Tag Archives: OPML

Google Bundles, OPML, Courses and Cohorts

Google Bundles is likely to be a good thing for classroom use, because it’s essentially the OPML idea with a catchy name (in fact, it looks like every bundle also creates an OPML file).

I don’t want to get into an argument about why things like Google Bundles and Twitter take off while things like OPML languish (one clue: OPML is a crappy, crappy name). If every Bundle produces an OPML file, I think we should postpone the religious war and promote this.

Google Bundles are a great way to turn sense-making and curating from concept to practice. I can see a teacher in a journalism ethics class selecting out the CJR feed, Jay Rosen’s blog, and a couple other sources and asking students to scan these for relevant posts. Bundles can also be used to pull together all the blogs created by students in a class, so that an institution with no internally provisioned Web 2.0 system (like Otago Polytechnic, for example) can reduce the administrative load of providing a way for all the students to see each other’s work — Bundles aren’t just for curators, but for peer groups as well.

Finally, I can see a group of people (whether students or staff) divvying up all the things they want to read into different bundles — Wendy and I will take Bundle A, Jenny and Mel will take Bundle B, Russ and Kim will take Bundle C, etc. Stories of interest that each group finds they can bookmark via delicious with a specific tag (which then flows it back into Google Reader). There’s less of this divide and conquer around than I’d like to see — Bundles might add a level of ease to it.

[And yes, the first person that says “You can do all this with OPML” gets flamed…. I know, you can. That’s not the point.]

Universal Grammar, meet the Black Swan

OK, so I’ve never been that big a fan of Chomskyan grammar: I just never quite understood what one would *do* with it. Besides, sitting around dissecting sentences like “The large gray man fell on the radio stand” just paled in comparsion to analyzing how people actually talk:

Oh I w’s settin’ at a table drinkin’
And – this Norwegian sailor come over
an’ kep’ givin’ me a bunch o’ junk
about I was sittin’ with his woman.
An’ everybody sittin’ at the table with me were my shipmates.
So I jus’ turn aroun’
an’ shoved `im,
an’ told `im, I said,
“Go away,
I don’t even wanna fool with ya.”
An’ nex’ thing I know I ‘m layin’ on the floor, blood all over me,
An’ a guy told me, says,
Don’t move your head.
Your throat’s cut.

(From a transcription of a tape in Labov Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis)

I mean, really, what’s more interesting, playing Chomsky-style mind games, or looking at techniques folks use to simulate POV in spoken discourse?

That’s a rhetorical question.

Given this, I couldn’t help but smirk reading this recent New Yorker article that claims Chomsky’s theory may be threatened due to some idiosyncracies in an obscure Amazonian language:

From the article:

Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.

The article goes on and frankly it looks not quite as bad all that for the cult of Noam. Despite the rigor, one black swan is not going to upset his applecart, at least according to Stephen Pinker, who’s quoted.

So TG or Mark VI or whatever it is now will survive.

And be just as boring as ever.