I activated my Gmail account earlier today, after having wrangled myself an invite, and have been impressed so far. I like the interface and the way that email conversations are grouped. The labels are a good feature, similar to the way I would put email in folders with other programs/sites, and the search capability looks very powerful, although I haven’t had the chance to really try it out since I only have about a half dozen emails so far. What I am most intrigued by, however, is the spam filtering. There have been a few accounts of tests of gmail’s spam filtering capabilities, but what I’m interested in is how it works. In the Inbox, each message (or conversation, or whatever it is each thing in the inbox is) has a checkbox beside it, and a button up top saying … Continue reading »

I’ve been watching students in two of my classes engaged in a fascinating process over the past few days, and I can best describe the process as antwork. They have been working on a project on Agricultural Practices in Saskatchewan in small groups of 2 or 3. Individually, they have been developing interview questions, interviewing, and in some cases taking pictures. All the content they created was put online by Movable Type, not specifically for its blogging capability but for its flexibility in content management. The site made by my class is one of four sites created as a school project in putting resources online – other projects included an Online Recipe Book as part of a project exploring how food is presented in magazines, a set of diaries and discussions about Romeo and Juliet, and an exploration of Land … Continue reading »

Mathemagenic: learning and KM insights – 10 June 2004::Wow – a great summary of some thoughts on the social collaborative nature of websites. Lilia hits the nail on the head when she says “…weblogs are more than bunch of linked egocentric websites.” They create a discourse within and between them that is often difficult to see, although tools like trackback make it easier to draw out some of that discourse. This is an interesting read after the DCoP workshop two weeks ago – I think that having agents within the policy community as bloggers, then aggregating their blogs, would be a powerful tool. I wonder if this is already happening anywhere?

I’m not sure if the start of this blog is confirmation or denial of Alan Levine’s observation that edu-blogs seem to have a lifespan of about one year. It does represent, to me, that my interests have changed sufficiently that I need to recreate myself. Previously I blogged at Technica (hosted at Typepad, a service I still recommend to anyone interested in doing some serious blogging), where I rambled on aimlessly discussed and analyzed some issues of interest in the area of educational technology. My attention has shifted towards emergent phenomena – like blogs, wikis, and virtual communities. The seed of this interest began in an entry on the technica blog back in February, along with Brian Lamb‘s book recommendation based on that entry (Thanks Brian, I’ve just started reading the book and it definitely resonates.) So, here’s the start … Continue reading »