http://me2u.athabascau.ca/markpenny/weblog/284.html

I think there's a little too much respect for the creators' intentions when it comes to the technology. For example, I've just read a post in Moodle forums about nwiki. A user had heard that there would be a private wiki feature in the next version. He thought that was a stupid idea, because wikis are supposed to be social in nature. My answer to that is, yes, that was the intent, but wikis happen to serve a number of purposes, including one that many authors will appreciate: versioning of private documents--purposes the creators may not have had in mind, may even have detested. In fact, I've been using some of my wiki installations in pretty much that way. Granted, being online they are open to viewing, but I have protected all my edited pages so that only I can alter them. Frankly, I wouldn't mind having some sort of wiki setup on my PC, or the ability to hide my wikis online. Perhaps the ability exists and I just need to poke around a bit more to find it.

It happens that I've been reading Tad Williams' Sea of Silver Light, the final volume of the Otherland series. At one point in the story, two of the heroes (!Xabbu and Sam) are surprised that following the bank of a river in a complex computer simulation has led them back to where they started. One of the villains (Jongleur), with whom they've been reluctantly but necessarily traveling, explains (p. 420, par. 5) that most simulations in the Otherworld network simulate conditions meaningful to humans, because they are created by humans for humans, but the part of the network the companions now find themselves in was created by an artificial intelligence (the Other) for its own purposes. The river, which flows through and between simworlds, serves most of the network as a conduit and gateway from world to world, but the river in this simworld serves as a barrier and gateway between subworlds.

What struck me about the explanation was that it resembled my diagram of electronic display and discussion (in fact Jongleur's diagram bears an uncanny resemblence to mine), and that the realworld disparity between the intent of the typical designer and the design of the user resembles the fictional disparity between the designs of humans and the design of the artificial intelligence.

It is helpful, I think, to distinguish different types of display and discussion, but old-fashioned to divide them. The same application should allow users to engage in and control monologues, dialogues and multilogues. Elgg achieves this flexibility to an extent and in a particular fashion. I can restrict individual entries to private viewing, so that only I can see them. I can restrict them to viewing by members of a group or community (a group or community which can be restricted to two members: myself and one other, if I wish to open a dialogue). I can restrict them to viewing by members of the network. Or I can make them available to the entire online world. However, commenting is not so easily tailored. Whoever can view can comment (with the exception of un-logged in viewers, if I disable public comments in my profile but do not restrict access to a post), meaning that I cannot confidently engage in a public monologue (display). Of course, the fact is that the majority of blog posts end up being public monologues, because  no one comments on them, but the blogger in question is unable to control the process by enabling or disabling comments on individual posts.

The lengths to which designers will go to have their designs adhered to was recently demonstrated in Moodle by none less than Martin Dougiamis, Moodle's founder, himself. He and his team introduced a blog module, but because Martin feared that blogging might subvert or replace other acitivities within courses, he allowed no commenting on blog posts. In other words, Moodle blogs are for display (public monologue) only. There are no other options.

Now, I think that Martin's concerns is a valid one, but I believe the solution, which people have in effect demanded, is an option to disable or otherwise restrict comments on blogs within a course or installation, so that those who wish to allow comments may and the blog module can serve the purposes of more people than its designers.

Another interesting development (or antideveloment) over at Moodle was the discontinuation of dialogues, which were essentially targeted forums. You could address a dialogue to a particular user. True, the module mimicked other devices, such as messaging and quickmail (both basically email, although Moodle messaging allows you to view a full message history, which resembles a two-way forum, aka dialogue), but from my perspective it was handy for the instructor to be able to very visibly instigate dialogues between instructor and student or student and student--and for those dialogues to be private, though held in public, or at least in a public place.

To return to the issue of design vs. use, I will just wrap up this harangue by remarking that there is a sort of interlocking, spiral flow to the river of innovation and development. Users request or are perceived to need certain functions. Designers respond with applications for which they have mentally, if not effectively, set parameters. Users break out of or protest against those parameters. Designers, sometimes the users themselves, respond with alterations or innovations.

My guess is, someday it's all going to merge into a single very flexible application, one with wysiwyg programming so that any old user can adapt it.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/7

Favicons are a tittle tougher to design, especially when your logo is a bit complicated. Here's what I've come up with so far.

It's simple. It's tight. But it's also very vague. I'd like something a little more evocative. 

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/8

SPAJDE aims to do what its full name suggests: be a journal for students, professionals and academics.

The contributions to this journal are made by students, professionals and academics.

The peer review in this journal is carried out by students, professionals and academics.

This journal is not confined to a table of contents, a few select articles and a layer of appendices. It consists of the individual, collaborative, casual and disciplined input of anyone capable of having an experience, thinking a thought or doing research in the field of distance education.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/9

Hmm. Still working on it. I'm onto something. In the meantime, I think this one looks a little more interesting.

Notice the cool overlapping entries effect due to some glitch in the image display.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/11

Introduction

For a designer, an author--for any kind of creator--the process of moving from nothing to something is a fascinating one, one worth sharing, if not reading about. So here's how SPAJDE wound up with its logo and favicon--and why the logo and favicon don't much resemble each other. Read on if you like. Click another link if you don't.

SPODES

Not long after I started blogging and "foruming", I came up with a concept called spoding (after SPODE: Search and Plug Online Discussion Environment). A spode is a so-far imaginary tool that allows users to post from a single web position to multiple web points. Today's RSS (Really Simple Sharing) feeds are a step or two in the direction of spoding, but they are not sufficiently quick or discriminating for my taste.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/12

Sounds like the name of a ship, doesn't it?

Well, it's a phenomenon we need to be aware of.

In my case, posts from SPAJDE were going to elgg.net, educationbridges.net and Me2U. Posts from the three targets were going to each of the other two. You can imagine what was happening. One post could get shipped to the same site four or five times.

My apologies to anyone inconvenienced by the clutter. I've now unsubscribed all three Elgg sites. Now they will only receive feeds from SPAJDE, so each post will only be posted once per site. 

http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/5

As a result of working with Maersk Kaoshiung on a business English course, I've become aware of and interested in the Common European Framework. It's available here , but I've uploaded a copy here for additional safety and ease.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/15

I'm in the process of developing a post on the subject of things like RSS, SSO, WAD, RPN and UDR. It could take a while. Meanwhile, I'm impatient to see whether my folksonomic tags in this Drupal installation will carry over into other installations such as the three Elgg installations I frequent.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/16

    I've done a lot of thinking lately about what I'd like to do in my fields (field=profession+discipline) and I reckon I'm far more interested in contributing materials, applications and ideas than in doing research. Research is essential, and I'd like to get a handle on doing, understanding and using it, but in the end I'm a thinker and creator more than a sniffer. Among other things, I will probably end up founding and heading an organization that does it all. People who are good at and enjoy research will take a few cues from the questions and notions that pop into my head but don't obsess me long enough (mainly due to overcrowding) to get properly looked into, so I will contribute a fair deal to the discipline in that way, and as a theorist, but most of my efforts will be bent on making things people can use.

Three of my little projects are SPAJDE, SPAJAL and O-WIRe. The first two are spajes. A spaj is a student, professional and academic journal, basically a glorified blog network and a journal-with-its-pride-knocked-out-of-it, an environment in which students, professionals and academics share as peers and in which the value of a contribution is judged by the user community. I call this democratic (vs. representative) scholarship. I developed this idea back in MDDE 601, when I noticed that a lot of us had a lot of useful things to say about the field. That's a diagram-of-the-realizations-that-inspired-the-concept you see at left (or above).

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/18

We're in the process of building our profile page. You can move in right now, but it will undergo some additions and renovations over the next few days and weeks.

Please take a few minutes to share a little information about yourself.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/19

Yikes! That was scary.

I'd just had all my sites transferred to a server with PHP 5.1.6. The whole business began as an effort to get Elgg running in SiteGround. The Elgg issue never did get resolved. There is an apparent conflict between Elgg and PHP 5.1.6, something to do with the equals sign. That part of the business is rather mysterious, frankly. I had trouble on 5.0.5, too--completely out of the blue as far as I can see. Things had been working fine. I'd even had the Elgg-Moodle integration working nicely.

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http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/6

I've just updated to Drupal 4.7.3. It's always good to update, but in this case it was essential. We are now on a PHP 5.1.6 server. Drupal 4.7.0 is incompatible with PHP 5.1.6. I couldn't log in.

For details of the update and associated trickery, see the related blog entry in SPAJDE.

PS In web parlance, you upgrade between versions (e.g., 3.x and 4.x) and update between subversions (e.g., 4.7.0 and 4.7.3). Upgrades are major alterations to the core code and functionality of the software. Udpdates are minor, usually bug-related alterations. In this case, a php compatibility issue had arisen within a version. The new subversion addressed the issue.

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http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/7 I recently started building the profiles function in SPAJDE. I will do the same here as soon as I'm happy with the layout there.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/22

I want to start discussion of a project I have in mind.

For now I'm calling it SAIF (Single Application Infinite Functions).

The idea behind it is that blogs, forums and wikis (among others) are really just slightly different versions of the same application.

All the systems that I'm familiar with (Elgg, Moodle, Drupal, Mediawiki) treat blogs, forums and wikis as separate by nature. I say the distinctions are artificial. I think it is quite possible to create a single application that offers the features and functions of blogs, forums and wikis (among others) and the potential to develop new features and functions.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/23

A lot of the inspiration for my thinking on social software has come from my experience with Elgg. I like the notion of access "options" (preferable in my economy to "restrictions") which draw on user-generated groups and communities.

How about groups and communities of groups and communities?

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/24

Just yesterday evening, a student and I were discussing the membership discount at a local stationery shop called 9X9. My student remarked that it's become very inconvenient to carry around all her membership cards. That made me think of single sign in--and I suddenly thought, wow! there's a business opportunity for somebody: a service that stores retail membership info. You use one card for all your memberships. Every time you sign up for a new membership, the info goes to the service and becomes accessible through your card.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/25

While I wait for Moodle 1.6.3 to upload from my IBM ThinkCentre to my SiteGround webspace, I guess I'll take a moment to share some of my hopes for the future of RSS.

1. Intersite Tags (IST) - I'd like my tags to carry over from the orginal post to all copies.


2. Perpost Pinpointing (PPP)- I'd like to be able to tell each post exactly where I want it to go. I'm a member of a number of communities in various networks, but the current state of RSS doesn't allow me to target communities outside of the network I'm typing in.


3. Comment Reversion (CRV) - I'd like comments from all copies to be added to the original.


4. Intersite Comment Sharing (ICS) - In fact, I'd like all comments on all copies, including the original, to be added to all copies.

Before somebody comes on and slams me for a disconsolate dreamer, let me say in my defence that I appreciate what the current state of RSS makes possible. I'm just verbalizing some ideas I have that would make RSS, or its successors, even better in my estimation.

http://spajal.targeteil.org:80/?q=node/8

I have to prepare a progress report for one of the students in my BULATS writing class at Maersk Kaohsiung. The Human Resources manager needs it to pitch the programme to his boss. I've decided to format it as a PowerPoint presentation, since this is a format familiar to business people. Moodle's Project module will allow me to upload the PowerPoint file to my Course Portal, where the HR manager can easily access it. One advantage to storing the report in the Course Portal is that it provides the boss direct exposure to the Course Portal, which is an integral part of the course as I run it.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/26

I've long pondered changing SPAJDE to SPAJDHE and SPAJAL to SPAJALT.

I personally am not currently running any completely distance programmes and I perceive that the numerical trend is toward incorporating distance elements into traditionally contiguous contexts, such as I have done at Maersk Kaohsiung and at the Taipei Language Institute, Kaoshiung Center, so I felt that the name of this blog network should reflect the "hybrid" option. However, once I'd added a subdomain and changed the header, I found that "SPAJDHE: and "Student, Professional and Academic Journal of Distance and Hybrid Education" looked a bit back heavy, so I scrapped the name change.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/27

Referring to my post RSS Wishlist 001, Steve Swettenham over in Me2U writes

Your ideas look interesting but can you give a sample field entry for each tag?

I'm not entirely sure what my new friend is asking for, but any indication of interest is always an impetus to elaborate. In fact, the inefficient acrobatics I'm having to go through to respond in SPAJDE to a comment in Me2U on a post that originated in SPAJDE nicely underline the need for the kind of stuff I referred to in RSS Wishlist 001, specifically, in this case, Intersite Comment Reversion.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/28

Here's another one I'd like to see: in-post link tags.

You know how you'd like to link to every blog post and website you refer to, but it gets time consuming and tedious to build links all the time? Sure you can copy and paste links you use more than once within a post, but you wish you could just type the name of the target and move on.

Anybody game to work on that one?

I reckon it would work like tags. Basically, the system would match text strings between post and database and automatically link the string to the target. I guess it would be a combination of tags and interwiki, except that the interwiki would be generated in-post, just like intranetwork tags, but with extranetwork links. Every time you created a link, the network would store it in the database.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/29

Much of what I advocate already exists, albeit in somewhat primitive form (sorry, Dave), in Elgg.

Let's take UDR (User Delimited Relay). The principle behind UDR is that the user, whether writer or reader (in the case of blogs), has full control over display, response and viewing. The writer can decide who gets to see and/or reply to a post. The reader can decide whose or what kinds of posts to see.

All this is possible in Elgg.

Elgg writers have two choices of webposition (storage): their own blogs or community blogs. From within either type of blog, they have several choices of webpoint (display), depending on which and how many communities they have created or subscribed to and which and how many groups they have created. It is possible to store a post in a given community but display it to everyone in the world, everyone in the network, everyone in any of one's communities, everyone in any of one's groups, or no one but oneself. Bizarrely, it is possible to store a post in a community but hide it from community members, either be keeping it private, or by restricting access to another community or group.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/30

Just a short note. I've given an acronym to my pain. I call it UDL now: User Delimitation. It's the notion that developers should create options, not restrictions.

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/31

The deeper I look into this rss business, the more certain I am that it amounts to glorified links. This is not quite so obvious in Elgg, for example, because a few lines of text from the post is included in the display, but you may notice that posts longer than, um, say 5 to 10 lines get truncated--and there is always a read more link at the end of the "teaser" (if the post exceeds the limit).

The glorified link nature of rss is quite apparent in WordPress and Moodle (at least the Elgg-Moodle integration, anyway). In both cases, you get a separate block in a sidebar with, in the case of WordPress, the titles of a set of recent posts in the source, or, in the case of the Elgg-Moodle integration, one or two titles with short teasers. To read anything, you have to click the link and go to the original post.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/32

For the last few months I've been talking the talk, making all kinds of suggestions for what I see as improvements to everything from nwiki (Moodle) to the Elgg-Moodle integration to the now venerable Elgg itself, stepping on toes, ruffling feathers and being put in my place, but mainly talking big about what I'd like to contribute to the world of social software. Well, finally, if ploddingly, I'm taking the steps to "enreal" my vision myself, in the face of all doubt and criticism (assuming anybody reads my prattle and has an opinion about it).

I've just downloaded and installed xampp, a web software package that contains apache, mysql, php, https, cgi, ssi, smtp and ftp. I'm not even sure what half that stuff does.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/36

So how do you go about changing the way online communication is effected?

First, you learn how it's effected right now.

Second, you make what's available work the way you envision.

Third, you make it easy for other people to adapt what's available.

Fourth, you make something designed to work the way you want and the way everyone else wants.

So what does that mean in terms of me and my vision?

It means that I

study what's available to see how it works,

learn to programme so I can make adjustments,

Technorati Tags: drupal saif sswid

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Posted by Mark Penny | 0 comment(s)

http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/37

I'm pretty clear on what I want, but I'm not ready to build it yet. In the meantime, what do I use?

I've used Elgg, Drupal and WordPress for blogging. I like all three, but I'm leaning precariously toward Drupal.

Elgg is great. The triple combination of group and community creation, per post access restriction and quadruple mode viewing options (personal blog, community blog, friends' blogs and all posts [with nascent SSwID]) make it an inspiration for me. However, to date it provides only for blogging (although there is an Elgg wiki plug-in for collaboration), blog comments are not threaded (although they're supposed to be at some point) and there is no forum feature (even in the roadmap). In other words, it's given me some great ideas, but doesn't have the functionality to power my dreams.

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http://spajde.targeteil.org/?q=node/38

Just watched a good video shared by Josephine Tan in Me2U. See her post “All Marketers Are Liars” for the video. It's marketing expert Seth Godin sharing his views on Google with Google. The point of his message has to do with stories. People buy stuff so they can sell a story. Make something worth talking about.

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