September Blog Clean Up

As I've mentioned before (eLearning Technology: Managing your RSS Feeds), I go through a ritual every three months to add and remove blogs. You can see the blogs that are in my highest priority reading list and not quarantined in the list on the right. Better yet, you can grab my OPML list and subscribe to the same list as me and then let yours evolve. See also: eLearning Technology: eLearning Blogs - Quick Way to Find Good Ones.

Move from Sept. quarantine to Front Page:

mLearning-World.com
Communities of practice for development

Kept in quarantine (gave it another chance):

Technology For Communities - Note: partial feeds is really annoying (see eLearning Technology: Why You Should Provide Full Feeds (especially on Blogger))

The other 20 or so I ended up deleting.

December's crop looks to be a lot better.

I also probably need to go through my blogs listed on the right to clean out some. If you have suggestions of blogs that I should be reading that are on eLearning, KM, PKM, communities, I'm always happy to hear about them.

The LCB Big Question Reframed: Should More Learning Professionals Be Blogging?

Out of the original October 2006: Should All Learning Professionals Be Blogging?, we've seen some pretty amazing discussion. But, we've also reached an interesting point. As Peter posted (The Learning Circuits Blog: Community Net Worth):

Now that the first wave of bloggers and blog-readers have read the initial results both in the form of serious utterances, straw polls and comic reformulations (thanks, Tony for that refreshing exercise), whither go we? Do we know more about our marketplace or do we simply know more about the individuals who have so far participated?

I would claim that I know a lot more about both the individuals out there and their perspecitves and also I know something about perception of the marketplace (but its skewed because people participating obviously have a built in bias towards blogs). More on this in a second...

Separately, Dave Lee (The Learning Circuits Blog: Throwing a Big Community Net) has provided a couple of interesting follow-up opportunities including keeping track of conversations across various posts that relate to the original post and a poll.

Personally, I feel great about how this discussion so far. It's actually gone way beyond my expectations. A few of the things that have struck me:

• The speed of contribution was much faster than I expected. I thought this would take 2-3 weeks to get responses in order to have any chance of going into a "summarizing" mode.
  
• I found that by going through and creating my lists (eLearning Technology: Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog), I personally learned quite a bit about reasons on both sides. It was a fantastic exercise for my own learning.
  
• Maybe I'm deluded, but I actually think the list is a pretty good representation of some of the important issues.
  
• There were a few "aha" moments and some great ideas. Including the suggestion - blog for a month (Karl Kapp).
  
• I've also learned a bit about dynamic of blog community as compared to discussion communities. Not sure I can capture these differences effectively - it's just a "feel" right now.
  
• I also found that there was signficant Mis-Understanding Blog Reading and Blog Communities especially in the world of discussion groups.

Peter - I get the sense that you also felt you learned something by participating. Maybe not? I would assume others did. Maybe not?

One thing that appears to be different about this exercise than in a discussion group, half of the response posts to any question is a response of "Here's why you are asking the wrong question..." Now before you assume that's negative, in most cases my firm belief is that having the right question is the whole battle - eLearning Technology: Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee (at eLearningGuild’s DevLearn). On the other hand, sometimes I feel that a discussion group immediately derails the conversation by forcing you into a question you didn't want to ask.

There were many posts that did challenge the question including my own. But, I didn't feel like we arrived at the next level of questions nearly as well as a discussion group might have. Or maybe I needed to look at the posts with a different perspective.

Certainly, some of the questions raised that I remember:

• What's a learning professional? (ASTD - that's an ouch given that's how you define your audience right?) (several)
• Given limited time, how do learning professionals decide how to use their time for learning, research, etc.? Then, where does blog reading and writing fit in? (several)
• Should all learning professionals be actively engaging with the current developments in their discipline? If yes, then how? And where does blogging fit in? (Bronwyn Clarke)
• What is the role of a professional should be in a networked environment? (Stephen Downes)
• What and how should other applications be used by learning professionals to share and learn? (Dave Lee)
• When do you use blogging vs. using other tools? (Bill Bruck)
• Should all learning professionals blog at least once? (Mike Oehlert)
• Should all learning professionals be aware of the potential of blogging? (Jane)
• How can we better invite others to be part of our thinking? (Nancy White)
• Should learning professionals shift some of their time from discussion groups to blogging? (Tony Karrer)

But what I think was the most appropriate next question, and probably the reason I thought of the question in the first place:

• Should more learning professionals be blogging? (Barry Sampson)

Independently, Dave Lee suggested that question as well. It would seem obvious that the answer is "Yes" - if you answer anything else, then you would have to think that there's a few who should stop blogging.

Of course, then it raises a couple of questions:

• Which learning professionals should blog?
• When? How long?
• Should we encourage them to blog? If so, how?

In discussing this with Dave Lee, I wasn't convinced that this is very interesting ground to go over. I'm not particularly missionary here. I want people to understand the value proposition (and draw backs) of blogging (my previous post). And, they can make up their own mind. At the same time, it does seem like we've not come anywhere close to 1%.

So, back to Peter's point - where to from here? I feel like I found out some really interesting things, and I'm not sure I need anything more. At the same time, I didn't go into this from a missionary position (sorry couldn't resist) and so I'm open to whether any further discussion is useful, interesting, etc. Maybe others have a different perspective and expectation of where to go from here.

Left on its own, this discussion will die off. Is that a problem?

I feel great about this whole thing. Do people feel cheated?

Blogger Permalink - Not Really

Over at LCB we ran into an interesting problem and I've just run into it as well on my blog. The situation reminds me of one of my favorite Seinfeld scenes when he goes to get his rental car, but they are out of cars:

JERRY: I don't understand, I made a reservation, do you have my
reservation?

RENTAL CAR AGENT: Yes, we do, unfortunately we ran out of cars.

JERRY: But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the
reservation.

RENTAL CAR AGENT: I know why we have reservations.

JERRY: I don't think you do. If you did, I'd have a car. See, you know how
to take the reservation, you just don't know how to *hold* the reservation and
that's really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody
can just take them.

It turns out that the people behind Blogger (now Google right) don't really understand the concept of a permalink.

The intent of a permalink is a permanent link (a URL) that points to that blog post. That way, anyone in the blogosphere can point to the URL.

Well Blogger seems to mysteriously add version numbers in the URL as you edit the post. Thus, we started with a URL that looks like:

http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/2006/10/big-question-for-october-should-all.html

then we edited it and it became:

http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/2006/10/big-question-for-october-should-all_02.html

then it became

http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/2006/10/big-question-for-october-should-all_04.html

Now, it seems to have stopped changing at _04, but we aren't sure why or how it stopped or when it will change again. The same thing just happened on my own blog when I edited one of my posts.

Of course, this messes up everyone who linked to the post originally. And it messed up within the blog.

You see Blogger, you know how to make a permalink, you just don't know how to *hold* a permalink and that's really the most important part of the permalink, the holding. Anybody can just make them.

Why You Should Provide Full Feeds (especially on Blogger)

I've been talking recently about blogging for learning professionals and claiming that as a blog reader, you spend your time in the RSS reader. Someone pointed out that many bloggers use partial feeds which forces readers to their blog.

I did that for a while as well. I started with full feeds and then found myself curious about who my readers were. So, I added SiteMeter to my blog to track traffic. Then I realized that very few people who subscribe to my blog actually go to the blog - they stay in their RSS Reader. Ah, so to fix that I decided to change my feed to a partial feed so you only get the first paragraph.

What I've learned since:

• Partial feeds are annoying as a blog reader, so I was being annoying providing a partial feed.
• Google only indexes Blogger's feed (not the blog itself) - so search is terrible on blogs with partial feeds.
• And, most interesting, when I switched back to full feeds, I didn't really see much traffic change. Readers rarely click through to the blog post in either case.

Bottom line: I would highly encourage anyone with a blog to provide a full feed.

I'd be curious if I've missed something here or if anyone who's providing a partial feed can convince me why they shouldn't provide a full feed.

Later maybe I'll start naming names.

The New News?

Could Jon Stewart's The Daily Show be the model for news programming of the future? Why not?, says a study by the University of Indiana that has found that The Daily Show is as substantive as any conventional news program -- perhaps more so.

Political heavy-hitters such as Sen. John McCain and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf have made recent appearances that have become newsworthy themselves, and Stewart's humor helps make important issues relevant in a way a "straight" delivery can't. Moreover, the show often picks up significant stories that the mainstream media miss. Add to that the Daily Show's popularity among college students and other highly educated, highly informed young viewers, and all the makings of a new wave in newscasting are in place. If the "Big Three" news ratings continue to fall, they may want to catch that wave.

Source: Huffington Post

Study Says US Rich in Renewable Energy

Oil prices are coming down for the moment, but that's hardly reducing exploration into wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources. And the US has great potential to harness such energy, according to a recent report the the Worldwatch Institute.

The American land mass ideal for generating wind power, and solar cell and biodiesel production has increased exponentially since 2000. Currently, the state of California gets over 30% of its energy through renewable sources (though renewable energy in the US overall is only 6% of total consumptions).

Worldwide, investment in renewable energy has reached nearly $180 billion since 1995. In addition to being clean and reducing dependence on fossil fuels, renewable energy also boosts economies. In Germany, which has a campaign to achieve energy independence, renewable energy projects have created 20,000 jobs in the past three years... not to mention lessening the volatility of imported oil dependence.

Source: Worldwatch Institute

Teleportation Moves Closer to Reality

Long a staple of science fiction, teleportation is rapidly becoming a reality, if only on a small scale.

In the past, scientists have managed to transport atoms and light short distances. Now, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have conducted experiments that use light as a transmitter of information between matter.

The Copenhagen experiments have teleported information only a few feet, but the researchers are confident that the distances can be expanded. Although teleporting large objects and individuals a la Star Trek is a very long way off at best, the transmission of quantum information has applications in transmitting digital information in new and powerful ways.

Source: News.com.au