abject learning

I posted last week about a distributed, tool-agnostic, tag-based framework for online discourse. It’s a key component for one of my looming grant applications — in terms of dollars requested it likely won’t be too big, but in terms of implementing open networked learning it’s a big step. And in this case I don’t even need to convince the instructor to experiment, it’s Jon Beasley-Murray’s idea.

When Jon started using Technorati Tags (a key component in the working plan), they totally jammed up — prompting an unseemly freakout on my part, and paradoxically jump-starting one of the best comments-field discussions ever to grace this blog. At the time, it prompted action from Technorati, and it seemed like things were somewhat resolved (although with a hard lesson learned).

So I’m scheduled to meet with Jon today, to firm up plans for an application that is due imminently. In the run-up to the meeting, I was monitoring how his tagging was going, and noticed some troubling gaps. Today Jon provides the full story:

Technorati have again, it seems, given up a) on indexing this blog and b) on responding to customer support queries.

(See here for previous travails. I’m also still not the only one with this problem. Someone’s even written a poem on the topic.)

Regarding the lack of customer support response, I’m prepared to give them a bit of slack given that it’s been Thanksgiving weekend in the US.

But the erratic indexing itself remains something of a pain. One would like to have a little more faith in the reliability of tagging.

(Meanwhile over on Latin America on Screen, in the last week some posts have been indexed, but others not.)

… this semester I’ve been writing up some notes on readings connected to a class I’ve been teaching. I’d like to be able to point students to the appropriate Technorati tag so that they can access the relevant entries without having to wade through my disquisitions on Agamben or cultural studies or whatever. Their exam is coming up, so they might especially appreciate this in the next week or so.

But if we can’t trust Technorati (or can’t trust them to fix problems in good time), all this rather goes down the tubes.

…it’s not at all obvious why this happens (there’s nothing on Technorati’s help pages that deals with the issue), nor therefore what can be done to prevent it. And if customer response time remains so slow, then it’s not as though it can be rectified unproblematically.

The point here (at least in my case) is not to diss Technorati. As Tim Bray notes, “Nobody who hasn’t been behind the firewall at Technorati or one of their competitors can grasp how pathologically hard it’s been to keep a service like that up and running in the face of the continuing insane growth of the blogosphere.” Updates to Jon’s post indicate some progress is being made, and it’s clear that Dave Sifry pays close personal attention to his tags for clues how the service is performing.

But all the good will in the world is meaningless if nothing is delivered. I have to ask, is the emergent approach really ready for prime time? Because it’s easy to talk trash about BlackWeb and other corporate behemoths, but at the end of the day reliability matters. If we promote a new approach, then instructors and students should have reason to feel confident in it.

I’ve given a lot of thought to some techniques to provide redundancies, but can’t think of anything that doesn’t put burdens on users. We plan some improvements to aggRSSive that might work, but doubt very much they will be ready for January, when we plan the first iteration.

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to see them.

Update: Stephen responds with a gentle poke, and a very constructive suggestion. Hmmm…

I was an admirer of Sean FitzGerald and Leigh Blackall’s Knowledge Sharing, so it’s a groove and a gas to see the Flickrfied Networked Learning emerge as a follow-up. The images are amazing, the audio compelling — this raises the bar for online presentation styles. Oh yeah, the content is killer too.

And as Leigh points out, the material was “created using pictures generously licensed to creative commons. I created an audio track to go with it, using backing music generously licensed creative commons.”

He adds: “This presentation is licensed creative commons, I hope you’ll use it.” I already have started reusing those images (with attribution and a backlink, natch), and suspect these will be a staple in my wikified presentations for some time to come.

I suppose it’s a form of pathetic fallacy to link the five days of fog we in Vancouver are experiencing with the hazy state of my cognition lately.

One of the things I’ve been batting around in my so-called mind is a framework for ripping, mixing and feeding collections of weblogs and resources for courses… This fall we launched a set of weblog-based courses linked up with aggRSSive. So far, based on the feedback we’ve gotten, I’d say these were successful efforts. We do break most of Farmer’s dictums, but that doesn’t bug me much. Rules are made to be broken, especially with this kind of stuff. None of the instructors had any familiarity with weblogs before we launched, and each had a set of requirements (privacy, etc…) that led to fairly tight integration of our networks. In a sense these are hybrids between weblogs and traditional course management — which is something of a cop-out, but I’m a believer in going where the users are, and for better or for worse these projects reflect that.

I had a promising meeting a couple months back with a professor here who wanted to go the other way… He was all for trying a blog-supported framework, but wanted it to be tool-agnostic (for our current courseblogs we need the students to have UBC-hosted Movable Type accounts, in order to exploit category-based security and RSS feeds), and wanted the individual students to be able to self-select what content they wanted to toss into the collective pool, and better yet to be able to group activity in an emergent, folksonomic way.

In a sense, this is dead simple. Get the students to add Technorati tags (or something like that), pull out the RSS, and render the feeds in something like Suprglu (sample from the Textologies course), backing it up in a searchable database like Blogdigger (ditto). Or we might use a portal-like tool such as Netvibes (which if you haven’t seen it, is worth a look) to pull it all together.

There are downsides to this approach — depending on third-party apps, even well-established ones like Technorati can cause its own form of pain. The risk is higher when using new apps (seemingly in a perpetual beta state) from start-up companies. Then there’s the advertising.

Talking with the resident office tech-heads, it seems we might be able to roll our own complement to this approach, tailored to educational needs, conceivably by taking advantage of already-planned improvements to aggRSSive, and rolling out a simple presentation template to give the collective output some sort of appealing and manageable format. They tell me it wouldn’t even take much programming time — but developers always say that before a project gets rolling.

My current thinking is that we try piloting the course using both approaches — the third party tools, and the custom job. The beauty of RSS is that once the content is created it can be republished and remixed in any number of permutations without any additional hassle to the users. We run the two approaches side by side, comparing and contrasting as we go. I watch the happenings, and write the occasional meandering weblog post like this one.

I don’t see any obvious holes in this plan, but I’m haunted by the sense that I’m missing something. Either that I’m missing an opportunity, or that something will break down. So out of the fog and onto the blog it goes.

Update: just so the fallacy can get a little more pathetic, as I finish writing this post the fog seems to be lifting, and the sun begins to shine in my window…