What would Marja have heard here?

I just read the weblog by Marja Verstelle. She is present at the ELI 2007 annual meeting, as far as I understood. I wonder what she picked up at this presentation:

EDUCAUSE | ELI 2007 Annual Meeting | Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner

Ofcourse, if others want to fill in here, that's fine with me.

Weblogs at Leiden University: are they succesfull?

After a few weeks of inactivity on this weblog (but not on my other weblogs! check Dutch Sakai, or Twente Open Source Standaarden), I thought I should revitalize it. And since this is the end of the year 2006, I sounded good to me to start with a little reflecting.

So I started with reading what I wrote about when I started this weblog (is that sentence correct?).

1. I wrote about TagCloud, back in July 2005. Well, TagCloud is sleeping right now. Very sad to see actually, that the initiators of a trend, cannot keep up. I hope they will be back.
2. I also wrote about clustering del.icio.us bookmarks. This service has also died.
3. Back then I also wrote about Elgg. They are still alive and kicking! Which is good. I really like Elgg.
4. And then something really interesting. I wrote about weblogs at Leiden University. At that time there were "(..) 8 staff and 5 students actively maintaining a weblog. There is one so-called 'onderwijsweblog' and 8 groupweblogs". And now, in December 2006, 17 months later? Well, check for yourself. I am counting 10 staff weblogs, (only) 8 students that maintain a weblog. And there are now 14 group weblogs. I would not call this a success! Do you? It might be that people use other platforms. Like Hyves, or MSN Spaces, or Blogger, or Wordpress. Well, actually I think that we would be finding lots more weblogs than on the 'official' platform.

For all my readers, I am wishing you Happy Holidays! See you in 2007!

Derek's Blog: Should all learning professionals be blogging?

Derek Wenmoth from New Zealand has pointed me (through Bloglines) to a very interesting post on blogging as a professional. The question is Should all learning professionals be blogging?: "The Learning Circuits Blog has posted a Big Question for October which is 'Should all learning professionals be blogging?'. "
I can only agree with the reasons he sums up. For example "it's helped me establish a discipline of recording some of the ideas, thoughts, references and tips that I come across in my daily work."
Just go to his weblog, and ask yourself why you don't have a weblog yet!

Willem Karssenberg: A Really Simple Service Bus

Just a quick reference to TrendMatcher tussen ICT en Onderwijs: A Really Simple Service Bus: "Verder klikken brengt je bij een formulier waarop je je e-mail adres kunt achterlaten. Dat schiet dus niet op! Even Googlen (ja, dat doe ik met een hoofdletter!) brengt je gelukkig wel verder, namelijk gewoon naar de rest van de site die achter dezelfde URL zit: http://www.rssbus.com/prebeta.aspx
Daar wordt toch wel een zeer veelbelovend concept uitgelegd! Wie noemt zich developer, heeft het weekend wat tijd over en wil eens wat stoeien met het programma dat ter download wordt aangeboden?"
A service bus is what we need, at least in the world where we talk Service Oriented Architecture. This is what the site itself says: "RSSBus is a Service Bus - but a Really Simple one, with RSS as the main interchange mechanism. No one can deny the tremendous success and popularity of RSS as a tool for information exchange. ESB is also about information exchange and if you carefully read the definition above and are familiar with RSS and World Wide Web concepts in general, you will see connection points between the concepts: RSS and ESB."