I've renamed my Blog!
21-January-2005
I never did like the name "Mike's Writes" but it was the first thing that popped into my head when I was building the new KnowNet site, and time is at a premium (I've worked an average of 12 hours every day since New Year's :o(
That name originally sounded amusing to me because there used to be a famous bicycle shop around the corner from my house called "Mike's Bikes" - famous because it had a sign painted by Ed Povey. There's still a lovely old shed from the Mike's Bikes days behind our house. Not missing a local trick, there is a greasy spoon around the other corner called "Mike's Bites". But a local pun is not a good reason to name a weblog.
"c-Learning" appeals to me for a number of reasons - not least its not being "e-Learning".
The "c" is intended as a bit of a pun: it admits that it is in a lower major version than "e" learning will admit to. It also stands for "collaboration" - which to me is the key missing ingredient in online-support for learning.
Welcome another site using knotes for comments and discussion
13-January-2005
The Work and Learning Partners project is having its startup conference today. KnowNet is a partner in the WLP project, mainly responsible for developing and maintaining web presence and online tools for the partnerships' activities.
We have erected a new site for the project, and included the weblogging for site comments feature in this site from the start. We have high hopes that this will encourage active and productive discussion!
See the KnowNet area in the partners branch of the site for further updates.
knotes - planned support for collaborative negotiation of categories
21-January-2005
- Preamble:
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I have been trying to concentrate on two site-development tasks over the past few days, leveraging knotes to support some particular activities in the NGRF and SIGOSSEE sites.
The NGRF activity was intriguing. Alan Brown, from the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick, is a key person in the NGRF development and a longtime colleague and collaborator. He recently became part of a TLRP project to assemble resources towards a big report on Work-Related leearning.
One of their first goals was to design a categorical structure to describe these resources and/or to delineate the conceptual territory (sorry, I've never been entirely certain which). He was eager to use an old systems-integration trick of ours, the Team Task, to provide online support for that activity. We recently made a first pass at upgrading the Team Task concept to embed a group weblog and a resource aggregator which would give a clean interface into resources however mesily they might have been thrown into the weblog.
I spent the past two days struggling to understand the activity they were engaged in, and how to make a framework in which to carry on discussions supporting their activity. The rest of this post consists of an unedited email I sent to Alan this morning when I finally got the point.
And the point is: knotes can quickly be adapted to make all categories inherently (cross)-discussable, and to provide an interface for the social negotiation of a categorical structure.
Further background to understanding the stream of text which follows is that I was also planning the upgrade of the SIGOSSEE site so it too begins to make good use of knotes for collaborative work. As part of that, I was working out which kinds of existing SIGOSSEE content should be imported into which new knotes weblogs, and wondering about how to set up the initial categories for these blogs... and more interestingly how to support a process in which the members of the site develop their own categorising conventions.
I hope the text of that email to Alan might give a flavour of what we're about to try to do with knotes and categories:
2 comments.
- Latest comment:
- 02-Nov-2005 12:35 by mmalloch; We're re-thinking social tagsonomy management
