The Ed Techie

CoComment - I want to be a good blogger

I confess, I am not a good blogizen - I don't link enough, and I definitely don't comment enough. The latter is partly based on maximum return on investment - I have so little to say, if I do have anything worth writing I need it for a blog post, not to be hidden away on someone's comments. But I recognise how much I like getting comments (apart from the snarky ones - you know who you are;) so I should do more of it.

Alan Levine has an annual week of no-blogging, just commenting, in recognition of the value commenting adds. He used CoComment, which Sue Waters picked up on, but rates co.mments higher.

In my one man campaign to make technological determinism respectable, I installed CoComment because I think having a good tool will make me more likely to comment. First impressions are good - it installs on Firefox, and when you add a comment to a page it automatically adds it to the list of 'conversations' you are having. It has a social element so you can add people as friends or favourites, (not entirely sure of the difference). You can subscribe to the RSS feed of other's comments, or to one conversation. You can even claim your own comments on Technorati.

All this leads to some interesting reflections on the nature of comments. They form one of the second order modes of dialogue that operate around blogs (blogs really are the glue that holds the web together - why did we even have a web before blogs?). Twitter is another example of this second order, but unlike comments it can exist on its own. It overlaps with blogs, but isn't dependent on them.

Does it make sense to subscribe to someone's comments? Kind of, in that it will alert you to their thoughts on other people's postings. What CoComment adds for me is some stickability around comments - if I did post I wouldn't revisit and thus the conversation would be lost. Now I'm much more inclined to get involved in a debate.

Feedburner, no Typepad, goes AWOL

[Update - the problem was Typepad's not Feedburner's, so I humbly apologise to Feedburner. See Sue Waters post]

Got a tweet from Sarah Horrigan today, saying her Feedburner feed for my blog was sending her to a blog on pregnancy called Jumping Monkeys. Sure enough, Google Reader had pulled in that blog's feed for me also. I checked in Feedburner, everything seemed normal, the feed pointed to my blog, the pages listed were my pages, but my reach had dropped to zero.

I tried unsubscribing in GReader and resubscribing, but to no effect. I was now panicking somewhat. Having worked hard to build up around 500 subscribers, they were now all getting posts about baby sitters (okay, some are probably preferring them). I could feel my technorati rating tumbling. The Feedburner help is, let's be fair, rubbish. There seems to be now way to contact them direct and the forums didn't contain anything useful.

So, I had to disconnect from Feedburner and reinstate and RSS feed on this blog. It's here by the way: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/rss.xml

But the thing is lots of people won't know I've turned feedburner off, they'll assume I've either had a sex change and started blogging about pregnancy, gone insane or just stopped blogging. Thank heavens I could at least put a call out in Twitter.

I'm whimpering now.

Top widgets (or why Google runs the world)

(charlessc - http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesc/100343106/)

My favourite search tool, Lijit, has a feature on the top widgets. The top two by quite some distance are Google Analytics and Google Syndication (AdSense). Surprisingly mybloglog is third (well above Technorati and Twitter).

The post also breaks them down by type, with 'metrics' being the most common type of widget people add. They also show the most popular tools within each category, and it's here you really see the dominance of Google. In the Analytics category Google Analytics scores 39.9% compared with Sitemeter in second place with 16.2%. In Ads, Adsense has a whopping 84.8% share of the market, and in video, YouTube unsurprisingly sweeps the board with 86.6%.

One rather ironic, and thus sweet result - Google comes third in Search (behind Snap and Lijit).

Still it shows one thing - all that twenty percent time is paying off for Google.

Blog as educational platform, VLE even

(http://flickr.com/photos/jbird/19650368/ JBrd)

This is really an re. loads of other people post, but I wanted to pull them together for my sake anyway.

There have been a few experiments recently in taking open content and putting it in a blog. Not mindbendingly innovative and yet very powerful when you see it.

I remember Tony showing me something like this around the early 19th century which he had knocked together using a penny farthing, carrots and a chimney sweep (Update: it was Nov 06), and he comments on the recent stuff. Then recently David Wiley took some of his open education course and republished it in WordPress. It looks really neat, enticing, well structured. Looks a damn site more inviting than, say, a Blackboard version of the course might.

Then Jim Groom took the OU's openlearn Goya stuff and put it in Wordpress. Guess what? It looks better than the original.

Brian Lamb (who easily has the best titles for blog posts around) sums it all up nicely and points to a session Jim Groom and D'Arcy Norman are doing at Northern Voice entitled  'Don't call it a blog, call it an educational publishing platform'. Which sums it up really.

There are several things of interest here for us ed techies. The first is that presentation matters. I like the look of these blog courses, and that would make me more inclined to participate in them, make me feel well disposed towards them and make me feel as though the people running them were vaguely modern and knew what they were doing. The aesthetics of the interface is something we pay scant attention to in education.

The second thing is that you may be thinking it's just a blog, it doesn't have tool X or Y that my VLE might have. Well maybe, but I think we're in disruptive technology territory here. Disruptive technology doesn't do the same things better for the same audience, it is often worse on some things, but it offers some new features for a different audience. The new features I would argue here are:

1. Ease of publishing - whether it's your own content or others, getting in to blogs is fairly straightforward
2. Ease of extendability - adding widgets and tools to blogs is just a click away, since blogs have become the universal platform across the web.
3. Openness - you can pull content and tools in from anywhere
4. Ease of navigation - blogs come with an inbuilt navigational structure that is easily co-opted for course structure.

I wonder if this isn't another example of how we in education create complex solutions to complex problems, whereas simple solutions often work better.

Blogs aren't a luxury

(lawgeek - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdawg/110174487/ - may take some looking at!)

The recent kerfuffle over openlearn made me reflect on the relationship between the individual blogger and their institution. I'm not going to go into the debate about openlearn itself, but rather point out some things about the incident. From the OU Tony, Laura and myself have all responded. Laura's probably counts as a semi-official response, while Tony's and mine are independent to the extent that we could say what we like (although not independent in that we are obviously affiliated with the OU and to an extent the project).

Here are some observations:

i) There was a very quick response. I saw Tony had twittered the original post, I blogged about it, then twittered my response, then Tony blogged, all within a couple of hours. Had we waited for an official response to be agreed and worded it would have taken days, if not weeks, by which time it would have been irrelevant anyway.

ii) Stephen Downes had blogged about Seb Schmoller's post. He then blogged about mine and Tony's response. A lot of people read Stephen's posts, so if Tony and I hadn't responded there would have been no counter-argument for this audience.

iii) Stephen and others only picked up on our responses because we have spent a long time establishing a reasonable blogging reputation.

iv) Both Tony and I didn't feel any pressure to respond or defend openlearn. We weren't doing it at the behest of the OU, but rather as people who have a tangential relation to the project. This meant I was also critical of openlearn, and Tony has always been a friendly critic. For institutions this is a difficult thing to grasp, you have to give us the freedom to be critical in order for our defence to have any meaning. In other words you have to relinquish control of your corporate image. Had I been requested to post a defence, I think I would have declined - I've worked too long at this blog to allow it to be an institutional mouthpiece.

What this really demonstrates to me is that if as an institution you haven't got reputable bloggers on your team then you are exposed to a world of criticism that you cannot engage with. For organisations having bloggers isn't a luxury, it's a necessity.

Technorati as scholarly metric

The other day my technorati authority finally nudged past 100. This is significant for me because in my annual staff appraisal meeting last year one of the goals I set myself was to achieve this. I did this because I wanted to test the whole staff appraisal system, and as part of my campaign to get blogging recognised as a scholarly activity, in the Open University at least. Having measurable outputs then is a means of bringing blogging in to the fold - like publishing a number of journal articles, or delivering a number of presentations. It's measurable, therefore it's real in the eyes of official processes.

Having achieved my goal (and ahead of schedule too!) I thought I'd reflect on it, in case anyone is attempting something similar. There are a number of questions one should ask about this use of Technorati as one measure of academic performance.

Firstly, is it reliable? This itself breaks down in to two parts: Is Technorati itself working reliably, and then is it a reliable measure of academic output. Taking the Technorati element first, I'd say - sort of. In my experience it sometimes gives odd results - my authority dropped when In posted two new items. Why would it decrease with new posts? It also hasn't picked up some people I know have linked to me, this may be because they are not listed on Technorati themselves. And it also takes ages to update sometimes. For some reason my blog is shown twice, with two different authorities. So, there may be some glitches, but overall it acts as a reasonable proxy to blogging reputation.

The second element was whether it is a good measure of academic output. Clearly Technorati itself doesn't care what I blog about. I could have increased my authority by blogging about Paris Hilton, or by indulging in blog wars and linkbaiting. That doesn't make it a good educational blog, so clearly your Technorati authority needs to be only one component.

After reliability we come on to desirability. Would it be good to have your Technorati authority (or any such measure) used as part of your scholarly output? There are two viewpoints to take on this, firstly from the educational establishment, and secondly from the blogging community. In terms of the establishment I'd argue that although there are issues around reliability, the same is true of traditional measures also. It is relatively easy to get publications out in some journals, to publish lots of papers from the same basic idea/research by only changing a small element between each and to get research students to do all the work. To combat this we end up with the convoluted and tortuous measures of esteem that are found in the RAE.

From the blogger's perspective the reaction might be 'please don't ruin blogging by making it one of your measurable factors.' Having seen what this has done to research publications (ie transformed them from a genuine activity to a game to be played for points), the last thing you'd want as a blogger is to have this area of creativity, engagement and enjoyment trampled over by herds of bean-counters. One can imagine what it would be like - points for rate of blogging, for your ranking, for the number of subscribers, etc. All of which would transform behaviour and ruin it. But, having said that if we bloggers truly think it is the best place for academic discourse, then getting it recognised as such may be important for encouraging new academics who need to keep an eye on their career path.

Overall then? For me it's been worthwhile having a specific target, and having some form of measurement I can feed into the system to have that activity recognised. Perhaps the thing to remember is that it doesn't matter what it means, after all is an authority of 100 good? Should it be 200, 700, or some other number? What does it mean in terms of reach? But there is a measurement in the system, and the system likes measurements, so it can rest easy.

The Selfies - award your own blog

After the Eddies and the Downesies, and in the spirit of end of year reviews, I've decided to award myself some Selfies, ie awards for my own blog given by me.

Here they are:

Best post

I think I'll give this to the Future of Content debate. I'm not sure it worked as an integrated article, but I enjoyed the discussion and playing with the format. This is probably the closest I've come to something that compares with 'proper' scholarly output in my blog.

Worst post

Aside from this one, I think the Lexicon for real world/virtual world interaction was a naked bit of linkbaiting. And it didn't even work. Sorry.

Favourite widget

I do like having my Twitter posts showing up on but I think I'll give this to Ligit. I don't use it a lot but socially enhanced search is going to be big I reckon.

Favourite use of media

I don't use embedded media much (see below) so haven't got a lot to choose from. So it's a no-brainer to go for Slidecasts. Insomnia sufferers will be pleased to hear I plan to do more of these next year.

Most irritating habit

I seem incapable of doing a post:

• that doesn't
• include
• a list
• of some sort.

Biggest area for improvement

If we accept I'm not going to have a personality change and become more interesting, than I really am too text based. I need to use more images, and this is my resolution for next year, to add more 'design' to my posts.

Best linker

Tony Hirst and I have a kind of extended blog dialogue going, but I'll give this to AJ for outing me as a Spongebob fan.

Technorati basher

The post that most improved your technorati ranking. It was probably the Future of content one, but I'll give it to The VLE/LMS is dead, because it was a post I knocked off quickly and was surprised by the interest it generated. Which goes to show, you can never tell what posts will spark off a debate in the blogosphere.

So there they are, the Selfies: indulgent, self-referential and pointless. Bit like the Oscars really...

The edublog awards experience

The awards ceremony for the Eddies was on Saturday night in SecondLife. I'm not much of a SecondLifer, and besides, spending my Saturday night in a virtual world is probably grounds for divorce, so didn't attend.

I was up in the Best Ed Tech Support category, which was won by El Tinglado. Congratulations to them, I think it's great to see a non-English blog winning - there is a tendency to first of all be North-America-centric about blogs and then English-speaking centric.

I thought I'd reflect on the experience of being nominated. One of my informal roles at the Open University is blog evangelist, and as part of this I see one of my aims is to get blogging recognised as both a valid scholarly activity and also beneficial to the organisation as a whole. Having three OU nominees up this time (me, Tony and Peter Twining's Schome project) has been the first concrete indicator I can use that there is external recognition for this sort of output. It has also given me an opportunity to raise the profile of blogging across the university, and particularly with senior management.

This to me is the real importance of the Eddies - they provide an opportunity for blogging activity to be recognised. We can talk about how great blogs but if it's only self-validation then it's easy to be dismissed. As soon as there is some form of external validation then people tend to pay more attention.

The other very useful thing has been that it has introduced me to some other blogs, and by being part of the nominees, the bloggers behind them. I'm going to use the 'C' word here - yes, I feel a bit more part of a community. And that's got to be a good thing.

The only downside is that, as Tony has highlighted, the voting process seemed a bit unreliable. I don't think this matters too much for the Eddies since one can truly say, 'it's the being nominated that counts', but if we wanted to really vote on something serious we'd need to find ways of addressing these issues.

So, thanks to Edublogs and Josie Fraser for organising it, I'm already looking forward to next year.

What web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose?

This is sort of web 2.0 desert island discs (I know lots of people have done this before, e.g. here and here). Having heard stories of people having their Flickr or Facebook accounts pulled, I wondered what would be the service I would least like to lose? Here are my top three:

1. Blog - okay, it's not a single service as such and pre-dates the use of the term web 2.0, but it's my list, so I'm bundling it in. As I said in my post of why educators should blog, I see the blog as the base camp for your online world. Everything else spreads from this identity. For me it is the sine qua non of an online existence, and it's also the one I gain the most satisfaction from. If I lost this I would feel truly that my professional life (and personal to an extent) was the poorer for it. Blog - I heart you.
2. Twitter - yes, in at number 2, and the surprise hit over Facebook. I started back in September when I decided I really needed to give Twitter a decent run. And I'm converted. It makes me feel connected to a range of peers, in a non-intrusive way (unlike IM), it is great for finding resources, it offers access to a support network, and is also good fun. If the future is a hive mentality then Twitter is it's waggle dance. If I lost Twitter I'd miss out on feeling part of a broader ed tech community, hell I may even have to go to conferences.
3. Facebook - I still like Facebook, but as my previous post sets out, Twitter has removed some of the motivation to go into it. Facebook is slightly more friend and institution focused. At the OU we have started developing applications for Facebook, which I think will be a very good way for students to enhance their own learning experience (for instance they can find people on the same course, find a study buddy, recommend courses, and soon share their story, swap resources, etc). I'm sure something else will come along and replace FB eventually, but the questions it has raised about how you support learners in this space and take advantage of the community it offers them, without invading their space will be important ones for us to address in education for years to come. If I lost Facebook I'd lose access to some friends who I only have contact through this and I'd also lose a space where we can think about the future of education.

Honorable mention - Slideshare. I do like Slideshare, it's just neat at what it does. And recording bad slidecasts is my new favourite hobby.

And that's it - Flickr, Delicious, LinkedIn, 43Things, YouTube - I could live without them. I like them, but their loss wouldn't be as catastrophic for me as the above.

What are the three you would least like to lose? Remember to focus on what impact their loss would have, not just on why you like them.

Google reader recommendations

Like a lot of people I use Google reader, and find it very useful (I recently discovered the mobile version which is cool). They've added in a recommendations panel recently which lists some blogs they think you'll find interesting. As the Google blog says:

Interesting" here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion.

The recommendations I've had have been pretty good, so whatever data mining technique they're using it seems to be effective. It's a cool feature and another step along the complete Googlisation of my life. It's a good way for newbies to build up their list and for old hands to find some new blogs. Of course the only problem is that it doesn't read them for me.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone comes across this blog via a Google recommendation.