Web 2.0

The Wonders of Collaborative Problem Solving and Sharing…

It’s strange but it still amazes me today, how wonderfully giving and collaborative the web community is. Here are few of the recent examples in which the larger community helped:-

  • Recently I have come across problems with using Woopra on OSX and thanks to Jeff McCord was able to sort out the not insubstantial problems with Java on OSX. Note all the problems are worth it when you come to using Woopra as it is a great tool, and with a little more development will challenge Google Analytics crown.
  • The flash uploader HTTP error problem on the new WordPress 2.5 installation was another incredibly annoying problem, and one even more weird due to the uploader working on Mac OSX browsers but not through Windows. Again through searching the community I was able to find a solution, straight away rather than have to wait for a fix through a new version of WordPress itself.
  • The above problem also led me to have to find out how to create a .htaccess file, which had always been a mysterious file that my shared server provider had hidden from me. The revelation that it was only a text file and I could add these to the roots of particular installations and folders to control any Apache server problems was great.

Why this post, about these problems being solved by communities – does it have any relation to education. Most definitely and although obvious the communities of practice on the web demonstrate the power of Wenger’s theories so well. But within a traditional educational context I have still striggled to show students how important this way of learning and helping others to learn is. However much my classes use weblogs, wikis and social network based tools like Magnify I am still unsure that I am getting this message across very well. I wonder if anyone else is having more success within secondary schools not at the use of communities of practice online but laying the foundations within your students of how these communities are very powerful learning systems?

Clearing out your Bloglines….

Old habits die hard, but even ones picked up over the last couple of years when it comes to RSS feeds seem to also take a while. So for the past few years all my feeds have been coming down to my bloglines account. The problem is you always seem to keep adding and adding feeds, until reading them all can take at least 30 minutes plus a day.

So I tried to swop over to a client based desktop RSS feed reader – called NetNewsWire. It has just become free to use and download for the Mac. So I thought why not? However after messing around with all the features, setting up the preferences which were shall we say a little complex I am not convinced. The lovely feature that it enables you to download and save the actual page where the feed is on, is undeniably fabulous and much better than the clippings feature within Bloglines. But the program would make no difference in my reading habits I believe and probably might make it worse. Beyond this there is something undeniably flexible and accessible about a web based feed reader.

Maybe the new Bloglines Beta might help, but in the end I just think it is time to prune all of those feeds that I never really read. I don’t think technology this time can improve my reading work flow as much, as the discipline of deleting those feeds from 103 to maybe 53. Any ideas might help, as would any ideas about how to get students involved in using feed readers for their research. I have somehow failed even if showing and discussing the power of these RSS feed readers to get students to use them on a regular basis. It may be due to them seeing how long it takes me to read my feeds?