community

This post sort of follows on from my musings on Pownce, and the relative (in)utility of the current glut of social networking "services".

Received any Spock trust invitations lately?

Spock, a self-described “people search application that allows you to see what your friends and colleagues are doing on the web”, could potentially tell us something about the future of metasearch engines—those clunky crawlers that tried, and mostly failed, to bridge the gap between structured web directories like Dmoz, and the chaotic openness of Google’s PageRank™ technology. Although its interface design, a web-2.0-ified “Google Classic Home”, is so trendy that I’m afraid it’s already terribly dated.

Oxford made a decision in Autumn 2006 to migrate to the Sakai VLE with the announcement of the Tetra collaboration. Since the completion of the academic year, we've been able to focus more on the task in hand. For myself, I decided the best way to quickly gain a feel for Sakai was to attend a Sakai gathering and conveniently the 7th Sakai Conference was recently held in Amsterdam, the first time the conference had been held outside the United States. I was primarily interested in sessions that addressed system migration, deployment and support, but also keen to hear about pedagogy and usability, leaving it to my colleagues to cover the more technical development aspects. I wanted to know what approaches were adopted to move to Sakai: organisation, resources, timescales, etc.

So was it a case of all aboard...?

Having extolled the virtues of sharing, my blog has been void of any further contributions. I'm sorry about that and aim to post a few entries in the coming week, especially as I prepare for the Educause conference in Dallas. At the very least I should elaborate soon on my abstract for my poster session on Wednesday evening.

In the UK there's been a lot of discussion and debate around the notion of personal(ised) learning environments (PLEs for short), with further funding available from the JISC in their latest call (04/06 Capital Programme) - see e.g. e-learning strand Call III. All this has raised fundamental questions about the nature of learning as individuals and within communities, let alone what this means in terms of software systems. It can be a heady and contentious mix and in all of this I wonder what about the role of teaching, guidance and so on? Is it being devalued?  So here I'm going to reflect on my brief experience with an online venture where personal spaces and community were closely connected, with occasional pauses to refer to learning environments.

There are 5 immediate job openings at Solano Community College in various technology support areas.  These jobs should be posted by July 1 on the campus web site:

http://www.solano.edu

They will also soon be listed with the Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/jobs/

They include starting or anticipated salaries (depending on the bargaining unit representing that position) and we are awaiting the news on the California state budget.  If adopted as proposed, there might be a 5.92% COLA for each of these jobs.  The two bargaining units involved are each in the third year of a three year agreement that guarantees a total pass-through of the COLA to their members.  Solano offers exceptional benefits as well.

These jobs are in Technology and Learning Resources, specifically in Technology Services and Support.

Customer Support Technician - help desk and operations for our legacy HP 3000 until it goes away with the implementation of Banner (underway).

Telecommunication Network Technician - phone and netwok support.  We have a Mitel phone switch and are contemplating the move to VOIP. 

David Horton has published an excellent article " How to get people to work for free: Attracting volunteers to your free software project" all about how to encourage the users of open source projects to contribute to the ongoing success. The key recommendations are to have an explicit, user understandable vision and to break at least some of the work down into easily understood tasks to let new contributors get started. If you're trying to build an open source comunity, you need to read this article.

I had a talk yesterday with an Alumni Development Officer whose job it is to support the University's Alumni online community initiative (http://olcnetwork.net/uwindsor). She was telling me how difficult it is to have people join and participate, largely because so few people do... People join and there is not much going on so they do not come back. I guess that is because there is not a lot of community there.We also talked about our children... Each night I sit and watch my children (Grades 10, 8 & 7) use their computers to communicate with their friends, as they do their homework and listen to their music. I know this is different than the way I grew up - each night we would go and play football, hockey or baseball, depending on the time of year, and then make our way home to eat and then "focus" on our homework (my mother might argue with the amount of "focusing" I did - but I digress). As I watch the kids, I know that my first temptation is to think that they should be doing things the way that I did them (that worked for me), but is that the truth? The reality is that my children are doing fairly well in school, get their homework done without me nagging them (much) and have really good friends. What worked for me obviously is not what works for them. I know that my work day pulls me in several directions, seemingly at once, and I am sure that the world is only going to expect more multitasking . I think that the way that the kids are working right now is the best way for them to prepare for the world ahead, especially since they will be shaping it....