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!

10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website

I am certainly not the first to higlight this excellent weblog by a company called auinteractive, which is run by guy called Markus (that's all I get from his website/log). He sums up 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website. Really some excellent stuff we all should be much more aware of! Most of the this top 10 is like reading the things that make up Web 2.0. For example: EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program. (Make the website easy to use. Then make it easier.) or Open up your data as much possible.

Mashing up the OU UK

For several months I've been following a really really great weblog, which is called
OUseful Info. The author is Tony Hirst. As with my previous post in this weblog, Tony is very much into the newest social software stuff that is out there. I like this!
The last thing that Tony has tried out and documented on his weblog is Dapper. This seems like a very very powerful service to screenscrape almost every website in the world and let this transform into almost anything you would like: RSS, iCal, Google map, XML...
I am just blogging this, so that this is a sort of reminder that I should look into this further. And you? Are you gonna try it?

Google as Personal Learning Environment? Yes, why not!

I have sort of gotten into the habit of starting up Bloglines before anything else (well, sometimes i forget and start with my email client), when I arrive at my desk. Today was no exception. And I came across CogDogBlog » Barking » Google Home Tabs: "I’ve had the personalized Google home page set on all my browsers for a while, but just recently noticed that you can now add tabs to organize and spread out the different tools and feeds you can use".
So, Alan Levine was the first to remind me that Google is taking on the competition. Since Netvibes already has tabs for some time now, and Pageflakes also I believe, Google couldn't stay behind for a long time.
Anyway, what strikes me more and more is that these kind of tools very well can serve as a very decent Personal Learning Environment, combining all sorts and types of (web)services from around your campus and beyond.
I also spoke a little bit about this at my workshop "Dancing with services" during the seminar last Tuesday of the Dutch Digital University. See the slide.
References: PLE Blog at CETIS (UK), Wikipedia entry on PLE

Great name: LeMill

The last two weeks have been quite busy for me. Last week i was present at the very succesfull first European Sakai Days, that were organized at the Lubeck University of Applied Sciences in Germany. I delivered a workshop about issues that we should work on within Europe, regarding Sakai. Therefore this weblog was a bit neglected. But here we are again!
I've been following some Finnish developments lately. One very interesting concept has gone live a few weeks a go. It is called LeMill (which is neat name, I think).
From the FAQ on LeMill: "LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. First at all, you can find learning resources. The stuff you find you can use in your own teaching or learning. You may also add your own learning content to LeMill. You may edit your content and combine out of the pieces some larger junks of learning materials. If you wish you might also join one of the groups producing or editing some learning content. In LeMill the content is always easily found where and when ever you need them."
This sounds to me like an interesting concept. You can export SCORM packages from LeMill, BTW. So far, the content is a little scarce, but let's see what happens in the near future.

Vacation

Will be back on August 29, 2006.

Two announcements

There are two upcoming events that I would like to promote here. They are both free of charge (except for your own time, but I really think this is worth your time!).
First of all I would like to point you to the first-ever European Sakai Days that will be held in Lübeck, Germany. This conference will feature a rich list of topics for those who already know what Sakai is. But you will also be catered for if you are not so much into Sakai, yet. Main language at this conference will be English.
The second conference that I would like to point you to is "Over de grenzen van de ELO "(featured speakers will do their stuff in English, but the rest of the conference will be mainly in Dutch), which will be held in Utrecht. There we are expecting some very interesting presentations by Scott Wilson on Personal Learning Environments and from Misja Hoebe on Elgg (or maybe OpenAcademic?). Oh, that is not all. We also will have Charles Severance, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation.

Derek' Wenmoth: People Aggregator

Derek's Blog: People Aggregator: "New forms of social networking services are coming thick and fast at the moment - and here's another, PeopleAggregator . PeopleAggregator is the product of 3 years of self funded work by developer Mark Canter."
So, because i read a weblog by someone in New Zealand (yeah, the world is flat!) i was pointed to a new social software tool. It sounds very promising indeed: "The PeopleAggregator is a feature rich, personal publishing oriented system. This is the hub social network you’ve been waiting for. Find out what its all about, what standards we support and how we can help you mesh yourself into the distributed Live Web."(from their website)
To be honest, I had seen it appear before in the blogosphere, and have tried to understand the purpose of it. I am stil not sure what it is, can be or should be. Might be because i find the user interface a bit overwhelming and daunting. See for yourself!

SamenvattingenWIKI

Social software at work, could have been the title of this post. I think that I pointed you to our campuswiki (that is entirely maintained by students on a voluntary basis) a few months ago.
But now I found an even greater example of the power of social software for educational purposes. This is called the SamenvattingenWIKI, where students can upload exams for all courses that we have on our campus. A small Dutch quote from the wiki: "Op deze WIKI kun je handige vakinformatie vinden van vakken die op Universiteit Twente worden gegeven. Hier worden o.a. tentamens met uitwerkingen, samenvattingen, oefenopdrachten en nog veel meer opgeslagen. Heb je nieuwe informatie, voeg deze toe. "

Why Personal Learning Environments?

There already has been quite an extensive online discussion (debate?) on a great post by Graham Attwell that really is worth a read. At least you should read the article on Personal Learning Environments (PLE) that he published a few weeks ago: "This paper will not answer all (..) questions. Instead it seeks to explain why the idea of the PLE is so appealing and what are the social and educational ideas which underpin the concept of the PLE. Secondly it will look at some of the issues that need to be resolved in a little more detail. Thirdly it will suggest some of the principles which should underpin PLE development and implementation and finally suggest what further developmental activities might be undertaken."
I personally see a strong connection between this PLE-debate and the kids of the net generation that will be flocking our campuses shortly. On this new generation of students enough has been said and published. Prof. dr. Wim Veen recently has taken this one step further by translating this to needed changes in education: "In het onderwijs hebben we de laatste twee decennia gedacht dat ICT een handig hulpmiddel was. Nu gaan we ontdekken dat we de invloed van ICT hebben onderschat. De gevolgen reiken verder dan we dachten." Read the complete story (in Dutch).

Stephen Downes on Flickr

Stephen Downes is back from hiatus for some time already. Always great to read his weblog (or even better: his RSS feed in my Bloglines account).
Stephen writes about what is happening with Flickr. The fact is that they are getting more and more into the Yahoo way of doing things: "So typical. A small company (Flickr) is bought by a large company (Yahoo!) and becomes coarse, unreasonable and insensitive (...) This sort of problem is the big question mark I see in hosted services - and hence, a lot of the approaches that typify what people think of as Web 2.0." Again, Stephen is exactly right on an important issue. Time will tell....
Actually, I must say that I am still a happy user of Flickr, as well as del.icio.us and Bloglines (all 3 of them are not indepedent anymore, right?). Oh yeah, and some more 'free' Web 2.0 services that I am quite happy using are Google Calender, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Feedburner, Suprglu and 30boxes, to name a few.

Croquet on the move

On the excellent eHub site by Emily Chang I just found out that they recently have added Croquet in their listings, which is cool: "Croquet - A new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. "
I saw Croquet in action at the last annual Educause conference and I was impressed. There is a Dutch article available on Croquet, in case you are interested.

Netgen en E-merge Consortium

Here we are again! I had a great time in Vancouver, where I met a lot of interesting people. Reports of the presentations that I visited can be found on the other weblog, http://sakai-nl.blogspot.com. One thing that really inspired me was a talk by Charles "Chuck" Severance, who was appointed Executive Director at the conference. Together with Andreas Wittke we made quite some progress in the programme of the 1st European Sakai Day which be held in Lubeck next September. Chuck will deliver a talk there!
Getting back to the business of this weblog: I just found a very readable report (in Dutch) by the E-merge Consortium in which they connect two trends that are visible in todays society, which are
(1) the new student, the netgen, makes integrated use of digital sources and devices and expects that education also works that way; and
(2) employers expect from their employees that they have an entrepeunerial attitude)
The authors, Wim Veen and Fieke Roozen, argue that the HE should act on those two developments. They describe examples of use of ICT that are in line with these developments.
The full report.

Next stop: Vancouver

This week I will be one of the many people visiting the 5th Sakai Conference. So keep your eyes on the other weblog, where short reviews will appear (if all goes well).

Google jockey

Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~: "This is a neat idea I hadn't run across before. 'A Google jockey is a participant in a presentation or class who surfs the Internet for terms, ideas, Web sites, or resources mentioned by the presenter or related to the topic."
Stephen points to a great resource on the Educause website (they have more!). I would like to call this Web 2.0 in the classroom or something.

Web 2.1 is here ?!?!

If you want to have a laugh (sort of) on what Web 2.0 could become, some sort of overhyped phenomenon, then read This is not your older brother's Interweb!: "What the hell is Web 2.1 RC 1 ?" Very funny post, great to read when you are doing your Friday afternoon boring stuff to close the week...

Web 2.0 Awards: again!

I guess that Web 2.0 awards are awarded as much as there are pragmatists that are jumping on the bandwagon of "Web 2.0". Anyway, i just found another roundup of awards for the newest and the coolest services to be found on the web.
There are some surprises (at least for me): e.g. Hipcal for the "Personal Organization" (and 30Boxes not even in the top3) category or Stumbleupon for "Social tagging" (and del.icio.us only rated 3rd). Check it all out at SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards.

Wanna take notes online?

I found this great list of notetaking services on the weblog of Solution Watch aka Brian Benzinger. Fifty Ways to Take Notes » Solution Watch: "So I started thinking about all the services I’ve used for taking notes and thought it would be a good idea to share them with you and while I’m at it, to make a list of any others that I find."
Great resource! Thanks for sharing, Brian.

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."

30 Boxes or Google Calender?

Well, I dunno if this is really social software.... But Google Calender is software that makes use of all sorts of innovative software technologies, so for me that sort of qualifies. Really nice! I have just started to explore. Importing an *.ics file is a breeze. Adding public holidays is easy, they can be added with one (or two?) clicks. Adding an event is so easy. This works really good. I have made my calender public, so it should be searchable for everyone also. Let's see how that works... I have only put some public appearances and conferences in my Google Calender yet.
I haven't found the feature where i can publish my Google Calender to a specific URL, which can be done at 30 Boxes. Here's my calender on 30 Boxes. 30 Boxes also features a RSS feed, that is quite handy. Oh, talking about that: that's exactly what RSSCalender does, which was featured here before.
So, in conclusion: I haven't decided yet which one is the winner for me. I will let you know which online calender I prefer, when I am ready exploring.