7 Responses to “Nobody blogging Merlot2005?”

1. Stephen Downes on July 29th, 2005 5:14 pm

   Well D’Arcy, if you read my newsletter yesterday you would have seen my link to Little Train’s Brad Carson, who blogged the whole thing.

   http://littletrain.blogspot.com/

   Tags, of course, are dysfunctional, but you’ve heard this argument from me before.

2. D'Arcy on July 29th, 2005 5:43 pm

   Tags may be disfunctional, but they do work. And they’re somewhat more automated than having a personal Downes-powered human blog filter

   I’d missed your OLDaily post on it - checking out Brad’s blog now…

3. Alan on July 29th, 2005 7:48 pm

   Why would anyone blog Merlot. Blogs are just “online diaries….”

   And remember back to 2003, when us 2.5 Canadian Amigos presented RSS and Learning Objects at Merlot in Vancouver
   http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/show/merlot03/

   Merlot had barely heard of RSS and it took them months more to get around to doing it.

   But moreso, it demonstrates our skewed view of connected, tag happy netizens- inside the sphere of folks who blog conference, read conference coverarge from conferences, it seems like an assumed action. This is, amng the general population, a small percentage of the pie of humanity.

   Blogging a conference is out there among the extreme ranges of OCD activitiy– there are not enough self motivated folks to do so? On the other hand, I have read references to folks that are paid to blog conferences.

4. D'Arcy on July 29th, 2005 8:22 pm

   Yeah, but that was 2 YEARS ago! Entire online ecosystems have evolved and died out in that time. I find it hard to believe that the Merlot attendees this year don’t include at least a handful of bloggers.

   But, yeah. I guess I do take this stuff for granted. Seems like we’ve been doing this stuff forever…

5. Matt Pasiewicz on July 31st, 2005 8:27 am

   For whatever it is worth, we’ll be publishing a tag to use for those that may be blogging info about E2005 … we have trackbacks enabled for the site at large too … thinking about making them visible for individual sessions. If you have other ideas, lemme know. Thanks, Matt

6. Stephen Downes on July 31st, 2005 3:20 pm

   Hard to believe it was two years ago, isn’t it? And it’s funny - it seems to me that the gap is widening, the gap between what’s happening on the web and in the blogosphere, and what’s happening in academic.

   p.s. I agree, the Downes-powered human blog filter is a poor substitute for a working system. I tried to find the MERLOT posts through the usual aggregators, but Brad Carson’s blog isn’t being picked up yet by any of them. *Normally* though I would have had a nice counterexample to tagging.

   But really, the people at MERLOT - at the very least, the presenters, if not the attendees or the conference itself - should have been providing some syndicated content goodness. That they didn’t shows (IMHO) just how far behind the curve they are.

7. D'Arcy on July 31st, 2005 3:29 pm

   Wasn’t complaining about my Downes-powered blogosphere filter - just concerned about the scalability

   Considering we, as a group, brought Merlot up to speed 2 years ago (wow - doesn’t seem that long ago…) I’m more interested/concerned about what that means wrt. momentum of this stuff… If the instigators drop off, will the tools cease to be used? That’s a pretty crappy story to tell about these “enabling and democratizing” online tools - if they only stay alive if a handful of individuals remain active in every community they can…

   Here’s hoping the EDUCAUSE crowd groks it better - Matt’s been doing some great stuff there (but again - if he were to leave EDUCAUSE, would the tools wither on the vine as they did at Merlot?)

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