I got to give a presentation to a group of about 15 anthropology grad students today, about new technologies for teaching and learning (the official topic was "new technologies for the classroom," but that's rather limited, no?). I had initially planned on talking for only 15-20 minutes of the hour we would have, and we booked a lab so every person could hammer away at weblogs, wikis, etc… I wound up giving the whirlwind tour of new technologies – intro to blogging (3 people read blogs, 1 has one already), wikis (huh?), Flickr (one user), social bookmarking (huh?) I showed them the new weblogs.ucalgary.ca service (which worked fine in the demo, but the LDAP connection died when they tried to login – think that's been fixed now). The students were quite interested in the tools, and we had a discussion about how they could be using wikis to collaborate with other students and colleagues. I told the story of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, TheFuss, and Pachyderm (showing the paper we wrote for Museums and the Web 2005 in a wiki). Next time I do this, I'll have to remember to break it into smaller bite-sized pieces. Perhaps a session on weblogs. One on wikis. One on RSS. One on social bookmarking… Links and resources for this session are online here and here.
Whirlwind Tour of New Technologies
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Those session resources are most groovy! I really like the way you approached these topics, and there are some links that are new to me. I shall be plundering this.
Plunder away! Where do you think I got a good chunk of that in the first place?
And, I totally plundered the “wiki as presentation tool” from DJ Wiki himself. Worked quite well – made for a much less scripted session, as we could easily branch and add stuff to the pages as we went along. Also a good demo of using wikis, since the students (and their prof) got to see one in action, rather than just as a quasi-static demo page.
We are on the verge of deploying a blog server, but we’re getting some resistance from administrative types about the content. They were worried about the “image” that the blogs might portray. Did you have any of these problems? Did you make any restrictions on who can have a blog?
Laura, I did hear some concerns along that line. “But, if they can publish anything, what if they publish something bad or wrong, or embarrassing?”
I responded that there are a few things that should minimize that.
1. Blog posts are not anonymous. They are tied to an account, therefore everyone will know who posted it.
2. It’s easy to track posts, to see what is being said (via RSS, email, whatnot).
3. This is no different than allowing people to carry megaphones onto campus. They could holler incorrect/embarrassing messages into the megaphone. But people typically don’t do that.
If someone has a valid negative comment, why not let them have their voice? Then, deal with the root causes (fix the problem) rather than silencing dissent.
We’re running the weblogs.ucalgary.ca project as an experiment. I phrased it that way so the Admin types would be more comfortable with it.
Currently, anyone with a valid University email address can have a blog (and polls, and book authoring…) with no additional intervention – they don’t have to apply for an account, since it’s automatically created when the login with their campus credentials.
Thanks for the info. We said that we’d do it as an experiment too. And we just said if it gets out of hand, we’d take it down. Honestly, I think if people want to complain, they’re going to set up a Blogger or LiveJournal account and do it. Our blogs will be attached to e-mail accounts as well so they won’t be anonymous. I totally agree with your assessment that people should fix the problem rather than stifle dissent. Not sure how that will go over. We’ll see. I’ll be keeping an eye on yours. Ours is at http://blogs.brynmawr.edu and is truly beta. We’re still tinkering with all kinds of code.
Good luck, Laura! I actually found your blogs.brynmawr.edu site by poking around on your ETC site. It looks good!