Following on my post yesterday on individuality and diversity, there is a flip side of the discussion that needs to be covered too.
A common argument in the face of innovation or new systems – which I explored here just the other day in fact – is the lack of resourcing. Resourcing for support, for maintainance, for training and documentation. Basically the issue of how the system is to be effectively translated to a sustainable service.
This is a significant crux in the issue. When we view systems as "services" that others …

There is a unfortunate tendency within organisations and central units to undermine innovation on the fringe by virtue of preferences to central infrastructure and systems. "Supported systems" are seen as better than those that might exist off-site, and obsessions about web presence and branding are such that individuality and uniqueness are seen as undesirable – as if learning is a package to be purchased in a neatly wrapped box.
Well, learning is not a neatly wrapped box. It is a complex, chaotic unpredictable process characterised by extraordinary uniqueness and individuality. It …

As a postmortem on the last post I wrote regarding the search for a means of auto-posting daily Twitter digests to Blogger, I wanted to report back on the outcomes of the investigation.
In the end I gave up. After many days of looking and searching – first for an easy solution and then progressively more and more complex ones as the week drew on – I ultimately realised I was developing an increasingly convoluted design merely to stay with a free public blogging service.
As it turned out this issue …

I’ve been beating my head against a basic technical question for about a week now and have made zero progress on it thus far.  So in keeping with the way I’ve always coped with this sort of thing, I’m going to put pen to paper – in this case fingers to keyboard – and write about the issue in the hopes of realising something I’ve overlooked.
The fundamental objective is to develop a process of capturing a day’s worth of Twitter posts, and auto-posting them in digest form to a Blogger/Blogspot …

I’m in a bit of a quandary over something I need to think through here.
I think diversity in educational technology is important, nay, essential to online learning. By this I mean choice; choice to explore different systems, different tools and networks; interact through visual mediums, auditory mediums, textual mediums, virtual mediums too.
Learning is diverse and unique – so too should be the spaces in which we learn.
But in increasing choice we also introduce additional factors that each carry their own implications. Foremost on my mind in this respect – particularly …