So I’ve been invited to Facebook several times… and of course it’s the bees-knees on every campus, and increasingly in high schools, organizations, anywhere there’s a loose semblance of community really. I remain conflicted as to whether to join. As a promoter of social networks and a believer in the ability of technology to connect, I think Facebook is an example of explosive community growth… but is there any substantial content? Does it not seem a tad egocentric to setup a profile, post a picture, and wait for your network to grow? For that matter, has it not become an over glorified Classmates? Lost touch with someone in high school? College? University? Well just wander over to Facebook. Post your profile and wait for everyone to surround you. Or if they don’t, you can seek them out instead. I just don’t know. I frequently wonder about people from my past… but to what degree am I remembering them and to what degree am I remembering *my* perception of them? Are they the same person? Is my perception distorted? I have contact info for many people in my past and if the need arises I can attempt to re-establish the connection. And if someone wants to seek me out, a quick Google should do the trick. I don’t really know if I have a need for Facebook… I’ll continue to grapple with this one… My question to the average Facebook user: what do you take away from the community? What do you contribute?
I’ve previously posted about McGill’s Instructional Scenarios Wiki, but it deserved another link - it’s focused on WebCT Vista, but good nonetheless. And this morning, via the blogosphere, I discovered the University of Manitoba’s New Technologies for Teaching and Learning wiki. Great stuff!
I’ve been meaning to post this for a loooooong while, but always forget. Below is a recording of a session I co-presented last spring (May 2006) about extending WebCT. When we initially put together the session, we were expecting to provide more coverage for blogs/wikis/web 2.0, but as it turns out, you can only fit so much content into an hour… lesson learned. I can only listen to the first 2 minutes because after that, I cringe at the sound of my own voice… and my laugh…. and my comments… and I’m learning why some people might be against recording their lectures. Hopefully I’ll have another crack at a similar session sometime in the future to cover *everything* that’s changed in less than a year - and to improve my presentation abilities.
Aside from the fact that this is a bit of a cat fight… My feelings on the topic are that open source software can succeed and work, but there’s no such thing as open source support - and this is what Curverider provides. (Well, in the general sense of the word there is open source support: mailing lists, discussions, etc. When I say support, I mean the type of support your director/manager will want to purchase.) None of this is any different than the slew of companies that provide consulting and support services for Moodle or Sakai.
Get over it gents. The mixed model works. Let’s get on with the real work at hand - making things better.
I’ve been evaluating Atlassian Confluence lately and will eventually do a review here. So far, so good. Easy to setup. Easy to configure. LDAP support out of the box. I don’t think LDAP support is too much to ask for, but looking at some of the open-source wikis, expect some headache. Anyhoo, I’ve also been reading the Atlassian Developer Blog and was rewarded with an article about Confluence implementing OpenID. Very interesting. Will need to follow-up on this.
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