the course will have 'got it'. And I hope this will provide some clues as to where I'm heading with my course development so far. There is a method to the madness after all nyaa haa haaarrr!

pp107tesol

Writingmatrix Update

I have recently returned from a brief holiday in France and Spain after delivering a series of lectures which I documented at http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm. There you can find links to Elluminate recordings of the lectures, links to the slide shows, and texts of the lectures I gave (more or less) illustrated with the graphics from the slide shows. Eventually Bobbi and I will link photos from our trip from there.

Meanwhile, the Writingmatrix project is getting interesting. This morning, Webheads held their usual chat at noon GMT this morning (each Sunday noon GMT for the past 8 years) in Tapped In http://www.tappedin.org . This morning some of the chat was about Writingmatrix. Webheads are bloggers and are very interested in this project. Some said they would like to join us at a live chat to be held later this evening (in the USA; Monday a.m. in Europe/Middle East, Asia).

Now, why am I writing all of this here? The reason is I wish to conduct an experiment. I am going to TAG this post writingmatrix and webheads. Then it should appear in the Technorati searches on those tags at the following URLs:

• http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix
• http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/webheads

In this way, anyone who is already in the project and who has put the RSS feed of the output from those searches in the aggregator (like Bloglines) will be able to find this post.

The second part of the experiment is to acknowledge the work of one of the students, Matias Basilico, who has left some interesting posts on the concepts that make Writingmatrix effective in helping students in different parts of the world find each other's writing and collaborate on it.

• http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/07/pingback-tracking-distributed.html
• http://mbasilico.blogspot.com/2007/06/rss-organize-and-update-your-content.html

The concept being experimented here is that of Pingback. By linking to Matias's posts in this way he should be alerted in his blog. There should be a link in his blog back to this posting.

And there is! Have a look below his posts. So it works!

And also I want to see what this code does. Technorati says: See your posts here
To contribute to this page, include this code in your blog post:

writingmatrix

Testing testing technorati 1,2,3 ....

I'm making what I think is great headway on the text of my three lectures for the Summer Course in Spain coming up July 11-13 in San Sebastian, Basque country (I think it's great but I'm a week over deadline arghh). I'm writing this text out here: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tesol/ppot/2007/basque2.htm

It's called Basque2 because it's the second lecture. Later a first lecture will be added, and parts of this one will become lecture 3.

In the course of writing all this out, as with the Writingmatrix project http://webheadsinaction.org/node/174, I'm learning as I go. What I have just learned was the impetus for this post, and that is ...

Technorati says it will give me a feed on blog postings tagged Writingmatrix if I plop this code in my blog. Let's see what it does:

writingmatrix

I have discovered (hint from Robin's presentation, below) that if I use the above link and choose to See All (all 1000 postings tagged writingmatrix) then I will discover at the top of that page a SUBSCRIBE link. If I right click on that and copy the link location, then I get: http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/writingmatrix. Now, I can simply copy that FEED link and ADD it to my Bloglines account, and now I can track through Bloglines the moment that ANYone in our group makes a posting tagged 'writingmatrix'. Try it!

Preparing to give a series of lectures in Spain

In preparation for my upcoming lecture series in Spain, http://www.vancestevens.com/writing.htm, I have been working hard on the side lately trying to figure out how aggregation works throughout the blogosphere (see my wiki collaborations at http://beevance.wikispaces.com and http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com). Time is at a premium but I took a moment the other day to accept an invitation from Robin Good, who offered to show me how to aggregate content through http://www.mysyndicaat.com. Robin had made a zany keynote for us at http://wiaoc.org in which he introduced us to http://www.operator11.com and ended by packing up his video streaming equipment and riding off with it on his motorcycle through the streets of Rome.

Robin made clear at the outset that I could make any kind of use of his presentation that I wished, so I made a Camtasia recording. Unfortunately, in the time we had to get set up and under way I was unable to do sound checks or troubleshoot and whereas my own audio was clear in the recording, Robin's came out on my recording garbled and barely comprehensible (problem on my side apparently, not his).

So I made Snaggit screen shots of the presentation and produced a 60-slide ppt show with annotations. This process helped me to consolidate what I had learned and was also done with intent to share. I then tried to upload my slides to http://www.slideshare.net but for some reason it wasn't working, so I used http://www.zoho.com instead. I was not perfectly pleased with the output. There were truncations in some of the slides; e.g. corruption of footer in all of them. But I'm at the end of time available on this effort and so without further ado, here's Robin (wait, further adooooo0000, I managed to upload to Slideshare and have replaced the file here and what I like better about Slideshare is that the links WORK - happy clicking):

Post-WiAOC 2007: CONNECTing Conversations on Networking, Education - aftermath

Webheads http://webheads.info has just finished its second almost-annual, universally global, completely free, online conference. http://wiaoc.org. I say 'just' but the conference, which we also term a 'convergence' ended ten days ago. And I'm just now finding time to blog it.

It's not that I'm lazy or spaced out, but the convergence took all spare time from me for many weeks leading up to it, and when it ended I had desperately to attend to odds and ends I'd been holding at bay, like spending time with a neglected family and creating exams and giving and marking them plus a backlog of student assignments, and finalizing grade reports (which I just now finished; hence my return to posting here).

And finally I'm looking forward to having time for some reflection. I'm at the stage where suddenly a halcion summer has appeared as a gently spreading plateau at the end of a long uphill struggle, and I'm staring ahead at three months of being able to spend time on my own projects for a change.

I have some interesting projects in the works. I just emerged from a planning meeting at my workplace and discovered that it is being assumed that my role in upcoming development in courses I teach will be to implement a web 2.0 multiliteracies, blogging, social networking component in a syllabus that focuses heavily on transiting from Office 2003 to 2007 (should I introduce Open Office? that would be a thrust too far I'm afraid). I had blogged my plans for this curriculum component much earlier here: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com/2007/02/multiliteracies-and-curriculum.html but it has only now been confirmed to me that this is what I'll be working on next term.

I'm elated at that because it fits in with courses I'm giving in Spain this summer, and perhaps in Sudan in August (see http://www.vancestevens.com/papers), and I've been doing courses and workshops lately in web 2.0 and in particular an interesting project on writingmatrix which I just posted on in a self access learning list.

The question on the self-access list was how to keep students learning English over the summer, in particular how to encourage them to engage in "conversation/interaction of meaning/substance"

I suggested for "written conversation/interaction of meaning/substance -- Keep blogs?

"The teacher could promise to comment on them from time to time during the summer. The teacher could manage this task by using bloglines, http://www.bloglines.com.

"To learn how to start blogs students and teachers can use this tutorial:
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/blogger_tutorial.htm

"But students could seek out students from other countries and have some fun making new friends this summer by joining in the writingmatrix project. To do this your students simply tag their summer fun postings writingmatrix. Then they can use http://www.technorati.com/ (search on tags) to find other blog posts with the writingmatrix tag. When they find another blog they like of someone else in the writingmatrix project they simply leave a comment and perhaps invite that person to view their blog."

I further noted that "at http://wiaoc.org/ project members organized a presentation entitled Writingmatrix: CONNECTing students with blogs, tags, and social networking, http://writingmatrix.wikispaces.com/. The other teachers are Nelba Quintana and Rita Zeinstejer (from Argentina), Doris Molero (from Venezuela), and Sasha Sirk (Slovenia).

I put my slides explaining the project online here http://www.slideshare.net/vances/vance-writingmatrix-wiaoc2007/ and the other contributions are posted at http://webheadsinaction.org/node/174 .
A recording of the presentation at WiAOC can be found here:
http://streamarchives.net/node/48

"This is an attempt to utilize the social networking aspect of blogs (via the simple means of tagging posts in such a way that identifies each posting as being that of another student in the project) to enable students to make friends through blogging. If it works for you or your students I'd appreciate having your feedback."

Then to check on the project I went to Technorati and did a search on writingmatrix: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix

I was looking to see what students had posted but I came upon a blog post that mentioned writingmatrix but was tagged wiaoc 2007: http://maryhillis.blogspot.com/2007/05/wiaoc-2007.html. Mary Hillis had visited the convergence but found she really liked our presentation, the one mentioned above, and another one on blogging by Carla Arena, Erika Cruvinel, and Ronaldo Lima. It is gratifying to see that aggregation based on tagging is working and is indeed putting like-minded students and teachers in touch with one another.

I left a comment of course.

And if Mary stops by here, "Hi Mary!"

---

Someone responded to my list posting, asking "How do you tag?"
Here is my response:

What are known as TAGS in social networking might be called something else in various blogs and wikis. For example, in Blogger they are called LABELS in English and Etiquetas in Spanish Blogspot blogs, and probably something else in German. There’s a good article on Tagging at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags. This explains the concept but doesn’t tell you how to do it.

I’ve also seen tags called ‘categories’

Technorati focuses on blogs and analyses what’s out there according to their tags (among other features).

We have a project where we try to get kids late teens to tag (or ‘label) their blog posts writingmatrix . To find the post I visit
http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix

and there, just grabbing one at random, http://leonardobravo726.blogspot.com/2007/05/welcome-to-my-blog.html, I find it’s one of Doris’s students from Maracaibo. Doris works at URBE. This students tagged his blog posting efl, introduction, urbe, and writingmatrix. I found it by requesting tags for writingmatrix. If you searched all blog posts tagged efl you’d probably turn up thousands, but if you were looking for URBE for example, you’d find fewer, and some of these would be tagged writingmatrix as well.

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+urbe and got 4 hits but I’m sure there are more. We still haven’t learned how all this really works. We need teachers in this mix to help us figure it out.

Still playing around, I tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+urbe and got 29 hits, so I think this is the correct syntax.

I've tagged this post in a number of ways. You can find my tags below where it says 'labels for this post.' You might be able to find my post (this one) with a technorati search on writingmatrix but I also used wiaoc2007 and vance among many other tags.

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+AND+vance and got 5 hits, but none of them what I was looking for (this post, at least not yet ;-) (and same results for http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/writingmatrix+vance). There were surprises.

One of the teachers in the project is starting a tag project on serendipity, and serendipity is exactly where this leads. And if you think this is fun, wait till we get on to del.icio.us. That’s where the kids will really get carried away (find out who’s reading their posts, who’s tagging them, what they’re tagging them ;-)

I just tried http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/serendipity

And got 32,000 hits, starting at 15 min ago. This is a case where I would recommend Rita try TWO tags serendipity+writingmatrix to narrow down the field. Right now there are no hits in that combination, which means it would probably work VERY well if she has her kids do it the multiple-tag way.

You can also tag flickr photos, google maps (I think, or if not there must be 3rd party software that allows it), and at least half the stuff if not 99% of what you can put up on the read-write web 2.0. So students can take pics during their hols and post them online and tag them writingmatrix or whatever and their friends can find them.

You’ll find you have that opportunity (to tag) on almost any web 2.0 site. It might take some looking for but it’s worth doing.

Multiliteracies and Curriculum

The computer-culture in the UAE, where I teach Arab-national first- and second-year college students, tends to be high relative to other countries in the region. Still, with developments in the field racing ahead in the year 2007, teachers as well as students are challenged to keep up with concepts driving the emerging literacies. There is an opportunity in the courses I teach now to revise the literacy aspects of our curriculum to help learners understand some of the ramifications of evolving uses of the latest technologies.

Basic premises

In the materials I'm involved with, the focus is to raise learner awareness of changes to the social structure of software. I don’t intend to call it exactly that at this introductory level, but perhaps a good starting point, one directed at a wider sophisticated audience, is Time's declaration of YOU as its person of the year.

In recognizing all of us as people of the year, Time has acknowledged that there has been a dramatic shift in alignment of control over the power structures traditionally used to convey and arbitrate media. One aspect of this shift is that software (and publishing and other social orders impacted by that software) have moved from the enterprise model into a more user-centric one where normal people and smaller, even individual, entities and groupings have increasing power over software and the Internet, and over content provided in both domains. This shift has important ramifications for the way people can now work both individually and collaboratively with software running either on their PC's and/or over the Internet.

ENTERPRISE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

I look at software as falling into these main categories: Enterprise, Open Source, Web 2.0

Enterprise software can be characterised by companies like Microsoft, which create software for sale and profit and guard its code, revealing only what is necessary to allow others to design products that will work with it, in such a way that the company retains control over the process and retains its dominance over aspiring competitors. One result, apart from satisfaction of the shareholders in the company, is software that sometimes gets 'published' without adequate testing, so that users are vulnerable, and the company, as in the case of Microsoft, is constantly having to supply patches, since the real testing of the software occurs only after it has been purchased and shipped.

Many software developers have responded with their support of an alternative Open Source model of software development. In contrast to the enterprise model, the software is developed by interested parties seeking not profit, but mainly to enhance their standing within a community of developers by being associated with the creation of the best possible software for a given task. The code is not guarded at all. It's made publically available in the hope that others in the community will create improvements to it. The result is generally software that gets thoroughly tested during the development process, so there are rarely unanticipated surprises for end-users (and if there are, the community learns about it quickly and moves together to correct the problem). Open source software is not created for profit, but business models are emerging whereby money can be made developing refinements and specific implementations of open source resources for companies whose profits rely on using that software effectively.

Open source software is by definition freely downloadable, but where it has to be set up on a server, this might be inconvenient for some users. Again the community has tended to share resources, so that server-based services are sometimes made available to all users. The concept has broadened into what has come to be known as Web 2.0, or the read-write Web. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to characterize the 20th century as the read-only century and the present one as the read-write century. Lessig's point is that whereas the enterprise model dominated media distribution until only recently, we are rapidly entering an era where this is no longer the case. It is important that this development be better understood by its beneficiaries (all of us) as the impacts are far-reaching in the way we organize ourselves productively through our understanding of what it means to be 'literate'.

I don't intend to include all that follows in the course, but as background and illustration of how these models apply in the real world, we can draw from the following cases:

Thomas Freedman in his influential book The World is Flat discusses how IBM gave up developing its own enterprise rival to Apache server and instead contributed its best engineers to the Apache community in order to be able to resume a business model on which the deliverables would be enhancements to the Apache kernel. That’s just one example of the power of community to produce a superior product (for free) compared to a commercial, patented, closed-source one.

Another good example is characterized in the Blackboard vs. Moodle approaches to development of learning management systems (background information regarding this controversy abounds on the Internet; here is a link to a Feb 2007 article in the well-respected T.H.E. Journal).

My own perception is that Blackboard is becoming regarded in the Open Source community as an old-school Goliath who’s made waves and rocked boats by taking out patents on certain aspects of LMS’s that other developers consider open source and unpatentable. On the day its patents were granted Blackboard brought suit against one of its competitors, Desire to Learn, for royalties owed under the new patents. This has sent shivers down the rest of the open source CMS community in case Blackboard were to use its fait accompli at the patent office to go after users of Moodle and others, including end users, for not paying royalties to the patent holder. But now we see this being reversed one slingshot at a time. Blackboard is seen to be undermining its own potential customer base at the cost of its reputation in the educational community, and more recently there are moves afoot to have the patent decisions reversed.

While this is going on, Sakai, another white horse open source project, is reaching fruition. If you agree that Moodle, arguably the strongest open source rival to Blackboard to date, scales well to enterprise settings despite its lesser polish, then seemingly the only real argument for paying licensing fees to Blackboard is that it might be worth the costs (to some customers) for an LMS solution that appears more crisply enterprise in a Web browser. Sakai apparently looks the part, slick and groomed for enterprise, yet has been developed for free distribution as an open source project by educational entities each taking responsibility for developing different parts of it. It seems that this could be a rather large nail destined for the coffin of closed-source enterprise ventures.

I find this of great interest in my own work context, but I see these two examples appearing, if at all, as text boxes in the materials I envisage , whose purpose would be to make the point that open source is on its way to significantly augmenting if not replacing the enterprise model of software development.

So to continue with a course outline, I am thinking ...

1. Enterprise and Open Source software
2. An overview of Web 2.0 tools
3. Social Networking
4. Implications for classroom (i.e. project) management

---------------------------------------

Example software products following the first three models of development and implemention are:

MS Office –-> Open Office –-> http://docs.google.com/

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AN OVERVIEW OF WEB 2.0 TOOLS

There are many hooks for a wider understanding and use of Web 2.0 tools in modern curriculum settings. Collaborative Google spreadsheets might be used in portfolio/project work for example. I’m not sure if you can format in Google docs to the extent you can in MS Word, but the potential is certainly worth exploring.

The two most salient Web 2.0 tools with application for our students are blogs and their close cousins podcasts and wikis, though there are many more -- online collaborative calendars, for example. I hope to list a few more here eventually; meanwhile:

• Many listings of Web 2.0 tools are linked from my Moodle course on Multiliteracies for Collaborative Learning Environments (guest access welcome).
• A well illustrated example of how the younger generation sees these tools as being used in various modalities ranging from social collaboration to enterprise project management can be found here: http://www.wsjb.com/RPC/V1/Home.html
• I have just come across a good listing of "Digital Literacies & Emerging Educational Technologies" at this wiki: http://couros.wikispaces.com/emerging+technologies

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Aggregation

The concept with greatest implication for collaborative and project work in education (and beyond, in the real world of collaboration and project management in the workplace) is that blogs and wikis can be aggregated.

I have an explanation of how this is accomplished at http://www.vancestevens.com/rss_edu.htm. This document explains how blogs for a class can be aggregated via an aggregator (e.g. Bloglines) in such a way that they can be efficiently read/followed by the teacher and others in the class, or by manager and co-workers in an enterprise project venture.

Tags

Blogs can be tagged, and tags also can be aggregated. One device for doing that is http://del.icio.us/ . Jon Pederson has developed a good explanation of how del.icio.us can be used to good effect by educators: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s

The concepts of tagging and aggregation lie at the heart of social networking. For example, my son posts family photos at his Facebook acct and tags the ones of me DAD. I then get an email that tagged photos are available. I get the URLs of only my photos but the whole albums are available as long as the owner has indicated that s/he trusts me with them. I don’t think we need to introduce our students to Facebook here in the Middle East, but participation in social networking sites like Facebook illustrate how the concepts work in a social context.

Podcasting

Podcasting is one highly productive example of how these concepts can be focused on two important literacy goals:

1. achieving appropriate levels of digital competence in a changing world
2. and staying abreast through lifelong learning.

In order to access podcasts, one needs to have a working knowledge of using an aggregator such as iTunes or Juice (a level of knowledge akin to knowing how to drive as opposed to knowing how to build or repair a car).

The working knowledge needed is two-fold:

1. ability to subscribe to podcasts
2. and to occasionally refresh subscriptions.

Internet search skills are needed to locate desired podcasts in the first place, and some multimedia and file management skills will help in downloading, storing, retrieving, and playing the files retrieved. A computer is all that is essentially needed for this, though most people like to transfer their files to an mp3 player and listen to them while away from their computer.

Although the only skill levels needed harvest podcasts are at the level of those needed while driving, higher education is pursued in order to achieve greater understanding, in the case of driving, of the mechanics and physical forces involved in converting energy to produce the torque to propel the car, etc. Similary, among the goals of a computer literacy course should be some understanding how RSS and aggregation works, and in theory how one can create one's own blogs and podcasts, and disseminate these to a wider audience through social networking skills.

Again, I have a Web document covering aspects of these issues: http://www.vancestevens.com/casting.htm

Conclusion

Enterprise is the ‘beyond’ application of these principles. But I think that blogs and wikis could be very well worked into current curriculum in student collaborative projects and in all aspects involving reporting findings from Internet search. These techniques and concepts could become built into those modules, and enable the class to pull together while learning about team techniques based in social networking concepts.

In not only social and enterprise but also in educational project/class management contexts, I think that these concepts are important because they show the way teams are learning to work together using the latest shareable Web-based technologies once they have achieved the requisite level of computer literacy.