[Note: this video only just updated, so quality will improve over time.]

As I’ve mentioned previously, an unfortunate reality of the current Twitter Search tool is the distinct – and short – lifespan for Tweets. After a matter of a few weeks content ceases to appear in the search results, effectively wiping them from the face of existence.

In my mind this is an absolute travesty. An enormous wealth of information is freely shared every day and is worth preserving for posterity – not only from the standpoint of access to links and resources, but also analysis of trends over time.

Therefore one of the pet projects I’ve been indulging in over the last year or so, Tweets in Perpetuity looks at how best to archive Twitter posts so they are searchable and easily referenced later. A number of people have asked how the system actually works, so I wanted to take the time to document it.

The basic building blocks of the system are:

• WordPress – http://wordpress.org
• FeedWordPress – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/
• P2 Theme – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2

In the case of P2 and FeedWordPress, both of these elements can now be installed directly from the WordPress Dashboard area. Please see the WordPress Docs area for information on Installing Plugins and Adding Themes.

Finally, a major shout-out goes to Jim Groom, whose work with P2 at UMW Blogs inspired this whole idea and yet I failed to acknowledge in the video.

Please note, this clip has only just been uploaded and is still processing, so quality will improve over time.

I’ll update this post with additional details when time permits. In the meantime, the links to the components I used in this demonstration are:

• Google Docs – http://docs.google.com
• OPML Generator – http://unold.dk/code/opmlgen/
• Netvibes – http://netvibes.com
• Example – http://www.netvibes.com/mikebogle#Educational_Publications

If you have any feedback or questions please leave a comment.

This video was initially intended as a brief demonstration and update for a few people to help bring them up to speed on the R&D I’m currently engaged in, however it ended up comprehensive enough that I thought I’d share it here as well.

This clip is best viewed full screen with the HD setting selected. Press play to start the video, and then from the up arrow just beside the full screen button select 720p HD.

One of my many hats above and beyond that of educational technologist for UNSW is as pseudo-webmaster for the local homeschooling community that my family is a part of here in the Blue Mountains. As with most networks – educational or otherwise – we’ve had a need for a web presence to help organise our activities.

WordPress has been used to establish the first incarnation of the community website, and has been a very valuable tool to help facilitate things, however increasingly the logistics, planning and scope of the group activities and families involved has become more involved, thus necessitating a site redevelopment.

With this in mind I’ve begun to experiment with BuddyPress in earnest recently. BuddyPress adds a social layer to any WordPress installation, and opens the door to far more participatory elements than the base installation alone. This can include creation of groups, forums, file storage, messaging, and a wide variety of other activities.

When combined with the newly discovered and AWESOME Events Calendar plugin, this has helped establish (at least in principle) a formidable web presence that has been extremely easy to set up.

Given the potential use of this model to other online communities and/or educators, I thought it would be worth sharing what components have gone into this particular installation (as demonstrated in the above walkthrough).

So far this site incorporates the following plugins, all of them downloaded and installed from the WordPress Dashboard via the Add New Plugin option.

• WordPress 3.0
• BP Group Documents
• BP Group Management
• BuddyPress
• BuddyPress Announce Group
• BuddyPress Group Email Subscription
• BuddyPress Restrict Group Creation
• Clean-Contact
• The Events Calendar

At this stage it’s unclear how much of this will comprise the final version of the site, however I’m impressed enough with BuddyPress’ power to want to share this information more widely.

One of the reasons this course is so important is that it’s a holistic fusion of learning, education and technology.  Not only does it discuss use of online tools and methodologies in a very pedagogically sound sort of way, it moves beyond this to explore facilitation techniques, and how these differ between tools.

This distinction is a crucial one to consider I think, because one of the most common approaches to online learning and teaching is to try and replicate exactly what is done in the classroom, and I for one believe that’s a very ineffective way to approach the matter.

If we consider the classroom as a medium this is perhaps more easily discussed.

One of my favourite quotes by Michael Wesch relates to the idea that media is more than content and more than a means of communicating.  ”When media change, human relationships change.”

So looking at a move (either partly or completely) from a face-to-face setting to an online setting, this concept is very important.  The points of reference, opportunities, challenges and over all environment are all completely different online versus in the classroom.

As such, learning online is a very different experience than learning face to face. You can’t approach a curriculum in the same way – the facilitation of the experience is critical.

Facilitating Online 2010 is a wonderful opportunity to explore these concepts in a supportive setting, led by a wonderful facilitator and using a brilliantly designed wiki.

If you’re interested please see course wiki: http://wikieducator.org/Facilitating_Online/

I already raised a big stink about this on Twitter yesterday and won’t do it again here; what I would like to do instead is add to the train of thought that George Siemens has expressed in his latest post: “Well Played, Blackboard.”

Essentially Siemens argues that Blackboard’s acquisition is a very logical business decision – and it is, but that’s the crux of the problem: it is a business decision.  For all parties involved, it’s a business decision; driven by financial interests on what’s best for the company, and the employees and shareholders of the company.

I can appreciate the need to keep a company profitable and running in the black and contributing to the morale and welfare of those who rely upon it as their source of economic welfare – but a healthy financial reality is not necessarily indicative of a healthy educational reality.

Indeed, I fiercely question how positive an outcome this can possibly be for the educational landscape, and fail to see how this acquisition can have anything but a negative impact on people’s learning experiences.

When we look at many of the acquisitions that have taken place in the tech sector over the years you discover a landscaped peppered with withering and dying services and applications, left fallow and neglected in the wake of the best business intentions.  See Jaiku, Delicious, Etherpad and Dodgeball for examples.

In Jaiku we saw a very healthy alternative to Twitter, whose acquisition by Google was seen as another very logical business decision that would provide it with access to the search engine giant’s deep pockets and influence. Unfortunately Jaiku was left in limbo with out any visible support and was eventually shelved as a project.

Dodgeball is another unfortunate example of services discontinued by Google after their acquisition.

Social Bookmarking Tool Delicious’ acquisition by Yahoo! is another example.  Once again, this was seen as a very logical business decision that would put Delicious in a more strategic decision to enhance it’s toolsuite and leverage Yahoo!’s influence.  Unfortunately this culmonated in founder Joshua Schachter leaving the company after the merger, declaring “I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.”

Etherpad is perhaps the most brutal example of them all.  This application had an enormous amount of potential as an collaborative online text editor – arguably the likes of which the web had ever seen before.  It’s adoption was beginning to skyrocket and it’s notoriety and recognised significance gaining steam by the day.

Then it was acquired by Google and promptly shelved.  After a great deal of outcry from the community about the decision, they later released the code as open source – however it was a bitter outcome that clearly demonstrated what happens to good services when logical business decisions take priority.

My point here is just because small companies and niche services are acquired by larger companies doesn’t guarantee service stability, predictability – or indeed even their long-term existence.  All too frequently we see start-ups subsumed and changed by a new corporate culture whose priorities lay elsewhere.  Unfortunately this frequently results in a far different reality for educators and users than had existed previously.

The fact that Blackboard has acquired the perhaps most widely-used synchronous educational collaboration suites may make sense for corporate stockholders, but educators should be petrified.

This is really neat to see for a couple of reasons.

First of all it’s an example of sharing and reuse in action.  I release all of my contributions to this blog as Creative Commons Attribution licenses, meaning anyone can copy the work, adapt it and republish it so long as they attribute the source, which Watching the Watchers has clearly done.

The fact someone thought enough of the post to reproduce it is quite a compliment, and it’s great to see the practical application of openness in publishing.

The second significant aspect of this is the replication of the Wave itself.  The whole idea was to explore the idea that Wave could be used to distribute centralised discussions in decentralised spaces – namely, many people engaging in a shared discussion in different locations.

The fact Watching the Watchers has included the original Wave in their version of my post lets us examine how this idea would work in actual practice.  All of the comments in the wave have been reproduced, as will any future contributions to the discussion.

Effectively it doesn’t matter if someone looks at the wave on this blog, on Watching the Watchers, or in Google Wave itself – the contents of the discussion are one and the same regardless.

So thank you to Watching the Watchers for not only helping demonstrate re-use, but also establish a proof of concept in use of Wave to distribute discussions.

Now that the hysteria has died down I’m finding it a bit easier to look at the tool in a more objective sort of way, and this morning I in fact had an idea about a real use for it in an educational context.

The significance of embedded content

One of the glaring voids in the tool historically has been there was no embed option. So you had to go into Wave in order to edit anything, or contribute to any discussions. For me the fact there are so many other communication tools out there meant that Wave was largely forgotten and overlooked.

However this morning I’ve just noticed they’ve added in an embed option, which means you can include a real-time view of the wave discussion in any website or blog that allows use of the embed code. The fact it contains JavaScript is a bit unfortunate though, since many websites are likely to lock down use of these sorts of code snippets (I suspect WordPress.com is one of them).

Decentralising Centralised Discussion

Nonetheless, it seems to me that Wave would facilitate centralised discussions in a decentralised fashion.

One of the corner stones of many online courses is use of a discussion forum. The centralised nature of this tool is such that people can engage with one another to discuss and debate concepts and topics in a shared space.

Historically this has required use of a centralised tool like a group or learning management system, which effectively makes the online element course-centric as opposed to learner-centric. My thought was that Wave could mitigate this reality by allowing centralised discussions to be situated in many different locations all at the same time – including student blogs, learning management systems, groups, etcetera.

Students would then have the power to engage in the discussions in their own chosen contexts, while not losing out on valuable interaction with their peers and instructors.

An Example

For instance, below is a publicly visible wave I’ve created. Why not try entering a comment, and see if you can embed the snippet in your own context – if only temporarily. Largely this idea is untested, so I’d appreciate any collaboration or feedback people have on how well this idea works in practice.

Note, in order to make this Wave publicly visible and editably I’ve had to add public@a.gwave.com to the list of Wave participants. More on this here.

Update: After experimenting with this a bit it appears that the embed code snippet is only available from within Wave, rather than via the embedded instance. So students would theoretically need to visit Wave in the first to grab the snippet, and thereafter could enter comments through instances. It also appears that many of the options in the tool bar within Wave are unavailable outside of it.

"man is the only animal" by aaron yendall http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaron-yendall/4606743415/

In speaking with Gina Minks this afternoon about a WordPress issue she was having, I’ve been brought to realise how much I’ve actually learned about technology over the years by virtue of completely destroying it.

You see, I have no technical background or formal training in IT.  I majored in Economics at university, and the only technical courses I took related to use of basic tasks like using Word and Excel.  Certainly nothing related to debugging WordPress or ham-fistedly interpreting PHP code.  Most everything I know I’ve learned through open-ended experimentation and frequently blowing things up.

This is one reason why I see so much importance in the notion of play and experimentation.  I’ve found the best ways of learning how something works is to discover how NOT to set it up; how NOT to fix it; changing the settings you must never, ever change; and pushing the buttons that you must not push under any circumstances.

For me, when something explodes, it’s a learning experience.  I may not know why I’ve reduced yet another installation to a smoking, smoldering crater, but I know not to do it that way again next time.  Over time, these experiences start to piece together to point me in the direction you ARE supposed to go, and the ways you’re SUPPOSED to configure things.

It requires a certain mindset to do things this way though, there’s no doubt about that.  You need to expect that failures will occur; that you’ll overwrite files or lose data.  It’s all part and parcel to the experience.  But at the end of the day the failures and technical corpses do as much – if not more – to educate us on how things work than doing them perfectly the first time.

At least that’s been my experience.