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Scott Leslie posted a link to Charter for Compassion, and I can’t think of a better thing to support. Compassion is so painfully lacking in the world today. It needs to be universal. We are all connected.

This is something I struggle with as well. I need to try harder. A LOT harder. Compassion is essential. Compassion is active. I can’t imagine leaving my son a world that lacks real compassion.

However, this is not about religion. Religion has nothing to do with compassion. I am an athiest, and see compassion as essential – without being muddied by religious interpretation. Compassion is not righteousness, nor is it divine.

(link to video, in case it borks in RSS)

I’m taking a graduate level course on Technology & Society, and for my Big Term Assignment, I’ve decided to try something a little non-traditional. Taking a page out of Alan Levine’s great playbook, I’d like to ask people to respond to a simple question:

How do YOU connect online?

More info is available over on the project website – but the short version is that I need people to respond to the question, however they interpret it, in whatever format they’re comfortable responding. I will assemble the responses into a narrative which will be published on November 30, 2009.

Please spread the URL – I need as many different responses and perspectives as possible.

If you can read this, then the move to a new server at CanadianWebHosting.com is complete. They had to disable SSH on the existing servers because of an apparent hack attempt, so I asked to be moved to a server that had SSH available. They moved stuff over the weekend, and DNS took a bit to propagate. But relatively painless…

(sorry for the banal feed noise – I needed a post published on the new server so I could test DNS propagation – and if I post a bunch of these, I might catch up to The Reverend, now that he’s gone all Bob Villa…)

I just posed this question on Twitter, but thought I’d try posting it here as well, in case there are different people reading each stream…

How is the nature of connection between people online different from “traditional” offline connections? How, really, do they differ?

I’m hoping to tease out some real, perceived, and possibly false differences between internet connections and traditional connections between people, for a project as part of the Technology & Society course I’m taking. I’m not meaning TCP/IP connections, or ethernet, but how people are able to connect, interact, communicate, engage, etc… online as opposed to offline.

Any thoughts?

I finally got my invite to Google Wave, and it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. Google’s in a bit of a hard spot, because they have to live up to some insanely strong hype that was created by non-Google folks about how Google Wave Will Change The World! Google Wave Will Kill Blackboard/Windows/BinLaden/WorldHunger. Sure, there was some hype sparked by Google themselves, but most of the unrealistic stuff was spun by people dreaming about what Wave could possibly do, in some mythical Wave-enabled future.

Sure, Wave is big. It’s probably going to be useful. But for now, it’s really just a glorified, collaborative, polysynchronous “Hello World!” generator. Yes, you can embed Gadgets/Doodads/Whatnots. Yes, you can make it convert your text into Pirate Speak. Very cool. Awesome. I can feel the future changing.

So far, from my limited experimentation with it, it is too confusing to use as a conversation space. It’s too disconnected to use as a publishing medium. So, its real functions have yet to be discovered. It’s not email. It’s not the web as we know it. It’s something different. But that doesn’t mean there is anything necessarily wrong or broken about what we have now.

If I want to communicate, I’ll talk to people. Or IM. Or email. Or write a blog post. Or post a tweet. Or any of an uncountable list of other activities, none of which are replaced by Wave. And that’s OK. It’s not going to absorb and consume all online interaction. It’s not going to change the world. It doesn’t have to.

Now, get off my lawn.

Update: I hadn’t seen this post before I wrote this, but from Slate:

Live-typing illustrates Wave’s bigger problem: In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don’t need fixing. What is Wave? Its designers say that it’s an effort to modernize e-mail by adding features from IM, wikis, and other tools for collaborating in the Web age. Improving e-mail is a worthy goal: There’s too much of it, a lot of the mail we get is useless (even the stuff that’s not spam), and threads involving more than two or three people can get wildly, incomprehensibly out of hand.

But Wave tries to fix these problems by replacing e-mail with an entirely alien interface that isn’t very intuitive and that introduces new problems of its own. You pretty much have to watch one of the Wave team’s instructional videos in order to learn how to do the simplest things—send a message, reply to a message, add more people to your message, etc. You’ve even got to learn a new nomenclature: In Wave, messages are called waves, which are themselves composed of smaller elements called blips. There’s also another class of message called pings, which are meant to be more urgent than waves—though once you’re done with a ping, it turns into a wave. Got that?

I’ve been having a heck of a time battling sploggers at UCalgaryBlogs.ca – roaches that create accounts and blogs so they can foist their spam links to game Google (thanks for providing spammers with such a powerful incentive, Google).

There’s an option in WordPress Multiuser to ban email domains – provide the domains, one per line, into a text box, and it will reject any roaches trying to create accounts from those domains.

The biggest offenders have been myspace.info and myspacee.info – and although they’ve been in my Banned Email Domains list for months, they just keep getting through. I figured there was some exploit they were using, but couldn’t find a thing.

So, today, I took a look through the code of WPMU 2.8.4, to see if I could find what was going on. Turns out, it’s a really simple fix. There’s a function in wp-includes/wpmu-functions.php, called is_email_address_unsafe() – it’s supposed to check the contents of the Banned Email Domains option field, and reject addresses from the flagged domains.

Except it wasn’t. Rejecting, I mean. It was letting everyone through, because of a simple bug in the code. It was written to treat the value of the option as an array and to directly walk through each item of the array. But, the option is stored as a string, so it needs to be converted to an array first. Easy peasy. Here’s my updated is_email_address_unsafe() function, which goes around line 880 of wpmu-functions.php:

function is_email_address_unsafe( $user_email ) {
	$banned_names_text = get_site_option( "banned_email_domains" ); // grab the string first
	$banned_names = explode("\n", $banned_names_text); // convert the raw text string to an array with an item per line
	if ( is_array( $banned_names ) && empty( $banned_names ) == false ) {
		$email_domain = strtolower( substr( $user_email, 1 + strpos( $user_email, '@' ) ) );
		foreach( (array) $banned_names as $banned_domain ) {
			if( $banned_domain == '' )
				continue;
			if (
				strstr( $email_domain, $banned_domain ) ||
				(
					strstr( $banned_domain, '/' ) &&
					preg_match( $banned_domain, $email_domain )
				)
			)
			return true;
		}
	}
	return false;
}

The fix is in the first 2 lines of the function – getting the value of the string, and then exploding that into the array which is then used by the rest of the function. I’ve tested the updated function out on UCalgaryBlogs.ca and it seems to work just fine. Hopefully the fix will get pulled into the next update of WPMU so everyone with Banned Email Domains can breathe a bit more easily.

One of the things I was missing when I switched from Google Reader to Fever˚ was a way to share items from my subscriptions. Fever˚ didn’t have any way to generate a feed of things I saved, so it was kind of a separate silo. But, the most recent version of Fever˚ includes a cool new feature to share my Saved items in an RSS feed. Easy peasy.

Here’s an embedded view of the last 30 saved items, thanks to the magical wondrousness of Feed2JS: (it’ll probably bork in the feed, though. irony.)

There are lots of other features that got added in the last update, including integration with Twitter and Instapaper. Fever˚ just keeps getting better and better…

A couple of weeks ago, the number of words in comments (i.e., stuff you wrote) passed the number of words in posts (i.e., stuff I wrote) on this blog. And now, the comment word count just pushed over half a million words.

This is no longer my blog. I’m not sure what it is, but it ain’t (just) mine, for sure.

The Open Education conference last week was easily one of the best conferences I’ve ever participated in. It was intense, incredibly run, thoughtfully planned, and brought together an extremely diverse and intelligent group of people. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so intimidated by the sheer number of scary-smart people in the same room.

The conference was awesome. Lots of people have already recapped the conference itself – I’m not going to even try to add to that. I’m also not going to write a post about how fracking awesome everyone is, listing them all by name. I had a blast talking to everyone. They all rock. I am honoured to have had the chance to meet so many great new people, and to hang out with so many old friends. Blah blah blah…

What I was struck by was the ways I found the conference changing how I was thinking about education, openness, and inclusion. I felt a similar shift at the first Open Education conference I attended back in 2007, but this was a much deeper, more pervasive feeling.

Open Education is not about Resources

Although many of the sessions touched on Open Education Resources (OER, Learning Objects, content, etc…) there was a strong consensus that education is about so much more than content, and is also so much more than the tools and technologies used to present the content and connect the learners. This was a refreshing stance, as we seem to be highly content- and technology-centric when thinking about education (and Open Education, specifically). How do we shift the focus from content to interaction? From publishing and/or consuming to interaction and engagement? There were some interesting conversations about this, and although I don’t think there can be any solid answers, the fact that we’re looking at this stuff as more than just content, at education as more than just broadcast/receive, is a good sign.

Openness

Scott Leslie talks about “planning to share” vs. “just going ahead and sharing” – and the most interesting projects (and non-projects) all shared this theme. There were no RFPs, no committees, no Advisory Boards. People just started sharing. And that’s the only part of Openness that matters. It’s not about licenses, copyright, or anything other than just sharing what you’re doing.

And, there is also some hypocrisy in “open” projects – for example, the showing of a very short clip of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, at an education conference, in an art gallery, apparently cost over $100. And the distributors wanted over $300 to let us watch the entire movie. A movie that ends by saying “Download this movie” – and is not legally downloadable within Canada, even though it was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Openness is not about licensing, it’s about sharing. And locking a movie that is inherently about sharing behind a paywall is breaking the spirit of openness. Hypocrisy.

Tribalism

At an evening session on copyright, Sonny Assu presented some of his work – where he appropriated many of the commercial symbols that have been pushed on us and have become part of our cultural heritage. He talked about how we now use these symbols as parts of our selected tribal identities. The tribe of the $5 coffee cup. The tribe of the white earbuds. This got me thinking about everything I saw in terms of tribalism and identity – which tribes or shared cultural groups do I broadcast membership in? What does that mean, for how other people perceive me? Do they see the symbols of the group identity? How does my perception of others’ group identities affect my interactions with them? How does this affect the relationships that are crucial in education? Lots of stuff to think about, and no answers to come.

Inclusion

Following on the thoughts of inclusion, and on the strong sense of male dominance at the conference (which was a veritable sausage party), I started thinking much more about inclusion. If the open education conference was so strongly over-represented by white males who shared similar backgrounds, why is that? If it’s not through active exclusion (there is no club to join, no registry to sign, no approval process), it may be through a sense of inclusion or non-inclusion. Why are women, people of colour, people of various other backgrounds, not as strongly represented here? Are they missing because they don’t feel welcome? Do they perceive a risk in joining the community? Do they see a barrier to entry? The middle-aged white dudes may not see barriers and risks, but are they tangible for others?

If so, what can be done to encourage others to actively participate in the community? Is that even something that is desirable for everyone? Does everyone’s participation need to be visible to be valid?

But… I said at the top of this post that the participants were extremely diverse. WTF? well, they were, compared to some other edu- and tech- conference. But were hardly diverse, when put into a global perspective. Yes, people were there from a long list of countries, and from a long list of institutions, but almost all shared a similar privileged western background.

—-
Photo by Diego Leal

Jim just asked me about what I used to do a quick Wikipedia search in Safari – I just hit a key combo and a text entry window pops up, where I entered “w trans lux” and got to the wikipedia page for the company behind the awesome Mighty Hercules cartoon.

I’m using Shortwave to search all kinds of crap – it’s like the Firefox search shortcut dealie, except that you don’t have to inflict Firefox on yourself in order to use it. It’s just a javascript bookmarklet that is configured to search a bunch of services, and you can extend it with your own services by editing a text file. I have it set to search my own flickr account for stuff, search my blog, my delicious.com account, etc… Very cool.

And if I put the bookmarklet on my bookmarks bar, it can be triggered by a keyboard shortcut – on mine, it’s the 9th bookmark in the bookmarks bar, so ⌘+9 brings up the box, and I’m off and running.

Easy. Free. Extensible. Shiny. Now you know, and knowing’s half the battle.

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