Monthly Archive for November, 2009

http://www.readtwit.com/

A while back I found readtwit (can’t recall from who, but thanks!), a service that creates an RSS feed of all the links that are posted by people in your twitter follow feed, expanding each link into the page it was actually linking to.

Now if you are like me, and follow people in your field who are passionate about what they do and share a lot of what they do, what they learn and what they find in twitter, this is a godsend. What it results in looks a lot like the below screenshot once you subscribe to it in Google Reader (or really whatever RSS Reader you like, but I am going to focus on GReader for a reason):

Well, so what you say- sure you have the links from twitter in GReader, but all you’ve done is shifted reading environments. Aha, just so! But shifted into one that offers better affordances for this specific use of twitter (learning and collective intelligence through link sharing.)

First off, if this is the primary way in which you approach twitter (as a social network primarily for finding new resources, it allows you to pay attention to just that. I’d suggest that this would be to not benefit from the full interaction of twitter, but for some folks that’s just fine. Indeed, in conjunction with the new ‘Lists’ functionality in twitter, this becomes a powerful way for a newcomer to subscribe to a curated list of ‘experts’ and see what they are sharing with each other (it helps too that readtwit sorts out duplicates, again reducing the noise).

But say you like spending time in twitter. What benefit then? Well, one aspect of shifting these particular tweets into a reader is that you can consume then at your own pace, and not loose them as twitter flows endlessly by. At least that is what I first thought when I subscribed. But sure enough, just as tweets flow by too quickly to “keep up” with everything, shifting to GReader doesn’t help that much. Instead I just get a feed full of too many links to follow up on.

It wasn’t until during the midst of presentation to Alec Couros’ grad school class (Elluminate recording here) on “Mashing and Remixing Open Education” that I actually realized what the REAL benefit of subscribing to the readtwit feed in GReader was. It wasn’t so that I could follow each of the links in the feed - I still will click through in twitter when I see something that is interesting, and let it flow past when I’m not there. No, the REAL benefit is that the pages in this feed GET ADDED TO MY PERSONAL FEED-FOCUSED SEARCH ENGINE.

I’m not sure how many people actually realize that GReader allows you to search across all the feeds your subscribe to (or even a specific feed). Why is this important? Because - if it’s in my feed reader it has already reached a certain level of ‘trust’ as a source for me. I’m not saying I “believe” everything in my feed reader, but the vast majority come from people who are curating their own identities/output, whose context overlaps mine to some extent (otherwise I wouldn’t be subscribing to them). Being able to see who else in my network wrote or linked to something I find is of great use for me, increases my ability to assess information 10 fold.

Anyways, try it out for yourself. It doesn’t cost anything, the worse that happens is you have a GReader feed that fills up with unread items. The best that happens is that you added another source to your growing socially filter search engine. - SWL

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams

I first started the collection of PLE Diagrams in June 2008 with no more planning other than “gee, it sure seems like there are a lot of PLE Diagrams out there, I wonder if I collected a lot of them whether we might not be able to learn something from different people’s conceptions of their PLEs.” And so off I went and gathered 25 or so images from around the web into a wiki page.

But it seems to have taken on a bit of a life of it’s own, soon to break 50 diagrams, many of which have been contributed by others on their own. And increasingly I see it cited as a resource in online classes and other sites. Both of which are fantastic! Both of which scare the bejesus out of me. Because I’m not an archivist, nor even really an academic researcher, and my attitude towards this as well as pretty much anything else I create (especially on that wiki) is that it is meant to be very disposable.

So:

• Is the collection useful to you? What have you gleaned from it? How have you used it?
• What would make it better?
• Would it be *more* useful to you if it were someplace else, say Wikieducator, that perhaps seemed more neutral (though, arguably, less easy to edit)? Would you be more willing to contribute to it if it were?
• Would you be interested in helping to grow or maintain the collection? What would you be willing to do to make it better?

Let me know. It’s not going anywhere, at least not for now, and there’s no rush or compulsion, nor am I under any delusion as to its lasting academic value. It was, as is everything I do, something I simply “just shared” (without planning to) and this is simply an effort to engage with others to see if there is nt some way to improve on it. Let me know. - SWL

This past weekend I joined about 100 others for the first Wordcamp Victoria, a celebration and exploration of all things Wordpress. Hats off to Paul Holmes and the other volunteers for organizing a fine gathering.

Now I am not a great joiner at the best of times, and when it comes to “camp” style gatherings I take my camping seriously, so I ended up pretty much hanging out in the “campout” room, a place for informal gatherings. Far from being a waste of time, for me this was the absolute best use of my time, allowing me to get into deep conversations, learn specific things I was particularly interested in, and forge new relationships. In particular, I was fortunate to spend most of the day next to Lloyd Budd, not only a fantastic ambassador for Automattic but a nearby neighbor in Victoria, and have some far ranging discussions with Chris Parsons, PhD-student Privacy Research extraordinaire. This on top of catching up with old friends too.

So, what did I learn? In no particular order:

How to stop targeted advertisers from tracking me so easily

Chris, fearless privacy warrior, pointed me to the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO) plugin for Firefox as the absolute simplest way to cut down on all the tracking cookies from targeted advertisers. Nice!

Where to find additional Buddypress themes

http://www.buddydress.com/category/buddypress-themes/ - sometimes it’s as simple as “let me google that for you” - thanks Lloyd.

How to implement a twitter clone in your organization

Lloyd referred a few times to P2 (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2) which I didn’t grok until I realized it was the next generation of the older Prologue theme. I look forward to trying this out (possibly in conjunction with feedwordpress to capture those existing twitter users, ahem) for BCcampus.

How to optimize images automatically for your wordpress blog

The Smush-IT plugin from my buddy Alex Dunae looks like it will do just the trick. Nice one Alex!

What to do if you are serious about needing to cache your wordpress site

Use Batcache.  Nuff said.

Additional Ways to Slow Down the Blog Bot Armies

Our inimitable guest from the East Coast, whose name escapes me, swore by Sabre (simple anti-bot registration engine)

And a whole lot of cool ways to start Wordpress themes

Including the bare-bones sandbox theme, artisteer, the wordpress theme generator, and for the designer but not programmer, psd2html, a service that takes a Photoshop site design and quickly turns it into a Wordpress theme.

And finally, we did have an actual “camp” session at the end of the day around WPMU, and I am proud to report that higher ed did REPRESENT! There was much love from people in corporate site development for many of the heroes from higher ed (and of course wpmu.org/edublogs) for their pioneer working on WPMU. That made me really proud.

See - you CAN learn without a curriculum or organized program. Having a desire to learn, some specific things you are trying to learn, and the ability to listen when there are smart folks around willing to share is really all you need. ‘Til next time - SWL