The amount of stuff Ning gets right is impressive, but they’re still blinded by tradition — and few things demonstrate this more than their forum/blog division. Want to know the question my members on my local Ning site ask me most often? “Should I do this as a forum or a blog?” And all I’m… Continue reading

So it’s weird moving from managing a high-profile political community to managing a local information site. One minute you’re spinning your way into the front page of the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, and the next you’re talking about salamander crossings. But there is a point here, trust me. Salamander migrations occur here in… Continue reading

I’m a week or so into building our new department here at Keene State, which I am proposing we call Online Communications. I actually like some of the more trendy names, but sometimes it’s good to use the idiom common in the field. Makes a lot of things simpler. Now to the hard part —… Continue reading

So starting today I’m the new Interim Director of Technology, College Advancement, Keene State College. I was promoted Friday afternoon to the new position. I have mixed feelings about this. I was hoping my next major career move would be back into net-enabled learning. It’s been almost five years since I left Cognitive Arts, and… Continue reading

From email from my co-worker, Jenny Darrow: I’ve done some thinking about the physical space that we will need to promote and support technology and engagement pedagogies. I’m concerned that our emphasis has been so focused on learning, teaching, and curriculum that we’ve been delinquent in addressing physical space requirements…. She goes onto link to… Continue reading

Might be time to get off Facebook, depending on the level of violation you feel about the recent Beacon revelations. Far more interesting to me though is Cory Doctrow’s observation that you are going to want to get off Facebook at some point anyway, no matter how much you like it. As he points out… Continue reading

Little bit of a Great Harmonic Google Convergence going on here. Jon Udell mentions in passing his rise and fall from the top of the “Jon” results. Stephen Downes replies in a amusing comment that he defeated Stephen King and Stephen Hawking — only to be conquered by the last of the Norman Kings. Meanwhile,… Continue reading

Sony set out to be the iTunes of book-publishing with its Sony Reader. And Sony built a pretty good technical and marketing replica of that iPod model — with an initial online offering that was comparable to Apple’s initial limited selection, with a desktop piece of software clearly modeled on the iTunes client, with redistribution… Continue reading

So I saw through someone’s feed on Facebook that National Novel Writing Month is going on. This is an improvement — I usually notice this when it’s already over. I dithered a bit on whether I should attempt it with the month half gone and so many other things in the works here. And then… Continue reading

Ah, zee blogs… So I’ve been away a bit, working on the college’s AT vision plan, which I wiki-ed out over a period of a week with some other folks. That turns out to be interesting from a process standpoint…we did some marathon work on it the past two weeks, and presented it to an… Continue reading