thoughts of the driverSteinn Eldjarn Sigurdarson on tech, tel, digital freedom and possibly his life..

It’s any system which allows me to socialize with people. What’s socializing? I am actually not sure, I think a lot of the socializing that happens might be classified as “useless” information exchange.

I happen to think (I don’t have any direct evidence though) that the information exchange between people is usually not useless, maybe not always useful in a direct sense though, but there is real, tangible, value found in the social networks built around exchanging things such as personal information which for most specific work/education-related goals is usually not relevant.

The personal relationships however can prove amazingly, amazingly beneficial for future informal learning scenarios I think.

I have taken notes on this stuff, and I have more questions than answers, but maybe I can in the next year or so find out how to analyze this phenomenon a bit, and most importantly to see why purely social software, which shares a lot of features with learning environments (messaging, forums, wikis, user presence and awareness) — yet there is some sort of social draw found in the purely social sites, which is usually not found in the more formal educational contexts!

Where does the social draw come from? It’s not enough to see who else is there, it’s not enough to know them in real life, it’s not enough to be forced to have online meetings with them (at least the teacher mediated ones), not enough to talk with them on forums — for some reason, people come into the educational system, and their mindset seems purely formal and not social.

Perhaps it’s the short time between classes in a real setting which causes socializing? Perhaps the fact that online, you’re never waiting for anything, you are either in the system, working (or let’s face it, I think 80-90% of systems are just used as word document repositories almost.. downloading), OR you are out of the system, on your myspace, your flickr, or doing whatever, just NOT building social ties with people in your online system.

My final simple questions are;
Why do on-site students make friends, off-site students don’t?
Why do people make friends over large distances every day, but not inside educational systems usually?
Is there value for education in people socializing?

I’m writing this from the iCamp developer meeting in Krakow, where we’re inching towards a better future for educators and the uneducated (read: everyone).

One of the things that I was responsible for presenting was a new spec me, and my colleagues Fridolin Wild and Stefan Sobernig at the WUW have been working on.

The spec is very simple (of course!) and provides a very simple mechanism for setting up update notifications (mostly designed to easily set up push-based feed management), we call the standard “FeedBack” for now, since it was actually born out of my idea to modify (mangle?) the PingBack to ping on updates, similar to what update services are doing with weblog.ping.

We ended up making our own little spec, within a new namespace “feedback”, and I’ve already written a simple reference implementation in wordpress, and Fridolin has written the base for a Moodle implementation, which I’ll try and finish up before the end of next week.

I look forward to testing around with it and finalizing the spec before releasing it along with implementations for various systems (there is already a python implementation from one of our project partners, that should be easily portable for plone or other zope based cms systems). We’ve also theorized about the possibilities for update notifications to point to URI’s containing Atom-PP messages for full edit/insert/delete possibilities between systems

On the COVCELL front, we are proceeding pretty well these days, after some setbacks and delays due to problems with the Whiteboard development, but now we have a new developer working on the Java side, and I’ve almost finished a new Moodle module for it which allows users to select background images and the width/height before opening a session, etc. It will be quite a big step forward from the current Drawboard-based one, and should have some fancy features such as image saving, and large background image with scrollability/draggability to reveal different parts of the whiteboard.

Anyway, back to work!