Mike Malloch's SuprGlu : recent blogging, bookmarking and images

Graham Attwell, in the wales-wide-web, notes a point that came out of a phone conversation we had this morning - that in the real-world users are almost always doing 'other things' when they come to use a bit of software. I've added a few more thoughts on the matter in a reply to his blog entry.

[ Weblog entry in "elearning2.0"]

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Graham notes, in his blog, a point that came up while we were chatting on the phone this morning:

...there is a world of difference between someone sitting down to develop use cases when this is the thing they are doing i.e. installing, testing, using, a service or a piece of software as the task in itself - and using the services and applications as one small part of their everyday working life.

Graham Attwell, The Wales-Wide Web | Real life experience Good computer systems should let me keep doing things my way, even if for a few minutes I will be sending things their way.

This is a surprisingly important point, and one which is surprisingly hard to get across. I hope we can illuminate the issue with further discussion - and some examples - over the next months.

I replied at length in his blog, and not being one to use prose once-only, I paste most of it below as well :o) ... see the extended text for this entry.

This is a much more important issue than it sounds, because by enabling casual, connected gestures of content-creation, systems like API-enabled weblogging and del.icio.us bookmarking let us share context to at least some extent. If it isn't *really* easy to post in the context of what I'm doing now - if I cannot make lots of tiny content-connecting/creating/categorising gestures without stopping what I'm doing - the good systems effects that we see in del.icio.us for instance will not emerge.

Yup! We're always doing 'other' other things - and that context is important (Mike Malloch in the wales-wide web)

If, like us, you have several different del.icio.us accounts which you would like to post to, these scripts might be for you. We've just written a python script which makes it pretty easy to automate workflows between mutually trusted accounts.

[ Weblog entry in "KNotations"]

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We are big fans of del.icio.us here at KnowNet, and maintain our own bookmarking pretty avidly (see for instance my linklog). We're also proselytisers for the 'data outside' approach to managing the different aspects of a project's content-management needs, and we've worked hard to train our project colleagues in the use of social bookmarking systems. This inevitably leads to people having multiple del.icio.us accounts that they have an interest in, which can become awkward.

Of course, that's what the del.icio.us API is there for :o) Yesterday we wrote a script (python) which we've started using to copy items with certain tags between mutually trusting accounts. We've run it to create the beginning content for three project accounts so far (pulling this content in from four main accounts in various combinations), and have set up chron jobs to maintain the synching workflow nightly.

The first screenshot shows the simple form used to do a batch copy between accounts (the chron jobs just use the same parameters as arguments in a url). The second screenshot shows a tag cloud displaying tags for a project account which includes many items pulled in using the API script. See EGCRF's del.icio.us bookmarks. We'll be publicising the nookmarks tag clouds for other project sites soon.

Please let us know if you're interested in the script. For historical reasons, it requires Plone and a little product of ours called KNUtilities.

[ In reply to weblog entry: "Patterns in the clouds: Some thoughts on not being completely wrong about PLEs", by mmalloch, 30-May-2006]

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Some good thoughts here Mike - the only thing I would add is that perhaps we should consider leaving the lid of the box closed for fear of changing the state of web 2.0 as a truely learner centred learning environment ;-)  - www.interactlms.org/blogs/post/1/106

We've continued to make steady progress on features and stability in Knotes. Version 0.85 is now available from our downloads area and from Sourceforge.

[ Weblog entry in "KNotations"]

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Apologies for this hasty post - we really have been hammering at the paid-for-projects recently, so haven't got much time for documenting our progress. The good news on this front is that we are about to draw lines under the administrative work for two very labour-intensive european projects; when that's complete we'll have much more time to spend on documenting progress, building connections with other developers and community-site managers, and collaborating on experiments using knotes as part of educational and community-building experiments. The text below is taken from the brief announcement I just made on our knownet site:

Knotes is now available in a new milestone: version 0.85.

See our Knotes download page for download files and other links. There are quite a few new or improved features in this release.

We will be writing up the new features - and producing an outline of our roadmap for Knotes - as soon as we get a chance (sorry, we've been working very hard on paid-for project deadlines, which makes knotes-documentation-time hard to come by).

[ Weblog entry in "elearning2.0"]

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Scott Wilson has posted a damn fine summary of a damn fine PLE workshop:

I've had a pretty good two days at the PLE workshop. Some very interesting ideas from the participants - looking back I think we were extremely lucky to get such a varied, knowledgeable, and positively engaged group - and I actually managed to do a demo without getting a firewall/proxy/gateway/dns related problem.

No doubt there will be a much more detailed wrote-up at some point; for now I think I'll just note a few things I found interesting...

PLE workshop [Scott Wilson's Workblog, June 09, 2006]

I enthusiastically endorse Scott's outline of the important issues and the emerging points of consensus. I had a wonderful (if exhausting) time at both days, and feel very positive about the emergence of a developer/practitioner community with some real vision and momentum. I've had to put nose to grindstone since the meeting, hammering out design and project work, and I won't have a chance to write extensively on the subject for a while. Let me just say what a pleasure it was to participate in such a focused and productive meeting with people as smart and long-sighted as Scott and Oleg.

Due to illness and vacations we've been forced to slightly delay finishing and uploading of the 0.85 tarball

[ In reply to weblog entry: "KNotes 0.85 is about to be released", by mmalloch, 02-June-2006]

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I got one of them bad migraines Saturday, which prevented me finishing some minor feature-completions in time to have Steve integrate them into the release files before he left on a short holiday.

I'm away until Thursday at meetings, so we cannot expect the upload to be ready until Friday or perhaps even Monday 12th.

We're putting the finishing touches on a new tarball of KNotes, which we're placing at 0.85 beta. The tarball will be available from this site by Friday June 9 [ note this is a revision from Monday June 5].

[ Weblog entry in "KNotations"]

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<p style=:margin:8px;padding:8px;background:#FFE;">Please note that we have had to put the date back to Friday June 9.

We have been extremely busy improving, testing and just plain using KNotes... though we have not been doing a very good job of blogging about it :o)

We've been hammering out many new features in several areas: collaboration / social software / community building / profiling and portfolios. Many of those features are not yet being used in our production version, but over the next months expect to see an increasing number of special-purpose blogging scenarios and features in our portals.

Our public, mature version of KNotes is about to take a small leap forward as well. We are almost finished preparing and testing a new public beta - 0.85. The tarball will be available here by Monday. SourceForge's site has been having a lot of problems lately, so we're not sure when the CVS version will be updated; please use the tarballs released here for the time being.

I'll try to document some of the new features in this weblog. If you have any questions please feel free to email me -- mike AT theknownet DOT com

Sometime in the next week, I'll also - finally! - be announcing KNotes within Plone.org. Many apologies to the hard-working Plonistas who've had to nag me to get round to this; our procrastination has been in part down to wanting to make the documentation more complete and the skin-ability more thoroughgoing :o}

I plan to work hard over the next 10 days on roadmap documentation. We'll also be starting either mailing lists or special blog_forums for users, administrators and developers, and sometime this summer knotes.net will at last get the facelift it needs.

KNotes can be a very powerful and user-pleasing addition to a Plone portal. Knotes + Plone makes a great platform for experimenting with educational or other applications which combine weblogging with social software and/or other functionalities. If you would like to try making use of KNotes, please let us know how you get on. If you feel you can help with development, documentation, or best-practice illustration, we'd really love to hear from you!

Re: Mike's position paper for the CETIS PLE Experts' meeting (June 2006)

[ In reply to weblog entry: "Patterns in the clouds: Some thoughts on not being completely wrong about PLEs", by mmalloch, 30-May-2006]

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Bravo! Excellent excellent excellent...

On a tangent:

If we talk about 'PLEs' for long enough, people will begin to assume they exist - and that there is a particular kind of artifact which 'is a' PLE.

- top man Mikey, this could be straight out of Korzybski's 'General Semantics' (if the PLE meme had been around in the 30s). He's the guy with the original beef against the 'is' of identity.

I also loved the

"Our ignorance of pertinent use-cases is almost complete"

statement - I admire your restraint! It reminded me of Voltaire's "The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity." :o)

Vendors rushing to WebTwoIse(TM) their ghastly monolithic 'VLE' products is the inevitable outcome of the PLE hype. As some sort of counter measure, I agree totally with the need to encourage funding bodies to concentrate on the other aspects (the components and the glue). The vendors will still think it is all about systems rather than tools, and constrained environments rather than loosely-coupled activities, but a concerted effort to educate the funding bodies (and ethical practice on the behalf of the R&D community [i.e. avoiding 'give me £x and I will develop you the ultimate PLE' bids]) just might have a chance to dissuade the punters (e.g. the HE institutions) to stop chucking their money at the crap stuff,

...and - you never know - e-Learning 'courses' might one day be worth the money that some poor saps have to pay for them!