I’m a middle of the road Twitter user (please don’t call me a Tweep, Twit or other cutesie-pie name). I post pictures of food and coffee and the places I go. I make observations about things in the media or in my fields of interest or I share links about the stuff I read. I retweet comments and links that are interesting or make me think. I talk to a few people, ask a few questions, respond to a few others. Somedays I am prolific; at other times I’m quiet. I read a lot more than I write.

I love Twitter because it’s about choice. I can dip in and out, engage or disengage. If I find someone who is really interesting or who posts stuff that makes me think, I can follow that person. If I find that someone that I already follow doesn’t interest me or posts too much rubbish then I can un-follow them. During an event I can follow a hashtag (#eqnz for the Christchurch earthquakes) or a specific user (eg, @acarvin who has been described as the man who tweets revolutions).

Some people mourn the days when it was just them and their friends on Twitter. This makes me laugh. You can choose who is on Twitter by carefully choosing who you follow. If that’s not enough then restrict who follows you – which I tend to think misses the point. It’s no different to blogs. If you engage only with people on the same wavelength then you will never be challenged to think in different or new ways.

I don’t like excessive retweeting. Some people go a bit crazy on the retweet button and copy everything a person says. This annoys me. If I find a retweet interesting I can go and look at the original stream and follow that person if I want to. I also don’t see the point of Kiwis retweeting archane news items from overseas. A lot of  BREAKING NEWS isn’t breaking for everyone. And just because it says PLEASE RT a lost or found  dog / cat / child … you don’t have to – especially if most of the people you interact with are on a different continent to the mislaid creature.

Sometimes I’ve discovered that my Twitter stream gets a bit unbalanced. I find that there are too many self-promoting journalists, politicians or celebrities pointlessly jabbering away at each other. Or like right now, I’m finding too much negativity in my stream. It’s easy to fix with a few judicious clicks of the delete button. After all if I wouldn’t enjoy it in real life, I don’t need to see it on my screen.

So, in order to finish on a positive note what do I like? New ideas, links and angles. Photos, music and videos that I’d never find on my own. The serendipity of making and meeting new friends (on and offline). And fun – good fun like the stuff in this collection of Kiwi gems. That’s what I love about Twitter.

No related posts.

As yet New Zealand does not have specific Creative Commons Licences so for those of us who choose to licence our work in this way we are using licences which are based on US rights and laws. From the Worldwide CC website:

Our generic licenses are jurisdiction-agnostic: they do not mention any particular jurisdiction’s laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. The licenses are, however, based on the U.S. Copyright Act in many respects. This means that, though we have no reason to believe that the licenses would not function in legal systems across the world, it is at least conceivable that some aspect of our licenses does not jibe with a particular jurisdiction’s laws.

And from the Creative Commons New Zealand FAQ:

You may well feel that you don’t need to take the trouble; both sets of licences are designed to give the same bundle of rights as the generic licences, so that they can be used worldwide. However, CC feels that there are advantages to switching to a New Zealand licence if you live in New Zealand. These licences have been designed to be fully compatible with national contract and copyright law. Some benefits from using a New Zealand licence would be:

• their plain English language; easier to understand than the American legal language of the generic licences;
• because they follow national contract and copyright law, they offer explicit protection of your ‘moral rights’;
• the support offered by the New Zealand project, [and its helpful joint mailing list??];
• in the very unlikely event of any dispute over the terms of the licence, they provide that this should be heard in the courts of your own country;

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy
2. Sunday Procrastination
3. Content Sharing

In the early days of the internet Usenet was developed to allow people to communicate and even to share files. Usenet resembled a lot of the bulletin boards that its users moved from and it quickly grew into a huge communication network with a hierachical structure. It was amazing. Ifyour method of getting onto the internet (ISP) had a newsgroup server you could get a newsgroup reader and get involved. If your ISP didn’t have an nntp server then you could login to a free or paid one.

Usenet newsgroups were cool. In the old days I used to dial up, fire up Forte Free Agent (my reader of choice) and I would download hundreds of message headers. I’d skim through and mark anything that interested me for download later. Posts were sorted into threads and if I was interested in something I could subscribe to a thread and even join in the conversation – all from my ancient computer in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand. It was very cool. (Sidenote: Usenet was a crazy mix of democracy and anarchy. Anyone could join in and for the most parts newsgroups were unmoderated and uncensored. There was a way to do things though and newbies were given a hard time for not adhering to the correct netiquette. Bloggers Code of Conduct? People really need to take a look backwards in order to go forwards – but that’s another post)

Usenet posts were archived in dejanews and you could search them. There was an ocean of information out there in the ether and you could choose to get it if you wanted it. In 2001 Google bought out Deja (which is what dejanews had become) and Usenet morphed into what we know today as Google Groups.

Enough of the history lesson.

O’Reilly Media coined the term Web2.0 to describe a new phase in the evolution of the internet. In a piece from 2005, (entitled What is Web2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models For the Next Generation of Software) Time O’Reilly writes,

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

If you do a cruise around the internet there is a common theme to material about Web2.0. The Wikipedia amalgamates a lot of those popular ideas when it says,

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004,^[1] refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.

Though the term suggests a new version of the Web, it does not refer to an update to Internet or World Wide Web technical standards, but to changes in the ways those standards are used. According to Tim O’Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”^[2].

I don’t argue that Web2.0 exists and that many amazing, clever and wonderful applications have come from it. Many of the new tools out there make it increasingly easy to connect, collaborate and create. And that’s what we want. However, by getting caught up in the whole Web2.0 terminology we’re being sidetracked by the hype. Which is what we are trying to teach our kids not to do.

If you randomly pick six educational websites or blogs, I would wager that at least four of them will be talking about a cool new web application or an advance on an old one. A new feature in Flickr, a new calendar application, ad free wikis for educators. Twitter anyone? Then we all dive in and get excited about what we can do. And then someone changes the rules.

And the reason why someone changes the rules? It’s because the people that are designing these new and improved amazing cool toys want (need) to make a dollar. Every month hundreds of new ideas are launched onto the internet in the hope that (a) people will get excited, (b) the big boys will sit up, take notice and offer them some money or a job (or both). And then they can be part of the big boys.

Remember Jotspot? That was a very cool wiki. It probably is still very cool but in October of last year it was sold to Google and it hasn’t been seen since. And Flickr, a major Web2.0 posterboy, is no longer the benign photosharing site that it used to be. That’s just a couple of examples.

I believe that as educators we need to jump off the Web2.0 merry-go-round and stand still for a minute. We need to take stock and look at the big picture. The internet has always been about communication. The new tools mean that it’s possible for anyone and everyone to be part of a (the?) conversation. Great. But the rules are continually changing. Those great little applications are going to disappear because something better will arrive on the scene or they are going to be bought out because they are that something that is better.

I think that it’s timely to go and have another look at EPIC. Either 2014 or 2015.

No related posts.

“The draft New Zealand Digital Content Strategy is a sub-strategy of the Digital Strategy, and is the government’s five-year vision for unlocking New Zealand’s stock of content and providing all New Zealanders with seamless, easy access to the information that is important to their lives, businesses and cultural identity.”

This is an important document for digital citizens to read. It seeks to address the debate about the ownership and management of digital information. A bit like the draft curriculum, this is a document that is out there for public consumption and comment.
The draft categories three types of content – formal, informal and commercial. Russell Brown (who has been part of the development of the strategy) has already developed this threefold categorisation further. Russell says,

“…you can spend years strategising and still be stuck with a basically top-down model that institutionalises all decisions and fails to capture the dynamism that drives the Internet community. The emphasis here remains on the institutional capture of both content and decisions about content.”

And further (as may interest Artichoke)

“I’d like to know how a New Zealand Creative Commons licence will interact with the generally obstructive practice of Crown Copyright, for one thing.” (italics added by me)

New Zealand has not yet adopted a localised Creative Commons license. Those of us that do slap a Creative Commons license on our blogs, photos or other works are doing so in hope that at some point the license will have some formal standing in New Zealand. There is a group that is working towards the New Zealand “jurisdiction-specific” license. It’s possible to follow some of the work being done by subscribing to the Creative Commons – New Zealand Mailing List.
I hope that the Draft Digital Content document gets people thinking and talking about digital content and ownership and all of the surrounding issues.

Related posts:

1. The Digital Strategy
2. Content Sharing
3. Licenced

He also announced a new project called Wikiversity. It will serve as an online center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual learning materials, for all ages in all languages. It’ll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.

This will be an interesting idea to watch develop.

In his notes from a Jimmy Wales presentation, Andy reports that the Wikipedia organisation are really concerned about quality.

“We have huge articles on things like Truthiness, like things that Britannica hasn’t even heard of – but I’m just teasing there.”

“We’re not there yet. We’re not as good as Britannica – yet…. So in the coming years we’re going to see a turn towards quality.”

In other surfing, I found a link to another blog called The Best Media in Life. This blog aims to show some of the gazillions of material available under Creative Commons license or in the public domain. It’s a great little site wityh heaps of links to CC texts, music and other audio.

Speaking of the Creative Commons, I have just discovered a new resource on the site They have developed new tabbed Creative Commons Search engine. Find Flickr images, use Google or Yahoo! Good stuff. This willmake it even easier to find “stuff” to use in presentations, movies and podcasts.

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy
2. Sharing
3. Licenced

1. Content is Conversation

This, I like. The conversation is strong and it is often (:) ) lucid. The media of the conversations invites even more conversation. This reminds me of something said by our Canadian visitors last week. They talked about kids publishing in the media of their times. Blogs, podcasts, v-logs, wikis … are the first web-media of our times. Who know what is going to be next.

2. Content is organizing itself

David says,

Well this is a rather melodramatic statement, meant to start a conversation about how the way that information flows is largely resulting from the behavior of its readers. Aggregators, mashups, blog linkings, and other more esoteric techniques are causing us to reshape the information environment on a global and on a personal level.

I’m not so sure about that. To organise, structure, categorise content or “stuff” requires an understanding of tagging and the basics of social networking. I think that it’s still very haphazard. Tagging is a very personal thing and many of us just aren’t that good at it. So our content becomes pretty dis-organised and often the good “stuff” is only picked up when one of the better organised conversationalists picks up on it.

3. People are connect to each other through their content

This is a great statement. I’m not sure if he wants “connected” or “connecting” but I love it. Our content defines our connectors and our connections.

And so communities are built.

Related posts:

1. Talking to Myself
2. The Media of Their Times
3. Web-volution