DISQUS

Hi sarah. Someone raised a similar point in the comments on the post, and so I'll just reuse my response (except I won't call you Christian): I agree that we have multiple facets to our identities in real space (that's what I meant by I find people strange who boast at not having these). But I think online _is_ different because in real space those identities are separated by physical space - you may be a different person with your gran and your rugby mates, but the two are unlikely to be in the same space together, so separation is easy. Online everyone can see every facet of you. So, you have to deliberately create the separation that occurs 'naturally' in real space.
Martin

I think you need to upgrade your respect for 'informal learning' Sarah (otherwise it'll come and get ya). Informal learning is just learning which isn't formalised - that doesn't mean it's dismissed or regarded as chatter. In fact informal learning (and the paradox of how to formalise it so we can recognise it) will be the holy grail of education over the next few years. It is exactly what the web is good at, and the Flickr community is a good example of that. So in that respect I think Brian is right, but he's praising informal learning not denigrating it.

Well, Patrick is looking to make JIME more blog like and do interesting things with it, and still keep it REFable, and I'll be chipping in too, so maybe there is an opportunity to explore some of these ideas around stretching academic publication.
And it's not just REF that makes people persist - blogs and the like are rarely recognised in formal promotion criteria, thus if one were a young academic (this rules us out Alan) then 'proper' publications are part of playing the career game.

For me it isn't the conversation or anything so grand but really about writing style. When we had no alternative I could force myself to put on the dead, stilted academic writing style. Perhaps I'd even get to put a sentence in 5,000 words which I actually enjoyed writing (although it'd be challenged in the peer review process and removed). But now I am FREE! I can write, I can make (bad) jokes, I can mix metaphors, I can make cultural allusions to zombies, Nabakov and football. I can use the language.
Now when I come to write a formal paper the absence of all these things becomes apparent so the process becomes even more painful. John Naughton told me years ago that he couldn't write academic papers, I think he obviously could do if he wanted, but he had found the liberation of journalistic writing, and so was seeing the sort of degradation of writing experience then that we are now finding.
In 'proper' research papers I accept that we need a dispassionate voice, but I think the removal of all aspects of humanity from all forms of academic writing has been detrimental and now they are seeing a backlash.
I've just written two papers, and it took me a long time and even then they are more 'bloggy' in tone than is the norm.

Damn! I do think Learning Styles are bollocks, but if Greenfield thinks so too, I'll have to rethink.

I missed this twitter chat yesterday (lovely example of an idea being explored by range of people who don't themselves have any involvement, but do it out of interest and social connection). Is the activity maybe a bit dry? I think I would find it difficult to write a post if 'ordered' to do so. Could you 'jazz' it up a bit? eg create a YouTube or XtraNormal or Animoto vid (2 mins max) which explains virology. Blog on which ones you enjoyed.
Or does using those 3rd party apps get too messy with assessment?

Just to make sure I'm clear on this: this is about MicrobiologyBytes not Science of the Invisible? To be honest I don't read MB much - not that it isn't good, but it seems more directly related to its field. SOTI is more personal. So, my feeling is that you could try moving MB to ScienceBlogs, not (just) for the money but because as you say it may be part of a move to 'legitimise' blogs within certain academic fields and may be part of a community.
If it were SOTI I'd say definitely not - the conflict between any commercial tie-in and the more personal interaction you have here would be the death of it. Or is that just because I prefer the SOTI side of your split personality?

Sure, in most circumstances it's experience and knowledge you need, but what I want to argue is that there are conditions under which this is not only not an advantage, but it's positively detrimental. You transfer the wrong knowledge to the domain but see it as an extension of an existing one (eg IBM and PCs). That's not about fearlessness of tinkering, it's more about not being weighed down by the knowledge of why things _won't_ work.
I can see I need to expand on this in a blog post - I was thinking of writing a book on it, but don't suppose I'll get around to that, so I'll blog it and then you can _really_ disagree with me :)

I know this is the conventional wisdom, but maybe it's not true. Often you find newcomers to an organisation or an industry are the ones who do something innovative? Why? Because they don't know the stuff the others do. IBM knew all the reasons why a PC couldn't succeed, Apple didn't. You could argue the same with many newcomers success over incumbents. I know this sounds wrong-headed, but sometimes you can have an excess of information. You could argue it is just filtering then, but in an uncertain domain you don't which information is more important than the rest.
I tell ya, expertise ain't what it's cracked up to be.

@AJ - in terms of your eportfolio problem I think you may need to separate this out from reflection in general. Students probably want to know what _You_ want from an eportfolio, because they don't really use it in normal life. Reflection as a practice is something some people do naturally (and others don't). Students who may be struggling with your eportfolio and what to put in it might well be able to sit down in a pub (David's context hypothesis may have something to it) and reflect on why they lost a football game on Saturday and how they could improve their performance.

I agree that reflection is hard to define, or is often circular, reflection is when people have been reflective. And I also agree it's hard to assess. But that doesn't mean it is therefore unimportant or shouldn't be encouraged. The same might be said for talent, or aesthetic beauty. We shouldn't let a paucity in our assessment methods determine what is important. Which leaves the last criticism - lack of necessity. I know, having tried to force-feed rfelective practice, and having had it force-fed, that it doesn't really map onto conventional teaching very well 'Now reflect on your answer'. Students get fed up with this, and feel it is playing a game - they know if they say 'I think I could have done better at this', then they'll get marks. Whereas if you said 'I think I did everything right' you won't. It feels like a prisoner playing at contrition to get past the parole board.
But I do think it's a good practice - there is all the Schon stuff that good practitioners do generally reflect on their practice (although maybe great ones don't - they have the courage of their convictions?). So, maybe we have to go at it in a more circuituous fashion - for instance we shouldn't surface it and be so obvious as to say 'be reflective or else', but maybe just give students tools such as blogs, and get them to read people who are good, reflective bloggers, and they may pick it up in a more subtle form.

I think you could probably get reliable stats across a sub-genre - eg academic blogs(?) where you could assume modes of behaviour, eg people are not gaming the system, posting porn, etc. If we see a research call around this area, let's go for it.

I wonder if what we need is some old-fashioned research that helps us makes sense of these figures? Ie what they mean in everyday life. So for example we might find that a subscription number of 1000 equates to around 500 actual 'reads' (averaged across blogs). And that a PostRank of 9.3 usually arises from X number of people having read it, a posting frequency of Y, etc.
This would give us reliable factors to add to the data metrics, so you could say with some justification things like 'In my field my blog reputation is X'
I think the combination of data metrics and good quality research is the way to go. I know, shall we call it web 3.0? What's that? Oh.
Does that make sense? And has anyone done it?
PS - Tony, I don't think I was 'quibbling', merely wondering why there had been such a large fluctuation.

Seesmic video reply from Disqus.

Seesmic video reply from Disqus.

That'd be sad - I was slow to Seesmic and maybe that's the problem - it is a tad ahead of its time. It is such an obvious educational tool, but we're all stuck in VLEs behind firewalls. So it may die in the time lag. Is your guess that YouTube will essentially replace it - just add a reply function to a video and there you are - the ability to embed links to other videos in YouTube as part of the annotation feature is already a step in this direction.
I was about to record something for a course in Seesmic, but if it is going to go belly up, maybe not, it'll add grist to the 'use internally hosted services' mill.

Bravo for being honest Alan, and not claiming it a reversioned victory. Re. funding - if you're looking for a partner, I'd be interested in seeing if we could do something around PLEs/social networks in education. Be interested to hear your analysis of what it aimed it to do, why you concluded it didn't reach those aims, and why you think it failed.

Hey, those are _my_ nominations ;)

It's not a bad problem to have - people want to (ahem) get jiggy with your site. But the problem seems twofold to me: you want people to use tools better suited to their niche purposes and if you did want a social site then a wiki isn't best suited to it. So do you move to a better social space (as you suggest, Ning), if that's what the users want? Or do you find a way of achieving your initial aim of incorporating lots of different technologies? As you suggest, Friendfeed is a good model here. Would a netvibes universe be any good for this? And could you hook that into a social space such as Ning?
I'm told by web 2 people that you should always listen to your users and be prepared to change track, if that helps.

Following up on my push it as an educational tool tweet - you could imagine every student on every campus automatically getting a seesmic accnt (if they don't have one), and it being used as a means of:
a) making discussions in forums more lively
b) communicating with their educators who they can never catch online
c) peer to peer support
d) easily generating content that can be embedded in elearning materials
e) creating communities around subject areas beyond the walls of the university
The education market is huge, and of course if you get them at university you've probably got an enthusiasric user base for life.
On a smaller scale, I run the sociallearn project at the Open University - we're developing an open API and social network for learning - we'd love to chat about Seesmic in this context.

Thanks for this Sol - only yesterday I did a 10 miler (alas a lot slower than you), and was thinking 'how could I microblog a run?' Utterz looks interesting, so will give it a try.

Quite right - what I should have said was a Professor's opinion is _almost_ as valid as a blogger's.
PS - I'm based in glorious Cardiff too...

Robert,
here are some other things you are woefully amiss in blogging about:

Zimbabwe
Deforestation in Borneo
Japanese Whaling
Burma

And you have the cheek to call yourself a tech blogger ;)
In case anyone gets upset - I believe all of the above are very important. But I wouldn't come to Scoble to read about them, in the same way I don't expect detailed analysis of the US recession on a football programme. That's the beauty of the blogosphere - you can find the info you want from someone, you don't have to get it from one provider.

Thanks for the link - I've not tried protopages so will have a look (your link didn't work for me, BTW). One of the interesting things about my PLE/PWE was that it's just sort of built up over time, I didn't set out to create one. I suppose you could argue it isn't really an environment in that there is little integration between the tools, but it is an environment conceptually, ie I think of all these tools as the way I go about my work.
Martin

I thought it was a good piece that you immediately felt hit on something. It's not saying one is better, but there does seem to be a class feel about it. In a blog reaction (http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reaso...) I commented that in the UK you used to be either a BBC or an ITV household. Now this can read Facebook and MySpace (which further supports the argument that social networking is the new broadcast).
Martin