I’ve also seen this one referred to by others, so I’m not sure how many good examples are actually out there, or how many academics (with the publishing pressures & the need to appear innovative etc) are writing about a limited number of viable models.

I also liked some comments:

“What are the reasons we use faulty judgement, and use the wrong technology for communications? …

…these technologies are getting better and cheaper at the same time, and there is a long-overdue trend to more simplicity and intuitiveness in some new tools. Unfortunately, many large organizations remain in the communication stone age, locked into expensive, centrally managed, unfriendly, sub-optimal legacy technologies. The change to decentralized, free, and open tools is just too frightening for many heavily-invested organizations to contemplate”.

Bugger it, I’ll post the whole diagram to pretty things up a bit. Thank you Dave Pollard…

The post below with the PodOmatic graphic showed as code when I loaded it in WYSIWYG mode.  A penny dropped, & I redid it in the HTML mode…& it worked – ah, the learnings !  So I thought I’d try to resurrect the Zoho presentation that appears as code in the post beneath titled ‘Finale- or is it?’.  Unfortunately, there was still a glitch, but there is obviously a difference between uploading the post in WYSIWYG & HTML modes.

So I emailed Zoho.  Quick response back, suggesting that the problem was related to the use of an apostrophe in my show title (they’re working on it), & that a rename/resave should do the trick.  I was also right about the HTML mode.

On trying it appeared that it still had dramas as the code didn’t delete the apostrophe in the code after a resave.  So I manually changed both references in the code & the slideshow worked…but something else meant that lines ran off the bottom of the page.  So I again tinkered & adjusted the vertical margin from 300 to 350, & this is the result. 

So, dear excited reader, you needn’t bother with the CD as you can download all 54 MB -which plays at about a MB a minute – of MP3.

“The purpose of this survey is to identify how ‘social software’ or ‘Web 2.0’ technologies are currently being used in teaching and learning today and to gauge how social software can significantly contribute to certain forms of learning”

As usual I can’t help myself with forced choice survey questions & make a welter of the open ended questions.  Soon after I received an email from Val Evans, one of the research team, in response to some of my comments.  A few email exchanges later & the project includes one of my referred readings as a discussion starter, & the following

“your delicious tagging is brilliant! … I would love to include these links in our research wiki as an example of social bookmarking – nobody has offered such well-organised links to-date. Would that be okay? 

Also your horticulture wiki is a great example how a statewide system can collaborate. In fact, you could spread it even wider and make it national. Again, with permission, can I include it as an example on our wiki under Teaching and Learning sites?”

With all due humility (the tagging is a very basic first effort), who am I to refuse?  So this project is now recorded on her Project wiki at http://socialsoftware-research.wikispaces.com/TandLSites  and lo and behold I also have a comment on the post beneath.  Good grief – from initial spam to the CEO of pbWIKI one day, and Val the next – I have a readership !

I looked around for some comparisons.  I found the Wikimatrix ( http://www.wikimatrix.org/ ) useful to some extent, cutting the possibilities back to a dozen or so.   A bit of a subjective run & my list came down to four: Seedwiki, Jotspot, pbWiki & Wikispaces.

We’ve used Seedwiki once before in the library.  It was pretty basic, & there was an obvious problem when we were all working on different pages & hit ’save’ - each update resaved all pages, so it had to be updated sequentially.  I’ve also had a play with JotSpot.  It again seemed pretty basic, & what you get as a freebie doesn’t seem well explained.  Suggestions of a limit of 5 users & 10 pages, limited appearance options, & a layout that seemed dominated by nav sidebars & titles didn’t seem to have user appeal (N.B. Jotspot is finding its feet again after having just been bought by Google – so it must have something going for it).   Robyn had given pbWiki a run, but had some usability issues with it.  I set up trials on all of these as well as Wikispaces (via Edublogs) which promised full – functionality & no ads – but it didn’t quite work out that way.  I also had some issues with pbWiki, primarily appearance & a tendency to reformat my layout at each save.  So it ultimately came down to Wikispaces, which had a cleaner layout & readability. 

Ultimately, however, if it is decided to proceed I would consider an upgrade to a paid, domain based corporate item, which would also open up the field considerably.

This one will be at http://horttafe.wikispaces.com/

The following email was sent to our staff…

“Further to my earlier email…

There are now 11 of us (as far as I know) with Delicious accounts.

Some of you have imported your favourites. All of these are imported as ‘private’, which means no-one else can view them.

Some of you have even been through & unlocked some of these to make them public, which is the idea behind the sharing thing.

As mentioned, there is now an account for bremertafe. I have pillaged a number of your shared favourites as a basis for building a core Bremer TAFE Delicious collection, & then bounced off these ideas & added quite a few others. Ultimately it would be nice to cover the needs of most of our jobs here (& possibly also be a precedent?). I have left out most ‘article’ type links & tried to keep it to useful practical work based stuff. It has been a work in progress & I’ve changed a few things as I’ve gone along, so as you play with it you may well think of a few obvious issues worth discussing.

It is located at http://del.icio.us/bremertafe

All 181 (so far) links appear in chronological order. The tags on the right of the screen are your search tool - you just click on whatever tag you might be interested in. If you scroll to the bottom of this to ‘tag options’ you will find they can be displayed either as a ‘list’ or a ‘cloud’. In the cloud, the more frequently used tags result in a heavier &/or larger font. You can also fine tune these by using the 1, 2 or 5 to indicate the cut off point for display (how much detail we use is obviously one of the issues). I have also created ‘bundles’ for government & suppliers, & you can display with or without the bundles.

Have a play.  Look at, for example, catalogues, or SearchEngines (the system only allows one word tags, hence the running of terms together), or through the Government sections. All the links we need for work, reference, purchasing, info lit sessions etc could be stored here, & (unlike favourites) stored under any tag/s & accessible from any net connection. Headings can be changed, explanatory notes can be added (e.g. see Zoho), tags changed / amended or whatever – immediately. From one screen we can access all intranet links, off-air recording links, subject links, reference links etc (though we would still need to keep them differently on the website)…You can access it by

• remembering the url,
• Googling ‘delicious’ (no you don’t have to worry about the punctuation) & simply adding bremertafe to the url, or
• even adding it to your favourites (just for use here of course).

Let me know if you want anything added, any explanations of how it works, or want the password to get yourself going.

Suggestions or feedback appreciated…”

“As part of my Ve-learn involves the word of the week, I guess it also involves some troubleshooting. Everyone seems to have managed pretty well to date, but Delicious seems to be the first one to throw up a few spanners. (If what follows seems too much just grab me in my ’spare’ time)… In order to be able to share links we all need accounts. Go to the delicious site at http://del.icio.us/ & register. At step 2 you will also need to install post / tag buttons, which seems the messiest bit. (N.B. These buttons (it seems) appear as a dropdown under your ‘Links’ on the toolbar (or if you are keen you can unlock toolbars via View>Toolbars> & untick ‘lock the toolbars’, then drag down the links to a new toolbar).Multiple PCs: These buttons will only be available, it appears, on the PC you have put them on though you can install them on others by going back to Step 2, or otherwise do without the buttons by using the posting page http://del.icio.us/post/ . See the FAQ… Multiple accounts on one PC: It appears that the buttons also work on the one PC irrespective of whether you are logged into your personal account or another, though it will only save to the account you are logged into – I haven’t pushed it by logging into two accounts at once…). You can then save any weblink by clicking on ‘post’. You can adjust your settings >bookmarks>’private saving’ to give you the option of whether you want the world in general to be able to view your saved link, or keep it all to yourself.  When you are saving you are given the option of adding tags. A little like your bookmarks folders, this is what is known as ‘Folksonomy’, which is basically user generated make-it-up-as-you-go-along cataloguing. You can also import all of your existing favourites into your account (settings>bookmarks>import/upload), & they will come in by default as private. Utimately, we end up with a mess of links in no particular order, & then use the tags to pull the relevant items. There are a few other tricks with the tags, but I will spare you these at this stage.As we are all likely to have duplicates & personal interest (?) links in our favourites, the tightest way of making a universally useful link collection is to set up a single Bremer library account. Robyn, Max & I were tossing this idea around a while back.We will need to monitor: a) what links go into it &b) what tags we use.Ultimately this will be accessible to all by (oddly enough) adding the single link back into your favourites, storing the link somewhere (e.g. a permanent email to yourself), just remembering the link, or coming in via Delicious & adding bremertafe to the homepage link. Accordingly I have started an account at http://del.icio.us/bremertafe (I have used the bremer.library email address) & have begun populating it with links & tags, though there is plenty more to do. For those of you I have spoken with who have already registered I have also added you as part of the ‘bremertafe’ network, so anything publicly viewable in your personal account is also available to all other members of the network. This is the sharing bit.The ’sharing links’ aspect will probably only be useful here until we get the Bremertafe account populated, but the social logic of it should be obvious if the network was a bunch of people with a particular interest in movies, music etc. Theoretically we could all simply just share the bremertafe account without having your own account. At this stage I think it best if we all have individual accounts just to see how the process / sharing etc works, & I feel it would be best to have limited access to the bremertafe account to avoid messy additions, deletions or even deletion of the entire account. If you feel confident enough to start playing in the bremertafe account, see me for the password. So set up an account, save a few links (anything will do for starters), let me know your account name & I’ll add you to the network.See me when you’ve got that far or if you have any dramas …”… Today we have several new accounts & a total of 8 tinkering in the network (as far as I know).  See how we go from here! Again, in the spirit of the Ve-learning project, this post was composed in & to be sent from Zoho writer, a free online wordprocessor, but neither Zoho supported Wordpress, nor did Wordpress allow for email options.