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I had a meeting with a prof last week about a very interesting project she wants to set up (to run the course as a series of blog posts resulting in a science magazine published by the students - I’ll write more on that later). During the discussion of the project, we got to talking about blogging in general and she mentioned that she had recently started a blog of her own.

Gwendolyn Blue started blogging less than a month ago at Home Grown Alberta, and already has some great posts up about sustainability and local food sourcing. 100 mile diet? In Calgary? Apparently, it IS possible (just a little more difficult due to the insane sprawl of this city…)

I’m looking forward to seeing what Gwen comes up with, and really excited to have discovered her blog!

This post is in response to Chris’ Twitter Condom post.

I’ve been on the fence regarding public or protected tweets on Twitter.com. I’ve actually toggled that switch at on at least 3 different occasions, and then reverted back to Public maybe a day later.

Public tweets are visible to the world, indexed by Google, and make it easy to nanoblog (something that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less, which might not otherwise be blogworthy). Protected tweets are private, and are visible only to those people whom you follow on Twitter. They aren’t indexed by Google, and they’re essentially part of a private conversation.

The problem is that the public/protected flag is a global setting for an account. Either all of your tweets are public or they’re all protected. There is no middle ground, or ability to change this on a per-tweet basis.

So, why set an account to be “protected”? One of the things that strikes me about Twitter is how much it feels like a conversation in a pub. It’s informal, loose, and sometimes a bit more unfiltered than would be otherwise advisable. A common type of tweet (of which I am probably more guilty than others) is the rant/vent. Bitching about meetings. Letting off some steam in little 140 character puffs. Probably not something that should be indexed by The Goog. To be really honest, probably the kind of thing that shouldn’t be online in the first place, but that’s probably another post.

If a twitter account is set to be “protected” then it becomes a bit more safe to open up a bit more (too much?). The pub conversation becomes more intimate and real.

Why set an account to be “public”? It makes it easy for people to follow you.  Your social network/graph can grow without obstruction, and you will likely find new people who are doing things that interest you.

But, it’s not as simple as it sounds. I currently follow 70 people. That’s about the maximum I think I can follow. There are 318 people following me. It’s just physically impossible for me to reciprocate. Am I missing out? Possibly. But anything important will trickle through various conversations and I’ll see enough to make sense of it. And anything really important will likely exist outside of Twitter.

And I doubt anyone would really miss anything by being unable to follow my tweets. Sure, they’d miss out on some extremely witty banter, but anything important would show up in other conversations, and eventually outside of Twitter.

To me, twitter isn’t a publishing platform. It’s an informal hangout. If I want to publish anything, I’ll put it on my blog, or as a comment on someone else’s.

I worked with our Faculty of Education to build a community blogging website for use by after-degree student teachers as part of their personal/professional development, reflection, and collaboration process, as well as to collect materials for use in ePortfolios. They had a set of pretty simple constraints. Because the student teachers would be writing about activities in the K-12 classroom, and likely would be posting media (photos, videos, etc…) they needed to restrict access to the site - there could be no public access to this content. Additionally, they needed to control with a fairly fine granularity which individuals within the community would be able to see specific pieces of content. Because of these constraints, we couldn’t just load up WPMU and set them free, nor could we just point them to WordPress.com or Blogger.com. What to do…

Drupal, of course. It’s got a blogging module available out of the box (it takes a checkbox to enable it). OK. Blogging is taken care of. Members just have to click “Create content” and select “Blog post”. Easy peasey.

Want to allow members of the community to create their own groups? Organic Groups. It’s amazingly flexible, and has an added bonus, in this case, of also enabling access control to content based on group membership (after enabling Organic Groups, go to the settings page for the module and enable “Access Control”). Meaning that the student teachers could create as many private group contexts as they like, and then grant access to their content to any of their groups (and only those groups) if desired. Very powerful stuff.

OK. So now we have a bunch of student teachers blogging their brains out. That’s a lot of content to keep track of. Their professors and practicum teachers need to keep up on all of the relevant posts, and provide feedback in a timely manner. How to provide tools to let individuals track content that they’re allowed to see, that they haven’t seen yet, and that they need to respond to… Views. Drupal’s Views module is killer for this. It’s basically a database query generator, where you can provide a set of criteria to filter content, and create a display on the website. So I created a couple of handy views to help people keep up.

The first view was a simple “all content that has been posted to any of your groups, sorted in reverse chronological order” - this is the “river of news” display, which meant that members didn’t have to go hunting through their various groups (some had over a dozen group memberships) to find new content. It’s all merged, sorted, and presented to them on the front page of the site. This let members keep their fingers on the pulse of the community - they could see at a glance what was being published in all of the groups they cared about. This view also displayed the number of comments (and any new comments were flagged) so people could easily follow up on conversations.

The second view was intended to help members keep up with new content - essentially an “inbox” to be used by professors and teachers. This view was a clone of the first “river of news” view, but only displayed unread items. As a professor viewed a blog post, it would get dropped out of this view for them.

We also used the Book module to create documentation on the site (how to use the site, as well as pages with links to other resources, an FAQ, etc…) and we enabled the Forum module to create a separate non-blog discussion board within the site (but this never really got used much…)

That’s really all there is to it - Drupal just handles the rest, and once it’s configured it takes very little care and feeding.

Here’s the stuff we used (the site was built a year ago on Drupal 4.7, but I’m listing what would be used as of the current Drupal 5.3):

• Drupal 5.3
• Organic Groups module
• Views module
• LDAP Integration module (current 5.3 branch borks on UCalgary’s LDAP, so you might have to play a bit)
• Insert View module (for embedding the views on the front page)
• TinyMCE module (for a rich text editor while creating/editing content)
• Anarchy Media Player (non Drupal - add the Standalone JS version as a block in your site theme’s header and all media will be embedded automatically)

I’ll try to revise this post to clarify stuff as needed, but this is the basic recipe. The best thing to do is just start downloading and playing…

I just set up a copy of WordPress Multiuser, running at calgaryblogs.net. It’s an open and free blogging service. I won’t be running ads, or charging for individuals to use it. My only goal is to get more people publishing content online, and if yet another blogging service will help, then so be it.

It’s configured to serve subdomains, meaning you can easily set up a blog at “mygreatblog.calgaryblogs.net” and treat it like it’s your own server.

I don’t have a “policiy” or usage agreement or anything yet, but for now, the only rule is “don’t be evil.” - so, I guess that means anything goes, except for spam splogs and link farms.

I’m probably a little crazy to set this up as a free service, but this stuff shouldn’t cost money for people to use. I’ll start things off sharing my Dreamhost account. If it outgrows that (and hopefully it will) then I’ll investigate other hosting options.

I've been posting to my blog far less frequently than ever before, in the entire history of this blog. Why is that? I'm still busy doing stuff. I'm still active in all the same places. The only shift lately is that I've also been much more active in social networking sites, specifically Twitter and Facebook.

Now, both Twitter and Facebook are essentially social networking systems. They are about forming and building connections between people, rather than publishing content. So, that shouldn't have an impact on my posts here.

The only thing I can think of is some kind of defusing effect that activity on social networking sites may have - I post there, and it satisfies the social component of posting here. Posting here doesn't affect posting there.

So, I'm starting to think about the relationship between social networking and blogging. They're definitely related, partially overlapping activities, but they also have their own subtle difference. Blogging is (for me) about personal knowledge management. Capturing the content and context of what I'm doing. Social networking is about context more than anything. Which looks at first blush to be purely banality. And yet, it affects me on a deeper level.

I was in Vancouver for an "eCOP" pathfinding meeting, and found that I flipped open the MacBookPro during breaks. What did I check first? It wasn't email. It wasn't my blog (or blog stats, or blog referrals). It was Twitter. I felt more connected to my distributed community of edubloggers (and others) because they're always there with me, no matter where I am. That's powerful stuff. Now, how to better make sense of that? Or does making sense of it suck the soul out of it? 

Sylvia mentioned this in an email discussion putting some ideas together for the Northern Voice Social Software for Learning Environments session we're wrangling, and I promptly forgot to check it out. Oops.

Anyway, she's coordinating an online seminar through SCoPE titled "Blogging to enhance learning experiences" - it's a moodle community with a fair amount of activity (and many familiar faces). It runs from February 12-25, so it's already under way.

Definitely worth checking out. I'll be mostly lurking, but will try to participate in the buildup to Northern Voice (our session is on the 24th)

To contribute to the discussion on SCoPE, you have to register in that instance of Moodle. After doing that, be sure to tweak your account's email subscription settings (to Digest mode) to prevent getting reams of email duplicating every forum post… 

I was contacted this morning by someone from Lexi.net to let me know about the upcoming “Your Online Identity” conference in Calgary on November 17, 2006. I hadn’t heard of the event before, so had to check out the conference website for info. It sounds like a really cool event. Not as by-the-people-for-the-people as Northern Voice, but still sounds interesting. They’ve lined up an impressive list of speakers, including The Dooce herself.

I think it’s pretty cool to have an event like this in Calgary. I’ve been toying around with the idea of a Northern Voice YYC since I went to the first Northern Voice YVR. I’m not sure Calgary’s ready - Vancouver’s much more plugged-in and seems more aligned with the whole “web 2.0″ / blogging / yaddayadda stuff. But, maybe this is a sign…

I’ll try to make it to the Lexi.net event. It’s definitely not as inexpensive as NV, at $125 for the day, but I’ll try to make the case for it.

Update: I’m in. Looking forward to it!