Monthly Archives: April 2008

E-mail and xobni

I have yet to properly get my anti e-mail campaign underway on all fronts. I’m waging war on a few small areas. The tide is turning here, but in other areas, people are waging a counter attack. Reminders about an event coming with full attached copies of all the documentation. One irony is that the topic for one of these committees is wikis.

e-mail patterns

I am convinced there are ‘email patterns’ just like there are ‘wiki patterns‘. We are aware of the basics: like ‘Me to’ e-mails sent to a group, reply all when it’s not needed. e-mail across the corridor etc. I have a feeling I am going to need some rational presentation of these for my team. That’s strategy one. The second is having tools to replace the bad habits.

xobni

Today Jess sent me an invite to Xobni (inbox spelt backwards) It looks cool, I will wait a little before I install it. Yet another startup. Just when you thought all the good five letter acronyms were taken. Has an endorsement from Bill Gates.

This is an e-mail app for outlook/pine that clusters emals, sucks out attachments.

I have tried to see an analogy of this. It could be the swiss watch makers after digital came out. They spent time trying to make their watches better. it’s not quite the right analogy. will try xobni when I get back from a holiday that starts today.

Links from Luis Suarez (who is still on an anti e-mail campaign): From 10000 to 0 Emails in an Inbox in 24 Hours Describing using GMail. Here is his first comment on lists, which we all know.

Merciless Unsubscribing

Email 101 lessons always say that you should unsubscribe to as many newsletters as you can. I was getting about 50 a week, most of which I didn’t EVER read. The first thing I did on Sunday was to unsubscribe from most of them and delete the majority of past ones that I’d put in my ‘read one day’ folder.

I hate the ‘read one day’ folder.

This post is not finished, just abandoned. . . . but I want to go on holiday, the family is up, eggs and bacon are on the table. 6 hour drive to paradise. But I will post anyway.

Engaged Learning

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As a belief statement I think so called engaged learning is important. I did the workshops in China in 2007 and once again had to face the fact of how shallow some of my thinking really is in this area. Helen reminded me of this on Monday. We were in the middle of a workshop here, when she asked the question “What is engaged learning, and how do you know it is happening, and if it does, how do you know it makes any difference?”

Today, a link crossed my monitor that mentioned

Russ Edgerton’s white paper on Pedagogies of Engagement? The commonly referred to link appears to be inactive ( www.pewundergradforum.org/wp1.html)

I checked out the phrase and discovered several interesting pages.

1. www.ce.umn.edu/~smith/docs/Smith-Pedagogies_of_Engagement.pdf

Prior to Edgerton’s paper, the widely distributed and influential publication called The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education [2] stressed pedagogies of engagement in concept. Three of the principles speak directly to pedagogies of engagement, namely, that good practice encourages student-faculty contact, cooperation among students, and active learning.

2. www.carnegiefoundation.org/publications/sub.asp?key=452&subkey=612&printable=true

One of Russ’s arguments focused on something he called “pedagogies of engagement” — approaches that have within them the capacity to engage students actively with learning in new ways. He wasn’t talking only about service-learning, though service learning was an example; he was talking about an array of approaches, from problem-based and project-based learning to varieties of collaborative work and field-based instruction. Russ used the rubric “pedagogies of engagement” to describe them all.

3. www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Civil_War/CWlearnercentered.htm

“Engagement,” framed within the theoretical concerns of social and cognitive development, seems to be largely about a student’s “maturity.” So, a student is engaged when s/he shows or self-reports gains in:

“personal development, academic achievement, civic responsibility, [and] career exploration” (Billig and Eyler)
personal development such as sense of personal efficacy, personal identity, spiritual growth and moral development (Vanderbilt review 2000)
interpersonal development and the ability to work well with others, leadership and communication skills (Vanderbilt review 2000)

To put it bluntly, where’s the fun in that? (Emphasis and italics added by me)

Just a taster really. How do you know someone is engaged? Does it REALLY affect learning?

I should have been posting on this last week as I read Bains superb book “What the Best College Teachers Do“. Here is something adapted from what I wrote for last week’s UCTL news sheet (FLAB):

‘What the Best College Teachers Do’ (Ken Bain)

Mike has found this quite a remarkable book, and loaned me a copy.

The book is a report on a fifteen-year study of a hundred or so college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities. It comes to the conclusion that it is not what teachers do, it’s what they understand.

Techniques and stuff (like lesson plans) matter less than the special way teachers view their subject and value human learning (or not!!). The best teachers, according to the study, know their subjects well, and also know how to “engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses”.

From the book:

Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.

It highlights the research that got me launched in thinking about teaching and learning in the early 1990′s: a bunch of physicists involved in the area of educational research. These guys introduced me to Vygotsky. It’s been an interesting mix actually: the kind of talk given by a physics lecturer on educational theory is quite different to other talks. Google “PER physics” (PER=Physics Education Research). They also have a different set of mental models, and some interesting (odd??) juxtapositions of ideas.

It is a short, well constructed, evidence based (is that the right term??) inspiring little book. I’ve wondered about a reading group around this book – or something. My first thought was something international through the POD group. Maybe. Watch this space.

WordPress and Themes

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It’s not been as simple a process to get a new theme as I thought. Here are a few random links I have traversed in the search for a good theme.

Essential Blogging Resources and Downloads. blogosquare.com/

Blog Tutorials www.blog-tutorials.com/category/design/

An aside, in one of my favourite themes: Cutline: University of Washington Academic advice blog and MP3′s Interesting University blog.

Not just about blogs

Intellectual Property is a Silly Euphamism www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

“Intellectual property” is one of those ideologically loaded terms that can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn’t in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency.

WIPO’s case for using the term is easy to understand: people who’ve “had their property stolen” are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than “industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated”, the latter being the more common way of talking about infringement until the ascendancy of “intellectual property” as a term of art.

Does it matter what we call it? Property, after all, is a useful, well-understood concept in law and custom, the kind of thing that a punter can get his head around without too much thinking.

That’s entirely true – and it’s exactly why the phrase “intellectual property” is, at root, a

dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are troublesome at the best of times, but they’re deadly to any country trying to make a transition to a “knowledge economy”.

Back to themes

From Craphound: How to be Blogged | Comments on quality themes: Free WordPress Themes |Wordpress 2.6 demo site: wp.chrisjohnston.org/

As I said: still very unhappy with the themes I see. Joomla has these themes clubs: www.rockettheme.com/ or www.yootheme.com/

WordPress resources: wordpressmodder.org/resources | Design Disease is pretty cool, I like his style of three column themes | WordPress QuickTag tip | Cool list of 46 ways to use wordpress | Spam trapping methods (with some plugins) | Another controversy over buying and selling blogs: www.wpdesigner.com/

I did meet a few people this week with an interest in blogging. Some have given up. A victim of overload, blogging stress or falling prey to expectations, sometimes self inflicted.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

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This was a suprisingly painless experieince, the first time I have done it completely unaided. I have decided to not move over the themes: I will engage in a new theme search tomorrow and get some new ones to try.

I’d like a theme that

allows more pages, more content.
is widget ready
is easy to use with e-mail subscriptions. Too few of my friends use RSS yet.

The new editor looks great. WordPress as an open source project is superb.

E-mail & what can do it better . . cont

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I have a well defined, high stakes, major project, with several members in the team, complexities around goals, timelines an politics: the Moodle trial. A dead sitter for a better way to work. I am going to find another way.

Week 8 with Luis on his “experiment, or initiative, at work where (he has) diverted most of (his) conversations into social computing and social software tools, both internal and external” is written up here: www.elsua.net/2008/04/07/giving-up-on-work-e-mail-status-report-on-week-8/

And here are the stats:

I couldn’t do this of course. Yet. I have fallen off the wagon again (I have got over 50 e-mails in my intray), but a passing comment to Diane at work (Thursday last week, about Luis) resulted in a passing comment today (“I thought about sending you an e-mail, but decided you didn’t need one”) Cool eh!! But this has set me thinking.

Collaborating around a wiki: the meeting scenario

I spent some time today trying to share a new way of working with our team. When working on this well defined project, Lets use a wiki and a forum. Lats take minutes as we go: simple actions who, what, by when – we got a wiki set up, even has a nice WYSIWYG editor, and made a start.

Things that slowed us down.

Failing to distinguish between Wiki and Page on wiki.
Not knowing when a page is required, and when just some more text in the page is needed.
Worrying in detail about formatting while we were merely getting down a few bullet points.
Too small a font on the data show.

It was cool, and we made good progress.

However: last week, one post to the project forum lead to three personal replies to my intray (all of which should have been in the forum), and one in the forum, and one person saying “I did reply to you (didn’t I)?”. Five interactions. I bet we can use the forum better.

I’m just deciding: do I have the nerve to say

“For this project, communicate ONLY via the wiki, the forum and the file sharing area (with it’s comments)”
Unless (as Luis says) it is a personal e-mail.
OR – wander into my airless hole of an office and talk to me. (Just don’t send me e-mails)

This would save a LOT of hassle.

Luis has made his post on Twitter. I will get to it. One question I have is this: How do we keep up with each other and what we are all working on, feed in comment when something may be of interest . . maybe a twitter-like blog of some kind?

Scenario, in the Moodle trial: Say in one day, Glen has made five discoveries on different topics (some bad), he has solved three problems, done a Moodle hack (or two), heard back from a consultant, will need to leave a meeting early. I need to tell him about a CSS problem, a setting I cannot find and I’m interested in half the things he’s worked on. I’m sure there is a better way to work than each of these needing an e-mail Have Skype open? Dunno. Yet.

We have our Moodle Trial

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I’m really not sure how I feel at the moment, 6 days into our Moodle trial. Surfing the forums. A lot of them. Just wondering where to delve in . . .

We need:

timed release
signups for groups [how can you have a supposedly constructivist enviroment without this?]
student folders for files [ditto!!]
better multimedia handling [Their mps player has no volume of time]
Better text editor

DOWNS:

They have a lingo (activity locking) where all I want is timed release like “Show the tutorial answers on Monday, after the tutorials” They are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
There are several ways to insert multmedia. A sound player with NO volume and NO duration – that you cannot stop downloadng the file whether you want to or not.
Few critical help messages in the screens, you need to use trial and error, or check the help. (ie a poor UI)
LOUSY text editor.
Save buttons ONLY at the bottom of screens sometimes.
Uploading of files has THREE approaches in different places.
Extra clicks: Tons of them.

BUT: then I get some help calls about Blackboard and it doesn’t seem so bad.

Just deciding how to engage in the forums, not finding them quite as helpful or positive as the wordpress forums. Martin seems to regularly exercise his right of veto with a robustness he really doesn’t need to use. I wonder if it is a different client base: institutions, whereas WordPress is largely individuals. More installations of WordPress . . dunno.

UPS:

Nice wiki (But then Glen loaded the OU wiki that is supposedly better)
Forums
New guy working here.
5 minute text editor fix sorted. (I am still waiting for a Blackboard fix from August 2006 to their text editor that I estimate could take all of 5 minutes)
Speed.
Multiple windows.

As an aside, we have not chosen to trial Sakai. To many show stoppers for us. For instance, “By sometime in mid-2008 admins will be able to delete forum posts”
Has anyone done a feature by feature comparison Moodle/Bb/Sakai recently?

Onwards. We have a plan, just figuring out how to work the plan.

Taking a Free Day.

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I posted a little about Dan Sullivan recently. I have just been browsing his website, wondering if it had anything on it about his ‘three day’ philosophy. There must be something there somewhere, but at the moment I cannot find it. However there is this link: on a Free Day.

Just what is a Free Day™?

Imagine the following scenario. It’s Wednesday afternoon. You and your spouse are having lunch at your favorite restaurant, “catching up.” After lunch you’ll consider a movie, or just go home and read. It doesn’t matter which. Your cell phone is off, work is the farthest thing from your mind, and you’re committed to nothing more than simply relaxing. You return to the office the next morning, guilt-free and feeling rather energetic.

Most people think of Free Days as a reward for hard work. I don’t. Free Days are a necessary precondition for achieving success and optimum productivity.

This is a Free Day, a 24-hour period completely free from work-related problem-solving, communication, and action.

And this:

Free Days are a necessary precondition for achieving success and optimum productivity. On any given day, most entrepreneurs would consider themselves extraordinarily lucky (or seriously pressured) to be able to squeeze in a bit of free time, let alone a whole day. It happens only IF they can first get “a few things” done, IF there are no unexpected crises, and IF they can just clean up a few “little messes” around the office. Not surprisingly, this seldom, if ever, happens.

But if you want to improve the quality of both your work and personal life, I think it should. And often.

He has a market niche in mind for his services (Entrepreneurs) but I think his ideas apply to the rest of us as well.

End of Long Dark Tunnel

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Basically, I can now look ahead. Our UCTL integration is complete (except that they are thinking of moving our new buddies at the Learning Skills Centre further away and out of the middle of Campus), we have a website (nearly releaseable), the LMS review committee is moving along, we have a wiki to play with, all classes have now started (except one) and there are some good things to look forward to – like this list, for a potential workshop later this month:

People were very excited about this initiative and all  the topics below had at least 12 - 15 keen responses.

Online communities

Wikis, blogs

Podcasting

Smartboards

E-portfolios

Video filming and editing

Video-conferencing facilitation

I’ve had a lot to do with some new applications

Drupal

We have a Drupal install at work. A fascinating product. I talked about this yesterday as well. From today’s surfing . . .

Local Company: egressive.co.nz Drupal, Linus, Open Office.
Interview with Drupal Founder

Scribus

The only open source DTP program I know of that really does serious stuff. I mentioned it last year. Now I am using it seriously.

Scribus Wiki
About [another standard, nice looking website by Nate Welch, www.natewelch.com/ some developer in Cape Cod]
and Flickr has a range of how to do it videos.

Wikis

My interest in wikis continues. There has been a lot of debate on TALO about this. My original request

Is there a decent wiki that meets these criteria:    ???

```
easy to install
```
```
open source
```

has a decent text editor (ie not using markup)

insert images (and image handling) is easy

insert link to other wiki pages: something decent maybe drop down list

maybe several: my recent pages, recent pages, all pages in my 'workspace'

```
Upload files
```
```
usual bold, bullets . .
```
```
Horizontal line
```
```
{I can do without decent tables]
```

```
Good discussions
```
```
Good notify
```
```
Good history
```
```
good permissions model
```
```
pref: several instances off one install
```

3 is really the problem.

Though we had something with Social Text, but not quite there for 1, nice ditor, then whammo: 'sorry, to upload an image you need to use the advanced editor (ie markup)'

Media Wiki claims to have some WYSIWYG editors as plug ins or hacks. Wikispaces on our server would be great.

TALO [teaching and learning online, a Google group and some random mashups] is a great place for support for MediaWiki, but . . . ome of the TALO discussion is here.

Wikidot: yet another wiki . . .

I quote:
“Wikidot.com is a farm of Wiki Sites. Our mission is to provide free and professional wiki publishing, collaboration and communication solutions to anyone who needs it and wants it. In other words — we are giving away free hosted wikis (like your-site.wikidot.com) with lots of features!”

sandbox.wikidot.com/ (insert a pagename here) gets you straight into editing mode for a page.
Not a WYSIWYG.
What they say about themselves – www.wikidot.com/tour:what “probably the most powerful Wiki engine available”
The syntax: www.wikidot.com/doc:wiki-syntax MW on steroids.
Some really cool features. Great forum style. Sad they have not put this energy into MW.

Diigg www.diigo.com/

Undecided about this. Kind of like delicious, highlighting, notes on sterioids, with a bit of facebook thrown in.

WordPress

Some more cool features in this cool blogging software. Version 2.5 now out.

Other things, Not software

China was great. May go back. The blog of the trip is here. The content of the workshops is here.

More on e-mail

I’ve found Luis’s first post (see yesterday).

Yes, I’m giving up on e-mail! At least, work related e-mail! That’s right, this week I have launched a new experiment, or initiative, at work where I have diverted most of my conversations into social computing and social software tools, both internal and external.

You did what?!?! Yes, I surely did!! Just like you are reading it. Last Saturday I decided that enough was enough and I created a post in my internal blog where I was mentioning that from that day onwards I would not be answering any e-mails, nor write any e-mails myself either, but instead I would make the most out of social software tools and social computing, in general, to get in touch with other knowledge workers and collaborate further sharing and exchanging our knowledge over there.

I know, you can call me crazy now! You can say I am out of my mind, but the truth is that I am now on the 5th day of taking such a radical approach to my daily workload and the overall experience has been tremendous!! In all of those 5 days I have received a total number of 45 e-mails. Yes, you are reading it right!! 45 e-mails!! When normally on a daily basis I would be getting, on busy days, between 30 to 45! A day!! But this time around, things have been different. I have been telling people I will no longer be responding to e-mails, because the more I respond, the more I get. I am sure you have seen and been through that already!

Blogging policies.

I’m not a great blogger. But we are needing some policies on blogging and wikiing. We have NO policies here @ UoC on the web, apart from web standards for official pages. But I have found some great links. I’ve listed them on AKOwiki.

In particular, the 4 key rules from CorperateBlogging.info.

Professional Development Workshops. (Have they passed their use by date?)

In spite of the fact that we are planning a workshop next month, we are looking at some better strategies (ie achieving longer lasting results in terms of real change) .

The long dark tunnel

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It probably should be the best time of year. Trying new things, getting up and running for the year.

In fact, it’s not. It’s largely firefighting, getting little things sorted in a less than decorous fashion, with the exception of Veronica’s project and Nicola’s Creative Thinking – it’s been a lot of business as usual. And the LMS review. I have done 12 sessions with staff in the last three weeks.

Do we do a Moodle trial?

This is the question – and the committee may be ready to make a decision on Wednesday. I’ve compiled a document comparing Blackboad and Moodle, and Podcast as well. My sessions were to elicit feedback on IF we have a trial and any comment on the PROCESS of a trial.

I’ve had a lot to do with Moodle in a short time. I’ll need to do a silly little things easlity fixed with Moodle post soon.

Why did we choose Drupal??

Still tinkering with drupal for our UCTL. Got a request for a revamp two weeks after we launched, and are now working on this. Drupal is cool!! But it is just a framework. Needs a lot of fixing to get it anywhere – needed is a template install with some stuff done. May be coming: Via Glen Davies:
www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/pirillo-starts-large-scale-community-cms-project/

In summary: Chris Pirillo (LockerGnome) wants to produce decent installs of Drupal for non geeks, out of the box functionality. Not just a framework.

Having just been through a drupal install, some built in installs would be great. There are several things I don’t really know much about in Chris’s talk. Chris is behind “activity streams”, a Drupal plugin. http://drupal.org/project/activitystream He is a little polemical and evangelistic in this video.

Getting things Done. GTD. My story continues . . .

I now do have a system where pretty well my whole life is in folders and lists. Piece of cake. It’s the psychic side that has been a problem. Tim Barnes, an old friend from the 60′s visited from California and has talked about a Canadia consultant (whose name escapes me)who describes three types of days:

Days where yooyu are really focused on your delivery of core business stuff. You are on the top of your game. You are delivering %110
Day’s off. Resting. No work. Re-creating.
Days to make sure type I and II actually happen.

A simple little template, which has been quite helpful during the busy March that is just about to end. My unit is less than a day. But the principle applies.

E-mail worries.

I’ve tried the 43 Folders approach. Didn’t work. Merlin has several buckets to toss e-mail into. I’ve checked a few of the variatins on this model, and until M$ outlook implements decent tagging, I’m sticking with three buckets.

In
Follow Up - no more than 30 e-mails, but it can drift up. All the stuff Merlin has in Waiting for, Action, Follow up etc. I have NOT been able to get hard edges, and rely on search in this folder . . .
Recent Past. A plie, that often includes “May need” I sort these later into Monthly buckets.

I also have a ton of subject related folders. These are growing at the rate of one a week. I am cavalier with these. I just chuck things into them as references I may use. My mail is empty several times a week at the moment. BUT:

Committee involvement

The wiki committee. The day I got a new wiki toy to play with with any classes I went to the University (Dekiwiki - but that is another story) I joined a committee to have it’s first meeting. The purpose: To investigate whether we needed a centrally supported wiki. We are doing the usual university thing: terms of reference, minutes . . . . we are sort of using a wiki, but it is not available outside the firewall, and at the moment people are still using e-mail.

The LMS Review committee. We have a superb forum, notifications etc – but people are still using e-mail. I am not actually on the committee (whew!!) but I am at their beck and call. We are now playing e-mail non-collabnoration in the countdown to a decision on Wednesday.

Which brings me to my next matter.

Death to e-mail at work

Today I stumbed across the blog of Luis Suarez www.elsua.net/
One of the worst designed wordpress blogs I have ever seen (little things like Blue on blue side columns, no post summaries, Scores and scores of links and stuff that prints in a single column out if you print a page (No print CSS!!!), lousy search, but I digress – ) – this guy is onto something about e-mail. It’s been hard to locate the posts in his latest theme, but there are several dating back over 7 week on a theme: death to work e-mail.

(quote to come, I cannot locate on the site the first post . .)

Death to work e-mail: with one exception . . . (personal, private/sensitive e-mails from one person to you) The rest?? Put it in some decent social software tool. Cool. Here are the posts: Week 1 (the announcement) | Week 3 | Week 6 | Week 7

As an aside, his comments about Twitter I will come back to later.

OK. Enough for now. Still to come. Blogging and wiki policies. TALO. China.