Clogged up? Or open, connected and social?

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RSS: A series of pipes, originally uploaded by MrGluSniffer.


The image above was snapped in a conference room at the new Ike Barber Learning Centre here at UBC. My office is scheduled to move into the building sometime soon, so I am pleased to see planners have not only built in an RSS pipe, but gotten out ahead on the emerging RSRR format as well.

I hope to share some of the outcomes from the meeting where I took that photo in the coming days and weeks, but not today. Some heavy deadlines coming down, activity will be lighter than normal in this space for the next few days.

I do want to point out my participation in an upcoming web seminar that promises to be most cool — with Alan, D’Arcy, and Jim as collaborators, how could it be anything but a gas?

In 2004 three of us presented a concept of decentralized connecting web content with RSS — “Small Technologies Loosely Joined” (http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/smallpieces), playing off of the book title by David Weinberger. Looking back at what we might call “Web 1.5”, using RSS to interconnect blogs, wikis, and chat seem rather simple. At that time, flickr and del.icio.us were still truly unknown betas, Google was just a search engine, folksonomy might not even had been coined as a term, podcasting did not exist, online videos were relegated to basic downloading to view– what a long way the web has come since then. However, underneath the shiny hood of the new tools, RSS remains a key integration factor Now we sit in 2007 with an explosion and continued expansion, of “small tools” leaving many educators overwhelmed and excited at the same time.

Jim has worked up some Andy Rush-style bliki goodness for the presentation space. The title says it all — open, connected and social — we hope you can join the latest learning party

On a personal/professional note, it does look like I will be doing some fun stuff with some groovy people in the coming year, but I will hold off on further details until we solidify the arrangement and I make some progress on other fronts.

And the Canucks have blown a 3-1 series lead and tonight must come through in a deciding seventh game. Really, they must.

Nobody said it would be easy.

About Brian

I am a Strategist and Discoordinator with UBC's Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. My main blogging space is Abject Learning, and I sporadically update a short bio with publications and presentations over there as well...
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