I got an HTC “Hero” on 3 Mobile a week ago (early Christmas pressie from my beloved) and I am very pleased. There have been a few teething glitches and a few things I might do differently, but – well – wow!

I have had Ericssons for more than 10 years so switching to a different platform was a small concern. I wanted a smart phone but not an iPhone (http://bit.ly/6qMlcA and http://bit.ly/5I7uQV )

The biggest problem has been the need to adopt fully the Google contacts and calendar back end. And, these are not straight forward.

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The question of whether you can rely on Twitter to filter your reading is problematic. Yes following 8,000 people (or however many) will probably serve to satisfy most information needs. I am sure that by some number (10? 100? 1000?) a Twitter follower will be deep into a long tail of duplication. The other 40,000,000 people who tweet just aren’t relevant to them. The number of sources may be large, but it is finite. My reading list is not in any sense unique or even, compared to serious bloggers (@Downes springs to mind) or Twits really wide. My feed reader (BlogBridge http://www.blogbridge.com/ ) is currently consuming 47 feeds, none particularly odd-ball, which together syndicate about 800 articles/day. I scan most of these, probably read the slug from about a quarter and click through to maybe 20 or 30 articles. I am no serious newshound. I am adding about 2 or 3 feeds a week: feeds I find from the ones I follow already, feeds I find from following my Twitterverse and feeds from things I hear about in other conversations, conferences, reading student essays, reviewing articles, subscribing to email lists, etc. Broadly and with some overlap my feeds are Project-related, Ed Tech-related, Tech-related, Ed Policy-related, Policy & Politics-related, Environmental activism-related, Global Justice-related. Most are from sources and people not known personally to me. Some are blogs of my RL friends. Some of my RL friends are blogospheric authorities. Some are just folk who are read by me, their kids and cats. Even within my little list of feeds there is a lot of echo. Maybe the whole world is just an echo chamber. Maybe we do only listen to what we want to listen to and then repeat it. Maybe I am deluded to think that if I find stuff out outside of Twitter (which has probably been brought into Twitter somewhere by someone before me) and bring it in that I have something of more value than if I only followed up items from people I follow on Twitter (a paltry 159 people) and retweet or bookmark my interests. For me the value of Twitter is the community, not just the information. Twitter is an important professional tool, but it is also a social tool. It is an evening stroll, my fag break, a pub, my sounding board. It helps me to get a sense of the relevance of some of my activity outside Twitter. Even if that activity may be pursued by someone else inside Twitter I value it differently. A quick scan of the people I follow suggests that by and large they are people like me. They have a couple of hundred followers and follow about double the number that follow them. They follow a few key professional celebrities. But, and here is the value for me, they all give the impression of thinking for themselves about things that matter to me and they widen my horizons. They show me a world beyond their own Twittersphere. They show me the world is not just the Old Dog and Duck. The best thing about Twitter is that it gets me out of Twitter, not that it makes it possible for me to stay in.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

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Posted via web from George’s posterous

Chris Rust sent me a link. He said:

An Innocuous list you might want to give to the new staff course? Even better, you might get them to discuss adding their own?! Best wishes Chris

————————— Original Message —————————-
Subject: TP Msg. #961 The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes
From:    “Rick Reis” [deleted]
Date:    Tue, September 1, 2009 12:56 am
To:       tomorrows-professor at mailman.stanford….
————————————————————————–

What might he mean adding their own?

Adding to this list? If it is an innocuous list why bother? Or, adding their own list? That might be more interesting. Could we use a mail list for discussion of our subject matters? In the past we have used the discussion forums on the VLE.

Some groups of tutors and participants have chosen from time to time to minimise their use of the VLE forums. Others have made good use of them and pushed the genre to new limits.

Are maillists the way we want to communicate?

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There is a tradition of keeping “work blogs”. Scott Wilson’s workblog is a touchstone for this kind of online identity and presence. Scott writes a lot on identity and presence and education (and here and here). This is written in my workblog. I feed stuff into here from my Posterous account. I use Posterous to feed my other work Blog, Developing Themes for the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme support, synthesis and benefits realisation project.

If any new Lecturer at Brookes wants a work blog on our WordPress MU development platform or a wiki space on our in-house Confluence server. Just give me a shout.

groberts@brookes.ac.uk

Andy Powell (@andypowe11) shared the text of Ramakrishnan & Tomkins (2007) “Toward a PeopleWeb”. According to the authors, “Attentional metadata is increasingly sought after and is beginning to accumulate in significant volume, suggesting a paradigm shift – and simultaneously raising serious questions about user privacy.” (63) A shift from what to what, I wonder? They argue, “As people and objects acquire metadata while moving across Web sites, a new kind of interwoven community fabric will emerge.” (64)

There is a disturbing passivity to this assertion. People and objects will not simply acquire metadata. They will largely be given it by sites that have been engineered to do so for particular purposes.

They observe (correctly imo) that, “… the theme of a centralized versus a distributed infrastructure will arise frequently. While the former approach has the appeal of technical simplicity, the Web has repeatedly shown itself to be anarchistic, and distributed solutions are viable for many of the problems we consider.” (65) This may be the paradigm shift. But the implications are extensive.
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e-framework.org

The eFramework people have published their technical model here: http://www.e-framework.org/Resources/TechnicalModel/tabid/1008/Default.aspx The model depends on continuing feedback from the community. Their aim is to develop “… a common approach to the description of service-oriented design and analysis,” and provide “… a neutral means to articulate the design of software services” in order “…to assist international education and research agencies and communities in planning, prioritising and implementing IT infrastructure more effectively.”

This is a good aim. So, the question is, does it? They want the framework to assist in strategic planning, but it is hard to see how to make the step from the more or less technical abstract layers up to the policy implementation layers. There is still an exclusive, jesuitical (exegetical, hermeneutic) gap, largely inaccessible to lay people, that needs to be interpreted. You have to learn the language.

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