Write Technology

I was at a professional gathering this morning where the topic of discussion was using blogs, podcasts, and wikis in adult/corporate learning environments. However, the meeting ended up being more for introducing these Web 2.0 concepts than discussing, in detail, their uses.

I could wax on forever about the joys and advantages to blogging and wikis. (I’m not really a podcast person, as they don’t tend to hold my multi-tasking, short attention span.) I can also go on forever about the benefits of a wiki as a supplement to either traditional or eLearning.

I was surprised, as I am repeatedly surprised, at how many people are oblivious to the advantages of Web 2.0 tools, from RSS to tagging to wikis and blogs. Last year, I attended Learning 2005 hoping to learn about cutting edge technology and instead, everyone was still learning about blogs and wikis. Many folks haven’t even heard the term Web 2.0! Why am I surprised? Because the mainstream news media refers to blogs as sources or allows blogs to affect their journalistic angle (whether that is appropriate or not is another question). Because there are over 12 million blogs and counting in the blogosphere. Because Microsoft is integrating both blogging and RSS into it’s new version of Office.
So many reasons to be aware of the blogosphere, yet, I bet my Mom couldn’t tell you anything about a blog, let alone wikis, tagging, and RSS. It’s a funny juxtaposition – I feel incredibly behind in technology because of all the changes with PHP, various new Flash programs, and all sorts of software I’m unfamiliar with. Yet, I’m cutting edge compared to a lot of people because of my knowledge of, and embracing of, Web 2.0. Is is generational? Will Web 2.0+ be simply a fact of life for Gen Y and those graduating over the next 5 years? Who knows where the Web will be in 5 years? Will I still be keeping up?

To bring the conversation back to learning, the one Web 2.0 feature I just don’t quite buy into for adult learning is a blog.
I could go on forever about the advantages of blogs for marketing,
product announcements, and getting personal with your customers. But
learning? More specifically, interactive learning? I don’t want to hear
about how you can comment and others comment and a discussion ensues.
If you ask me, you can get that from a threaded discussion board. So
tell me, how would you, or could you, apply blogs to learning?

Thanks to an upgrade by my blogging host/software, I’ve now re-instituted comments. Granted, they never really went away, but they did get a lot harder to post. You are no longer required to be a Typekey member to post, nor do you have to wait for me to approve the comment before its visible. Now you just need to pass the CAPTCHA test and prove you are a happy reader and not an evil ‘bot. In theory, this combats comment spam.

The downside of a CAPTCHA is that it is not Section 508 compliant. If you are visually impaired and want to post a comment, simply email me your comment and I’ll make sure it gets posted.

One caveat to this: I still have the Power of Delete. If you post an anonymous comment or comment with obviously fake contact info, I will most likely delete you. Sorry!

Guy Kawasaki is now blogging, which seems like perfect "synergy" to me. For those of you who don’t know, Guy Kawasaki was the first Mac
Evangelist (that was his job title at Apple). In 1989 he published a
great book on product evangelism and business models at Apple called The Macintosh Way.
I have an autographed copy of it somewhere.

Why is it such great synergy? The way I see it, the new method of evangelism is via blogging and the Internet. It makes perfect sense that the man who originally defined product evangelism has segued into the blogosphere.

From his first post back in December:

Welcome to my first attempt at blogging. Admittedly, I’m three years
behind the bleeding edge, but I had to get over the inherent arrogance
of blogging: that people would give a shitake about what I have to say.

A book every two or three years is one thing, but a daily blog? (Not
that I’m committing to daily blog.) However, many people pounded on me,
so here goes. Not that you can hold me to this, but I’ll write about
entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation, public speaking,
Macintosh, and hockey.

From time to time, I will also discuss things that I do not “know,”
but I’ve never let ignorance get in the way of expressing an
opinion—and clearly, very few bloggers do! So let the good times roll…

Via Boing Boing, I found a great article over at AdAge.com, positing that a blogger is just a writer with cooler software. The creative force is the same – the medium is just changing. Therefore there’s no such thing as a blogger. Much to my surprise, I found myself agreeing.

So why does the idea of the blogger as The Other continue to persist?
Because many bloggers, of course, like the idea of being all alterna;
it’s a point of pride, a tenet of the “blog community” (whatever that
is), that bloggers are superior to the musty, lumbering, out-of-touch
traditional media. And for traditional-media types,
blog/blogging/bloggers are variants of a sort of linguistic armor –
labels that allow old-school-ists to convince themselves that they are
the true professionals, and they needn’t radically alter the way they
work (i.e., work way faster, interact constantly with readers, be
vastly more voracious, etc.) to compete with the amateurs, the
arrivistes.

In case you want more, you can read the whole article after the jump.

continue reading »

Even if you don’t have an opportunity to attend Learning 2005 in a few weeks, you can still access some of the content. Elliott Masie and The MASIE Center have several public, themed blogs with attached podcasts. Several of the Podcasts have associated PDFs to read instead of listen. (By the way, you don’t need an iPod to listen to Podcasts. You only need a computer, a program such as Windows Media Player, and working speakers.)

Channel 1: Learning 2005 University
Channel 2: Learning Authors Interviews
Channel 3: Learning Rants, Raves, & Reflections
Channel 4: Learning Research Conversations
Channel 5: Learning Notes from Other Fields

Technorati Tag: Learning 2005

Here is the abstract from a white paper by D. Calvin Andrus on how the CIA is using Blogs and Wikis in a secure environment.

Abstract:    


US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a
real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The
rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of
their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict.
The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of
us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own.
We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that
dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as
the national security environment changes.
Recent
theoretical developments in the philosophy of science that matured in
the 1990′s, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes
the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include
allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved
tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new
technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are
self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information
sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our
non-intelligence National Security colleagues access to these
technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the
transformation.

The white paper is licensed under Creative Commons and is a free download (PDF).

With all the blogs available on the web, it was only a matter of time before spam spread to Blog Comments. Comment spam is a blog comment, usually containing an offensive URL, that has no relation at all to the blog or blog post topic.

Due to an influx of irritating and offensive comments from spammers, I have needed to do two things to improve security on this blog:

1. Moderate Comments. All comments are emailed to me, where I will hit the big orange "Approve" button unless it is comment spam. This means that if you comment, you won’t see the results of your comment until I check my email. I know this might be frustrating, but I promise – unless I’m out of town or you’re a spammer, your comment will be approved within 24 hours.

2. Authenticate Commenters. My blog is hosted by six apart, which provides a service called Typekey. Basically you get a user name and password and you can sign in to any number of Typepad and Moveable Type blogs that require authentication. Sign up for my blog and have access to thousands. I know this is a pain, and I apologize for that. However, spammers are less likely to go through the effort of creating a user name and password.

Yes, the comment spam problem is that bad. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience to my readers.

Blogmeister is a blogging tool created specifically for the education market.  The biggest difference between blogmeister and any other blogging tool is the ability for the teacher to review the student blog entries before the entries are published.

But blogging is also showing up in schools, where teachers have known for a long time that students  develop better communication skills when they are authentically communicating. A number of educators are helping their students developing their writing skills by having them publish their work as blogs, and then invite comments from people in the outside.

There are many freely available tools that facilitate blogging, but none seem especially suited for the classroom. That is the reason for BlogMeister. This online blogging tool is explicitly designed with teachers and students in mind, where the teacher can evaluate, comment on, and finally publish students’ blog articles in a controlled environment.

I have long been an advocate on the use of blogs in education – especially in creative writing classes.  For a teacher to be able to control what is then published to the outside world, as well as provide private comments and guidance, is the next step in an emerging and useful technology.

Blogmeister

The New York Times Magazine did an article on bloggers as they relate to politics. It’s an interesting article on the people behind “the new media.” It’s also much more positive than I tend to find articles in that particular magazine.

In a recent national survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than two million Americans have their own blog. Most of them, nobody reads. The blogs that succeed, like Kaus’s, are written in a strong, distinctive, original voice.
…Early in 2002, Joe Trippi read on Armstrong’s blog, MyDD, that Howard Dean might be running for president, and after Trippi joined the campaign as its manager, he helped bring the Dean movement to life online, in part through the campaign’s massive community blog, which connected Deaniacs all over the country, helped them organize and became the access point for the $40 million that fueled Dean’s explosive run. The Dean phenomenon drew so many new people to the grass roots (or ”netroots,” as the Dean bloggers used to call them) of presidential politics that a kind of fragmentation occurred in what had been, until then, a blog culture dominated by credentialed gentlemen like Kaus, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, a conservative law professor whose blog, Instapundit, is read faithfully at the White House.
…But at the same time that blogs have moved away from the political center, they have become increasingly influential in the campaigns — James P. Rubin, John Kerry’s foreign-policy adviser, told me, ”They’re the first thing I read when I get up in the morning and the last thing I read at night.”

It’s an interesting look at how the Giants in Politics are paying attention to the blogs. And whether or not the bloggers care.

New York Times Magazine: Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail

An MSNBC article talks about Blogging for Business. They seem surprised at how effective a blog for business can be, and discuss several ways of using blogs. Blogs can be used by employees on an intranet, providing an avenue for employees in a corporation, especially a large corporation, to better get to know one another. Blogs can also be used to publicize a business, sort of like this one! I use this blog to inform you of the latest happenings in technical writing, editing, elearning … but in the process, I’m generating leads to my main site, I’m linking to other sites, and people are linking to this blog. With every hit and every link, my search engine score improves. The higher I am in a search engine, the more likely customers will click on me and eventually, hire Write Technology. (You knew there was a business benefit to this blog, right?)

The article also quotes from a Microsoft blog, without giving the blogger credit. Heather’s blog can be visited here, and is an excellent example of a corporate blog, by an employee specializing in recruiting marketing talent. Recruiting is a fantastic use of a blog for business purposes and Heather helps give Microsoft a “friendly face” with a sincere, down-to-earth delivery. In essence, her blog helps humanize Microsoft. In addition, she has a communication line into the tech community, giving her an advantage when searching for new “talent.”

Heather’s ‘Marketing at Microsoft’ blog
MSNBC/Reuters: Business and Blogging moving mainstream
The Empire Blogs Back