A place to capture and share ideas and links about online interaction, online community, distance learning, distributed CoPs from Full Circle Associates
At June's e/merge online conference originating out of South Africa, Robin Good's Synchronous Collaboration live presentation won raves. You can hear/see/experience it now from the archives. Robin has put together a set of criteria then ranked a variety of tools and providers.
More folks are looking not only at open source products. In the content management category (CMS) - an expensive option in the propriatary software world, it is nice ot see an option like opensourceCMS for evaluation. "This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to 'try out' some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs."
[via Stephen Downes]
Here are some snippets from TechSoup: Weblogs: The Promise for Nonprofit OrganizationsSome things (snipped) out – see the article for all the good stuff.10 Reasons You Should Start a Weblog Right Now
1. Updating is easy. It can be difficult to organize information on your Web site. The better weblog tools (such as Movable Type's TypePad, WordPress and Blogger) have … templates that give you a functional site at the click of a button. (snip).
2. Links are valuable to your readers. Most weblogs are made up of separate posts that consist of a link with some commentary. These links to other sources of information give readers a reason to visit your site. Your organization's blog can serve as a clipping editor on a particular topic, pointing your readers to the best sources of information so they don't have to do all the sifting themselves.
3. You can become a trusted information source. The more you add useful links to your weblog, the more you become a trusted source for information. (snip)
4. A Weblog gives readers a reason to visit your Web site regularly. The useful information you post gives visitors a reason to come back regularly. Frequent visitors are more likely to engage with your organization's efforts online and off-line.
5. Weblogs provide a more personal communication vehicle. Writing a formal Web site takes a lot of work writing a polished presentation of your organization, your projects, and your fundraising efforts. The nature of the weblog medium, with its quick and frequent updates, promotes a personal voice that can engage users on a more human level. For example, Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth is a personal site. Andy's voice comes across. (snip)
6. Google loves weblogs. Google ranks frequently updated sites with many links (and many links to it from other pages on the Web) as more valuable than those with fewer links…. If your weblog comes in high, so will your organization's Web site, issues, and viewpoint.
7. Reverse chronological order is wonderful. The vast majority of weblogs display information in reverse chronological order, so that the newest information is automatically on the top of the page. This makes it very easy for your readers to find and follow what is fresh and topical.
8. It's easy to be topical. With the newest information at the top, lots of links, and easy content formatting and publishing, weblogs give you tools that make it very easy to be topical, pointing your readers to the most recent relevant issues and news. (snip)
9. You can use a variety of media. Look at Andy Carvin's weblog again, and be sure to check out the column on the left. There you will find an audio blog with posts that provide, for example, a narrative of what was going on outside of Fleet Center during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. (snip) By using other media in this way, you have other ways to engage with your users. And the blog tools make it easy.
10. The sum is more than the parts. The nine reasons cited so far work together to help you create a valuable, credible resource that points to outside sources, publishes a variety of media, and uses your own voice to engage your constituency in an ongoing conversation about the issues to which your organization is dedicated. (snip)
Okay, So Blogs Aren't Really for Everyone
The success of a Weblog depends on the strength of your message and your sense of audience. For this, you need people who regularly search for valuable information, relate it to your organization and audience, and posting it. Easy content formatting aside, this still takes work, time, and commitment. A weblog that was last updated six months ago does not build credibility, it begins to destroy it.
Not everyone enjoys reading them, either. In this TechSoup Community thread, you'll see that some people don't like having to follow links to follow a conversation. Sometimes links can even lead you in a circle, without a feeling that you've actually found any new information. Research indicates that weblogs are read by 17 percent of Internet users. That's around 4.76 million users. And some of them could be visiting your site.
What Weblogs Already Can Do
1. Allow you to informally gather information from your co-workers
2. Track a project at work
3. Point to outside resources related to your work
4. Provide a way for your constituency to engage with a less formal version of your organization
5. Make it easy to frequently update your Web site
6. Make it easy to turn a portion of your Web site over to your constituency, through commenting or authoring privileges
7. Serve as a personal knowledge management database
8. Allow you to share a variety of media, audio posts, images, and videos
9. Make Google love your Web site
10. Entice readers to come back to your site
What Weblogs Might Be Able to Do If We All Play Our Cards Right
1. Provide an opportunity for ad hoc collaboration
2. Raise the profile of important issues to a large, cross-organization constituency
3. Provide a World Wide Web-sized conversation in context
4. Provide access to tools to organizations that might not be able to afford them
5. Create a variety of win-win situations
OD guy Dutch Driver pointed me to gapingvoid. Visual thinking. Irreverence (plenty of those four letter words my son tells me are a critical part of modern communication!) and some interesting ideas on creativity. I was chuckling at many of his cartoons like this one:
Clearly, I am not yet a commodity. I'm still trying to figure out how to explain what I do. Thank goodness for small favors!
More visual thinking connecting into socially oriented software. Something about networks that says VISUAL!!
b r o w n h e n . c o mDelicious Mind: I've been playing with Freemind again, a free Java-based mind-mapping application that also includes an applet for displaying browsable versions of your mind maps on the web. I tend to rotate through several different outlining tools, unfortunately—for fiction writing, for to-do lists, for just thinking.
delicious_mind is a Python script that makes a mind map out of your del.icio.us links, a web-based tool I've also been using/playing-with quite a lot. The script [pretty] [src] uses the del.icio.us api to get your tags and (by default) your hundred most recent posts and build a spartan looking mind map out of them.
Too many succulent tidbits to blog tonight. Flying through them...
BoingBoing: Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech "When Blobjects Rule the Earth": "Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That's the world that needs conquering. Because that world can't manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.
It is going to get one from you."
COSE Virtual Learning EnvironmentAnother system that takes collaborative learning seriously is COSE from Staffordshire University. Similar in some ways to LAMS (see my previous post), 'the emphasis is on the learning opportunities provided for learners and the resources needed to enable the learners to carry them out'. COSE 'views a course as a group of people to whom learning opportunities are assigned, rather than as a body of content to which people are assigned'. It is free, apparently relatively easy to install, and last time I looked there were plans to make it open source. A new version (2.1) has just been released.
I appreciated the perspective on a course being a group of people, rather than a body of content.
[Via Martin Terre Blanche]
In a conversation today with Lee LeFever, we were batting around the key differences of online interaction tools like forums and blogs. Then I stumbled upon Roland Tanglao's post in my blog reading tonight. He pulls a quote by Andy Carvin that he liked from a conversation on Tech Soup this week:QUOTE
He goes on to comment:
'blogs are diaries that can be read by the public, while bulletin boards are town hall meetings in which the public can all discuss issues equally.'
I think there's also a lot of insight in the ways that these two things can be used in conjunction with one another. The town hall quality of message boards can play off of the informational/journal quality of weblogs.
UNQUOTE"like the town hall analogy for bulletin boards. Not sure I like the blogs are public diaries analogy (IMHO blogs, in addition to being great diaries, are also great marketing tools, support tools, etc). My favourite definitions are still 'blogs are digital paper' and 'blogs are the unedited voice of a person'.
Danyel Aharon Fisher shares his dissertation draft at
Social and Temporal Structures in Everyday CollaborationDissertation draft in one 214-page file, and four happy megabytes of PDF.
From his intro:"This dissertation shows that social networks and temporality can be used to provide meaningful, useful descriptions of the interconnections within groups of people. These descriptions allow the development of software that support the collaborative aspects of apparently individual work, by placing the single-user experience more explicitly in the wider social frame within which works takes place."
The details: Social and Temporal Structures in Everyday Collaboration, by Danyel Aharon Fisher, Doctor of Philosophy in Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, 2004.
Congratulations, Danyel. I'd love to play around with the software you developed!
Readings on web credibility -- the best list ever compiled. I'm looking forward to seeing this. BJ Fogg reports that Lab member David Danielson recently wrote a chapter on web credibility for the Encyclopedia of HCI... He did an excellent job bringing together the research relating to online trust and credibility.
Chapter Title: Web Credibility, To be published in Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction in 2005. Edited by Claude Ghaoui , Liverpool John Moores University, UK. For more info see http://www.idea-group.com/encyclopedia/details.asp?ID=4467
Danielson's AbstractUnique characteristics of the World Wide Web result in differences between the Web and traditional media with respect to (1) the evaluative processes users employ in making credibility assessments; (2) factors impacting the credibility of the Web as a medium; and (3) factors influencing credibility assessments of Web information sources. Web credibility research seeks to understand these underlying evaluative processes, assessments, and influences. This chapter provides an overview of Web credibility theory and research, covering (1) conceptualizations of credibility that have either been produced within the field or influential in Web credibility research; (2) unique features of the Web as a medium with respect to credibility; (3) evaluative processes underlying Web credibility assessments; (4) research on factors affecting user credibility assessments on the Web; and (5) future trends in the field."
[Link BJ Fogg]
I have picked a few snippets of this article. It has a strong PR/Marketing slant, but I think in a good way. ;-)
Radiant Marketing Group: The Future of Blogging, In Their Own Words, Part 3
The Future of Blogging, In Their Own Words, Part 3Today, I want to feature two other commentators: Amy Gahran and Steve Rubel. [snip]
STEVE RUBEL
The future of blogging is that it will humanize business.
Do you remember what business was like in the first half of the 20th Century before the Information Age? ... People actually knew their butcher, their baker, their candlestick maker and everyone else they transacted with.
With each successive advance in technology, however, corporations became far more distant impersonal. [snip]
Blogging is significant because it is reversing this trend. It humanizes business. It gives consumers the ability to see and hear from the people inside the companies they love (and hate). And it gives companies the ability to do the same with customers.
In short, the future of blogging is public relations. This is not PR, but actually relating with publics.
AMY GAHRAN
...I don't think weblogs are a transitory media phase. I think they're here to stay, because the Internet is here to stay. I think blogs are an inevitable outgrowth of the Internet. They've become a valuable way for people to connect with each other, and to hear what individuals have to say. We might not always call them blogs, and their format and the tools used to create them will undoubtedly evolve.
[snip]
... the unvarnished thoughts and opinions of average people matter too. They may not always be articulate, circumspect, or well-informed, but they're real and vital in a way that the mass media have long since ceased to be. Even though blogs are technologically based, at heart they're probably one of the most thoroughly human media channels around today.
Even better, blogs are about conversations -- another very human function. These conversations occur in comments to blog postings, and between blogs, and between blogs and online discussion forums or Web sites. In this way, despite their apparent chaos blogs actually can help integrate and synthesize the jumble of information on the Internet and elsewhere -- because ultimate conversations are about connections and sharing. [snip]
Influence is the essence of power, and it's far more effective and less costly than direct control or theft. [snip]
Em duas linguas is my dear friend and colleagues blog. She is a boundary spanner: cultures, languages, ideas and her new blog shows off that strength. I am particularly drawn to her wonderings about living in many languages. Bev has spent a good deal of time looking at the issues of multilingual online learning environments and the effects of online learning in second (third, fourth) languages.
Welcome, Bev!
Cycles: African Life Through Art, a fantastic multimedia exploration of Africa Art. From the opening page (unfortunately in flash - hard to clip or blog): "Thousands of cultures in Africa see the stages of life bound together in a continuous cycle - a circle of birth, growth, maturity, transition and rebirth."
I like how you can zoom into different aspects of the pieces. What if you could do that with a distributed conversation? What would it look like? How can you keep the whole and the parts coherent? Is there a visual clue here?
Figmento is Cliff's new venture into blogging. I read with interest his post today about "The Empty Cradle."
Welcome, Cliff! 
Starting this week, Tech Soup community talks about Blogging for Non Profits. From a quick glance it looks like basic information on blogging starts the week.
Ross Mayfield pointed to this blog post on categorizing types of business blogs. (Don't miss the comment conversation on Ross' blog.)
Are there "Six Types Of Business Blogs - A Classification"? Fredrik Wackå suggest that it is far more complex, but having some "buckets" helps people think about their blogging options.Corporate (or Business, Organizational) blogs can be classified into six different categories. Each category shares common characteristics and the blog content can be expected to differ between the categories. Furthermore, there's differences in terms of target groups and purposes.
I'm interested in this category of "culture blogs." Anyone have examples? Are they authentic? Manipulative?
Even if we also see hybrid forms where blogs are examples of more than one category, an organization that professionally incorporates blogging into its communications strategy will likely prioritize one purpose (for each blog)."
Ira Fuchs on Learning Management Systems: Are We There Yet?, asks a question that I wonder about not just with LMS, but with any kind of collaborative tools. (Bolding in his quote is mine) Learning management systems have been high on Mellon’s radar screen ever since we made a grant to MIT in 2000 to support the OKI project. The purpose of OKI was to create a new framework to facilitate collaborative development of the components that comprise a modern learning management system.
[Via OLDaily]
That eventual goal is still in sharp contrast with where we are today. Now, if an institution acquires a commercial, proprietary LMS, and then finds that the system is deficient in some way, they often must wait until the vendor decides it is financially viable to develop the enhancement—an event that may never occur. Ideally what we’re seeking is a situation in which the schools that want a new capability added to an LMS can, if they wish, develop it themselves, and then make it available to the higher education community so that others may benefit. That’s the point of leveraging collaboration among institutions.
I'm in the throes of a variety of projects that have 'design' as part of the task. The monumental reality of how we each differently perceive and experience an online space rears it's large, shadowy head again so I'm reading design articles. Again.
I am particularly looking for insights about the challenge of fitting content and process tasks to technology - especially when learning the technology is a secondary learning goal. Pointers appreciated. Right now I'm looking at two polarities: the polarity of simplicity and range of goals (which is like, but not quite the same as depth and breadth) and the polarity of short term efficiency with tools and long term gains of struggling with and learning new tools. If this is not clear, that is because I'm not clear. It's evolving and I'm reaching out in case someone has that insight or link which will help me go to the next level of thinking.
In my cyber strolls, I came across Uzanto, which offers an intriguing list of articles on design. Previously I've linked to their article on Roller Coasters vs. Driver's Seats: Design and the Concept of Situational Control By Rashmi Sinha, published on Uzanto.com, June 2004. Some of the other articles are:
By Jonathan Boutelle, May 2004.
The Applied Improvisation Network " is a community of practioners and clients who value the use of improvisation skills in organsiations." They are planning a conference October 13th to 16th. I have been playing around with collegues with improv - online and offline, so this caught my eye. (Unfortunately, I can't go due to schedule conflicts. I hope someone blogs it!) Here is their line up:
Lisa Heft is a facilitator out of the San Francisco area who has a particular strength in using Open Space Technology (a facilitator form - not a computer technology) She has offered some resources on her site, Opening Space
Facilitation
Opening Space for Collaboration and Communication (Swedish) (View in Word)
The Mouse and the Earthquake - An Introduction to Systems Theory (View in Word)
Brief Brief User’s Guide, by Harrison Owen (View in Word)
Behavior Change Theory and Organizational Change (View in Word)
Change, Grief and the Transformation Cycle (View in Word)
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