Open, Connected, and Social

1. Open, Connected, and Social, the video!
   
   
   
   Just in case you missed the Small Pieces Loosely Joined 2.0 jam, D’Arcy Norman and Brian Lamb have combined to make it freely available here (as a m4v or mov file) or on Blip.tv here (as a flv or m4v file). Enjoy!

2. A Bliki -what’s a Bliki?
   

   Well, here’s a test…

   (MAC) Learning Environments Presentation

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   Genetically recombining a Blog and Wiki

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   Collaboratory Context

   The University of Mary Washington has taken the small pieces loosely joined philosophy to heart. Over the last several years UMW has concentrated the lion’s share of its instructional technology praxis upon crafting learning environments through open source blogging and wiki applications. This philosophy of remaining limber and flexible has afforded our division the opportunity to experiment at length with tools that we have identified as the most malleable and extensible to reflect a dynamic learning community.

   In short, our group spends very little, if any, time on infrastructural or network issues, and concentrate all our efforts solely upon developing, experimenting, and iterating through small pieces loosely joined. Exploring the possibilities of combining and re-combining these tools inside and outside of the classroom for both students and instructors.

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   The Objective

   

   To integrate a blogging application with wiki software (for our purposes WordPress and MediWiki) in order to harness the simple publishing platform of the blog as a quick and easy personalized content management system with the ongoing, collaborative editing and easily extensible publishing logic of the wiki.

   In other words, the blog provides the framework for publishing dynamic content, providing out-of-the-box feeds, and managing content. While the wiki enables one, or a number, of users to constantly edit, update, track revisions, and extend content spontaneously. The logic here is that a blog post or page is no longer necessarily static after its been published. Along the same lines, a wiki article has some more sophisticated and consistent ways of being organized, searched, and re-presented.

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   Initial Inspirations & Experiments

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   The Bliki -It’s Dead Simple

   

   John Maxwell’s Thinkubator, which I saw at NV2007 got me excited about the ways in which a wiki could be skinned and framed to look and, to some degree, act like a blog. His vision and architecture framed out quite clearly the interrelatedness and the potential power of blurring of these two tools.

      This Thinkubator thing is my [John Maxwell's]
      project. It is (currently) a wiki pretending to be a blogging/webforum
      platform. More broadly, it is a working laboratory for publication
      architecture concepts.
   

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   Visual Integration

   

   Andy Rush, from the University of Mary Washington’s Division of Teaching and Learning Labs, has recently made some progress in effecting the visual illusion of such a recombination. By modifying the front-end of a WordPress theme (MistyLook) for MediaWiki -the two have become basically indistinguishable. See the experiments here and here.

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   Further Experiments: Grab MediaWiki

   

   The next logical step after the visual integration is a more seamless structural integration between the two applications. The DTLT labs (actually all the love goes to our code wizard Patrick Gosetti Murray-John) are currently working on a plugin for Wordpress that will grab MediaWiki articles from a specified url and publish them (including images, videos, etc) within the specified Wordpress post or page. The idea has already be successfully accomplished in the open source content management system Typo3 using PHP’s fcurl. DTLT is currently still tweaking the code for WordPress but a working example is up and running here.

   To do:

   • Tweak database and search functionality for wiki through an integrated search field on the blog.

   • Fix all the bugs, details, breaks, and general screw-ups in my code.

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   Conclusion: Why go to the trouble?

   

   Blogs and Wikis remain the most popular publishing platforms for distributed resources and online publishing. David Wiley’s development of the bookmarklet Send2wiki, exemplifies how easy it can be to put web content into a MediaWiki article with the click of a button. Riffing off this, Grab MediaWiki asks the question- “How can we get the content out of MediaWiki and into a blog or content management system quickly and easily?” The Bliki idea can be understood as using the functionality of the wiki for the backend editor and collaborative revision possibilities, while harnessing the blog as the user-controlled management system for creating posts and pages that will pull in the relevant wiki article. And, as a bonus, you can also post content the old-fashioned way!

   Such a system may very well change the way in which we publish content to a university website quite dramatically -allowing for intense flexibility, numerous plugins, and a more malleable and easy-to-use content management system. A genetically recombined, open source Contribute. Now we have to fill it up with Open Content!!!

   Retrieved from “http://bavatuesdays.com/bavawiki/index.php?title=%28MAC%29_Learning_Environments_Presentation“

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3. Follow along
   

   The website (blog/wiki and resources) are available online at:

   http://openconnectedsocial.learningparty.net

4. Open, Connected, and Social
   
   
   D’Arcy Norman has already announced the (Mac) Learning Environments presentation that will take place this Wednesday, April 25, 1:00pm EST (10:00am Pacific, 11:00am Mountain, etc…). D’Arcy, Brian Lamb, and Alan Levine will be re-visiting some of the generative ideas from their 2004 presentation “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” (you can see the archived wiki here) that was premised on framing a learning environment using decentralized, web-based tools -even before K2 was widetized for WordPress! If you want some additional information about the presentation, or are already sold and just want to sign up for this completely free and open presentation, go here.

   Now, to set the record straight (I do this a lot), these three guys owed me on account of a little wager I placed for them on the Chicago WhiteSox back in 1919. So now, as a result of their rigged misfortune, they have to slum a bit. Their lack of options aside, I am extremely excited to take my five or ten minute portion of the jam to act as a stand-in for the hard working folks at Mary Washington’s DTLT (and UMW more generally) whom, through the leadership over the past year-and-half of Martha Burtis and Gardner Campbell, have taken the small tools loosely joined philosophy and ran full speed ahead with it. So, to quote Lee Harvey, “I’m just a patsy!”

   In hopes that the MAC folks -those geniuses!- would want to see the possibilities of online learning environments, I took some familiar tools (and a snazzy new rug that really ties the room together! -thanks Andy Rush) to frame out a space where intensely open, connected and social learning could happen. Moreover, this can all occur within the framework of open source applications like WordPress, WPMU, and MediaWiki, applications that play nice with Web 2.0 services such as flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, etc. That’s right, start with a little open source then pull in some open content, and we got ourselves the beginnings of a learning environment that is closely modeled upon the small tools loosely joined philosophy.

   The site for the presentation can be found here, and I invite any and every one to join in on the fun. The idea is that this is going to be a classroom/learning environment, and let’s pretend the course is on “Web 2.0.” Now all you have to do is get in there and offer up some content. It’s easy. Here’s how:

   • Create a blog here
   • Play around a bit with over 25 attractive themes in the presentation tab
   • Add in some videos or music from your favorite online services (like YouTube, Revver, etc.) by testing out the Anarchy Media Playerlook. Simply look for the yellow A on the text editor toolbar and copy in the relevant url.
   • If you’re still bored, you can always add a flickr stream, del.icio.us bookmarks, recent tweets, etc. using your sidebar widgets. And presto, your hard work over the past months is already there waiting for everyone during the presentation.
   • Not impressed? Well, the wiki is also wide open, so feel free to frame out my portion of the discussion for me while you’re too busy being underwhelmed

   I can’t offer you much in the way of fame and fortune for testing it out. But maybe I can convince you all by stressing the fact that any and all examples of a dynamic, open source learning environment that plays well with the Web 2.0 services we have all come to know and love is well worth collaboratively testing out and highlighting for corporate entities that are used to hand delivering the “next, best thing!” The work we are doing is not about companies, it is about people and the importance of keeping the highly socialized connections amongst us open and free. So take a few minutes and give it a test drive, it won’t be used as some lame advertisement, and it shouldn’t be any worse than having a tooth pulled -I promise!

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5. Group Assignment – Debunking the Web 2.0 hype
   

   Your assignment for this week is to find an article hysterically hyping Web 2.0 (these articles are not hard to find) and debunk any misinformation found in the article. Web 2.0 is cool and all, but hype is useless if the facts aren’t straight…

   I’ll be looking for things in the Directory that are tagged with “debunkweb2.0″