Let's talk blogs

[Nathan Pearson-2]

More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page.  I'm thinking
a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site -- a personal blog.
But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a site.  So how might a blog
vignette be useful?  Things that come to mind for me are similar to the type
of stuff that one might find in a WordPress sidebar: recent posts, blog
rolls, popular comment, top contributors, etc.  RSS feeds also come to
mind.  But on some level, those represent techie things.  In other words,
stuff that's cool and that we "can" do if we wanted since the
technology/design more or less already exists.

But what about real use cases?  What are the real needs to add a blog
vignette to a page?  Any thoughts?

Nathan

--
Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation

E. me@...
M. 602.418.5092
Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
S. npearson99 (Skype)

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[Michael Feldstein-2]

I don't think there's much blog /functionality/ that's unique and worth
pulling through. If you think about it, a blog at its core looks a lot
like an oddly configured discussion board. Most of the other functional
bits are similarly generic. A blogroll is just a list of links, for
example.

More likely what you want to pull through is blog /content/. Here are a
couple of examples:

    * You want to pull posts from various student blogs into one
      discussion board so that they are consolidated for class
      discussion. Maybe they are posts that are tagged for a particular
      assignment.
    * You want to pull through a post /and the comments on it/ in a live
      discussion thread.
    * You want to create a "planet" type aggregator within a site.

Notice that the first and third items could be accomplished through RSS
syndication. It's only the second one--particularly if you want the
comments made on the thread in the new site to be synchronized with the
thread on the post in its original context--that requires a little magic.

There is one blog-specific functional doohickey that could be very
useful sprinkled across a variety of settings. I'm not sure that it
works purely as a gadget, though; it might require a new core service.
It's the trackback. If somebody links to an item, a reciprocal link
would be generated along with a summary snippet of the text surrounding
the original link. Trackbacks are obviously much more complicated in an
environment where you have access privileges to contend with, but maybe
you check who the user is and only show trackback links to content
assets that she has permission to see.

- m


Nathan Pearson wrote:

> More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page.  I'm
> thinking a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site -- a
> personal blog.  But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a site.  
> So how might a blog vignette be useful?  Things that come to mind for
> me are similar to the type of stuff that one might find in a WordPress
> sidebar: recent posts, blog rolls, popular comment, top contributors,
> etc.  RSS feeds also come to mind.  But on some level, those represent
> techie things.  In other words, stuff that's cool and that we "can" do
> if we wanted since the technology/design more or less already exists.
>
> But what about real use cases?  What are the real needs to add a blog
> vignette to a page?  Any thoughts?
>
> Nathan
>
> --
> Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation
>
> E. me@... <mailto:me@...>
> M. 602.418.5092
> Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
> S. npearson99 (Skype)
>
> http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix 
> <http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix>
>
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--


Oracle <http://www.oracle.com>
Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
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[nato]

adding on to Michael's points...

in my mind, a blog is primary user-centric, eg, a journal I keep for/
of myself (whether I am a person or a larger entity/project/etc)

accordingly, ideally the default behavior of a blog is that I post to  
MY blog, but may additionally tag an entry (and adjust viewing/
commenting permissions?) as pertaining to a specific activity (eg, a  
course, an assignment, etc), perhaps merely via a tag for that/those  
activity/ies

On Jan 28, 2009, at 8:35 PM, Michael Feldstein wrote:

> I don't think there's much blog functionality that's unique and  
> worth pulling through. If you think about it, a blog at its core  
> looks a lot like an oddly configured discussion board. Most of the  
> other functional bits are similarly generic. A blogroll is just a  
> list of links, for example.
>
> More likely what you want to pull through is blog content. Here are  
> a couple of examples:
> You want to pull posts from various student blogs into one  
> discussion board so that they are consolidated for class discussion.  
> Maybe they are posts that are tagged for a particular assignment.
> You want to pull through a post and the comments on it in a live  
> discussion thread.
> You want to create a "planet" type aggregator within a site.
> Notice that the first and third items could be accomplished through  
> RSS syndication. It's only the second one--particularly if you want  
> the comments made on the thread in the new site to be synchronized  
> with the thread on the post in its original context--that requires a  
> little magic.
>
> There is one blog-specific functional doohickey that could be very  
> useful sprinkled across a variety of settings. I'm not sure that it  
> works purely as a gadget, though; it might require a new core  
> service. It's the trackback. If somebody links to an item, a  
> reciprocal link would be generated along with a summary snippet of  
> the text surrounding the original link. Trackbacks are obviously  
> much more complicated in an environment where you have access  
> privileges to contend with, but maybe you check who the user is and  
> only show trackback links to content assets that she has permission  
> to see.
>
> - m
>
>
> Nathan Pearson wrote:
>>
>> More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page.  I'm  
>> thinking a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site --  
>> a personal blog.  But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a  
>> site.  So how might a blog vignette be useful?  Things that come to  
>> mind for me are similar to the type of stuff that one might find in  
>> a WordPress sidebar: recent posts, blog rolls, popular comment, top  
>> contributors, etc.  RSS feeds also come to mind.  But on some  
>> level, those represent techie things.  In other words, stuff that's  
>> cool and that we "can" do if we wanted since the technology/design  
>> more or less already exists.
>>
>> But what about real use cases?  What are the real needs to add a  
>> blog vignette to a page?  Any thoughts?
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>> --
>> Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation
>>
>> E. me@...
>> M. 602.418.5092
>> Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
>> S. npearson99 (Skype)
>>
>> http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix
>>
>>
>> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal 
>> ) from the DG: User Experience site.
>> You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >  
>> Preferences.
>
> --
>
>
>
> Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
> Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
> 23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
> [see attachment: "oracle_sig_logo.gif", size: 658 bytes]
>
>
> Attachments:
>
> oracle_sig_logo.gif
>
>
> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal 
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[jrnorman]

Well you have triggered one of my hobby horses :). Blog is a word that  
has no meaning to many people outside our world (although the number  
is shrinking). Mostly, those who understand it, understand it in the  
"interweb" sense. A means of self publishing a live memoir of some  
kind, sometimes with a way of connecting to the public memoirs of  
other people with whom you share an interest. The resulting public  
network is sometimes called the Blogosphere. *Blog is essentially a  
self publishing tool*

If you take the technology that provides the UI for a blog and wrap it  
in access control it then supports a number of uses that are very  
different. It is very confusing to talk about Blog affordances in this  
context because the same affordance can have a very different  
*purpose* and it is not safe to assume you can deduce purpose from  
general "interweb" experience of the affordance. There is a similar  
potential confusion when you add access control to a Wiki.

In education we have experimented with several uses for a technology  
that provides time-stamped journal entries that can be shown to a  
controlled audience. We have used it to maintain a class diary (all  
students in the class can post time-stamped journal entries), we have  
used it as a research diary (researcher and supervisor can post time-
stamped journal entries and maybe even ask and answer questions), we  
have used it as a general purpose learning log for a student (covering  
many courses) and we have used it as a private learning log for  
individual students and/or individual courses. All of these examples  
have used Blog software with some measure of modification and/or  
permission configuration. But I would argue they are not "Blogs". In  
other words, using Blog software does not make it a Blog.

So to come to Nathan's question. I think we should offer a number of  
gadgets that perhaps take advantage of a blog service to support time-
stamped journal entries and name them according to purpose, e.g. a  
gadget/vignette for a 'class journal' and a different one for a  
'research log' and offer a configuration that makes sense for that  
purpose rather than offering a generic tool and hoping users will  
learn how to configure it for different purposes and hoping that  
someone accessing the tool will be able to divine its purpose and use  
it appropriately.

I think the history of Blog development in Sakai has actually modified  
the concept for some of the purposes I mention, but whole different  
tools have been created rather than configuring the interface to a  
shared service and we have sown the seeds of confusion by referring to  
all of the incarnations as "Blog".

There are other use scenarios not mentioned above and I haven't  
touched on the networking to others' blogs.

HTH
John

PS I use "interweb" to indicate the naive user who has a vague  
understanding that there is something connecting all these computers  
together and making it possible to reach Google and ask Google where  
things are, but to whom 'world wide web' and 'internet' has no meaning  
so they are apt to confuse the terminology. Such people are not as  
rare as we might imagine and are likely not to have a clear idea what  
a 'Blog' is.

On 29 Jan 2009, at 03:35, Michael Feldstein wrote:

> I don't think there's much blog functionality that's unique and  
> worth pulling through. If you think about it, a blog at its core  
> looks a lot like an oddly configured discussion board. Most of the  
> other functional bits are similarly generic. A blogroll is just a  
> list of links, for example.
>
> More likely what you want to pull through is blog content. Here are  
> a couple of examples:
> • You want to pull posts from various student blogs into one  
> discussion board so that they are consolidated for class discussion.  
> Maybe they are posts that are tagged for a particular assignment.
> • You want to pull through a post and the comments on it in a live  
> discussion thread.
> • You want to create a "planet" type aggregator within a site.
> Notice that the first and third items could be accomplished through  
> RSS syndication. It's only the second one--particularly if you want  
> the comments made on the thread in the new site to be synchronized  
> with the thread on the post in its original context--that requires a  
> little magic.
>
> There is one blog-specific functional doohickey that could be very  
> useful sprinkled across a variety of settings. I'm not sure that it  
> works purely as a gadget, though; it might require a new core  
> service. It's the trackback. If somebody links to an item, a  
> reciprocal link would be generated along with a summary snippet of  
> the text surrounding the original link. Trackbacks are obviously  
> much more complicated in an environment where you have access  
> privileges to contend with, but maybe you check who the user is and  
> only show trackback links to content assets that she has permission  
> to see.
>
> - m
>
>
> Nathan Pearson wrote:
>>
>> More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page.  I'm  
>> thinking a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site --  
>> a personal blog.  But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a  
>> site.  So how might a blog vignette be useful?  Things that come to  
>> mind for me are similar to the type of stuff that one might find in  
>> a WordPress sidebar: recent posts, blog rolls, popular comment, top  
>> contributors, etc.  RSS feeds also come to mind.  But on some  
>> level, those represent techie things.  In other words, stuff that's  
>> cool and that we "can" do if we wanted since the technology/design  
>> more or less already exists.
>>
>> But what about real use cases?  What are the real needs to add a  
>> blog vignette to a page?  Any thoughts?
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>> --
>> Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation
>>
>> E. me@...
>> M. 602.418.5092
>> Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
>> S. npearson99 (Skype)
>>
>> http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix
>>
>>
>> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal 
>> ) from the DG: User Experience site.
>> You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >  
>> Preferences.
>
> --
>
>
>
> Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
> Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
> 23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
> [see attachment: "oracle_sig_logo.gif", size: 658 bytes]
>
>
> Attachments:
>
> oracle_sig_logo.gif
>
>
> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal 
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[Sean Keesler]

I mentioned this in another thread...

I'll point out that at Syracuse, we considered blogs as key to
"portfolio development". When I wrote about our observations I tagged
them all as "Interaction Styles"...they are available here:
http://lsb.syr.edu/interactionstyles

We said, "Student blog posts would appear as messages in the
instructor's inbox. Instructor's would periodically read the blog
posts and send back either plain comments or comments with assessments
(as related to tagged goals). An important feature of this interaction
style is that it supports the idea that "knowledge is emergent" by
allowing students to add new learning outcomes to their Goals and to
tag their blog posts with those tags. Assessment of student learning,
then, can be done in response to student Goals and Faculty Goals
(related to the original activity description)."


--
Sean Keesler
130 Academy Street
Manlius, NY 13104
315-663-7756


On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:23 AM, John Norman <john@...> wrote:

> Well you have triggered one of my hobby horses :). Blog is a word that
> has no meaning to many people outside our world (although the number
> is shrinking). Mostly, those who understand it, understand it in the
> "interweb" sense. A means of self publishing a live memoir of some
> kind, sometimes with a way of connecting to the public memoirs of
> other people with whom you share an interest. The resulting public
> network is sometimes called the Blogosphere. *Blog is essentially a
> self publishing tool*
>
> If you take the technology that provides the UI for a blog and wrap it
> in access control it then supports a number of uses that are very
> different. It is very confusing to talk about Blog affordances in this
> context because the same affordance can have a very different
> *purpose* and it is not safe to assume you can deduce purpose from
> general "interweb" experience of the affordance. There is a similar
> potential confusion when you add access control to a Wiki.
>
> In education we have experimented with several uses for a technology
> that provides time-stamped journal entries that can be shown to a
> controlled audience. We have used it to maintain a class diary (all
> students in the class can post time-stamped journal entries), we have
> used it as a research diary (researcher and supervisor can post time-
> stamped journal entries and maybe even ask and answer questions), we
> have used it as a general purpose learning log for a student (covering
> many courses) and we have used it as a private learning log for
> individual students and/or individual courses. All of these examples
> have used Blog software with some measure of modification and/or
> permission configuration. But I would argue they are not "Blogs". In
> other words, using Blog software does not make it a Blog.
>
> So to come to Nathan's question. I think we should offer a number of
> gadgets that perhaps take advantage of a blog service to support time-
> stamped journal entries and name them according to purpose, e.g. a
> gadget/vignette for a 'class journal' and a different one for a
> 'research log' and offer a configuration that makes sense for that
> purpose rather than offering a generic tool and hoping users will
> learn how to configure it for different purposes and hoping that
> someone accessing the tool will be able to divine its purpose and use
> it appropriately.
>
> I think the history of Blog development in Sakai has actually modified
> the concept for some of the purposes I mention, but whole different
> tools have been created rather than configuring the interface to a
> shared service and we have sown the seeds of confusion by referring to
> all of the incarnations as "Blog".
>
> There are other use scenarios not mentioned above and I haven't
> touched on the networking to others' blogs.
>
> HTH
> John
>
> PS I use "interweb" to indicate the naive user who has a vague
> understanding that there is something connecting all these computers
> together and making it possible to reach Google and ask Google where
> things are, but to whom 'world wide web' and 'internet' has no meaning
> so they are apt to confuse the terminology. Such people are not as
> rare as we might imagine and are likely not to have a clear idea what
> a 'Blog' is.
>
> On 29 Jan 2009, at 03:35, Michael Feldstein wrote:
>
>> I don't think there's much blog functionality that's unique and
>> worth pulling through. If you think about it, a blog at its core
>> looks a lot like an oddly configured discussion board. Most of the
>> other functional bits are similarly generic. A blogroll is just a
>> list of links, for example.
>>
>> More likely what you want to pull through is blog content. Here are
>> a couple of examples:
>> • You want to pull posts from various student blogs into one
>> discussion board so that they are consolidated for class discussion.
>> Maybe they are posts that are tagged for a particular assignment.
>> • You want to pull through a post and the comments on it in a live
>> discussion thread.
>> • You want to create a "planet" type aggregator within a site.
>> Notice that the first and third items could be accomplished through
>> RSS syndication. It's only the second one--particularly if you want
>> the comments made on the thread in the new site to be synchronized
>> with the thread on the post in its original context--that requires a
>> little magic.
>>
>> There is one blog-specific functional doohickey that could be very
>> useful sprinkled across a variety of settings. I'm not sure that it
>> works purely as a gadget, though; it might require a new core
>> service. It's the trackback. If somebody links to an item, a
>> reciprocal link would be generated along with a summary snippet of
>> the text surrounding the original link. Trackbacks are obviously
>> much more complicated in an environment where you have access
>> privileges to contend with, but maybe you check who the user is and
>> only show trackback links to content assets that she has permission
>> to see.
>>
>> - m
>>
>>
>> Nathan Pearson wrote:
>>>
>>> More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page. I'm
>>> thinking a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site --
>>> a personal blog. But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a
>>> site. So how might a blog vignette be useful? Things that come to
>>> mind for me are similar to the type of stuff that one might find in
>>> a WordPress sidebar: recent posts, blog rolls, popular comment, top
>>> contributors, etc. RSS feeds also come to mind. But on some
>>> level, those represent techie things. In other words, stuff that's
>>> cool and that we "can" do if we wanted since the technology/design
>>> more or less already exists.
>>>
>>> But what about real use cases? What are the real needs to add a
>>> blog vignette to a page? Any thoughts?
>>>
>>> Nathan
>>>
>>> --
>>> Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation
>>>
>>> E. me@...
>>> M. 602.418.5092
>>> Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
>>> S. npearson99 (Skype)
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix
>>>
>>>
>>> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
>>> (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal
>>> ) from the DG: User Experience site.
>>> You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >
>>> Preferences.
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>>
>> Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
>> Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
>> 23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
>> [see attachment: "oracle_sig_logo.gif", size: 658 bytes]
>>
>>
>> Attachments:
>>
>> oracle_sig_logo.gif
>>
>>
>> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
>> (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal
>> ) from the DG: User (Using Sakai) site.
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>> Preferences.
>
> ________________________________
> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
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>

--
Sean Keesler
130 Academy Street
Manlius, NY 13104
315-663-7756
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[Plourde, Mathieu]

Regarding the use of blogs in Sakai, here are some of my suggestions:

- Blogs inside Sakai should be more course-centric, some "assignment" of some nature, so their target audience should be smaller than a general blogosphere blog post. At UD, we have changed the default behavior of BlogWow! to make it visible only to a site instead of fully open because our faculty members requested it.

- A blog widget could be of different natures:
-- It could be an activity feed, showing the most recent activity of a blog set, including comments.
-- It could be a filtered activity feed, showing posts tagged with certain keywords, or from a certain sub-group of users.
-- It could be a link to a blog post in particular, from a discussion thread or a page.
-- It could also be a way to grab a quote (and attribute/link it) from a blog post to ask a specific question to a group, and then have a comment box related to this quote, not the whole blog post.
-- And, of course, it could be a RSS feed coming from any source, with some formatting capabilities (title, summary, author, date published, etc.).

Best Regards,

=================================

Mathieu Plourde, MBA
Instructional Designer
IT-User Services
021 Smith Hall
18 Amstel Avenue
Newark, DE 19716

Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
mathieu@...<mailto:mathieu@...>
http://copland.udel.edu/~mathieu/

=================================

From: John Norman [mailto:john@...]
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:24 AM
To: Sakai Developers; Sakai User; Sakai UX
Subject: Re: Let's talk blogs

Well you have triggered one of my hobby horses :). Blog is a word that
has no meaning to many people outside our world (although the number
is shrinking). Mostly, those who understand it, understand it in the
"interweb" sense. A means of self publishing a live memoir of some
kind, sometimes with a way of connecting to the public memoirs of
other people with whom you share an interest. The resulting public
network is sometimes called the Blogosphere. *Blog is essentially a
self publishing tool*

If you take the technology that provides the UI for a blog and wrap it
in access control it then supports a number of uses that are very
different. It is very confusing to talk about Blog affordances in this
context because the same affordance can have a very different
*purpose* and it is not safe to assume you can deduce purpose from
general "interweb" experience of the affordance. There is a similar
potential confusion when you add access control to a Wiki.

In education we have experimented with several uses for a technology
that provides time-stamped journal entries that can be shown to a
controlled audience. We have used it to maintain a class diary (all
students in the class can post time-stamped journal entries), we have
used it as a research diary (researcher and supervisor can post time-
stamped journal entries and maybe even ask and answer questions), we
have used it as a general purpose learning log for a student (covering
many courses) and we have used it as a private learning log for
individual students and/or individual courses. All of these examples
have used Blog software with some measure of modification and/or
permission configuration. But I would argue they are not "Blogs". In
other words, using Blog software does not make it a Blog.

So to come to Nathan's question. I think we should offer a number of
gadgets that perhaps take advantage of a blog service to support time-
stamped journal entries and name them according to purpose, e.g. a
gadget/vignette for a 'class journal' and a different one for a
'research log' and offer a configuration that makes sense for that
purpose rather than offering a generic tool and hoping users will
learn how to configure it for different purposes and hoping that
someone accessing the tool will be able to divine its purpose and use
it appropriately.

I think the history of Blog development in Sakai has actually modified
the concept for some of the purposes I mention, but whole different
tools have been created rather than configuring the interface to a
shared service and we have sown the seeds of confusion by referring to
all of the incarnations as "Blog".

There are other use scenarios not mentioned above and I haven't
touched on the networking to others' blogs.

HTH
John

PS I use "interweb" to indicate the naive user who has a vague
understanding that there is something connecting all these computers
together and making it possible to reach Google and ask Google where
things are, but to whom 'world wide web' and 'internet' has no meaning
so they are apt to confuse the terminology. Such people are not as
rare as we might imagine and are likely not to have a clear idea what
a 'Blog' is.

On 29 Jan 2009, at 03:35, Michael Feldstein wrote:

> I don't think there's much blog functionality that's unique and
> worth pulling through. If you think about it, a blog at its core
> looks a lot like an oddly configured discussion board. Most of the
> other functional bits are similarly generic. A blogroll is just a
> list of links, for example.
>
> More likely what you want to pull through is blog content. Here are
> a couple of examples:
> * You want to pull posts from various student blogs into one
> discussion board so that they are consolidated for class discussion.
> Maybe they are posts that are tagged for a particular assignment.
> * You want to pull through a post and the comments on it in a live
> discussion thread.
> * You want to create a "planet" type aggregator within a site.
> Notice that the first and third items could be accomplished through
> RSS syndication. It's only the second one--particularly if you want
> the comments made on the thread in the new site to be synchronized
> with the thread on the post in its original context--that requires a
> little magic.
>
> There is one blog-specific functional doohickey that could be very
> useful sprinkled across a variety of settings. I'm not sure that it
> works purely as a gadget, though; it might require a new core
> service. It's the trackback. If somebody links to an item, a
> reciprocal link would be generated along with a summary snippet of
> the text surrounding the original link. Trackbacks are obviously
> much more complicated in an environment where you have access
> privileges to contend with, but maybe you check who the user is and
> only show trackback links to content assets that she has permission
> to see.
>
> - m
>
>
> Nathan Pearson wrote:
>>
>> More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page. I'm
>> thinking a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site --
>> a personal blog. But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a
>> site. So how might a blog vignette be useful? Things that come to
>> mind for me are similar to the type of stuff that one might find in
>> a WordPress sidebar: recent posts, blog rolls, popular comment, top
>> contributors, etc. RSS feeds also come to mind. But on some
>> level, those represent techie things. In other words, stuff that's
>> cool and that we "can" do if we wanted since the technology/design
>> more or less already exists.
>>
>> But what about real use cases? What are the real needs to add a
>> blog vignette to a page? Any thoughts?
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>> --
>> Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation
>>
>> E. me@...
>> M. 602.418.5092
>> Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
>> S. npearson99 (Skype)
>>
>> http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix
>>
>>
>> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal<https://collab.sakaiproject.org/portal>
>> ) from the DG: User Experience site.
>> You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >
>> Preferences.
>
> --
>
>
>
> Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
> Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
> 23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
> [see attachment: "oracle_sig_logo.gif", size: 658 bytes]
>
>
> Attachments:
>
> oracle_sig_logo.gif
>
>
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[Michael Feldstein-2]

There is a strong educational case for having blogs that span across
courses for ePortfolio purposes. In fact, if I had to choose between one
or the other, I would prefer that each student have a global
trans-course blog, and that the student could pipe course-specific posts
into the course environment via tagging. (I would also prefer that the
trans-course blog be integrated via RSS and maybe supplemented by a
simple plug-in or two, so that non-Sakai-based blogging systems could be
used.) But, of course, we don't necessarily have to choose.

I do agree with John that course-specific "blogs" really aren't blogs. I
would call them "journals" and would focus on distinguishing them
clearly from trans-course blogs in the user's perspective, even if they
share much of the same underlying plumbing.

- m


Plourde, Mathieu wrote:

>
> Regarding the use of blogs in Sakai, here are some of my suggestions:
>
>  
>
> - Blogs inside Sakai should be more course-centric, some "assignment"
> of some nature, so their target audience should be smaller than a
> general blogosphere blog post. At UD, we have changed the default
> behavior of BlogWow! to make it visible only to a site instead of
> fully open because our faculty members requested it.
>
>  
>
> - A blog widget could be of different natures:
>
> -- It could be an activity feed, showing the most recent activity of a
> blog set, including comments.
>
> -- It could be a filtered activity feed, showing posts tagged with
> certain keywords, or from a certain sub-group of users.
>
> -- It could be a link to a blog post in particular, from a discussion
> thread or a page.
>
> -- It could also be a way to grab a quote (and attribute/link it) from
> a blog post to ask a specific question to a group, and then have a
> comment box related to this quote, not the whole blog post.
>
> -- And, of course, it could be a RSS feed coming from any source, with
> some formatting capabilities (title, summary, author, date published,
> etc.).
>
>  
>
> Best Regards,
>
>  
>
> =================================
>
>  
>
> Mathieu Plourde, MBA
>
> Instructional Designer
>
> IT-User Services
>
> 021 Smith Hall
>
> 18 Amstel Avenue
>
> Newark, DE 19716
>
>  
>
> Phone: [phone]
>
> Fax: [phone]
>
> mathieu@... <mailto:mathieu@...>
>
> http://copland.udel.edu/~mathieu/ <http://copland.udel.edu/%7Emathieu/>
>
>  
>
> =================================
>
>  
>
> *From:* John Norman [mailto:john@...]
> *Sent:* Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:24 AM
> *To:* Sakai Developers; Sakai User; Sakai UX
> *Subject:* Re: Let's talk blogs
>
>  
>
> Well you have triggered one of my hobby horses :). Blog is a word that
> has no meaning to many people outside our world (although the number
> is shrinking). Mostly, those who understand it, understand it in the
> "interweb" sense. A means of self publishing a live memoir of some
> kind, sometimes with a way of connecting to the public memoirs of
> other people with whom you share an interest. The resulting public
> network is sometimes called the Blogosphere. *Blog is essentially a
> self publishing tool*
>
> If you take the technology that provides the UI for a blog and wrap it
> in access control it then supports a number of uses that are very
> different. It is very confusing to talk about Blog affordances in this
> context because the same affordance can have a very different
> *purpose* and it is not safe to assume you can deduce purpose from
> general "interweb" experience of the affordance. There is a similar
> potential confusion when you add access control to a Wiki.
>
> In education we have experimented with several uses for a technology
> that provides time-stamped journal entries that can be shown to a
> controlled audience. We have used it to maintain a class diary (all
> students in the class can post time-stamped journal entries), we have
> used it as a research diary (researcher and supervisor can post time-
> stamped journal entries and maybe even ask and answer questions), we
> have used it as a general purpose learning log for a student (covering
> many courses) and we have used it as a private learning log for
> individual students and/or individual courses. All of these examples
> have used Blog software with some measure of modification and/or
> permission configuration. But I would argue they are not "Blogs". In
> other words, using Blog software does not make it a Blog.
>
> So to come to Nathan's question. I think we should offer a number of
> gadgets that perhaps take advantage of a blog service to support time-
> stamped journal entries and name them according to purpose, e.g. a
> gadget/vignette for a 'class journal' and a different one for a
> 'research log' and offer a configuration that makes sense for that
> purpose rather than offering a generic tool and hoping users will
> learn how to configure it for different purposes and hoping that
> someone accessing the tool will be able to divine its purpose and use
> it appropriately.
>
> I think the history of Blog development in Sakai has actually modified
> the concept for some of the purposes I mention, but whole different
> tools have been created rather than configuring the interface to a
> shared service and we have sown the seeds of confusion by referring to
> all of the incarnations as "Blog".
>
> There are other use scenarios not mentioned above and I haven't
> touched on the networking to others' blogs.
>
> HTH
> John
>
> PS I use "interweb" to indicate the naive user who has a vague
> understanding that there is something connecting all these computers
> together and making it possible to reach Google and ask Google where
> things are, but to whom 'world wide web' and 'internet' has no meaning
> so they are apt to confuse the terminology. Such people are not as
> rare as we might imagine and are likely not to have a clear idea what
> a 'Blog' is.
>
> On 29 Jan 2009, at 03:35, Michael Feldstein wrote:
>
> > I don't think there's much blog functionality that's unique and
> > worth pulling through. If you think about it, a blog at its core
> > looks a lot like an oddly configured discussion board. Most of the
> > other functional bits are similarly generic. A blogroll is just a
> > list of links, for example.
> >
> > More likely what you want to pull through is blog content. Here are
> > a couple of examples:
> > . You want to pull posts from various student blogs into one
> > discussion board so that they are consolidated for class discussion.
> > Maybe they are posts that are tagged for a particular assignment.
> > . You want to pull through a post and the comments on it in a live
> > discussion thread.
> > . You want to create a "planet" type aggregator within a site.
> > Notice that the first and third items could be accomplished through
> > RSS syndication. It's only the second one--particularly if you want
> > the comments made on the thread in the new site to be synchronized
> > with the thread on the post in its original context--that requires a
> > little magic.
> >
> > There is one blog-specific functional doohickey that could be very
> > useful sprinkled across a variety of settings. I'm not sure that it
> > works purely as a gadget, though; it might require a new core
> > service. It's the trackback. If somebody links to an item, a
> > reciprocal link would be generated along with a summary snippet of
> > the text surrounding the original link. Trackbacks are obviously
> > much more complicated in an environment where you have access
> > privileges to contend with, but maybe you check who the user is and
> > only show trackback links to content assets that she has permission
> > to see.
> >
> > - m
> >
> >
> > Nathan Pearson wrote:
> >>
> >> More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page. I'm
> >> thinking a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site --
> >> a personal blog. But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a
> >> site. So how might a blog vignette be useful? Things that come to
> >> mind for me are similar to the type of stuff that one might find in
> >> a WordPress sidebar: recent posts, blog rolls, popular comment, top
> >> contributors, etc. RSS feeds also come to mind. But on some
> >> level, those represent techie things. In other words, stuff that's
> >> cool and that we "can" do if we wanted since the technology/design
> >> more or less already exists.
> >>
> >> But what about real use cases? What are the real needs to add a
> >> blog vignette to a page? Any thoughts?
> >>
> >> Nathan
> >>
> >> --
> >> Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation
> >>
> >> E. me@...
> >> M. 602.418.5092
> >> Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
> >> S. npearson99 (Skype)
> >>
> >>
> http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix 
> <http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix>
>
> >>
> >>
> >> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
> (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal 
> <https://collab.sakaiproject.org/portal>
> >> ) from the DG: User Experience site.
> >> You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >
> >> Preferences.
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> > Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
> > Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
> > 23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
> > [see attachment: "oracle_sig_logo.gif", size: 658 bytes]
> >
> >
> > Attachments:
> >
> > oracle_sig_logo.gif
> >
> >
> > This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
> (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal 
> <https://collab.sakaiproject.org/portal>
> > ) from the DG: User (Using Sakai) site.
> > You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >
> > Preferences.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
> (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal 
> <https://collab.sakaiproject.org/portal>) from the DG: User Experience
> site.
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> Preferences.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
> (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal) from the DG: User Experience
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--


Oracle <http://www.oracle.com>
Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
[see attachment: "oracle_sig_logo.gif", size: 658 bytes]



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[Plourde, Mathieu]

Hi Michael,

After re-reading this thread, I do agree that course-specific and hidden blogs are in fact "journals" or "diaries". I could easily see how a student following a nutrition course could be embarrassed to publish a story to the open web about his/her fight with anorexia, for instance.

I like this idea of a user-owned blog, where the user would "push" a post to a certain assignment in a specific course.

Best Regards,

=================================

Mathieu Plourde, MBA
Instructional Designer
IT-User Services
021 Smith Hall
18 Amstel Avenue
Newark, DE 19716

Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
mathieu@...<mailto:mathieu@...>
http://copland.udel.edu/~mathieu/

=================================

From: Michael Feldstein [mailto:michael.feldstein@...]
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 10:27 AM
To: Plourde, Mathieu
Cc: Sakai Developers; Sakai User; Sakai UX
Subject: Re: Let's talk blogs

There is a strong educational case for having blogs that span across courses for ePortfolio purposes. In fact, if I had to choose between one or the other, I would prefer that each student have a global trans-course blog, and that the student could pipe course-specific posts into the course environment via tagging. (I would also prefer that the trans-course blog be integrated via RSS and maybe supplemented by a simple plug-in or two, so that non-Sakai-based blogging systems could be used.) But, of course, we don't necessarily have to choose.

I do agree with John that course-specific "blogs" really aren't blogs. I would call them "journals" and would focus on distinguishing them clearly from trans-course blogs in the user's perspective, even if they share much of the same underlying plumbing.

- m


Plourde, Mathieu wrote:
Regarding the use of blogs in Sakai, here are some of my suggestions:

- Blogs inside Sakai should be more course-centric, some "assignment" of some nature, so their target audience should be smaller than a general blogosphere blog post. At UD, we have changed the default behavior of BlogWow! to make it visible only to a site instead of fully open because our faculty members requested it.

- A blog widget could be of different natures:
-- It could be an activity feed, showing the most recent activity of a blog set, including comments.
-- It could be a filtered activity feed, showing posts tagged with certain keywords, or from a certain sub-group of users.
-- It could be a link to a blog post in particular, from a discussion thread or a page.
-- It could also be a way to grab a quote (and attribute/link it) from a blog post to ask a specific question to a group, and then have a comment box related to this quote, not the whole blog post.
-- And, of course, it could be a RSS feed coming from any source, with some formatting capabilities (title, summary, author, date published, etc.).

Best Regards,

=================================

Mathieu Plourde, MBA
Instructional Designer
IT-User Services
021 Smith Hall
18 Amstel Avenue
Newark, DE 19716

Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
mathieu@...<mailto:mathieu@...>
http://copland.udel.edu/~mathieu/<http://copland.udel.edu/%7Emathieu/>

=================================

From: John Norman [mailto:john@...]
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:24 AM
To: Sakai Developers; Sakai User; Sakai UX
Subject: Re: Let's talk blogs

Well you have triggered one of my hobby horses :). Blog is a word that
has no meaning to many people outside our world (although the number
is shrinking). Mostly, those who understand it, understand it in the
"interweb" sense. A means of self publishing a live memoir of some
kind, sometimes with a way of connecting to the public memoirs of
other people with whom you share an interest. The resulting public
network is sometimes called the Blogosphere. *Blog is essentially a
self publishing tool*

If you take the technology that provides the UI for a blog and wrap it
in access control it then supports a number of uses that are very
different. It is very confusing to talk about Blog affordances in this
context because the same affordance can have a very different
*purpose* and it is not safe to assume you can deduce purpose from
general "interweb" experience of the affordance. There is a similar
potential confusion when you add access control to a Wiki.

In education we have experimented with several uses for a technology
that provides time-stamped journal entries that can be shown to a
controlled audience. We have used it to maintain a class diary (all
students in the class can post time-stamped journal entries), we have
used it as a research diary (researcher and supervisor can post time-
stamped journal entries and maybe even ask and answer questions), we
have used it as a general purpose learning log for a student (covering
many courses) and we have used it as a private learning log for
individual students and/or individual courses. All of these examples
have used Blog software with some measure of modification and/or
permission configuration. But I would argue they are not "Blogs". In
other words, using Blog software does not make it a Blog.

So to come to Nathan's question. I think we should offer a number of
gadgets that perhaps take advantage of a blog service to support time-
stamped journal entries and name them according to purpose, e.g. a
gadget/vignette for a 'class journal' and a different one for a
'research log' and offer a configuration that makes sense for that
purpose rather than offering a generic tool and hoping users will
learn how to configure it for different purposes and hoping that
someone accessing the tool will be able to divine its purpose and use
it appropriately.

I think the history of Blog development in Sakai has actually modified
the concept for some of the purposes I mention, but whole different
tools have been created rather than configuring the interface to a
shared service and we have sown the seeds of confusion by referring to
all of the incarnations as "Blog".

There are other use scenarios not mentioned above and I haven't
touched on the networking to others' blogs.

HTH
John

PS I use "interweb" to indicate the naive user who has a vague
understanding that there is something connecting all these computers
together and making it possible to reach Google and ask Google where
things are, but to whom 'world wide web' and 'internet' has no meaning
so they are apt to confuse the terminology. Such people are not as
rare as we might imagine and are likely not to have a clear idea what
a 'Blog' is.

On 29 Jan 2009, at 03:35, Michael Feldstein wrote:

> I don't think there's much blog functionality that's unique and
> worth pulling through. If you think about it, a blog at its core
> looks a lot like an oddly configured discussion board. Most of the
> other functional bits are similarly generic. A blogroll is just a
> list of links, for example.
>
> More likely what you want to pull through is blog content. Here are
> a couple of examples:
> * You want to pull posts from various student blogs into one
> discussion board so that they are consolidated for class discussion.
> Maybe they are posts that are tagged for a particular assignment.
> * You want to pull through a post and the comments on it in a live
> discussion thread.
> * You want to create a "planet" type aggregator within a site.
> Notice that the first and third items could be accomplished through
> RSS syndication. It's only the second one--particularly if you want
> the comments made on the thread in the new site to be synchronized
> with the thread on the post in its original context--that requires a
> little magic.
>
> There is one blog-specific functional doohickey that could be very
> useful sprinkled across a variety of settings. I'm not sure that it
> works purely as a gadget, though; it might require a new core
> service. It's the trackback. If somebody links to an item, a
> reciprocal link would be generated along with a summary snippet of
> the text surrounding the original link. Trackbacks are obviously
> much more complicated in an environment where you have access
> privileges to contend with, but maybe you check who the user is and
> only show trackback links to content assets that she has permission
> to see.
>
> - m
>
>
> Nathan Pearson wrote:
>>
>> More precisely, blogs as a vignette (little gadget) on a page. I'm
>> thinking a user(s) could have a blog in Sakai outside of a site --
>> a personal blog. But also, a user(s) could have a blog inside a
>> site. So how might a blog vignette be useful? Things that come to
>> mind for me are similar to the type of stuff that one might find in
>> a WordPress sidebar: recent posts, blog rolls, popular comment, top
>> contributors, etc. RSS feeds also come to mind. But on some
>> level, those represent techie things. In other words, stuff that's
>> cool and that we "can" do if we wanted since the technology/design
>> more or less already exists.
>>
>> But what about real use cases? What are the real needs to add a
>> blog vignette to a page? Any thoughts?
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>> --
>> Nathan Pearson | UX Lead | Sakai Foundation
>>
>> E. me@...<mailto:me@...>
>> M. 602.418.5092
>> Y. npearson99 (Yahoo)
>> S. npearson99 (Skype)
>>
>> http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=kfqdgv5itkg1kl08050cu45pb8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Phoenix
>>
>>
>> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal<https://collab.sakaiproject.org/portal>
>> ) from the DG: User Experience site.
>> You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >
>> Preferences.
>
> --
>
>
>
> Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
> Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
> 23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
> [see attachment: "oracle_sig_logo.gif", size: 658 bytes]
>
>
> Attachments:
>
> oracle_sig_logo.gif
>
>
> This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal<https://collab.sakaiproject.org/portal>
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> Preferences.

________________________________

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[cid:image001.gif@...]<http://www.oracle.com>
Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
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[Adams, David]

Michael Feldstein:
> I do agree with John that course-specific "blogs" really aren't
> blogs. I would call them "journals" and would focus on distinguishing
> them clearly from trans-course blogs in the user's perspective, even
> if they share much of the same underlying plumbing.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see what's confusing or
incorrect about calling a blog a blog. If it's a series of posts
presented in reverse-chronological order, then it's a blog, no matter
what tools are used, who the audience is, what access control exists,
who the authors are or how many, what the topic is, or what the content
is.

If anything I think it's confusing to users to ask them to create a
blog-like thing with a blogging tool and telling them it's not a blog.
"Journal" isn't inherently objectionable, but explicitly avoiding "blog"
seems more likely to confuse than clarify.

David Adams

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[Sean Keesler]

I notice that even on this list we have members that post things on
their "blog" and then write about them again in an email discussion
and cross reference the two frequently. I get "tweets" that reference
interesting blogs, discussion and such all  the time. The notion that
my blog is "mine" and the discussion is "shared" is interesting. I
sort of think that the same sort of thing would happen in a LMS as
well. There should be an easy way to reference other content and
handle the permissions gracefully.

I'd hate to have a "blog" post I wrote in Class X be difficult to
share in a discussion with Class Y.

Sean

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 5:43 AM, Adams, David <da1@...> wrote:

> Michael Feldstein:
>> I do agree with John that course-specific "blogs" really aren't
>> blogs. I would call them "journals" and would focus on distinguishing
>> them clearly from trans-course blogs in the user's perspective, even
>> if they share much of the same underlying plumbing.
>
> Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see what's confusing or
> incorrect about calling a blog a blog. If it's a series of posts
> presented in reverse-chronological order, then it's a blog, no matter
> what tools are used, who the audience is, what access control exists,
> who the authors are or how many, what the topic is, or what the content
> is.
>
> If anything I think it's confusing to users to ask them to create a
> blog-like thing with a blogging tool and telling them it's not a blog.
> "Journal" isn't inherently objectionable, but explicitly avoiding "blog"
> seems more likely to confuse than clarify.
>
> David Adams
>
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[Michael Feldstein-2]

This is a good point, and it brings up a few thoughts. First related to
David's point:
> If it's a series of posts
> presented in reverse-chronological order, then it's a blog, no matter
> what tools are used, who the audience is, what access control exists,
> who the authors are or how many, what the topic is, or what the content
> is.
Saying that a blog is a series of posts presented in
reverse-chronological order is a bit like saying that a poem is a series
of lines that don't go all the way to the right side of the page (which,
by the way, is the definition of a poem that one of my graduate English
professors used non-facetiously). It's true as far as it goes, but it
doesn't carry a whole lot of semantic weight.

As Mathieu pointed out, there are issues around expectations of privacy
in some cases. When people's expectations of privacy are violated
(because, for example, they get confused about how public their blog
post is going to be), really bad things happen. So it's important to
signal privacy expectations as loudly as possible. The term "blog"
usually carries public connotations and inspire no real expectation of
privacy. Quite the opposite, in fact. A "journal" has very different
connotations.

Along with the different expectations of privacy probably come different
affordances. For example, even though my WordPress installation has the
ability to put up private or password-protected posts, I can't really
imagine using those capabilities. Heck, I hardly ever even save drafts
before publishing. But if I were journaling for a class, I probably
would use those tools. The kinds of sharing capabilities that you build
into a tool where you want to protect a student's privacy are probably
different than those that you would build into a tool that is designed
to foster conversational promiscuity. So a journal tool will probably
feel very different to the user than a blogging tool, even if their code
bases are 90% identical.

Getting down to more of the details of what implementing blog post
sharing might look like, I can think of at least two models. One is a
generic approach to simply take an RSS entry and stick it
somewhere--might be in a discussion thread, might be on a Sakai web
page, might be in a portfolio--whatever. The other would be to build
discussion-specific affordances, which is what I interpret Sean to be
getting at here. I was just thinking the other day about how clever
Facebook's Wall-to-Wall feature is. Now, I don't think that model will
work as-is in this context for a variety of reasons, one of which is
there's no obvious way to do it with more than two conversants. But I
think it's the right ball park. One idea I've always been fond of is
piping blog posts with a certain tag into a discussion board and making
each post be a thread starter. I'm sure there are a bunch of other ways
to implement as well. Use cases will really matter here.

- m



Sean Keesler wrote:

> I notice that even on this list we have members that post things on
> their "blog" and then write about them again in an email discussion
> and cross reference the two frequently. I get "tweets" that reference
> interesting blogs, discussion and such all the time. The notion that
> my blog is "mine" and the discussion is "shared" is interesting. I
> sort of think that the same sort of thing would happen in a LMS as
> well. There should be an easy way to reference other content and
> handle the permissions gracefully.
>
> I'd hate to have a "blog" post I wrote in Class X be difficult to
> share in a discussion with Class Y.
>
> Sean
>
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 5:43 AM, Adams, David <da1@...> wrote:
> > Michael Feldstein:
> >> I do agree with John that course-specific "blogs" really aren't
> >> blogs. I would call them "journals" and would focus on distinguishing
> >> them clearly from trans-course blogs in the user's perspective, even
> >> if they share much of the same underlying plumbing.
> >
> > Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see what's confusing or
> > incorrect about calling a blog a blog. If it's a series of posts
> > presented in reverse-chronological order, then it's a blog, no matter
> > what tools are used, who the audience is, what access control exists,
> > who the authors are or how many, what the topic is, or what the content
> > is.
> >
> > If anything I think it's confusing to users to ask them to create a
> > blog-like thing with a blogging tool and telling them it's not a blog.
> > "Journal" isn't inherently objectionable, but explicitly avoiding
> "blog"
> > seems more likely to confuse than clarify.
> >
> > David Adams
> >
> > ________________________________
> > This automatic notification message was sent by Sakai Collab
> > (https://collab.sakaiproject.org//portal) from the DG: Development
> (a.k.a.
> > sakai-dev) site.
> > You can modify how you receive notifications at My Workspace >
> Preferences.
> >
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--


Oracle <http://www.oracle.com>
Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
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[Clay Fenlason-3]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Michael Feldstein
<michael.feldstein@...> wrote:
>Use cases will really matter here.

There are sometimes profundities buried in platitudes (I suppose
that's how they got there) and I just wanted to take the occasion -
each time afforded - to say that I think this is the pivot of the
3akai turn.  It is at the same time a consolidation of framework and a
diversification of supported use case.  K2 and "vignettes"; a richer
variety of possibilities for content authoring, while at the same time
we see collapses of concept like "everything is content."  The "tool"
dies not because it didn't serve a need, but because it was too
top-heavy.  It was too thin in its service, and too fat in its use.
3akai should have a lower center of gravity, and many limbs.

Blogs are a fine illustration of the point.  A series of posts in
chronological order:  well, yes and no.  Yes, that's a good spine
around which to wrap a richer service that can support blogs (among
other things);  and No, that doesn't really match user expectations
and contexts of what a blog does and can do.  Some practices and
pedagogies used chronological entries long before blogs arrived on the
scene, and they have their own conventions and strengths.  "Blog" is
one instance of a pattern.  Taking it as the starting point is a
mistake, or at least a chauvinism of the epoch.

~Clay
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[Michael Feldstein-2]

I may very well just be missing something in the documentation, but it
seems to me that there may be a class of 3akai use cases that aren't yet
accounted for. I assume that the old school heavyweight tools aren't
going away. People will still be able to use a full-on discussion board,
for example, I also see inline lightweight tools, like embedding a
thread or a poll as part of the content on a page.

What I don't see is middleweight applications. I'm thinking like LAMS or
Moodle here. Maybe I want to do something that requires a fair bit of
screen real estate, but I still want it focused on a short-term goal.
For example, I want a discussion that allows multiple threads but only
one topic (or board, depending on your terminology). Maybe I want a wiki
for students to work on one single-week project, but I don't want to
have to garden a wiki for the whole course. And so on. I should be able
to spawn a middleweight tool that lives on its own, separate page.
Furthermore, I'd like to be able to spawn it from the same content
authoring page for embedding content inline. This might require
launching a short wizard, but that would be OK. Again, LAMS is a good
model. If you look at the configuration screens you get when you
double-click on a tool icon placed on the canvas, that'll give you a
pretty good idea of what's needed.

- m

--


Oracle <http://www.oracle.com>
Michael Feldstein | Principal Product Manager | +1.818.817.2925
Oracle Academic Enterprise Solutions Group
23A Glendale Road, Glendale, MA 01229
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