David Davies' Weblog
Tuesday, January 11, 2005Mac mini
Wednesday, January 5, 2005Another David Davies
Tuesday, January 4, 2005Content rather than container
Rob Reynolds has a good new year's resolution "My suggestion for all educators in 2005 is that we concentrate on content first. I propose that we actually pretend there is no technology available to us other than simple sticks with which we can draw in the dirt."
Moving to Movable Type?
I'm experimenting with a parallel weblog setup for a few weeks. I've installed Movable Type on my server to see how it compares to Radio Userland. The MT installation was a bit more involved compared to Radio but the docs were fairly straightforward and I got it working. What prompted me to try this was that I just get the feeling Radio Userland is going nowhere. The underlying technology, Frontier, is still a great application and I use it for most of my web-based scripting/database apps but as a weblog app Radio is sometimes just too much work. I get the impression that Manila is a better weblogging environment but finding a commercial Manila host, and one that allows you to install your own scripts/plug-ins isn't easy.
The most obvious difference between Radio and MT so far is reliability of posting. Upstreaming via Radio is a real dog most of the time, even via FTP to my own server. Not so with MT. I use MarsEdit (a great app by the way - try it!) all the time now to post rather than either Radio's or MT's own web-based client. So far with my MT posts it's a breeze and 100% reliable. For some reason I usually have to force Radio to upstream my posts, especially if I post a couple of items in quick succession. That's a real pain.
The other benefit of using MT is a real strategy for managing comment and trackback spam. There seems to be a concerted effort to get on top of this in the MT community. In contrast there seems to be little happening on the Radio Userland front.
I'll duplicate all my Radio weblog posts to my new MT weblog for a while to see how things go. If MT is as useful as it looks like it's going to be then I'll ditch the Radio app. Then I'll be looking out for advice exporting all my legacy posts from Radio into a format MT can import. Any tips will be gratefully received.
Monday, January 3, 2005Mobile phones: 20 years old in the UK
Just missed the birthday party by a couple of days. The first mobile phone call in the UK was on January 1st 1985. When the first consumer mobile phones were launched they were "the size of a briefcase, cost about £2,000 and had a battery life of little more than 20 minutes". So they've seen my Sony Ericsson P900 then.
Sunday, January 2, 2005Edu-nap-torrent
When does an activity become educational? Is there something you have to do to turn an activity into one with educational value? I'm not sure. If education is the same as learning then I feel as though I'm learning all the time, although I never usually think of it like that. But it wasn't always like that. As a kid I was more interested in learning about things outside of school than within. Learning about things in school was boring but the things that interested me outside, well, that wasn't learing, that was fun. The educational context of school wasn't that attractive for me. With kids, often the best way to kill their interest in something is to say it's educational. I have a standing joke with my son (now 13) that whenever anything comes on TV for instance that's vaguely educational one of us quips, 'I'm learning!'. Something from the Simpsons I think. So much for the Simpsons generation. Thankfully my son is a lot cleverer, more learned (another Simpsons joke) that I was at his age.
There's a bit of a trend to look for the educational value, the educational angle almost, in new Internet technologies. A while back there was Napster, then Gnutella, and soon after folk started wondering if P2P technology could be used to share educational materials. Take LOMster or Edutella for example. More recently Podcasting, nothing more than sharing audio (mix tape anyone?) with the extra step of loading it onto your iPod, has gone all educational. Now BitTorrent gets the educational treatment. Of course there's nothing wrong with looking for the educational angle in these things and I dare say some innovative applications will come from such speculation. I just have a suspicion that by trying to find an angle in something that in itself has already successfully formed around a shared common goal, e.g the exchange of music and other files, then you'll lose the essence of success.
An example. I was at an educational technology meeting in the summer and attended a presentation on the outcome of a trial to connect distance learners via instant messaging. How could that not be successful? Everyone uses instant messaging, right? It's the ideal way of keeping in touch, especially in these days of spam-ridden email. Well you'd think so but the trial wasn't a success and do you know why? They could get enough active participation amongst the learners. A survey discovered that the subjects of the trial didn't find using instant messaging outside of their usual cause to do so (chatting with friends and family) was something they could sustain. The novelty wore off quickly. Outside of its usual context instant messaging wasn't as valuable. There will be exceptions to this naturally but as a generalization, context is everything. Change the context and you change the meaning.
