Open Source Social Software

Over the weekend, I came across a blog post by Josie Fraser entitled, Open Source Social Software. It summarised, very succinctly, a variety of open source social networking platforms and tools. I wanted to make mention of this post as I felt that it dovetailed quite nicely into a post I submitted a couple of months ago relating to Web 2.0 type tools and their applications.

Protected: MoodleMoot 2008 call

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Working Paper [Draft]

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Mapping Salmon’s five stages

I spent a bit of time this afternoon with a copy of Gilly Salmon’s e-moderating – The Key to teaching & learning online (2004) in one hand, and a pen for my tablet PC in the other. This with the intention of trying to map Gilly’s five stage model onto my model for Developing the use of Wikis. The results were (surprisingly) quite interesting and there was more than common between the two than I initially thought. I guess that Gilly does a much better job of articulating her findings than I do. An annotated version of my diagram is available for download.

Next steps: To develop a short paper (to be eventually hosted in the University of Bath’s OPuS repository?) to explain how the model works, what references/resources it draws upon, and provide examples of wikis at the University of Bath that fit with the classification.

Dipity Timeline

A couple of my colleagues [Andy, Brian] at the University of Bath have already blogged about Dipity, but I thought that I would join the fun too! Dipity allows for users to collate together a variety of RSS feeds from services such Twitter, Flickr and SlideShare, and allow for their display on a visual, interactive timeline. I’m having a few issues with not being able to customise certain elements of the tool, but as with most Web 2.0 services at the moment, it’s probably still in some kind of beta. As Andy has already suggested, one potential use of this tool might be an informal way for a University community to keep an eye on the activities of the e-Learning Team. This might also be an excellent way of collecting together contributions from people at conferences who have blogged or Twittered using a particular tag.