Read my blog in Dutch

Thanks to a posting by Willem van Valkenburg I now have the Google translate widget on this blog. You can find it in the column on the right, half way down. The translations are reasonable, they sort of make sense. (I wonder how it will translate that sentence.)
This is of course also specially for Ineke who complained about my English at the last Blackboard user group meeting: Ineke, I hope this will help you out :-)

Blogs in education, success stories

Shame it's quiet in this session at the end of the first day of the Onderwijsdagen. In this session Rene Jansen from the UvA describes plenty of examples of application of web2.0 tools in higher ed. Blogs have been used for reflection on learning. This does spurn a discussion on whether you can use a blog for reflection, and can you do this on a public blog?
A nice conclusion from a research by Martin Kloos is that social software individual tools do not offer sufficient features to accomodate a community of practice, though a combination will work.
Two of Rene's students also explain their experiences. They have set up a knowledgecafe to share and grow together by setting up a groupsblog. Blogging was an important tool in developing skills in collecting and aggregating and reflecting on knowledge. 'Publicating-light' as they called it.

A pipe for the Onderwijsdagen

Finally got round to reading some of my feeds and it paid off. From Stephen Downes blog I found a reference to just the tool I was looking for: Yahoo/Google pipes. I must give it a try and see if it can be put to use as a feed aggregator for conference reporting. Let's see if I can get all the edubloggers to subscribe...

And it worked! Brilliant stuff. We have now got a pipe combining postings from various bloggers which contain 'onderwijsdagen or owd2007' in the description (the body of the message) or the title. Most RSS feeds do not also send tags in a standard format so filtering by tag or category isn't possible for all postings.

You can find the pipe at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/owd2007/woPVKnaN3BGQwHbenkartA

If you want your blog added, do send me a comment (you may even already be in the list feeds)

Technorati test

I am just testing out the possibility of using the Technorati search service to search all blogs for a specific tag. As I want to do this regularly I have just set up an account. Click to find my Technorati Profile.

Clustrmap on my blog

As a true geographer I am always intrigued where my visitors are coming from. On Arina Teemu's blog I found the Clustrmap badge, so I simply had to add this to my list of badges.... So now I hope they come from afar ;-)

Dappit graph

With thanks to Moqub for her posting :-) I have no idea what these three values stand for, so I will follow them for a while and see how they develop...

How about an aggregated blog for conference reporting?

At the last onderwijsdagen a number of bloggers published together on a group blog. This does mean you have to write a separate story for the group blog and for your own blog...

How about creating a blog that consists of contributions of different bloggers on one subject (defined by a tag). This means that at a conference everybody can happily blog their own blog, but the common postings can be presented on a single blog (and of course you can subscribe to the feed). The articles can be read on this blog, or you can refer to the contributors blog the posting came from. This would require a moderator for the blog who does the mashups on the side and who defines which rss feeds will be searched for the relevant tag. You could also leave this open and let anybody add their blog to the list,

Of course there are a number of variations to this that already exist. Is see that Wordpress has a similar function but this does not (yet) appear to select on tag..
See http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/?p=87

And you can create your own aggregated feed
http://blog.unto.net/miscellaneous/aggregated-blog-and-news-feeds/

Or what about all sorts of group blogs:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2005/05/16/group_and_multiuser_blog_platforms.htm