[Google Earth snap stolen shamelessly from Christen]

A post by Doug Belshaw mentioned his dislike of people auto-posting links to their blog from sites like del.icio.us or diigo. I’ve thought about this before, but never come up with a good answer. While I don’t auto-post all of my links (only those selected for the linklog) or tweets (I modified Alex King’s useful plugin so that it wouldn’t include any posts directed to specific people), I’m also not a particularly prolific blogger, so it isn’t uncommon to come here and find that the only visible posts are those with this kind of auto-content. I can understand that this can be annoying, particularly to those addicted to me deathless prose, but I don’t want to get rid of these posts– I know a variety of people find them useful for all the links therein and I want them archived here as part of my ever-growing me-stream.

Doug’s comment stirred me to think about it some more, though, and while I didn’t come up with any earthshaking solutions, it did result in a bit of redesigning so that only the latest links and twitters are immediately available, and they are in collapsed boxes on the front page that readers can toggle and, from there, go to the archives for more.

This is all leading to an impending redesign in which I will move Ruminate to a three column layout (probably one similar to Cosmopoetica) and recent links and tweets will go into the sidebar.

This doesn’t effect the RSS feed. I’m undecided about removing this auto-content from the RSS feed. I suspect it’s relatively easy to exclude those categories, but I’m guessing that those savvy enough to use feed readers are probably less bothered by them (and more likely to find the content useful) given the many ways they can display the feed content and easily dismiss that which they aren’t interested in.

The ebbs and flows of the blog audience are strange. In some ways, I’d love to be an A-lister (at least when it comes to ed-tech-learning) theorizing on the esoterica of social software, the implications of folksonomy, the latest and greatest remixes… but down here on the lower-rungs  of the ladder where I operate from day-to-day, the faculty I work with and the people I present to are really at the beginning of this transformative journey, desiring nuts and bolts information about getting started creating a new learning environment, and managing these new processes given their already exploding workload.

Figuring out the applications and ramifications of Connectivist learning theory may interest me, but judging from the amount of backchannel discussion, the basics of classroom blogging with reference to the familiar world of discussion boards (and the two parts to come about that topic) are of much more interest to my readers. I don’t know that attempting to do both satisfies either audience. Am I here for my faculty or here for my (often) more advanced “peers”?

It also makes me wonder if perhaps many faculty– trying to follow these discussions and derive pragmatic instruction for their classrooms– are either being left behind or feeling forced forward beyond what they are ready for. There is certainly a lot of value left to be wrung out of even “old school” technologies like discussion boards, much less blogs and the newly-revitalized wikis. But I hear regularly from (and see discussion involving) faculty frustrated at being unable to really integrate podcasting (originated by themselves or by their students), or videocasting, or remixing using five different popular technologies… instructors who have yet to really get the whole context of blogging and syndication in their more friendly and immediately useful forms, much less these relatively cutting-edge methods which are fraught with technological difficulty.

[ruminate, edtech, blogging, edblogging, social software]

A long overdue conversion from Textpattern to Wordpress is underway. I really like the Textpattern model, but the development pace, number of external plugins/tools, and smaller developer base of Txp just doesn’t suit the things I want to do.

So, expect some turmoil here while I try to get everything fixed. I got my old entries imported and converted from Textile to HTML, but I still want to redo the post IDs to match the old ones (so old links will work) and get the syndication feeds redirected properly to Feedburner…

Sorry for any inconvenience and repetition!

I’m travelling for the next few weeks, so the extended silence here will likely continue… don’t write me off yet!

Hey, I’ve been mashed-up — it actually reads kind of like a presentation I might make while drinking…

[ruminate mashup socio-kybernetics]

I’m back after nearly a week in SunnyRainySunny Ketchikan attending a Cisco Summit (interesting how Cisco is taking to the Distance Education market) and a statewide program meeting (got to work out some new theoretical material in front of an audience other than myself– which was useful if not as smooth and persuasive as I would have liked).

Lots of things to blog about, but not a lot of time. Right now I’m thinking fondly back to the days when I went to school and could hang out at the coffee shop with paperback of Nietszche and a notebook in my pocket, chatting up the baristas. I should have enjoyed that time more…

[ruminate]