Navigator bites the dust

Web icon set to be discontinued: "The browser that helped kick-start the commercial web is to cease development because of lack of users.

Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, the company has said.

In the mid-1990s the browser was used by more than 90% of the web population, but numbers have slipped to just 0.6%."

Not really that sorry to say goodbye to something which kind of got its legs tangled in the web of the late 1990s and never quite moved on... but it was the first browser I used and was my first experience of the web. I definitely don't use the web in the same way I did back when Navigator effectively was the web for many people (I no longer have to go make a cuppa cha and pile my way through other work while a 1 meg file downloads for a start!) and it's interesting to think how rapidly and how far it's come. And how relatively easily a hu-u-u-u-uge name can become a blast from the past. And no-one even really notices it's gone.

The web's a strange old place, isn't it?

Power of Facebook affects law

Much to the surprise of sceptics who paint government as unable or unwilling to listen to public concerns, those voices had an immediate impact. Ten days after the Facebook group's launch, Jim Prentice delayed introducing the new copyright reforms, seemingly struck by the rapid formation of concerned citizens who were writing letters and raising awareness.

Not only had tools like Facebook had an immediate effect on the government's legislative agenda, but the community that developed around the group also led to a "crowdsourcing" of knowledge. Canadians from coast to coast shared information, posed questions, posted their letters to politicians, and started a national conversation on copyright law in Canada.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Power of Facebook affects law


Interesting example of how potentially powerful Facebook can be.  You definitely have to pick the right topic to get people interested (obviously!), but there's an additional factor as well.  Grabbing a little piece of zeitgeist and getting in with the 'right' people early.  The article also has some useful clues as to why this group had the impact it did.  Sowing the seed of awareness is important and making links to appropriate places too.  I guess some of this treatment of a political issue can be translated into an educational context.  If you want students to adopt a tool for their learning, you either have to give them ownership and let them run with it or tap into something they can run with.  Facebook groups aren't challenging to belong to.  There's very little barrier to entry once you've got a Facebook account.  Search for a particular topic of interest, and join in.

The potential of this stuff is pretty huge - but it does seem to be that things are 'hot or not' in very brief spans of time and I wonder if the lumbering beast that is education can move quick enough to keep up...

Ten years of blogs...

Weblogs rack up a decade of posts

The word "weblog" celebrates the 10th anniversary of it being coined on 17 December 1997.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Weblogs rack up a decade of posts

Happy Geeky Birthday, Blog!

Makes you wonder though...  ten years of blogs but mention them to many internet users and the word 'geek' is never far from their lips.  Do blogs have a bad press?  After ten years will they ever be more than a minority tool?  Or is currently that the nature of things anyway?

I wonder if blogs will be having the same 'death knell' comments that e-mail receives these days in another ten years' time.  Either way, ten years is an awful long time in IT... so Happy Birthday blog!

Words not to like

The system will centre around authored articles created with a tool Google has dubbed "knol" - the word denotes a unit of knowledge - that will make webpages with a distinctive livery to identify them as authoritative.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google debuts knowledge project

Urgh!  New made up word 'a knol'.  How on earth can you have a unit of knowledge which is quantifiable and measurable in any truly meaningful way?  Not only are Google jumping on the Wikipedia bandwagon a few years too late, now they're inventing words like some third-rate web 2.0 company.  Think I'll be keeping my 'knols' to myself unless Google manages to put out something pretty special...

Shock at $85k mobile phone bill

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Shock at $85k mobile phone bill: "Shock at $85k mobile phone bill Mobile phones - file photo Many new mobile phones can connect to the internet A Canadian man has been shocked to receive a mobile phone bill for nearly $85,000 (£41,000). Piotr Staniaszek thought he could use his new phone as a modem for his computer under his $10 unlimited mobile browser plan from Bell Mobility."

Ouch!!! That's gotta put a dent in your Christmas spirit, hasn't it?!

Two weeks

Two weeks is clearly a long time in RSS world.  I've over 1000 feeds to read!!!  So I'm not going to.  As far as I'm concerned, the last two weeks never happened.

There.

Problem solved.

This online life malarky is dead easy, huh?

Poor neglected blog

Dear blog

Sorry I have been neglecting you lately.  It's not you.  It's me.  I'm on holiday, traipsing round the South Eastern bit of Australia and I feel sure some space will do us good.

Will see you soon.

Love

Sarah  :o)

Weakest links

TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service's Risks: "The link shortening and redirection service TinyURL went down apparently for hours last night (it's still down, in fact), rendering countless links broken across the web. Complaints have been particularly loud on Twitter, where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do, but the service is widely used in emails and web pages as well. The site claims to service 1.6 billion hits each month."

Funnily enough, this is one of the things we tell students on T183 (Design and the Web) could be useful for them to shorten the URLs they use as part of referencing internet sources. And yet - it goes down and there is absolutely nothing the OU can do about it. It could be said to be an example of where a VLE might be better. Or is it just that because the VLE doesn't offer that service, we are left with no choice but to go to an external source? The article makes a critical point to conclude, "There ought not be one single point of failure that can so easily break such a big part of the web". True. There ought not to be. But how to build that in without taking away flexibility from those who want it? Control from those who need to implement it? Where does the middle ground lie?

Ways to communicate

Every so often in my inbox arrives an e-mail saying 'you haven't replied to my e-mail, did you get it...' which prompts me to go 'whoops, I read it and forgot to reply'. I keep reading articles which predict the "Death of E-Mail" and "Kids say e-mail is like sooooo dead" and a large part of me feels that there's something in the water where that particular charge is concerned. It set me thinking about the ways in which I communicate these days...

1. Face-to-face
2. Facebook to Facebook
3. Forums
4. Blogs
5. Skype
6. Phone
7. E-mail
8. A.n.other way!

Sometimes I communicate by not communicating myself - I subscribe to a fair few RSS feeds and have them drifting quietly into Google Reader as they are released onto the internet. I read blogs - read, not necessarily always comment. I communicate and don't expect a reply - I may post a link to Del.icio.us, a picture to Flickr, a link to a Facebook group. Yes, I check my e-mail every day, but I've got into the habit of not replying immediately and my lack of filing moves their priority further down the list than they used to be. I can't quite pin down why that is. Maybe it feels clunky? Maybe it's just not addictive in the way some social networking sites can be? Maybe there are other ways to communicate which provide other services and are better integrated into your consciousness?

It struck me how much I've learned by using various web 2.0 technologies. I've done a lot more written reflection since keeping various blogs. I've touched base with a load more of my 'friends' (friends in the 'there's no other category to describe the multitude of relationships you have with people' kinda way). I've read more. Thought more. Connected more. And e-mail seems stuck in a period before that. Spam swarms into my mailbox. Viruses abound. You can filter. You can file. But still the onslaught continues...

Maybe it's just Mark Anderson's 'long tail' at work? So many ways of communicating that every niche is catered for. E-mail is stuck in the head? Doing what it does (mainly alerting me to what's happening elsewhere!), but if you're looking for a particular way of keeping in touch, then you just toddle down the long tail to find it? It doesn't mean what it once did to me anyway... but what was that... and what is it now?! Have things changed... or is it one of those weird breakups which start 'it's not you, it's me'...

VLE theory doesn't match reality?

Random musing time...

I think there's a real risk that when a course team is designing into their offering the means by which students are 'allowed' to communicate with others, that they risk (unintentionally?) showing students the virtual door.  There's an interesting perspective which seems to say 'pedagogically this is the best thing, so it's what we'll do'... but forgets that more often than not these are the result of finger in the wind musings and that other, equally valid, needs and thoughts may be ignored as a result.  It smacks of a patriarchal stance which doesn't seem to tie in with constructivist thinking or even just the fact that students want to meet others... or not.  It all depends!  There is no 'one size fits all' model.

Here's an example.  One of the OU's postgraduate education courses has no course-wide forum, only regional offerings.  A request for an informal, OU-hosted but OUSA run one is turned down.  No reason given.  Fine - but how do I communicate with others on my course?  How do I know who else is studying it other than the very limited pool of people I'm being 'allowed' to connect with?  How do I maximise the possibility that out there are interesting, engaging people to talk to and exchange ideas with if I'm only being revealed a restricted hand?  VLEs have lots of plus points - but this idea of 'we know best' in dictating what services are or aren't offered is a serious drawback.  You want to control the students' experience of their learning environment?  VLE!  You want to control the students' experience of their learning environment but don't end up giving them what they want / need?  Off into the big wide virtual world they go to find what might actually meet their needs.  Bye bye virtual campus.  Hello Facebook?

I can't help but wonder, are VLEs really a supportive environment?  Does it become institution = them.  Students = us?  Are institutions scurrying after the students they themselves drove away?  They can come trampling into Facebook or MySpace etc... saying... 'Sorry... didn't mean to drive you out of our systems... we're here now.  Everything's okay!'  Why not be flexible in implementation?  Be responsive rather than dictating?  Or is this an inherent drawback with VLEs?  They become a lumbering beast which is all about design and control... and casts their users as subservient and unquestioning?  Doing 'what's best' for them rather than what's really best for their users...