13:51 11/06/2004 Mathemagenic: Mathemagenic
Mathemagenic
...giving birth to learning...
        

Mathemagenic

  Wednesday, December 24, 2003


  Wish you to take courage to follow your passions :)

Flight

More on: fun passion 

  Tuesday, December 23, 2003


  A year of passion

My news aggregator slows down, showing that people are doing other things than blogging. I should be packing for my flight to Moscow, but I can't help my "almost end of the year" mood, so I'm writing.

For me 2003 was a year of learning to make choices for the things I'm passionate about. I always knew that dreams come true if you chase them, but knowing is not the same as doing.

A year ago I didn't believe that weblogs could become a part of my PhD and a part of work I do. It's happening. I couldn't imagine the power of professional and personal connections I've got now with people around the globe. Connections that are starting to turn into joint actions.

Last year made my implicit beliefs very obvious and more sharp. Now I not only know that life is too short to do things you don't enjoy, but I'm also learning not to be afraid of making choices and taking risks to follow my passions. Both professionally and personally.

As usual, I'm not alone thinking about it. And my weblog is reminding me about a post almost a year ago - Plan for 2003: follow your passion

OLDaily comments on How To Succeed in 2003:

Here's a better plan: find something you're really interested in, learn as much as you can about it, and start working on it. Don't worry about the money, the money will come. Invest your time and your energy in your passion, not your job - reinvent your job if you have to, or plan to leave it if you can't.

It worked!

I guess the next year will be an actionable sense year. Learning how to act together with other passionate people :)

  Weblog reader

May be useful for someone else: I made a collection of links on weblogs for my colleagues.

This is the last working day this year and I guess it will never end :)))

This post also appears on channel weblog research

More on: blog research 

  Weblog networking: emotional connections

One more piece from e-mails of Martin Dugage:

I don't know you, nor do I know Sebastien Paquet, Martin Röll, Judith Meskill or other authors of the few weblogs I scan regularly, but after six months of blogging, I tend to prune my blogrolling list now, keep a shortlist of weblogs I like, and cast the fishing rod once more to find others. But I am not only doing this on the basis of the relevance of those weblogs for my own practice. There is also a personal desire to know more about their authors as people (Who's behind the weblog? Why is he or she doing this?), to try and figure out what it is they are really looking for, and, if possible, to do something for them. It's not completely rational, because what all of you are doing can be quite remotely connected to what I am doing, but still, I like your styles, I'd like to know what makes you tick, what it is you are really fighting for. When you are moving away from pure self-interest, there are human emotions involved. What makes blogging exciting is this desire for community. Fishing for friends, in a sense.

  Effects of Longhorn blogs

The long road to Longhorn [via Roland Tanglao]

It's hard to continue thinking of Microsoft as a monolithic Borg when you can follow the day-by-day jottings and musings of individual developers and Windows architects like Chris Anderson, Don Box, Chris Sells and many others.

More on: blogs in business 

  Weblog networking: recognised by a question

From e-mail from Martin Dugage after we missed each other at KM Europe:

I think I saw you at Edna Pasher's presentation on Innovation Management. Were you the girl in the back who raised the issue about not knowing what we need to know? It appeared to me as a typical "Mathemagenic" question. Should it be the case, then my only comment is that your picture on the K-Board doesn't do you justice, and that you need to change it.

I was delighted to be recognised by the question I asked... I'm posting this because the example is so powerful as an illustration of effects of blogging on personal connections.

And - I have experiences myself of not recognising people from their online photos. So I'm going to post several photos and ask people who met me to vote :)

  Sunday, December 21, 2003


  Weblog networking: degrees of strength

Brainstorming degrees of (weblog?) networking:

  • no - you don't exist in my world
  • awareness (~familiar stranger?) - I know that you exist (weblog: finding someone who links to my weblog)
  • interest - I start learning about you (weblog: RSS subsription?)
  • occasional conversations - we start talking (weblog: commenting)
  • regular conversations - we start relying on each other in thinking together (weblog: regular commenting, blogrolling)
  • occasional actions - sometimes we do things together
  • regular actions - we often do things together and rely on each other

Moving from regular conversations to occasional or regular actions is a core question of the whole actionable sense conversation (1, 2, 3), which has resulted in establishing Actionable sense Socialtext space (which deserves another post, but probably not today :). I still suspect that weblogs are not good for it.

This post also appears on channel weblog research 

  Weblog networking: two way awareness and different degrees of strength

Still thinking about networking effects of weblogs (weblog as networking instrument, easy way to stay in touch, "fuzzy" profile).

What weblogs create is two way awareness. If I read someone's articles online or check personal pages or "know" a person by reading comment in online discussion, in most cases this is one-way "getting to know": this person is not aware that I'm learning about him or her. Weblogs change it: if another blogger links to your weblog as least ones, he is likely to get on your radar. Of course, it happens if you pay at least some attention to referrers, trackbacks, Technorati, ecosystem tracking tools, but most bloggers do. With a weblog you have the power of tracking an interest to your writing and thinking and links give an estimation of how strong is this interest (related Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web).

This awareness creates something that I don't have a good name for. It's close to familiar stranger, but there is some kind of interaction (or, may be linking is similar to looking at person a physical environment, you don't expect a feedback, but another person is likely to notice that you have looked). I would say that this connection is one degree stronger than "familiar stranger" connection. And then this connection may turn into something stronger - "weak-tied" conversations, with one more degree stronger. Then it may result in joint actions and "strong ties" at the end.

So, what we have is a continuum of getting from no ties to weak ties to strong ties and our "around blog" relations. I wonder if someone is looking at it and how it can be studied (there are too many things relevant for my PhD :)

This post also appears on channel weblog research 

  Saturday, December 20, 2003


  What kind of social software are you?

what kind of social software are you? One more funny test -  What kind of social software are you? [via Dale Pike]

I'm a wiki and I've "just deleted everything" :)

I should be shopping and not reading weblogs :)))

More on: fun 

  Discovering your passion

Dina on blogging

When i think of what i've gained from blogging, i've made some great friends with whom i can share many parts of my life with.  I've also been stunned sometimes at the personal discoveries i've made through the act of blogging - about my own dreams, persuasions and passions, some of which i talk about more openly, others that make me see with new eyes, still others that i maynot be able to consciously pinpoint but that have allowed me to grow as a person.   And on the work-front, or professional front - today i have so many options that i could never have dreamt possible before i started blogging and interacting with this community - there's many loose-ends still, yet some clear directions too.

More on: blog writing passion 

  On book writing

One more in Blogger Creative tutorials - How To Get A Book Deal With Your Blog [via Ronald Tanglao]. It's simple: become obsessed, write as you are, be part of a great team or start from self-publishing :)

That's how I got my first deal. I became obsessed with blogging over four years ago when I discovered how easy it was and realized that a revolution was at hand. I talked about blogging so much that my friends thought I was a freak, and people mostly rolled their eyes whenever I opened my mouth. But hey, I'm an author now. This obsessive fixation can work for you too. Obsessive behavior is treatable, but if left unchecked, it can land you some sweet gigs.

This rings a bell :)

I had a discussion about writing books with a friend last week. To be fair I don't get this excitement about publishing a book. It's perfectly clear how being a book author helps in your professional life or how good it for self-esteem. What I don't get and I guess I don't have myself (yet? ;) is an intrinsic motivation to put together many ideas (or one idea in many words) and to get it published.

I wonder how does it feel - you "baby" is out there and you don't have trackbacks and Technorati to see what impact it makes. Of course, you have sales numbers and people do write reviews, but still it's more about "broadcasting" then about conversations...

It comes back to my thinking about PhD research. When I started I decided to do my best to make sure that my dissertation is not a nice reminder on my bookshelf, but a book that people read. I guess it's a bit ambitious: for a scientific work you need some boring details that would make it not so easy to read. The funny thing is that I don't feel like putting a lot of energy into something that may be just a dozen of people will read... I guess I'll find a solution. Anyway, I have to do the study first :)

  Friday, December 19, 2003


  Monkeymagic, blurbs and weblogs as abstract art

One more weblog discovery: Piers Young, Monkeymagic - thought-provoking and fun writing on creativity and thinking (also revealing that the author seems to like tea :) Between other things - do "question memes" travel the same way as "answer memes"?

A comment to my note that "the microcontent nature of weblogs is an important component of the mix that makes them so powerful":

Which made me think that in many ways weblogs are like the blurb on the backs of books. They offer a quick, personalised insight into a bigger piece of content.

Which in turn made me wondering what are those "bigger pieces of content" touch while reading weblogs? Our bigger canvas? Ourselves?

Sometimes I feel that weblogs are "blurbs on the backs of books" without books themselves. I read a "blurb", get interested, but I hardly get an opportunity to read the "book": weblogs provide many "blurbs" about our bigger canvas and hidden agendas without making them explicit.

Weblogs are good as personal profiles, but the impression they give, although very much holistic, is still difficult to put in explicit words. It's like an abstract art - you can get the meaning from a few lines, but it's difficult to explain explicitly and you are never sure that this "clear picture" that you have inside is the one that the artist had in mind.

I guess I'm trying to explain something I can't explain yet :)

  IFTF's Map of the Decade

Found on a wall at a colleague's office: IFTF's Map of the Decade (you can also check other research resports by Institute for the Future). It worth A3 color printing and studying in detail :)

Trends (reformatted by me)

Emergence: from top-down to bottom-up sophistication. Emergence is about the unpredictable phenomena that occur when lots of individual actors following simple rules create complex behaviour.

The new agency: from trusted agents to self as agent. Agency is about who acts on behalf of the individual, the organisation, and the community - a who assumes the risks and burdens.

Shared value: from the value of proprietary ownership to the value of shared interests. Shared values is the increased value that information, products, and services acquire when they are held in common by players with diverse interests.

Focus & fusion: from virtual boundaries to embedded focal points. Focus is about the relationship pf the center to the periphery. In a distributed information world, the search for center - fused with real places -  comes foreground.

Smart presence: from episodic interactions to persistent experiences. Presence is defined by the experience of persistence - whether it's an always-on web cam or the digital tracks left behind by visitors to public spaces.

Health values: from traditional health care to a burgeoning health economy. Health values are like family values - they provide a touchstone for all kinds of decisions at home, in the workplace, and in the community.

More on: future 

  Or: personal knowledge productivity

Still thinking about personal effectiveness in knowledge intensive environment. May be talking about personal knowledge productivity is better (actually, it's only shorter, but I guess more confusing).

Or may be I should pick up Dave Pollard's idea of personal productivity improvement and then add my "knowledge intensive environment"...

I'm reworking my PhD plan and trying to come up with a good title :)

More on: knowledge networker PhD 

  Thursday, December 18, 2003


  Personal effectiveness in a knowledge intensive environment

I guess I found a good way of explaining the focus of my PhD research. Talking about knowledge work is confusing, because it could be considered  not only from individual perspective I want to emphasise. Talking about knowledge workers is even more confusing, because there are not many people these days that don't have aspects of knowledge work in their work. Personal knowledge management is also limited, I'd like to take networking into play and it's not implicit in the term.

So this is what I have in mind now: personal effectiveness in a knowledge intensive environment. I wonder if it will survive and end up in the title of my dissertation at the end :)

  Adding machine-translation to your weblog

Martin Roell shares a secret of adding machine-translation to your weblog. The instructions are clear, but I have to figure out how to do it for Radio.

I guess the main problem is to find out how to add page link to the equation. I can think of two ways of doing it:

  • on server-side (as Marting did), adding a parameter that says "look for the url of this page and add it"
  • by blogging software, adding a macro in a template that inserts page url when page is generated

I guess I'll try the second one after I find the right macro :)

Posted a question to Radio support forum...

  Wednesday, December 17, 2003


  Weblog as an easy way to stay in touch

I'm thinking why I encourage some of people I know to start a weblog. The answer is simple: I don't know easier way to stay in touch, to maintain and develop an intellectual and emotional connection with someone over the distance.

It's like chatting with friends over a drink or with a professional acquaintance at a conference: not goal-oriented, open-ended, easy and fun, creating shared context without any deliberate effort. And RSS feed works much better than relying on a chance to meet or remembering to call, to mail, to plan a meeting: it make sure that people you care about are on your radar. It creates some kind of awareness, weak-tied connection that is needed to make joint fun or work possible when the time comes to get closer.

That's why it's more difficult for the people I care about: I'm very selfish constantly suggesting that they should start a weblog :)

  Slow down time

Chris Lawer on plenitude

Now my unfortunate problem is that I am suffering real bad from a plenitude of plenitude, i.e a curse of consuming plenitude itself, i.e. a deep desire to consume all the books, articles, comments, papers, journals, magazines etc etc. that discuss issues of plenitude in modern consumer society. And its driving me nuts, to the point that sometimes I feel that I just want to give up - a real case of "Amazon Overload"!!

While reading it I thought of the old post by Ton

With all the enthousiasm that comes with entering new uncharted territories at first everything is interesting. All special interest groups on KnowledgeBoard are worth contributing to, all interesting blogposts, and boy there are many out there, are worth commenting on or reflecting on in your own blog. You reach addiction levels when you start being afraid to miss something interesting.

But that eagerness takes its toll. There is no real time to filter all that passes before your eyes, as you're already sprinting to the next interesting post as soon as you've linked to the last one. And finally there is the time when all that discovering and exploring, and playing with ideas for fascinating projects, becomes too much.

I'm learning to deal with this thirst for new isights, to let it go, to make sure I have time for a reflection,  for working on a bigger canvas and for the "simple act of human contacts" as John Moore puts it commenting on the post of Chris.

There is so much real pleasure and satisfaction to be had in the simple act of human contact without the need for an orgy of consumption.

And I keep coming back to my own mantra: let's put relationships before ideas. Blogging at its worst becomes a diet of too many ideas and not enough real contact. We tend to think of innovation as inherently good, but an awful lot of grief is caused by the championing of an abstract idea in a way that trashes relationships. It's a mistake I catch myself making, or about-to-make, quite often.


  Weblogs from a philosophical perspective

Elmine Wijnia, about her thesis on weblogs:

What my thesis is going to be about? I haven't got my research questions formulated yet, but I do know one part is to describe the weblog as a communicationtool and compare the weblog to other types of communicationtools used on the internet, such as chatboxes, fora etc. The other part of my thesis will consist of a philosophical investigation of the weblog. A Dutch philosopher (Jos de Mul) has written about personal homepages as a tool in the construction of personal identity in the postmodern world. That's a very interesting subject. An other thing that I noticed about blogging is that the communicational culture amongst them has some resemblance with the ideal speech idea of Habermas. In short that is: respect for the opinions of the other, no differences in power between the persons joining the conversation and transparancy. It is worthwhile to investigate whether my ideas about this are true in some way.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

More on: blog new blog research 

  Tuesday, December 16, 2003


  A look at links in weblogs

Found via referer logs: A look at links in weblogs, a small study looking at "a correlation between listing a site in a blogroll and linking to that site in weblog posts".

Tasks:

  • Experimented with some mapping tools.
  • Processed three months of archives from five blogs and checked:
    • Most popular post links, are they in blogroll?
    • Blogroll links, are they mentioned in posts.

Pattern discovered (see also an exception)

These results were typical for 4 out of 5 blogs examined

  • Post links least a few of the most linked to sites show up in the blogroll.
  • Blogroll links the majority (60 to 90 percent) of blogroll links are linked to in postings.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

  Blogging: listening to the river flow

Here is an example of benefits of doing "community work" on-line: maintaining the KnowledgeBoard blogroll brings me into a contact with all kinds of interesting people.

The recent example is an e-mail of Barry Hardy pointing to his weblog The ferryman. With new weblogs I often go and see what the first post was about. When I saw the first post by Barry I couldn't resist quoting it whole:

Why the Ferryman name?

If you have ever been to Basel in Switzerland you may have taken a ferry across the Rhine between the main city and "Klein Basel"(Little Basel). This ferry is tethered to a cable line stretching across the river and uses only the river's current to be pushed quietly from one side to the other. Here I imagine sitting with the river's flow of information swirling past, reflecting on the voices that have spoken to me that day. Here we can also sit together and share a conversation as we observe the constant and changing flow around us.

And so this Blog has been taken to the river.

"You will learn it," said the Ferryman Vasudeva, "but not from me. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it too... And it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts, perhaps of a conversation of the previous day, or about one of the travellers whose fate and circumstances occupied their minds, or death, or their childhood; and when the river told them something good at the same moment, they looked at each other, both thinking the same thought, both happy at the same answer to the same question."

Herman Hesse

  Weblog research in Dortmund University and problems with weblog research

Finally, I've got the reviews for my abstract on weblogs and knowledge work for OKLC04. It is accepted, but one of the reviewers was more negative than positive and also suggested that I missed some relevant references:

There exist extensive studies on evaluating weblogs as a basis for suggestions to improve the knowledge transfer. These studies have not been cited. For example the group of T. Hermann at Dortmund University has done a lot of research in this area (http://iugsun.cs.uni-dortmund.de/publications/publications/inhalt/)

I checked the suggested publications, but didn't find explicit pointers to weblog studies (I still have to check the papers in more depth). Is there someone who knows about this research? I would appreciate any pointers or background information.

This comment made me thinking in more general way about difficulties of finding publications on weblog research:

  1. I suspect that weblogs are addressed with more "serious-looking" terms, like "personal webpublishing"
  2. It's not easy to predict in what type of conference/journal weblog research will be published: could be anything between internet studies, education or e-business
  3. It seems that some weblog researchers do not have weblogs themselves, so the information about their work do not get to the blogosphere. Or sometimes they have weblogs in languages I don't understand :(

That's why I feel bad about luck of coordination between people doing research on weblogs. Back to work...

This post also appears on channel weblog research

More on: blog research 

  Wednesday, December 10, 2003


  Blogging as thinking in short paragraphs

Top 20 Definitions of Blogging by Debbie Weil [via Dina Mehta]. From all 20 this is the one I like most today:

13. A way to think and write in short paragraphs instead of a long essay (which no one has time to read anyway)

I think that the microcontent nature of weblogs is an important component of the mix that makes them so powerful: I can't finish the report I'm supposed to write for a week, but at the same time I wrote a few weblog posts :)

  Styling weblog quotes

An old post by Seb pointing to Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion by Peter Van Dijck with a suggestion to check HTML source. I did - and loved the way quotes are crafted:

  • each quote has a name and a face next to it
  • this is done by simple <blockquote id="name" cite="link"> and styling

Are there any technical people around to implement it? Otherwise the only option is to do it manually with Radio shortcuts or something like it...

  Tuesday, December 09, 2003


  Outliner use patterns

Ted Goranson, Outliner Use Patterns [via Mark Bernstein]

Outlining is a feature rather than an application category. Actually, it is a collection of features that we have been surveying the last couple of months. The idea behind that survey was to help you decide on the best marriage of mind and tool for your particular outliner. This month we turn to all the various things that people use outliners for. Between the two, the "what" of features, and the "for" of use patterns, you should be able to characterize the applications we'll review in due time. Then you can select your own particular outliner(s).

[...]The four main use patterns -- those that have several products that target them -- are: long document generation (with some variants); notetaking, scrapbooking and journaling (that's one category with these three functions); snippet management; and list management, including to-do lists.

It's part of a series, other pieces include: Outliner History,  Outliner Features-Part 1, Outliner Features-Part 2.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

  Monday, December 08, 2003


  Weblog and information overload

Jonathon Delacour: Overloaded [via Edward Bilodeau]

Self-employment, a constant Internet connection, a weblog, and a mildly addictive personality turn out to be a killer combination - even for someone who no longer feels compelled to post regularly, let alone every day. Liz Lawley went cold turkey by taking a vacation with her family:

The best part of the trip was that by midweek I'd stopped blogging things in my head. I hadn't realized how much I'd begun to detach from real life, always running meta-commentary in my head to save for later blogging. Letting go of that was very refreshing. It's not that I don't want to blog, it's that I don't want to do it all the time.

Although Liz didn't say this explicitly, I think she realized that having a weblog turns information overload into a two-way process: first you suck all this stuff into your head for processing; and then you regurgitate it as weblog posts. And, while this process isn't all that different from the ways in which we manipulate information in our jobs, it's something that we've chosen to do in addition to our jobs, something that detaches us even further from "real life".

At the beginning my news aggregator was giving me the same sense of being overloaded - too many things to comment on - but then I've learnt to leave "delete after 48 hours" setting on and to let go. I've also learnt to rely on Google (if there is a good stuff, then I should be able to find it back) and on printing out (if I want to have it, I'd better have it on paper). I've learnt to select weblogs I read. And I'm conctantly trying to make blogging (at least reading other blogs) part of my job. I still feel overloaded, but now it has more to do with ideas boiling inside me than with outside flows of information.

Anyway, the original post and comments are worth reading for getting an overview of how people cope with information overload.

  Can't find 'John Patrick on Weblogs' article

This is not fair - just when I recommended to a colleague reading John Patrick on Weblogs as a best "weblogs in business" artilcle it's not availiable on-line anymore. Google cache is empty and I even couldn't find the full reference to request the paper copy. Hard lesson: make printouts immediately.

I wrote to the CIO Insight asking for it, but if you happen to have an electronic/paper version I would be very happy if you mail/fax it to me...

Later: that was a kind of "panic attack" :) The article went on later...
More on: blogs in business 

  Saturday, December 06, 2003


  Weblog as a networking instrument

Nardi, Whittaker & Schwarz article distingush between three tasks in networking:

1. Building a network: Adding new nodes (people) to the network so that there are available resources when it is time to conduct joint work;

2. Maintaining the network, where a central task is keeping in touch with extant nodes;

3. Activating selected nodes at the time the work is to be done

It seems that weblogs are good for the first two and not good for the last one:

1. Reading weblogs helps to find like-minded people. You read someone, he links to someone else and this link serves as a personal recommendation. Then regular reading turns into linking and commenting, you get on the radar of this new person and after sometime you say "we know each other by reading blogs".

2. Weblogs are particularly good for maintaining the network. With the power of RSS you know that you don't have to remember to check what someone is doing/thinking. Weblogs really help to stay in touch.

3. It seems that weblogs are not really good for activating connection for a joint action: my experience shows that it's usually done by e-mail ("I know you from reading your weblog and I wonder if you can help me with this") or in some other ways. See recent post on weblogs weakness as action tool for more details.


  Friday, December 05, 2003


  The power of loose ends (3) or the weakness of weblogs when it comes to joint actions

To continue The power of visible loose ends (1) and (2).

Gary Lawrence Murphy, comments:

In most cases, the necessity comes first, and that's when we will overcome all barriers to make it happen. When someone has a specific goal, especially a paid goal, others can clear their date-books and engage, and any frustrations of distance or bandwidth vanish proportional to the value of the collaboration [...].

But in all cases, we don't create the team and then see what happens (Andy Warhol excepted) but we find the purpose and then staff a solution. It's my observation that, by being the wide-sweep distant-early-warning radar, the skin of humanity, blogspace is spontaneously very good at identifying each itch, and from that point, coordinating the hands to scratch it is almost trivial.

Thus I don't agree that we need to be "writing about future plans" as our starting point. What we need is an articulation of the goal state, the concrete world scenario that describes the itch scratched, what it would look like when done, and from that visioneering the scratching will begin. This is what happened with the blog-spam problem, the trackback problem, even the RSS vs Atom debate is all from bloggers having touched some problem, articulated the itch, and spread fragments of plans to scratch it until it gelled.

Ton Zijlstra, continues:

I think the writing about future plans, especially if they're pretty concrete like Lilias possible conference calendar, can join up with coordinating the hand to scratch an earlier identified itch easily. Probably some or all of your plans are connected to identified itches, announcing them makes it possible to get other bloggers to go along for the ride.

And another, independent stream. Julian Elve, Actionable Knowledge (see comments as well, coming to "safe places in the middle" point):

After I'd let these posts mull around in my mind for a day or two, the first thought that came to me was this - just because I don't neccessarily blog about actions I have taken as a result of blog-inspired knowledge creation, that doesn't mean there wasn't actionable knowledge created!

[...]But just because I blog carefully (or not at all) about those areas of my life does not mean that I don't derive actionable knowledge from blogging that I can apply to those domains. The dilemma though is how to report that back? Some actions won't make it through my blog-filters; others may be delayed or distorted; in either case there is a break in the learning cycle with my blog learning colleagues.

This is not about the trust I have in the people with whom I have blogosphere conversations, it is more about who else is eavesdropping. Is there any way to resolve this whilst still using an open channel? I'm not convinced there is - the contradiction we need to resolve is that a completely public channel will inevitably cause us to filter what we write, whilst part of the power of the blogosphere is the opportunity to discuss ideas with people from very different contexts.

I guess this conversation (and especially it's hidden part) is a good example of tensions between "thinking together" and "doing together" as well as tensions between private and shared. To give you a feeling of the hidden part: some of the invisible activities related to this conversation (hope nobody gets angry about the disclosure):

So I guess it's possible to get something actionable from our weblog connections, but weblogs are not the best instrument for it :) 

I wonder why do we make choices for other tools as "actionable" spaces. Is it because their support for collaboration is better? Or - do we need more privacy than we can get in our weblogs? Or may be we just don't know a good way to use weblogs to come up with joint actions?

This post also appears on channel weblog research

  Thursday, December 04, 2003


  Ed Tech conferences

Ed Tech conferences (by submission deadline). Will update my own conference list later on.

Btw, I was friendly "brainwashed" yesterday by a couple of colleagues about my conference selection criteria. They said that I should pay more attention to a conference location (preferably in nice places far away :)))

More on: learning event 


© Copyright 2002-2005 Lilia Efimova Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

This weblog is my learning diary. Sometimes I write about things related to my work, but the views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

Last update: 6/27/2005; 9:37:40 PM.