The emergence of social media tools, with user friendly interfaces and WYSIWYG editors, has drastically changed the nature of web publishing. Whereas many years ago, posting content to the web required advanced technical knowledge, new tools and services now enable the average individual to establish a presence online in which they can share or explore their thoughts, opinions, ideas, as well as share information, resources and files.
However, as with similar changes in the past, these advancements in technology have had a disruptive influence on certain aspects of society, with …

Via @timbuckteeth I’ve recently run across a new tool for Twitter seems to have a lot of potential. TweepML is a service that lets you create indices of Twitter users that can made available to others.
The idea of cataloging groups of Twitter users is nothing new certainly, however the additional functionality that TweepML offers makes it a far preferable option to a standard web page or wiki article. In particular, whereas static indexes just provide links to view the profiles of other people on Twitter, TweepML actually lets …

Via Twitter just moments ago Joss Win posted a link to a version of Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society” that has been made available via digress.it.  Deschooling Society is available elsewhere on the web, however this is the first time I’ve seen it accompanied by the option to engage in discussion as well.  Importantly the discussion framework that is being used here is particularly powerful.
Digress.it is a plugin for WordPress that supports discussion at a far finer level than is traditionally available on most blogs.  Rather than limiting conversations to a …

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education, I’ve just discovered that Google has just announced the launch of an initiative that permits distribution of Creative Commons licensed works via Google Books.
The announcement indicates that this option is available as an account setting to members of their Partner Program.
Creative Licensed works will be identifiable by the standard Creative Commons logo and links to the full license, and will include download links. Google continues:
“…if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a …

Yesterday afternoon I gave a short presentation on CCK08 to the UNSW Network of Faculty Educational Developers, focusing primarily on an overview of CCK’s distributed nature, the technical environments used during the 12-week course and the underpinning logic behind the distributed framework.  Seeing as I had access to an iPod and microphone attachment I decided to record the first half of the presentation and share it here.
The talk was divided into two parts – roughly 20 minutes of which featured my presentation, and a following 10 minutes of open discussion.  …