Democratizing Innovation

Homebuilt recumbent construction detail 1, originally uploaded by xddorox.

... was a book that I read a few years ago now by Eric Von Hippel. Someone brought up the notion of "democratizing innovation" on Wikiversity the other day which reminded me of how it would make another good reading group, so I've started one for it here: Eric Von Hippel:Democratizing Innovation

Now there's a good chance that I won't be able to participate in this reading group all that much but I like the idea of Reading groups on Wikiversity and I've been involved in creating one before, so I created this one because I think that Reading groups are a great model of a learning project that can work well in the Wikiversity environment. This book appealed to me for such treatment because it may be of some relevance in helping us understand the processes involved in the development of large scale collaborative wikis and, in particular, the development of Wikiversity. I was driven by a desire to establish the reading group in the chance that others over time may find it useful to have structure already in place to discuss this text. This was greatly assisted in this case by the text being freely available in PDF format under a Creative Commons license.

This is one of the features of wiki based Reading groups that I really like, the fact that the group can exist over long periods of time and experience fluctuations in activity but because of the written nature of the discourse it doesn't suffer from the temporality of the face-to-face Reading group which is dependent on synchronous interactions around a specific text. So starting the group now, even though I probably won't actually take it much further at this point, has I think merit in the long term for my own learning process and for Wikiversity.

And this is also what I'm finding particularly interesting lately -- how I'm starting to use Wikiversity as my predominant learning environment, call it a Personal Learning Environment if you have to ... but also possibly in a form that I've not seen discussed in other PLE discourses. The fact that I'm creating projects that I may not at this point have time to participate in immediately, but anticipate that if others do start contributing I will be inspired to participate myself is quite unique I think; it's as if i'm setting myself and others up a space to potentially learn. But I don't consider myself a "teacher, i'm more a technologist, but I am a learner and I want to learn in communities where-ever possible so what better way to facilitate my own learning than by creating a space where a community can form around, in this case, a text?

The other thing is that this is something quite different to what Wikipedia is all about.

While Wikipedia is a great resource for a part of the learning process, it is not so good at being a space for working through the personal or communal process of learning, for journaling, recording, keeping bibliographies, etc and for the kind of free discussion of any idea that comes up. This does happen in Wikipedia, but not really out in the "open" so to speak; mostly these kinds of socratic learning experiences and debates happen in Wikipedia talk pages, where pretty much anything goes, and they are behind the scenes for most readers, and rightly so. Wikipedia is about creating quality encyclopedia articles, not facilitating the spaces where ugly old learning may take place. Ideas in Wikipedia articles need verification, they need sources, written/published sources ... while in Wikiversity, they don't. Ideas, debates and opinions should be out in the open.

I think that Wikiversity may truly be the big sister to it's brother Wikipedia one day and that some of its recent critics will have their words forever quoted from wiki history pages or listservs. I'm working in that direction from now on, from the position of both creating a space for my own individual learning, but also in creating spaces where others can participate along with me, or even without me.

Podzone Country

Simphone093, originally uploaded by pumicehead.

I've just got back from lovely Riverton, New Zealand ... way down the South Island -- next stop Antarctica. Down there I met Chris Diack an empassioned radio broadcaster who has turned a small caravan into a mobile Low Power FM broadcasting unit that also streams his morning breakfast show out on the internet for rebroadcast to other small town radio stations. Amazing guy, with a great idea and just enough string, chewing gum and the required amount of kiwi determination to pull it off. The podcasting workshop was presented to residents of Riverton to develop content for their site http://www.westernsouthland.co.nz. The handout for the workshop is a resource I've been developing on Audacity on WikiEducator. You can find that here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Using_Audacity .

Alexander Hayes and Leo Laoshi interview - FLNW08

The Future of Learning in a Networked World un-conference has kicked off with this excellent interview by Alexander Hayes and Leo Wong, a teacher and blogger working at Soochow University outside of Shanghai. Leo talks about using Web2.0 tools in education in China and his experience joining the TALO group about a year ago. I've cleaned up the interview a bit and created Ogg and MP3 formats for download here: http://www.archive.org/details/AlexanderHayesAndLeoLaoshiInterview-Flnw08.

For more info on participating in FLNW 2008 events, see the wiki here: http://flnw.wikispaces.com

Image Credits: CC-By

keitai shousetsu / modalities of text

Just had to re-blog this fascinating story from the Sydney Morning Herald called "In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage" about how half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed and serialized primarily on cell phones! Sounds like the books then get picked up by publishers, fleshed out, and printed as paperbacks. Interesting thought in relation to Leigh Blackalls' recent post, Time to read helps one to listen. Perhaps the reading of singular texts will take place anytime, anywhere, come to you instead of you coming to it, and involve into a kind of distributed process that involves multiple delivery platforms and modalities. The author/publisher becomes a type of multi-media composer who stiches together and uploads artifacts and coordinates synchronous and asynchronous interactive nodes, all of which make up a singular yet evolving work.

Photo Credits: Author - Newlearnscope Image: Mobilephone Mosaic

The Emergence of Internet Television in New Zealand: TVNZ ondemand

Earlier this year TVNZ released its latest strategy document entitled ¨Inspiring on Every Screen¨. Theres a funny section in there called “It's 2011”, which provides a gloriously utopian account of the TVNZ of the future where a range of delivery mechanisms and new media outlets, controlled by the State sponsored broadcaster of course, are set to capture the viewers who are slipping through the cracks of the more traditional core channels. The new digital, broadband and mobile platforms that will have been made available are said to engage people and communities in such as way as to enable TVNZ to “truly become one with the public”. On a similar high note the piece ends with the superlative soundbite: “We are TVNZ. We are New Zealand.”

Cool eh? Well, until you're forced to consider that there may be a few others waiting in the wings to upset this beautiful little media applecart... but they can dream I suppose

Anyways, this paper: The Emergence of Internet Television in New Zealand: TVNZ ondemand
I wrote for a Media Industries in NZ course that I was taking at the University of Auckland looks at the TVNZondemand web site that is pretty much the first real web offering out of the gate for the new TVNZ strategy, and also takes a look at one of the new entrants that are fragmenting the traditional TVNZ audience: YouTube.



Photo Credit: The TVNZ Television Centre by Robyn Gallagher (CC-By)

Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

"The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern." -- Ivan Illich.

I've started a reading group on the English Wikiversity for discussion of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society; if you're interested in reading and discussing this work then please register an account on Wikiversity (or don't -- you can edit anonymously if you wish). The text is available online through a link from that page, but should also be readily available from most libraries. Each chapter is broken down on the wiki with a space for notes and space for discussions, but being a wiki you may edit and modify this structure as you see fit.

Photo Credits: Empty School by xaxl4

Tumblelogs

A tumblelog is a kind of micro-blogging platform that favors quick mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. I'm becoming quite enamored of this form lately; for me it's acting a bit like a kind of blogging del.icio.us + twitter; i'm currently friends with only one person jtneil who is also tumbleloging about educational technology. From my brief investigation Tumblr seems the best platform currently available and even at this early stage has some very simple features available. I can see this progressing into text messaging capabilities quite quickly and making Twitter look obsolete. I need more friends on the platform to really test it out, so if you're interested create a Tumblr account and look for me ... pumicehead.

More Wikimedia hacks - Instant Commons

In light of the preceding post I think it's also worth mentioning the Instant Commons as well. Another great hack around the MediaWiki software that will allow any MediaWiki installation access and usage of any uploaded media file from the Wikimedia Commons. Instant Commons-enabled wikis will cache Commons content so that it would only be downloaded once, and subsequent pageviews would load the locally existing copy rather than the Wikimedia foundations servers. If this could be combined with some localized search interface ... perhaps using Grub to index Commons content ... now we're talking.

There's an test of Instant Commons available here.

Image: Instant Yakisoba (CC-By-SA)

Wikimedia Quality

Inevitably one of the first queries that arises during conversations about authoring content using wikis is the question of how to ensure quality. Generally the response wanders around the nature of the wiki-way and collaborative development models - ie, the community will create quality in articles over time, vandalism will be removed and, for Wikipedia at least, Neutral Point of View (NPOV) will be adhered to by authors and editors.

The scale and increased importance of a source like Wikipedia though has meant that while this model of creating quality actually works quite well, there is little indication of it within articles themselves besides perhaps taking a look at their history over time and inferring from that at least a level of interest and support for the creation of a quality resource. The Wikimedia foundation though has decided it's time to tackle this growing issue head on, and to enhance the MediaWiki platform and Wikipedia with software to assist in the designation and evaluation of articles for quality. Wikimedia Quality has been created as a portal to discuss current work in this area and to solicit thoughts and feedback from interested parties.

Currently there are two projects that are investigating this area. The first is an extension to the MediaWiki software called FlaggedRevs. The goal of this revision tagging tool is to allow a subset of editors to identify the most recent version of an article that has been checked for vandalism, or even gone through an in-depth review process. The second is called Article Trust and is being undertaken by Luca de Alfaro is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Cruz's research studies the patterns in Wikipedia article histories and his team has created software which colorizes Wikipedia articles according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed and edited the text.

I think that also what is important to note in the development of this initiative is how the Wikipedia project is now at a point where resources and time are being applied to tasks around future scalability of this massively significant project. Tackling the quality issue is a great place to start and I will be following it with keen interest.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/criminalintent/339344589/ (CC-By-SA)

eXe 1.0 Released

Today marks a bit of a watershed for me - the eXe team has released the long awaited 1.0 version of the eLearning XHTML Editor.

Whew!!!

The highs and lows of working on an Open Source project could fill a large, large... blog post, but all I can say is that at the moment it feels pretty good. It feels good to have been part of something that has had input and impact on a global scale. Along the way the eXe team has physically been places: Australia, Ghana, USA, India, Netherlands, Peru and the US talking about eXe, giving workshops, participating in the community, and we've met heaps of people from all over the world online as well. So here's also a huge "cheers" to all those people who asked questions on the forums, filed bug reports, translated eXe, blogged about us, stopped by IRC to have a chat, or even just downloaded it and gave it a shot.

Its not easy. No way is it easy. Making software completely from scratch is a hard yard and you can see why a lot of it just languishes on Sourceforge. But making Open Source software can be incredibly rewarding if you can pull it off. And I think that we may have done just that ... time for a beer.

Tags: exe

What I learnt on my summer holiday...

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In order to get a little up to speed on some of the basic concepts of tourism I have been reading an overview of the field by Arthur Berger called, "Deconstructing Travel". It's a gentle introduction to the main areas of tourism research and investigation via Cultural Studies. I'm guessing that its a quite popular book for introductory courses in the area given that there were three copies of it in the library. I'm actually looking for intersections between my interests in learning and my new position inside a travel research institute.
Well it wasn't long before Berger suggested some links between tourism and education. In chapter one he suggests that what tourists are primarily consuming are experiences that they believe will educate and entertain them. If being a tourist has a degree of educational experience about it (and I think that anyone who has traveled would agree that this sensation is often quite remarkably vivid after some travel experiences), then in nations where that experience is increasingly mediated by a sophisticated tourism industry, what is the role of teaching in the industry? Is the educational experience an inadvertent one, or is it something that a country could, and should, consciously supply to its visitors? In effect 'teach' to its visitors.
In thinking back towards an earlier post I made about James Farmers' Community of Enquiry graphic it occurs to me that the difference between educational experiences mediated by an online environment or an institution and travel as an educational experience is probably that the traveler doesn't particularly want the "teaching presence" to be all that up front. As Berger points out in reference to Aristotle, people like learning new things, even if that learning comes disguised as entertainment. So, perhaps technology could play a role in blending this 'teaching' a bit more subtly into the background so to speak and make the experience of learning on the move, and more importantly learning that shifts radically with changing locales and geographic contexts, somewhat less intrusive and more like entertainment. As technology becomes more and more mobile and more and more people travel with it in their backpacks, hotels, cafes, cars, etc., then the possibility of tapping into this educational potential of both the tourist and the technology becomes even greater. Hmmm... i'm starting to like this job more and more every day.
Photocred: The Accenture Interactive Network by Luisvilla License: CC-By

It's been so long darlin'...

New job. That's my excuse. I'm now no longer held safe in the arms of Open Source software development grants and have moved to a new position as a Research Officer (whatever that is) at a place called the New Zealand Tourism Research Institute (NZTRI) at the Auckland University of Technology. I'm still in the eLearning game, and the Open Source game so don't count me out just yet ... I need some time to get my head around this tourism stuff though: travel/learn ... sounds like a beautiful thing to me.

photocred: Sky by Aoifejohanna.

And on that farm he had a blog ...

From the "picking out small pieces of other people's blog posts to regurgitate on my own" category comes this graphic from James Farmers presentation on using Blogs as a PLE:

which I think is worth a thousand words (could use a bit more colour but, ok...) I've just given it 75 so if you'd like to add the other 925 then you can view the full presentation, here.

Where there's a will, there's a wiki.

There's been some discussion over on the WikiEducator google group about whether there needs to be a wikilearner.org ... about whether WikiEducator is just reproducing traditional pedagogical practices and principles. I don't subscribe to the "one pedagogy to rule them all" approach in this epic battle, and think that WikiEducator is doing some fantastic stuff... but I do think that there may be a place for a wikilearner.org (or something along those lines.) A few weeks back after a conversation with Leigh Blackall along the streets of Vancouver I reserved the domain name wikilearner.org just in case we wanted to give this a shot. What follows is basically a post I made to the WikiEducator mailing list/group today.

I've been conspicuously quiet on this one... particularly on my 'intentions' ... which are mostly good ;-)

I am / we are thinking about how, or why a wikilearner.org card might be played out. It seems to me that there is definitely a black hole appearing here ... which is something along the lines of, "can you 'learn' on this platform' and if so, how? (Which, of course, implies .. can you teach? should you teach?) It also reminds me of the age old question posed by Freud: What do women really want? Well.. replace 'women 'with 'learners' and you'll get it from the perspective of a bunch of educators and technologists running around with good ideas, tools, and desires. What those learners really want may tell me more about my own psychologies/philosophies/pedagogies than i'm willing to admit.

I'm very appreciative of the benevolent goals of Wikieducator, it's focus on the Free Culture movement and developing societies. Personally, I see it as a site for "educating the educators", developing robust "content" in the more classical sense - the result of which is essentially a print based model, stemming from the lessons of distance education but replacing the printing presses with distributed, collaborative authoring tools. I don't see anything 'wrong' with that, and I'm more than happy to partake in that vision. But the truth of it for me is that I co-exist with a very very very digital-native (even though I hate that term) - so native in fact that the terminology doesn't even apply to him. "There was something before digital, Daddy?" And, to tell you the truth, I want make something that might end up contributing towards how he and his buddies learn and teach. Fortunately, i've got some time (he's only 2.75 yrs old.)

I don't know how and if "curriculum" applies to him.

I also spend a great deal of time lingering on the IRC chanell for Wikiversity as well, and engaging in conversation with that group as well, as do some others on this list. What Wikiversity is ... is mostly "what Wikiversity is about" ... a great struggle for self-identity. If my psychology was more up-to-date i'd probably have a great term to explain this in tems of some evolving stage of development. It's kind of painful to watch sometimes, but it's also a wonderful space full of some cutting edge thoughts and ideas about using the platform for learning in a networked world, (see: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WCR), etc. The problem with Wikiversity is that it's a 'versity' and it scares the pants off of people ... i'd never try to "learn" there. It's also currently stuck on the same MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia ... that's a serious drawback at the moment, because what's good for the goose is not, in this case, what's necessarily good for the goslings. How they will break this bond and fly away from the nest is yet to be seen. Some smart guys over there though, and backed by some heavyweights in the wiki game.

So it seems to me that between these two .. there is a grey area that should really be a very colourful area. Think of it as the little brother or sister of it's parents WikiEducator (the Mom/Mum/Id) and Wikiversity (the Dad/Superego). I think that this is the area that a wikilearner.org might fill, a space that is carefully oriented towards learners in a networked world, that balances content with creativity, an online learners mirror stage (excuse all the psychology references please!). It still needs it's parents for the most part but it may not need all the baggage they bring with them.

This wiki platform isn't the be-all-and-end-all but it's the best manifestation of Berners-Lee's original intent we've got; it's the second half of his dream come true, but it's probably just one bit, one skill, in something larger. So maybe we are nearing the need for another experimental space here ... and maybe a wikilearner.org is it. It wouldn't/shouldn't be about content development though.. that's what WikiEducator and WikiBooks do best. It should be about the activities of living and learning online. Not about all the worlds knowledge in one place, but about the subtleties of discovery, the moments of clarity, and the power of peer-produced creativity; it should be about harnessing the spaces in between teaching and learning (and it shouldn't be anything near a varsity), it should be equally about teaching/learning how to navigate the metaverse, as how to sharpen a chainsaw; how to manipulate a mesh-network, as how to manipulate a solar cooker. So, there's my 0.10 c worth.

brent.

Image: Where to find a good wiki

What do wiki want?

I'm off to Vancouver, Canada from April 11th - 14th for the Tectonic Shift Think Tank hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning. This event will bring together an international group of educators and technologists to identify the transformative opportunities for MediaWiki and related FLOSS technologies for eLearning. Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytech will be there along with various other and sundry wiki fanatics, tech heads and educators to bash out how the wiki platform, specifically MediaWiki (which runs Wikipedia amongst others) can be transformed to accomodate teaching and learning mo' better. My hastily concocted vision is up here, but I thought i'd extend an invitation for any of the people who actually may read this blog (does anyone read this blog?) to add your vision to my page so that I can present them at the meeting as well. What would you like a wiki to do for you as an educator, as a learner, as a consumer or producer of Open Educational Resources? Let me know and i'll put it on the table and we'll make it happen!

Image: Sedimentary, my dear Watson, by: Sean Stayte

Tags: wikieducator, tectonic shift think tank, COL, Commonwealth of Learning, MediaWiki

iPod ... meet eXe

iPod Video, originally uploaded by Alexandre Van de Sande.

One of the areas we are continuing to explore with the eXe project is making educational resources available in a variety of formats, including mobile content delivery. In the 0.23 release of eXe, we've added a prototype of an export function that writes the Notes format used by the Apple iPod. There are several limitations imposed by this format, including being restricted to unstyled text, a strict page size limit, and a design that makes it difficult to include images or audio. However, even with these severe limitations, certain types of read only resources are still usable and are now very portable.

The File > Export > iPod Notes menu item in eXe will prompt for a folder to be used for the export. Within that folder, it creates a new folder with the current eXe package name that contains the table of contents and all of the pages. Simply copy that new folder to the Notes directory of an iPod to make the resource available on the go.

If you don't own an iPod but have some other kind of mobile device that you'd like to be able to get your eXe content onto, try the Text export under the same menu.

Tags: eXe, iPod, mobile, elearning

Scraping, feeding and spitting out ... or "How I learnt to stop going to conferences and love the Real"

"As Western technophiles enamored by the affordances of the tools of networked society and rhetorically situated inside a 'global culture' the quick upload is the vector of desire. The fantasy of products consumed by the mass Other creates a sort of compulsive drive to upload, express, share, tag, intersect, etc. Speed and immediacy have become our drug because they imply the lessening of mediation, negotiation, or the possibility of control."

I said/blogged that last year after my first encounter with an FLNW as it somewhat clashed with the pace and networking capacity of the island I live on. And while at that time it all seemed to me possibly a bit of a culturally insensitive 'shoot first upload immediately and ask questions later' style affair ... it was turned out to be one of the most interesting, inspiring, and engaging encounters of my 'professional' life -- so much so that I can't even stomach the thought of attending yet another *fest style conference.

I'm still engaged in a variety of different dialogues with some of the participants; some face to face, some via IM, Google group posts, blog posts/comments, Wiki Talk pages, or Skype; i've loaned one my spare bedroom, and I often track their Flickr photos and add my Del.icio.us tags to networks I know they're lurking/participating in. No doubt we will be called a bunch of bloody navel gazing, tech, geek, nerd, self important anti-socialist wankers! at some point (yea, yea, ... "First they mock you, then they fight you, then you win." yadda, yadda, yadda.) But I'll say that FLNW #1 changed my life a bit, it definately changed the way I think about a lot of things in the world of networked teaching & learning.

There's a curve somewhere, on some mathematically adept sociologists graphing software that would explain/rationalise some of the criticisms of swapmeets, unconferences, and hyperactive networked literacies ... it peaks at a point, then flattens out and along the way some people will get runover, and others age indiscriminately, their mousing hands succumbing to arthritic pangs, their predictive txting dictionaries falling miserably behind the vernacular. I know that all this TALOing stuff doesn't sprinkle pixie dust on schools along the way, there's a heap of soap-boxing going on, but it does act like a magnet for some of the outcasts, outside thinkers, luminaries, geeks, nerds, artists and other passionate sociopaths who on one level see learning as some kind of metanarrative glue for almost everything we do in this world. What I really like about it all is that it's never about the "best practice", it's not the "tried and true", the "path most trodden" because personally I'm not really in it for those things. My world doesn't seem to work like that, I mostly feel like I'm making it up as I go along, i'm suckered in by emergence. And so for that reason I'll go along for part deux if I can regardless of any critics or naysayers. I may not actually make it physically, but if not I'll be a virtual support crew - headset strapped on, aggregating and directing flows of data thru chanells ready for the stuff or not. Because, after all, I am enamored by the fantasy -- there isn't really any escaping it.

Good NetVibrations!

I've tried a plethora of Feed Readers, Aggregators, personal homepages, whatever you want to call them... I've tried Sage and Aggreg8 for Firefox, Google Reader, Protopage, Straw and Liferea for Linux, as well as some others back in the day on for Mac whos names I can no longer remember... but for the past year or so I've been stuck on Netvibes. For a while I thought I wanted a standalone application, but I'm not sure why. All the stuff in the reader comes from the Web anyways so integrating it into the browser seemed the best route to go, so after overcoming my attraction for the standalone app I went for Sage. I still recommend Sage to quite a few people. It's really simple and works well with Firefox, is easy to install and does autodiscovery of feeds which is a real plus for newbies who fear the orange button. But it gets a biut unweildy when you start getting hundreds of feeds going! Then I tried Netvibes. Netvibes has a fantastic drag and drop web interface, is really easy to add feeds (including autodiscovery -- autodiscovery means that you can just point it towards a web page and it will try to find out whether there is a feed associated or not.) It also includes a simple way to group my feeds with a tab interface along the top and you can also add a heap of "widgets" that have been created by the Netvibes community, including things like pulling in your Flickr photos, Del.icio.us bookmarks, weather widgets, and my new favourite - the Remember the Milk widget, etc, etc. I like also that they keep plugging away at it. A new feature appears almost every month or so and so far they've all been really useful and not gratuitous. Just today I noticed that you can now actually view the site that the post came from, from within the Netvibes interface. This is really handy because sometimes I need to go to the site to get to the article (most notably for me on Stephen Downes site) and i'm sick of opening tabs or new windows to get there. This feature allow me to switch effortlessly between the feed view and the actual site. Nice!


There's a whole other part of Netvibes that I've not really looked that far into, what they call the Netvibes Ecosystem. From what I can tell it's a place for all the third party modules, etc, but there's also an option on your feeds to be able to share them via email, IM, or some cut'n'paste code for your blog or web page which could be really useful.

The country where I quite want to be

Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
It's the country for me.

Lyrics by Michael Palin.

Forget watching TV ... if I was in Helsinki right now I'd be txt messaging the MobilED Helsinki server. Basically it goes like this: the server receives an SMS search query, looks it up on a MediaWiki they've got setup, then calls you back and reads the article found from the wiki to you! Teemu and co have just got the basic functionality up and running.

Find out more here: http://mobiled.uiah.fi/
and if you're going to be in Helsinki anytime soon drop Teemu a line - he says he'll give you the # to txt to try it out. Nice job Teemu!

Tags: MobileED

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

It seems that even more these days i'm swamped by information that is of interest to me (RSS feeds, blogs, etc) or that i'm obliged to read (a.k.a., email.) It's getting pretty critical for those of us who spend a lot of time in here to be able to sort through this stuff, to slow this flash flood of a data flow down a bit and try to just irrigate the bits of our brains that we're currently into cultivating. To this end I spent a few hours over the weekend looking into Yahoo Pipes which is a really cool idea and one that I suspect will be a dominant geek meme next year as others jump into this space as well (there's already a few). Basically Pipes is a relatively simple GUI for creating aggregate RSS feeds; it's a bit more dynamic than that, there's some neat stuff you can do besides just combine feeds like doing content analysis on a feed for dominant words, or allow user input into a hosted Pipe to create searches across focused data sources.


So why would you need this? Well I suspect that a huge part of the literacy of networked learning will be about acquiring the skills on just how to manage your personal learning by being able to alternate between broad and narrow approaches to information. Search is generally the broadest approach but with the sheer amount of information currently available even the best boolean searches are often thwarted. Which is why establishing narrow, focused approaches to information acquisition through network protocols like RSS, Atom and then creating specific content interactions with applications like Pipes will be crucial for learners as they become more specialized in their subjects and pursuits. The interaction with content and data that the learner engages in will be in creating connections between content and data sources which for a lot of people equates to what learning is all about anyways.

These skills are not easy to explain (I've helped create two tutorials on Boolean in my life and it always confuses students) - i'm still having a hellishly hard time explaining what RSS it to most people and why it's so valuable let alone something like Pipes, but I think that it's time we start developing some basic resources on how to do these things: how to subscribe to a feed, how to tag resources in social bookmarking systems then subscribe to the feed of this tag, etc. We'll need to make all this as simple as, well... looking at a picture of a pipe.

I've got it in the pipe to do so on WikiEducator and Wikiversity as part of the Networked Learning resources ... it's just that with all this stuff to read I get so little time these days :-)