e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • overstated: Weblogs and authority

    In the Overstated weblog (great name, by the way), Cameron Marlow suggests that blogrolls are proxies for popularity while links directly from a blog post to a permalink of another blog are proxies for influence. For example, slashdot is popular in blogrolls but Joi Ito is popular to link to in posts. Marlow does some empirical analysis showing that, while some of the very top sites show up in both permalinks and blogrolls, the two groups (i.e., the group of heavily permalinked blogs and the group of heavily blogrolled blogs) diverge dramatically in the lower ranks.

    Why? Marlow doesn’t address that question in his post, but my guess is that it has to do with competitive differentiation. Bloggers who are serious about building their reputations need to find content that nobody else in their circle is talking about. If they only got their material from the hubs that everybody reads, then they would have little to make them stand out from the crowd (except, perhaps, quality of analysis and quality of writing). So competition for readership may be the reason why bloggers tend to link to sites that are not on everyones blogroll yet. (By the way, as Marlow correctly points out, this effect tends to mitigate the power law problem.

  • digital amalgam :Going Wide or Going Deep? Blogs or Discussion

    Jim Woodel has a thoughtful blog post in response to the Complese class blog that I noted in my own last post.

    Here’s a sample:

    I really, really like the idea of either discussion tools or blog tools that give the instructor some ability to manipulate display based on pedagogy. I’ll have to do some thinking about what this might look like if the instructor wanted, say, problem-based learning to be happening. Could the instructor have the display organize posts by steps in a problem-solving process?

    Right on. What discussion board designers really need is a pattern language of educational conversations. What are the types of interactions that teachers want to have with students and what sorts of affordances support those different conversations?

    Woodel also added an interesting comment to my original post (which is how I found his blog).

    As a side note, I think I’m going to need do something to make posts with comments on them more conspicuous. As far as I’m concerned, the reader responses are at least as important as anything I have to say; and yet the current interface of my blog makes it easy to miss them. Expression Engine probably has a “recent comments” function or plug-in; I’ll look into it.

  • Great Example of Using a Blog in a Class

    Cole Complese provides a great model of one way to use a class blog. Take a look at this post as a good example. The use of the rubric is smart.

    One of the things that this highlights for me, though, is that blogs and discussion boards ultimately need to fuse. What you have here is, essentially, the blog being used as a discussion board with each post starting a new topic. Now, frankly, most blog commenting interfaces are pretty weak. But the compensating strength here is the affordances of showing the full text of the professor’s discussion starters in chronological order. I think that provides some coherence for the class. But that’s just a difference in display; there’s no reason that I can think of why the underlying representation in the data model for a blog with commenting needs to be any different than that of a discussion board. I’d like to see a unified tool that enables the professor to choose display and permissions settings based on pedagogical goals. For example, if you kept the blog display (i.e., showing the full text of all starter posts in chronological order) but reversed the permissions, so that any student could post to the main blog level but only the professor could post replies, then you’d have something like a Q&A or FAQ interface.

  • The Blog's True Contribution to Election 2004?

    John Borland at ZDNews writes:

    When history books are written, bloggers’ real contribution to the 2004 election may well turn out to be in providing leagues of amateur sleuths to fact-check political controversy.

    In other words, the productive role of political blogging is to break the informational cascade in the mass media by adding both new data and new analysis. That sounds exactly right to me. The implication, though, is that we need to keep thinking of blogs and alternative perspectives rather than our main sources of news. I’m not sure that’s what’s happening.

    Found via Roland’s Sunday Smart Trends on Smartmobs.com.

  • Distributed Categories: Something's in the Air

    One way or another, it looks like distributed categorization is going to really take off, and soon. There’s just too much chatter going on about how to implement it for it not to happen pervasively.

    Let’s start by summarizing the stuff that I’ve already posted on the topic:

    • I quoted John Udell on how Flickr and de.licio.us use tight feedback loops to show users how their tagged item fits in with the universe of items that share the same tag
    • I pointed out how Stephen Downes created a meme tracker using a method that Martin Terre Blanche refers to as “shibboleth.”
    • I suggested that a meme-tracking system could be created in which URLs function as tags and a Bayesian filtering system could help identify overlaps in tagging systems.

    This morning I found a slew of pages all sniffing around roughly the same idea space:

    • Gunnar Langemark points to Carrick Mundell’s post on how he would love to have a plug-in for his blog that gathers “related posts” from other blogs besides his own.
    • Langemark, while pointing to Carrick’s post, also refers to Drupal, an Open Source content management system with some blogging features. I’m not sure what he had in mind, but it might be the feature called “site cloud,” which appears to track similar sites. (I can’t give you the details because I got a “permission denied” error when I tried to look at the details page.)
    • In the comments on Mundell’s post, a reader notes that something called “WayPath” does what the author is looking for in the Movable Type blogging system. I couldn’t verify this because, as of this writing, the WayPath site (http://www.waypath.com) appears to be down.
    • Another comment on Mundell’s post points to a post on the Aquarionics blog about something the blogger calls “Threadnaught,” which has a more centralized model with something like a DMOZ categorization system where blogs could ping their categories via XML-RPC.
    • The same Aquarionics post notes that Topic Exchange implements his idea, although “nobody uses it.” (I can see why; the implementation is horribly awkward.)

    So there’s a lot going around this idea. It will be interesting to see what comes of it.

  • SAKAI – Open Source LMS or Developer Framework?

    Stuart Sim over at Java.net has a blog post clarifying the current state of SAKAI’s development. The SAKAI team could do itself a huge favor by issuing this kind of an update summary itself on a regular basis rather than relying on the small handful of informed outsiders who are capable of making this kind of evaluation.

    Some highlights:

    It’s not fair to evaluate the current release candidate against the goals of the SAKAI program. It is widely accepted that these aims will not be realized until version 2.0 in the spring/summer of next year. The current release is a snapshot of the code base that will be deployed at the leading SAKAI contributing universities. This fact alone is a testament to the practical and real world applicability of the solution….

    (Snip.)

    The problem is that the ‘open framework’ is already showing signs of the real world constraints it inherited for deployment. In every software project, the challenges of interoperability and deployment are at odds and compromises have to be made.

    Much of the constraints inherited from both Chef (open source collaboration tool) and uPortal (open source portal) are evident in the current code snapshot and it will take some time and effort to unwind them.

    SAKAI uses the Spring Framework to define the loose coupling between components in the framework. The use of Spring and similar lightweight containers is a good approach for loose binding components without the need for a full J2EE container. What is not clear is the value the SAKAI framework would provide over an above Spring itself. Spring is a development framework and, it it’s current state, so is SAKAI….

    On this last point, I’d love to get some further clarification. I’m not familiar with Spring; how lightweight is it, really? Is it just lightweight in comparison to J2EE? Where does it set the bar for a programmer who wants to add new components or extend the framework?

  • Learn What CSS Can Do at the CSS Zen Garden

    The CSS Zen Garden is one of those sites I wish somebody had told me about a long time ago. Basically, they invite designers to show off their CSS kung fu by taking the same HTML file and styling it radically differently. Visitors can switch CSS styling with one click to see the various submissions. This site has enormous value to non-programmers as well as programmers.

    If you are a complete beginner then you can teach yourself some basics about the separation between content and styling in today’s HTML. Just use the “view source” function on the “Edit” menu in your browser to look at the HTML code. Don’t worry if you don’t know HTML; there are just a few things you need to observe:

    • Any time you see “div”, that means the author of the content wants to set a section of the content apart for its own styling. “/div” marks the end of that section.
    • Any time you see “class” that means the author wants to apply a certain generic styling. You can think of it very much like “styles” in Microsoft Word; you might, for example, have a style that you want to apply to all body paragraphs.
    • Any time you see “id” that means the author wants to uniquely identify a single item for styling just to that item.

    Armed with no more than this information, you can look at the source code and start to get a sense of how to think about your content in terms that will enable you to work with your designer much better. And really, if you just know a small handful of additional HTML tags to mark paragraphs, bold text, and things like that, you’re pretty much ready to start writing content in HTML that looks pretty. Once you agree on conventions with your designers and learn the appropriate CSS tags for your document, you can start writing.

    Beyond that, CSS Zen Garden can educate you on the stunning range of what can be done with CSS. The variety of designs is just jaw-dropping. Text moves all over the page. Even behaviors such as rollovers change. Paging through the Zen Garden is a good way to build your design vocabulary so that you can go back to your designers and say, “Give me something like that.”