An old (2004) article from Clay Shirky, rediscovered serendiptously as I was reviving a long-dead research system I built (CoFIND – a personal instance of which is visible again after many years of absence at http://cofind.jondron.net/, including all my old bookmarks for that instance from 2004 to 2007). In the perceptive article, Shirky explores a range of methods used to deal with flaming, including a few that we have considered for use on the Landing.

His description of Slashdot’s (http://slashdot.org) approach from way back then reminds me yet again how amazingly intelligently that system was designed. Slashdot is one of the oldest examples of modern social software still going strong, and it knocks spots of the likes of Facebook and Twitter in how it uses the crowd in an egalitarian and open fashion.  It has never been easy to take advantage of its briliantly innovative methods and its usability for beginners, which was never great at the best of times, has suffered a bit more from its ever-increasing sophistication over the years. For those who take the time to learn its ways, though, it is the nearest thing to group intelligence out there today; adaptive, subtle, and hugely creative, a well-tuned personalised SlashDot thread beats single-authored systems for learning almost every time and makes Wikipedia seem almost pitifully rigid and uninformative. Always arcane, always a nerd-only site, never destined to enter the mainstream, steadfastly focused on its mission of offering ‘news for nerds’, it is none-the-less a shining example of how to do things right.

Address of the bookmark: http://shirky.com/writings/group_user.html

I’ve started using this to write a couple of books I’m working on and thoroughly recommend it to anyone with large amounts of writing to do. It is remarkably intuitive and natural to use, and remarkably powerful as a means of organising thoughts, keeping notes, incorporating texts and much much more, as well as providing neat distraction-free modes for actual writing. It’s not open source but pricing is very reasonable, especially if you are a student or academic – less than $40 – and it is available for Mac and Windows.

It’s primarily a tool to support the writing process, not for finished drafts. It can be used to generate pretty decent simple-ish output, but the idea is to export the results to a word-processor or desktop publisher to do final tweaks.

The only big problem I have with it at all is that it doesn’t neatly integrate with reference managers, reflecting its origins as a tool for authors of fiction, novels, screenplays etc. Sure, you can insert relevant codes from things like EndNote, Papers or Zotero, then format bibliographies etc when you export the document, but it’s clunky and unintuitive, and not at all friendly or flexible. I’m really hoping that an update with such support arrives soon as this is going to be a real pain as I go on. On the other hand, it has great annotation and reference tools that can be pulled in to do part of that job, so it is not a complete showstopper, but it’s a major omission. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

I find this a little depressing, though full of interesting figures.

It is interesting and astonishing that there is still such notable resistance to online learning among conventional faculty, even though there are positive signs that many recognise potential and actual value in extending the media and methods they are attached to. The notion that blended learning (in this report meaning a mix of online and face to face) done right could conceivably be worse than face to face is particularly bizarre, as it carries no learning implications one way or the other about dropping what people already do. If what they already do is OK, then it is hard to see how (assuming mindful design and a recognition of systemic interdependencies) it could be made worse by adding new capacities and possibilities.

I think that this all springs from asking the wrong questions in the first place.  Asking whether online learning is better for learning than face to face learning makes no more sense than asking whether people using paint brushes produce better art than designers using Photoshop. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Despite the stupidity of many of the assumptions and questions in this report, it provides a very interesting snapshot of attitudes, prejudices and beliefs held by college professors in the US, as well as a good overview of how institutions are thinking about the use of various tools and methods. In spite of its blindspots, this is good information, and fuel for the struggle to get over some of the hurdles that stand in the way of common sense and good teaching practice.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/conflicted-faculty-and-online-education-2012

An interesting and quite slick free WYSIWYG HTML editor that, on cursory examination, seems pretty good. It is easy to use and the code it produces seems clean and standards-compliant from what I have seen so far.

It operates on an interesting variant of the freemium model – there are plenty of extensions available to make it more Dreamweaver-like in its range of functionality that you can pick and choose from, all as Mozilla-style xpi files. One or two are free but most start at about five euros, including its manual. If you want things like CSS editors, they add another 10 euros to the price. Because of that, I think that I still prefer Kompozer as the free WYSIWYG editor of choice, but this is not bad and has less obvious glitches.

Address of the bookmark: http://bluegriffon.org/

I’ve been playing with this app on Mac, iPhone and iPad for a few days and am finding it quite useful, if so far lacking in some quite important features. The general idea is that you use it to record thoughts and notes, and that it asynchronously seeks relevant information in the background from a few sources (Bing, Wikipedia, News, YouTube, iTunes) so that, when you get back to it, there’s a whole load of detail that you can follow up on.

It cries out for better means to move results from one place to another: even a bit more copy and paste would help, but the ability to send to EverNote or ReadItLater would be really useful. It could also do with a few more sources: for me, Google Scholar would be a must, and Google Search is generally superior to Bing for me.  I’d also like to see options for refining and filtering searches: a typical search is a real-time conversation whereas this is more like sending a letter and waiting for a reply, and the lack of export and filtering makes that feel quite clunky. For many notes, there is just a bit too much serendipity in the returned results. However, I like the way that you can jot down ideas and questions then come back another time to find that the app has done a bit of preliminary research on your behalf, and that searches are replicated across different devices so you can (say) jot a note on the iPhone while sitting on a bus then explore related things later on a Mac.

Address of the bookmark: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/06/15/dunno-for-mac-and-ios-will-change-the-way-that-you-take-notes-forever/

An interesting model intended to create a cut-price for-profit top-class university. It could work. The combination of online learning with a novel approach to kindling a traditional face-to-face academic community, mixed in with a focus on high quality teaching, no national barriers to entry and, above all, a rigorous selection process that focuses entirely on ability to succeed rather than money or sporting skills, seems to be a good one. Not in itself a particularly disruptive or tradition-defying model, but part of a trend towards eroding traditional university battlements that, despite the profit motive, seems to be a good one. So much of current university thinking, even in a modern and open university like AU, is mired in path dependencies, dated funding models and historical happenstance that maintains a mediaevally archaic status quo. All the arcane paraphenalia of ancient and absurd forms of religion and redundant technologies of learning have no place in learning and yet they drive us still. This kind of minor re-thinking of what it is all about, especially because it retains much of the implicit values and constructs that made universities worth having in the first place, stands a fair chance of success.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/04/25-million-investment-backs-startup-aiming-create-elite-university#ixzz1r6Vy2Sy2

I’ve loved Clay Shirky’s writings for well over a decade. In this interview he presents some characteristically fine insights. I particularly like what he has to say about universities:

“Plainly universities are the kind of institutions that are ripe for pretty radical reconsideration. Probably because the founding story of many institutions and particularly the ones that we think of as the kind of original avatars of American higher education was “notable gentlemen X donated their library.” Right? So literally just access to written material became an important enough gesture that you would organize a university around it. And whatever [laughs] — whatever it is people need more of today, it ain’t access to written material.”

Address of the bookmark: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/on-bubbles-facebook-and-playing-for-keeps-ten-questions-with-clay-shirky/

A recording of my presentation at the Follow the Sun 2012 conference on finding the pedagogical spot that is not too hard, not too soft, but just right. The context was open learning and my take on this was that open access is only part of the story. For learning to be truly open, learners need to be in control of their learning and, in particular, this implies the power to choose whether and when to delegate control to another. I examine the generations of distance learning pedagogies with a view to modelling their distinctive freedoms, noting that all have some weaknesses and that a holist solution, combining all and aggregating them via emergent collectives, seems to be the most promising approach.

Address of the bookmark:

Perhaps the strangest thing about this story is that it is not the first time it has happened. In 2008, residents of another Romanian town elected a dead man as mayor: “I know he died, but I don’t want change,” a pro-Ivascu resident told Romanian television (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/17/1). 

This is an interesting example of a problem caused by a hard technology that could simply be averted with common sense. The situation is apparently possible because of the rigid rules of Romanian elections, which require that the candidate name cannot be removed from the ballot paper. It is just a rule, made by people, and people could choose to ignore it if it leads to absurd outcomes. And yet they don’t. I find this very weird. Though this is very bizarre indeed it is not as weird at North Carolina dealing with the problem of global warming by legislating against it (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/01/north-carolina-sea-level-rises) but it is part of the same family of collective insanity.

Why do apparently rational people place such enormous credence in legislation to the point that they take precedence over the laws of physics and what any sane person would recognise as common sense? These kinds of legislation are classic examples of hard technologies but, unlike a manufacturing process or restrictive computer program, they are enacted by human beings who could very easily behave differently.

While these examples make such craziness plain to see, we constantly do the same kind of things in our institutions and businesses. I wish I’d kept a track of the number of times someone has objected to a sensible course of action in a committee meeting because it is not in accordance with the regulations. I’ve seen students fail courses despite clearly demonstrating their competence because work was submitted one minute later than allowed or because the rubrics are too inflexible to accommodate what they have done. I’ve been told that I cannot use a particular form of assessment because the system cannot record it. I’ve watched rooms full of very intelligent people make ridiculous decisions because they are hamstrung by some earlier decision they or someone else made. The legal profession has become an industry for those who can operate the machinery to make it do stupid and evil things. I’m far from immune to it myself: I recently failed a student (in both senses of the word) because of my unwarranted adherence to a set of marking criteria that I had actually devised myself. Because of such craziness I recently had to take a basic English Language competency exam despite being not only a native English speaker but actually having taught English, having won awards for my skills, being an experienced reviewer and editor, and having scores of English publications to my name.  

If rules and regulations are too inflexible to accommodate logic and common sense then a) the rules should change and, in the interim, b) we should ignore them and do what we know to be right. OK, I know, that way a different form of madness lies, but at least we should be aware of when we are bending to the machine and try to remember to act mindfully as human beings, not just as cogs in a machine.

Address of the bookmark: http://austriantimes.at/news/Around_the_World/2012-06-07/42178/Dead_Heat

A neat site set up to explain how Facebook’s powerful and profitable EdgeRank algorithm works. Very straightforward and easily understood explanation if a little lacking in detail (probably because the precise details are a moving target and likely secret in places).

Address of the bookmark: http://edgerank.net/