elearning2.0

...by the way, apologies for the long interval since my last post. This is partly down to me having a longer-than-usual post-Christmas bout of illness, and partly down to a mad coding frenzy through December which prevented me from finishing and posting a number of little articles I'd started.

A personal note for today's post. Something about the intense cold the other morning reminded me of early mornings watching for evictors at Newbury tree protest camps, and through that nostalgic haze it occured to me that it must be exactly ten years ago. Sure enough, today's Guardian includes a short reminiscence / celebration of the 10th anniversary (linking, I'm glad to see, to two current protests :o).

It does not seem like 10 years ago. My KnowNet colleague Al Harris and I, with many of our good mates from here in furry North Wales, spent some times at Newbury that winter. The North Wales climbing community was galvanised into active participation when some Sheffield climbers shamed the climbing world by turning tree-bailiff. The climbers proved a valuable press attraction and also showed that talent on the rocks can translate into amazing climbing feats in the trees. Among my bittersweet memories is a large ring of police giving a big round of applause to Dave Towse when he finally came down out of the distant, whiplashing top of a giant oak after foiling the best efforts of cherry-pickers and tree-bailiffs to shake or cut him down all day. Of course, there were some utter nutters about, but in general the experience gave me a new faith in young people. Just when my own middle age was starting to make anyone under 30 look selfish and unmotivated, I met some wonderful, aware, gifted, committed and imaginative young people - full of bravery, zeal and organisational nous, but without the dogmatic ideologism that blighted my own youthful activism. Here's to them.

Anyway, below are links to the Guardian article, and to some other resources:

The fierce battle against the Newbury bypass a decade ago changed the way campaigners fight for the environment, and altered forever the lives of many of those who took part. By Bibi van der Zee and John Vidal

The wikipedia articles on the A34 and on the A34 Newbury bypass include some (oddly worded) information and links about the protest. There is an extensive links-list on the Third Battle of Newbury in the press. That page also links to the chronology quoted below:

9 January


Third battle of Newbury starts. Attempts to start clearance work on the route of the Newbury bypass are foiled when hundreds of security guards and contractors are prevented from leaving their overnight base by protesters perched on two scaffold tripods. The location of the security base had been revealed to protesters by a 'mole' planted within the security firm. The tripod action appears on the news that day. It seems 15 people, with a five metre tripod of scaffolding poles had stopped the whole day's work.

Tuesday 17 November 1998 01:15 GMT


Bypass opens, with the movement of some traffic cones at Chieveley. There is no opening ceremony, "for fear of disruption by protesters".

The official opening ceremony is held in the afternoon at a secured Newbury Racecourse, and is led by Newbury MP, David Rendel, who cuts the ribbon. At the opening ceremony is also Undersheriff Nicholas Blandy. The racecourse was the site where the police and security convoys used to congregate before driving off in high speed to evict protesters.

...by the way, apologies for the long interval since my last post. This is partly down to me having a longer-than-usual post-Christmas bout of illness, and partly down to a mad coding frenzy through December which prevented me from finishing and posting a number of little articles I'd started.

A personal note for today's post. Something about the intense cold the other morning reminded me of early mornings watching for evictors at Newbury tree protest camps, and through that nostalgic haze it occured to me that it must be exactly ten years ago. Sure enough, today's Guardian includes a short reminiscence / celebration of the 10th anniversary (linking, I'm glad to see, to two current protests :o).

It does not seem like 10 years ago. My KnowNet colleague Al Harris and I, with many of our good mates from here in furry North Wales, spent some times at Newbury that winter. The North Wales climbing community was galvanised into active participation when some Sheffield climbers shamed the climbing world by turning tree-bailiff. The climbers proved a valuable press attraction and also showed that talent on the rocks can translate into amazing climbing feats in the trees. Among my bittersweet memories is a large ring of police giving a big round of applause to Dave Towse when he finally came down out of the distant, whiplashing top of a giant oak after foiling the best efforts of cherry-pickers and tree-bailiffs to shake or cut him down all day. Of course, there were some utter nutters about, but in general the experience gave me a new faith in young people. Just when my own middle age was starting to make anyone under 30 look selfish and unmotivated, I met some wonderful, aware, gifted, committed and imaginative young people - full of bravery, zeal and organisational nous, but without the dogmatic ideologism that blighted my own youthful activism. Here's to them.

Anyway, below are links to the Guardian article, and to some other resources:

The fierce battle against the Newbury bypass a decade ago changed the way campaigners fight for the environment, and altered forever the lives of many of those who took part. By Bibi van der Zee and John Vidal

The wikipedia articles on the A34 and on the A34 Newbury bypass include some (oddly worded) information and links about the protest. There is an extensive links-list on the Third Battle of Newbury in the press. That page also links to the chronology quoted below:

9 January


Third battle of Newbury starts. Attempts to start clearance work on the route of the Newbury bypass are foiled when hundreds of security guards and contractors are prevented from leaving their overnight base by protesters perched on two scaffold tripods. The location of the security base had been revealed to protesters by a 'mole' planted within the security firm. The tripod action appears on the news that day. It seems 15 people, with a five metre tripod of scaffolding poles had stopped the whole day's work.

Tuesday 17 November 1998 01:15 GMT


Bypass opens, with the movement of some traffic cones at Chieveley. There is no opening ceremony, "for fear of disruption by protesters".

The official opening ceremony is held in the afternoon at a secured Newbury Racecourse, and is led by Newbury MP, David Rendel, who cuts the ribbon. At the opening ceremony is also Undersheriff Nicholas Blandy. The racecourse was the site where the police and security convoys used to congregate before driving off in high speed to evict protesters.

...by the way, apologies for the long interval since my last post. This is partly down to me having a longer-than-usual post-Christmas bout of illness, and partly down to a mad coding frenzy through December which prevented me from finishing and posting a number of little articles I'd started.

A personal note for today's post. Something about the intense cold the other morning reminded me of early mornings watching for evictors at Newbury tree protest camps, and through that nostalgic haze it occured to me that it must be exactly ten years ago. Sure enough, today's Guardian includes a short reminiscence / celebration of the 10th anniversary (linking, I'm glad to see, to two current protests :o).

It does not seem like 10 years ago. My KnowNet colleague Al Harris and I, with many of our good mates from here in furry North Wales, spent some times at Newbury that winter. The North Wales climbing community was galvanised into active participation when some Sheffield climbers shamed the climbing world by turning tree-bailiff. The climbers proved a valuable press attraction and also showed that talent on the rocks can translate into amazing climbing feats in the trees. Among my bittersweet memories is a large ring of police giving a big round of applause to Dave Towse when he finally came down out of the distant, whiplashing top of a giant oak after foiling the best efforts of cherry-pickers and tree-bailiffs to shake or cut him down all day. Of course, there were some utter nutters about, but in general the experience gave me a new faith in young people. Just when my own middle age was starting to make anyone under 30 look selfish and unmotivated, I met some wonderful, aware, gifted, committed and imaginative young people - full of bravery, zeal and organisational nous, but without the dogmatic ideologism that blighted my own youthful activism. Here's to them.

Anyway, below are links to the Guardian article, and to some other resources:

The fierce battle against the Newbury bypass a decade ago changed the way campaigners fight for the environment, and altered forever the lives of many of those who took part. By Bibi van der Zee and John Vidal

The wikipedia articles on the A34 and on the A34 Newbury bypass include some (oddly worded) information and links about the protest. There is an extensive links-list on the Third Battle of Newbury in the press. That page also links to the chronology quoted below:

9 January


Third battle of Newbury starts. Attempts to start clearance work on the route of the Newbury bypass are foiled when hundreds of security guards and contractors are prevented from leaving their overnight base by protesters perched on two scaffold tripods. The location of the security base had been revealed to protesters by a 'mole' planted within the security firm. The tripod action appears on the news that day. It seems 15 people, with a five metre tripod of scaffolding poles had stopped the whole day's work.

Tuesday 17 November 1998 01:15 GMT


Bypass opens, with the movement of some traffic cones at Chieveley. There is no opening ceremony, "for fear of disruption by protesters".

The official opening ceremony is held in the afternoon at a secured Newbury Racecourse, and is led by Newbury MP, David Rendel, who cuts the ribbon. At the opening ceremony is also Undersheriff Nicholas Blandy. The racecourse was the site where the police and security convoys used to congregate before driving off in high speed to evict protesters.

I thought I'd share these figures/drawings from the notorious patent, since they were such a pain to access and organise. You can read the Blackboard document at the US Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Full-Text Database, but it refers to 41 figures/drawings, and these are organised in a very awkward navigational format, viewable one at a time in a pane that requires a lot of scrolling (the uspto site says this is because some patents are 5000 pages long, and thus they cannot afford in general to allow omnibus downloads).

I wanted to read the patent, so I downloaded all these images, gave them meaningful names and rotated them as necessary so that I could make reference to them in a sensible way. That was such a pain that I thought I'd spare others the trouble, so I uploaded the images to flickr, gave those images complete titles based on the captions in the patent document, and placed them in order in a Flickr set: Figures from Blackboard's Patent (also available as a Flickr slideshow). If you want to have a local copy of all the figures (for printing etc), I also uploaded the figures as a zip full of TIFFs to my yahoo briefcase.

While I'm at it with links to resources... I've collected a good set of links in my del.icio.us tag 'blackboard', and will continue to add items I feel are particularly useful or important. Best viewed in our shiny new interactive tag-viewer: mmalloch/tagviewer?tag=blackboard.

By the way, I hope to post next week about these slick new tools we've been writing for interactive viewing of del.icio.us tags, clouds, items and related tags (and even for live-searching tagged sites!). Lots of goodness on the way and we'll release variants for Plone and plain html embeds under GPL as soon as the interfaces are complete.

And I also hope to post sometime soon with my own feelings about the Blackboard patent issue. For the moment, let me just say that having spent the summer of 1998 in Blackboard's DC offices (seconded there from the UK to do some IMS work on metadata), and having spent a lot of that time interacting with the architects of Blackboard's subsequent systems, I know that these guys did not 'invent' the VLE, and that they knew they weren't 'inventing' the VLE.

On the other hand, I've never understood why people are interested in these 'L' blinking 'E's in the first place. I prefer to call these things 'procurement-ware', since their sole use in the real world is to get bought by IT departments as evidence that they 'offer online learning'. I agree with those who've pointed out that outlawing the monolithic VLE really doesn't matter - it'd be wonderful if anybody peddling such monstrosities could be sued (and not just BB's competitors :o) ...I think a bit of student protest would be very welcome, against the injustice of this nuisance patent, but also against the injustice of cramming procurement-ware down students' eyeballs ... "No L Es" anyone?

Technorati Tags: blackboard, patents

I thought I'd share these figures/drawings from the notorious patent, since they were such a pain to access and organise. You can read the Blackboard document at the US Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Full-Text Database, but it refers to 41 figures/drawings, and these are organised in a very awkward navigational format, viewable one at a time in a pane that requires a lot of scrolling (the uspto site says this is because some patents are 5000 pages long, and thus they cannot afford in general to allow omnibus downloads).

I wanted to read the patent, so I downloaded all these images, gave them meaningful names and rotated them as necessary so that I could make reference to them in a sensible way. That was such a pain that I thought I'd spare others the trouble, so I uploaded the images to flickr, gave those images complete titles based on the captions in the patent document, and placed them in order in a Flickr set: Figures from Blackboard's Patent (also available as a Flickr slideshow). If you want to have a local copy of all the figures (for printing etc), I also uploaded the figures as a zip full of TIFFs to my yahoo briefcase.

While I'm at it with links to resources... I've collected a good set of links in my del.icio.us tag 'blackboard', and will continue to add items I feel are particularly useful or important. Best viewed in our shiny new interactive tag-viewer: mmalloch/tagviewer?tag=blackboard.

By the way, I hope to post next week about these slick new tools we've been writing for interactive viewing of del.icio.us tags, clouds, items and related tags (and even for live-searching tagged sites!). Lots of goodness on the way and we'll release variants for Plone and plain html embeds under GPL as soon as the interfaces are complete.

And I also hope to post sometime soon with my own feelings about the Blackboard patent issue. For the moment, let me just say that having spent the summer of 1998 in Blackboard's DC offices (seconded there from the UK to do some IMS work on metadata), and having spent a lot of that time interacting with the architects of Blackboard's subsequent systems, I know that these guys did not 'invent' the VLE, and that they knew they weren't 'inventing' the VLE.

On the other hand, I've never understood why people are interested in these 'L' blinking 'E's in the first place. I prefer to call these things 'procurement-ware', since their sole use in the real world is to get bought by IT departments as evidence that they 'offer online learning'. I agree with those who've pointed out that outlawing the monolithic VLE really doesn't matter - it'd be wonderful if anybody peddling such monstrosities could be sued (and not just BB's competitors :o) ...I think a bit of student protest would be very welcome, against the injustice of this nuisance patent, but also against the injustice of cramming procurement-ware down students' eyeballs ... "No L Es" anyone?

Technorati Tags: blackboard, patents

I fell very ill in February and have not posted to this blog since then. I've been ramping up slowly towards having a productive life again, but it's only in the past week or so that I'm feeling 50% and able to get any real work done in a day.

My first priorities now that I'm back have got to be finishing knotes and catching up on progress with our main projects and portals. I'll be trying to get round to some serious writing though - or at least some frequent writing :o). One thing that illness taught me was that there is too little time to be putting off what I'm really interested in - which is writing and thinking not coding.

My blogging is scattered across a number of our sites. I'll be posting soon about a "My Blogging Space" feature for knotes, but until then have a look at my sidebar links for an idea of the portals I am active in. I posted quite a lot in the SIGOSSEE site last week, especialy in the Standards and Architectures Working Group, about standards, architectures and open source software for education.

I've been doing quite a lot of thinking lately about web standards, web-logging standards, and educational applications or services like ePortfolios. Watch this blog and my other blogging for posts soon to come on these and other topics.

As noted in the past week by Graham Attwell and others, Riina Vuorikari of Flosse Posse has organised a petition against software patents:

I am deeply concerned by the current European Commission plans on industrial property. The development of the Community Patent and European Patent Litigation Agreement, in combination with the London protocol, could lead to the EU-wide introduction of software patents. I believe that this could jeopardise developments in the field of technology enhanced learning by inhibiting innovation among European e-learning developers and practitioners.

Here are two examples of pending European Patent Office patents on e-Learning solutions that would clearly impact on current and future e-learning development:

Testing learned material in schools

Use a computer for testing pupils. The main claim covers the basic procedure, the others just specify useful things to be done. The “technical contributions” consists in the teaching that a computer can be used to do these things more efficiently. There are ongoing activities in schools and universities all around Europe that potentially could violate such patent and may have to be cancelled. As an example most open source LMS have this kind of functionality.

Language learning by comparing one’s pronunciation to that of a teacher

This covers all digital language learning systems that allow a user to compare his pronunciation of a selected piece of text to the right pronunciation. This patent is a good example of how concepts that is considered “common knowledge” suddenly becomes patented and restricted for use in the digital world. As a byproduct, the claim also seems to include the learning function of voice recognition systems like ViaVoice.

I wish I had time to do more than say "right on!". It's too easy to assume that someone else will stop the lunacy of software patents, but the fact that the EU is considering them so seriously is alarming evidence that they could become a major obstacle to the improvement of educational technology. Please go to Flosse Possee and sign the petition

As noted in the past week by Graham Attwell and others, Riina Vuorikari of Flosse Posse has organised a petition against software patents:

I am deeply concerned by the current European Commission plans on industrial property. The development of the Community Patent and European Patent Litigation Agreement, in combination with the London protocol, could lead to the EU-wide introduction of software patents. I believe that this could jeopardise developments in the field of technology enhanced learning by inhibiting innovation among European e-learning developers and practitioners.

Here are two examples of pending European Patent Office patents on e-Learning solutions that would clearly impact on current and future e-learning development:

Testing learned material in schools

Use a computer for testing pupils. The main claim covers the basic procedure, the others just specify useful things to be done. The “technical contributions” consists in the teaching that a computer can be used to do these things more efficiently. There are ongoing activities in schools and universities all around Europe that potentially could violate such patent and may have to be cancelled. As an example most open source LMS have this kind of functionality.

Language learning by comparing one’s pronunciation to that of a teacher

This covers all digital language learning systems that allow a user to compare his pronunciation of a selected piece of text to the right pronunciation. This patent is a good example of how concepts that is considered “common knowledge” suddenly becomes patented and restricted for use in the digital world. As a byproduct, the claim also seems to include the learning function of voice recognition systems like ViaVoice.

I wish I had time to do more than say "right on!". It's too easy to assume that someone else will stop the lunacy of software patents, but the fact that the EU is considering them so seriously is alarming evidence that they could become a major obstacle to the improvement of educational technology. Please go to Flosse Possee and sign the petition

After many a month at the code-face without time for writing prose, I'm finally ready to start posting some of the ideas we've been developing about how small open standards and lightweight open services can make elearning work for real users. To reflect our new fired-up mission to communicate these ideas, I've changed the name of this weblog.

Why 'elearning2.0'?

There's a lot of '2.0' going around at the moment, and a lot of people must be wondering what all the fuss is about, and whether it means anything at all or is just venture-capitalist hype and hysteria. We think that it does indeed mean something - in the sense that a lot of hard work on the part of long-sighted web / service developers is starting to pay off in beneficial systems-effects, and that it's time to start communicating the implications and possibilities to the web-using public. A slogan is called for, and 'web2.0' is a good one for many reasons.

"elearning2.0" has been mentioned a few times by people like Stephen Downes. All of us seem to be using it as a slogan in about the same way: To suggest that the bad old days of Big Standards, Big Content and Big Systems can be viewed with some perspective now, and that open architectures and open pedagogies can synergise to create some great new learning experiences and opportunities.

To get a feel for the kind of stuff that the 'elearning2.0' slogan is inspired by, see my del.icio.us elearning2.0 tag, or indeed everyone's elearning2.0 tag. For a feel for what people are talking about when they talk about web2.0, see my web2.0/intro tag

Why "putting the 'oh!' back into elearning"?

Because I never could resist a pun (two-point-"oh!" - geddit?)... but also to emphasise that our mission as developers is to create opportunities for learners to enjoy compelling and rewarding experiences, not to create software architectures :o)

The new look is our first re-skinning of the KNotes blogging-for-Plone system

Over late October 2005, this weblog is also serving as a test-case for some work we're doing on KNotes, our open-source weblogging and discussion system for Plone. In the first place, it's meant to shake out issues in the rendering/markup architecture. Secondly, it's an experiment in re-styling from scratch starting from a 'foreign' (non MT2) stylesheet. If that means nothing to you, please just ignore it. Much credit to Frederico Oliveira of WeBreakStuff for the original stylesheet, and for having the foresight and generosity to open his gorgeous design work for re-use with a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

After many a month at the code-face without time for writing prose, I'm finally ready to start posting some of the ideas we've been developing about how small open standards and lightweight open services can make elearning work for real users. To reflect our new fired-up mission to communicate these ideas, I've changed the name of this weblog.

Why 'elearning2.0'?

There's a lot of '2.0' going around at the moment, and a lot of people must be wondering what all the fuss is about, and whether it means anything at all or is just venture-capitalist hype and hysteria. We think that it does indeed mean something - in the sense that a lot of hard work on the part of long-sighted web / service developers is starting to pay off in beneficial systems-effects, and that it's time to start communicating the implications and possibilities to the web-using public. A slogan is called for, and 'web2.0' is a good one for many reasons.

"elearning2.0" has been mentioned a few times by people like Stephen Downes. All of us seem to be using it as a slogan in about the same way: To suggest that the bad old days of Big Standards, Big Content and Big Systems can be viewed with some perspective now, and that open architectures and open pedagogies can synergise to create some great new learning experiences and opportunities.

To get a feel for the kind of stuff that the 'elearning2.0' slogan is inspired by, see my del.icio.us elearning2.0 tag, or indeed everyone's elearning2.0 tag. For a feel for what people are talking about when they talk about web2.0, see my web2.0/intro tag

Why "putting the 'oh!' back into elearning"?

Because I never could resist a pun (two-point-"oh!" - geddit?)... but also to emphasise that our mission as developers is to create opportunities for learners to enjoy compelling and rewarding experiences, not to create software architectures :o)

The new look is our first re-skinning of the KNotes blogging-for-Plone system

Over late October 2005, this weblog is also serving as a test-case for some work we're doing on KNotes, our open-source weblogging and discussion system for Plone. In the first place, it's meant to shake out issues in the rendering/markup architecture. Secondly, it's an experiment in re-styling from scratch starting from a 'foreign' (non MT2) stylesheet. If that means nothing to you, please just ignore it. Much credit to Frederico Oliveira of WeBreakStuff for the original stylesheet, and for having the foresight and generosity to open his gorgeous design work for re-use with a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Just a little note about a feature I did not know Writely had - but which makes such obvious good web2.0 sense. You can post to an API-supporting weblog or CMS from within Writely. Another great example of features falling out of the small, loose way :o) And it makes me very happy about the effort that we here at KnowNet have invested in the implemention of the APIs that support this! Similar to my realisation that ordinary users can already mash up content and live tagfeeds (see Monday's post for a big how-to)... we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of emergent feature in the future I think!

I got a beta account with Writely some time ago but forgot to give it a try. stung into action by Microsoft announcing their move to web based software I though I would give it a go. Its fabulous - greta potential for changing work flow in terms of sharing documents. And...I saw this blog tab. Thought I would give it a go. Entered the url and all the rest. And it worked - first time - wonderful.

For my del.icio.us tracking of Writely and similar services, see my webtech/office tag, or enjoy the goodness of live embedded links from my more selective services/file-editing tag below:

Just a little note about a feature I did not know Writely had - but which makes such obvious good web2.0 sense. You can post to an API-supporting weblog or CMS from within Writely. Another great example of features falling out of the small, loose way :o) And it makes me very happy about the effort that we here at KnowNet have invested in the implemention of the APIs that support this! Similar to my realisation that ordinary users can already mash up content and live tagfeeds (see Monday's post for a big how-to)... we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of emergent feature in the future I think!

I got a beta account with Writely some time ago but forgot to give it a try. stung into action by Microsoft announcing their move to web based software I though I would give it a go. Its fabulous - greta potential for changing work flow in terms of sharing documents. And...I saw this blog tab. Thought I would give it a go. Entered the url and all the rest. And it worked - first time - wonderful.

For my del.icio.us tracking of Writely and similar services, see my webtech/office tag, or enjoy the goodness of live embedded links from my more selective services/file-editing tag below:

Scott Wilson has posted a damn fine summary of a damn fine PLE workshop:

I've had a pretty good two days at the PLE workshop. Some very interesting ideas from the participants - looking back I think we were extremely lucky to get such a varied, knowledgeable, and positively engaged group - and I actually managed to do a demo without getting a firewall/proxy/gateway/dns related problem.

No doubt there will be a much more detailed wrote-up at some point; for now I think I'll just note a few things I found interesting...

I enthusiastically endorse Scott's outline of the important issues and the emerging points of consensus. I had a wonderful (if exhausting) time at both days, and feel very positive about the emergence of a developer/practitioner community with some real vision and momentum. I've had to put nose to grindstone since the meeting, hammering out design and project work, and I won't have a chance to write extensively on the subject for a while. Let me just say what a pleasure it was to participate in such a focused and productive meeting with people as smart and long-sighted as Scott and Oleg.

I'll be participating in an meeting in Manchester hosted by CETIS on June 6th. This is a meeting of experts, the day before CETIS' public meeting on personal learning environments. We experts ( ahem :o) were asked to contribute very short position papers in advance of the meeting. I've pasted my position paper below (also available in a pdf version).

By the way, apologies for the scarcity of these posts.. I've been burning both ends of the midnight oil for a while now and just haven't had time to write...

Patterns in the clouds: Some thoughts on not being completely wrong about PLEs

To kick things off, let me admit that I have been completely wrong about some previous "xLx"s. When "virtual learning environments" and "learning objects" began to be spoken of in the 90's, I was one of the original dupes. Back then, I would tell anyone who would listen that these objects and environments, powered as they were by Standards™, were going to make cheap online learning possible, even ubiquitous. The web was great, and everyone saw its potential for learners, but creating good learning experiences online was hard and labour-intensive. To address that obstacle, software & standards architects had seen a way to augment the infrastructure.

Augmenting the infrastructure was what I assumed it was all about. When people spoke about 'learning environments', I took it as read that we were talking about smart middleware that added value to content and supported rich interactions across users and applications. It seemed obvious that by 'learning objects' people meant clever little programmatic objects that bundled content with code and knew how to hook up with each other in those smart environments. Begging, of course, the little question of engineering the actual software, but I assumed that (a) everyone knew about that little matter, and (b) the hard work would get done - what with big institutions on board, and big standards to help them work together for a common good.

I was completely wrong. That 90's jargon in effect meant something like... 'learning environment': institutional intranet, but with some 'spaces' named after a university's administrative concepts; 'learning object': a web page, but in a folder with the word "course" in its name. I'm not saying that nothing good has been accomplished by researchers, developers and practitioners of online learning - just that the hard infrastructure work implied by the 90's jargon got sidestepped in the rush to market.

Evocative notions like 'Personal Learning Environment' can mean radically different kinds of thing to people in different fields of work. So, nowadays, when I get excited about how some great common good can come from sharing out some tricky work, I assume that we'd better belabour the nature of that work before we get carried away with how good everything is going to be when we have the product. Work first, then hype.

So here I go, belabouring it. But first let me make it clear that I am very excited about the potential of "PLEs" in the sense of "leverage web2.0 for learners". In fact, I spend much of my working life organising and coding for experiments which try to deliver great features to real world users by combining, proxying and integrating the "small, loose" standards, simple services and social software entities of web2.0. (We here at KnowNet have built KNotes - a GPL'd collaborative weblogging system for Zope and Plone - which makes a very useful platform for such experimenting - pardon the plug :o) Some caveats, do's & don'ts follow:

Avoid reification by repetition

If we talk about "PLEs" for long enough, people will begin to assume they exist - and that there is a particular kind of artifact which "is a" PLE. This could encourage funders and vendors to concentrate on visible omnibus products - to the neglect of much needed work on other aspects of the services, systems, clients, interfaces, applications and best-practices which could comprise an environment worth describing as 'PL'.

The 'E' is out there

Many punters will mistakenly assume that the 'environment' will be metaphorically instantiated in some kind of desktop application program or web interface, but we all know better: a large part of the work required to make 'PL' happen will be in adding new services, service layers and bits of bridging code.

Practical experiments to reveal real-world use-cases

Our ignorance of pertinent use-cases is almost complete. The best way to shake out the issues and use-cases is to undertake some serious experimentation - try to use existing services and tools to accomplish small-scale aims with real users, and document the issues, patterns and gaps. Ideally, these experiments should have access to specialist development help, so that ad-hoc features and behaviours can be added or tweaked to meet the emerging cases.

I've done some experimenting with real users, and can attest that it is subtle and tricky in the extreme to mix and mash existing services and applications for ordinary groups of users. To my mind, small-scale collaborations among educators and developers, imaginatively pushing the limits of what can be done with existing equipment, are the most pressing immediate issue for all of us.

Creativity, connection and expression - not just consumption and aggregation

There is much work to be done to enable ordinary end-users to create their own content-in-context; to add connection and commentary to what they 'pull in'. The connectedness of content in web2.0 offers huge scope for exploring new ways for learners to create interesting structurings and representations of their own, but that will require determined experimentation, research and development

Respect the web2.0 way

In any work on PLEs, let's be very careful to learn from the simplicity, clarity, user-centricity, restraint and attention to detail that characterise web2.0. The good systems-effects only emerge when usage becomes rich and plentiful - and that depends on an ecology in which the individual parts are simple, focused and easy to get along with, and in which the interoperability architecture makes very lightweight demands on its citizens. Small pieces, loosely joined. Small APIs. Small steps. And remember to make it shiny :o)

Understand the gaps in web2.0 as it is

There are some wonderful applications, services and mash-ups out there, but existing services and applications are not quite enough to support the features we can envisage learners having access to in a PLE. Only by determined experimentation can we begin to characterise and address the gaps. (By the way, I have some hunches about where a few key gaps are to be found, but have had no chance to document them yet).

Concentrate on the parts web2.0 doesn't reach

My feeling is that we should concentrate our limited efforts on implementing functionalities and services which are not already available elsewhere ( or which practice has shown are unsuitable in the forms currently available).

Tools and platforms to experiment with

One crucial development task is to provide experimenters with platforms which can be flexibly and rapidly adapted to cases as they emerge. For instance, I am not sure that we need an omnibus desktop application in itself, but I am certain that we need to be able to rapidly experiment with desktop clients for new or adapted APIs/services (structured blogging and microformats through atom-publishing or weblogging API clients for instance, or structured-commentary on items read within an aggregator). Our own KNotes - which I mentioned above - is a useful platform for playing with the serverside of such experimental interactions.

Practice, practice, practice...

In case I did not emphasise my feelings about this enough above: web2.0 is a loose set of practices as much as it is a system... 1) Practical experiments are a key immediate task; (2) practice "in anger" with the web2.0 services and social software systems is to be heartily recommended to anyone who hasn't yet done so; (3) much of what will make the 'E' in PLE will be distillations and encodings of good practice, and much of our jobs will be to solicit, support, generalise and empower such practices.

The communication challenge

This stuff is subtle. What seems obvious to us is unknown to most policy-makers - indeed it's little-known or misunderstood by most professional ed-tech developers. In my experience, people do not "get" the new opportunities until they have made fairly serious use of some of them. Spreading the meme to funders and educators will require vivid demonstrators and small real-world success stories to exemplify the potential we see represented in those pretty omni-graffle clouds :O)

I am just noting here a reference I found to a recent book similar to the paper by De Cort which Graham cites in his recent entry...

I stumbled on this one the other day in a book I helped edit (can't find the book on line - must put it there but related papers can be found here) . Interestingly it was developed for work based learning - and pre-dates the advent of e-learning. Nevertheless I think it stands up pretty well in the e-learning age.

Aha! I have also just added a connotea shared bookmark for De Corte et al 2003. I had been frustrated trying to use the connotea bookmarklet from the Elsevier entry, but there must be a connotea plugin for Amazon - I got a nice citation from there. I'll try to remember that Amazon is the place to go to 'connotea-ise' any book. I may alter my ecto plugins to reflect this... what a rich and wonderful world this web is becoming :o).

Amazon link for Powerful Learning Environments

POWERFUL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Unravelling Basic Components and Dimensions

Elsevier link for Powerful Learning Environments

Buy online with a credit card in the Elsevier Science & Technology Bookstore: http://books.elsevier.com/elsevier/?isbn=0080442757

Edited by E. De Corte, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium, Email: erik.decorte@ped.kuleuven.ac.be L. Verschaffel, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Belgium, Email: lieven.verschaffel@ped.kuleuven.ac.be N. Entwistle, Moray House, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Email: noel_entwistle@education.ed.ac.uk J. van Merriënboer, Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands, Email: jeroen.vanmerrienboer@ou.nl

Included in series Advances in Learning and Instruction,

Description Over the past ten to fifteen years the international scene of research on learning and instruction has witnessed the emergence of important and promising developments. New theoretical frameworks, design principles, and research methodologies focusing on the construction, implementation, and evaluation of powerful learning environments have been put forward, coming from three intersecting subdomains within the broader field of research on learning and instruction - namely instructional psychology, instructional technology, and instructional design. Although it is obvious that the developments in those three subdomains are characterized by similarities and convergencies, there are still important differences. Therefore, there is a great need for scientific debate and attempts to integrate, or justify, the contrasting theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and empirical outcomes.

A European research network, coordinated by the Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology of the University of Leuven, has been set up to work towards this end. The present volume is the first collective output of this European research network, and focuses on unravelling and identifying basic component and dimensions of powerful learning environments. It is based on the presentations and discussions that constituted the "piece de resistance" of a first meeting of the research network.

Contents General Perspectives on Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments. Identifying and Measuring Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments: Experiences and Reflections. Design and Application of Technological Tools to Support Learning in Powerful Learning Environments. The Role of Peer Tutoring and Collaboration for Promoting Conceptual Change and Intentional Learning in Different Content Domains.

Bibliographic & ordering Information Hardbound, ISBN: 0-08-044275-7, 266 pages, publication date: 2003 Imprint: PERGAMON Price: Order form USD 85 EUR 85 GBP 56.50

I am just noting here a reference I found to a recent book similar to the paper by De Cort which Graham cites in his recent entry...

I stumbled on this one the other day in a book I helped edit (can't find the book on line - must put it there but related papers can be found here) . Interestingly it was developed for work based learning - and pre-dates the advent of e-learning. Nevertheless I think it stands up pretty well in the e-learning age.

Aha! I have also just added a connotea shared bookmark for De Corte et al 2003. I had been frustrated trying to use the connotea bookmarklet from the Elsevier entry, but there must be a connotea plugin for Amazon - I got a nice citation from there. I'll try to remember that Amazon is the place to go to 'connotea-ise' any book. I may alter my ecto plugins to reflect this... what a rich and wonderful world this web is becoming :o).

Amazon link for Powerful Learning Environments

POWERFUL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Unravelling Basic Components and Dimensions

Elsevier link for Powerful Learning Environments

Buy online with a credit card in the Elsevier Science & Technology Bookstore: http://books.elsevier.com/elsevier/?isbn=0080442757

Edited by E. De Corte, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium, Email: erik.decorte@ped.kuleuven.ac.be L. Verschaffel, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Belgium, Email: lieven.verschaffel@ped.kuleuven.ac.be N. Entwistle, Moray House, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Email: noel_entwistle@education.ed.ac.uk J. van Merriënboer, Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands, Email: jeroen.vanmerrienboer@ou.nl

Included in series Advances in Learning and Instruction,

Description Over the past ten to fifteen years the international scene of research on learning and instruction has witnessed the emergence of important and promising developments. New theoretical frameworks, design principles, and research methodologies focusing on the construction, implementation, and evaluation of powerful learning environments have been put forward, coming from three intersecting subdomains within the broader field of research on learning and instruction - namely instructional psychology, instructional technology, and instructional design. Although it is obvious that the developments in those three subdomains are characterized by similarities and convergencies, there are still important differences. Therefore, there is a great need for scientific debate and attempts to integrate, or justify, the contrasting theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and empirical outcomes.

A European research network, coordinated by the Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology of the University of Leuven, has been set up to work towards this end. The present volume is the first collective output of this European research network, and focuses on unravelling and identifying basic component and dimensions of powerful learning environments. It is based on the presentations and discussions that constituted the "piece de resistance" of a first meeting of the research network.

Contents General Perspectives on Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments. Identifying and Measuring Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments: Experiences and Reflections. Design and Application of Technological Tools to Support Learning in Powerful Learning Environments. The Role of Peer Tutoring and Collaboration for Promoting Conceptual Change and Intentional Learning in Different Content Domains.

Bibliographic & ordering Information Hardbound, ISBN: 0-08-044275-7, 266 pages, publication date: 2003 Imprint: PERGAMON Price: Order form USD 85 EUR 85 GBP 56.50

I am just noting here a reference I found to a recent book similar to the paper by De Cort which Graham cites in his recent entry...

I stumbled on this one the other day in a book I helped edit (can't find the book on line - must put it there but related papers can be found here) . Interestingly it was developed for work based learning - and pre-dates the advent of e-learning. Nevertheless I think it stands up pretty well in the e-learning age.

Aha! I have also just added a connotea shared bookmark for De Corte et al 2003. I had been frustrated trying to use the connotea bookmarklet from the Elsevier entry, but there must be a connotea plugin for Amazon - I got a nice citation from there. I'll try to remember that Amazon is the place to go to 'connotea-ise' any book. I may alter my ecto plugins to reflect this... what a rich and wonderful world this web is becoming :o).

Amazon link for Powerful Learning Environments

POWERFUL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Unravelling Basic Components and Dimensions

Elsevier link for Powerful Learning Environments

Buy online with a credit card in the Elsevier Science & Technology Bookstore: http://books.elsevier.com/elsevier/?isbn=0080442757

Edited by E. De Corte, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium, Email: erik.decorte@ped.kuleuven.ac.be L. Verschaffel, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Belgium, Email: lieven.verschaffel@ped.kuleuven.ac.be N. Entwistle, Moray House, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Email: noel_entwistle@education.ed.ac.uk J. van Merriënboer, Open University, Heerlen, The Netherlands, Email: jeroen.vanmerrienboer@ou.nl

Included in series Advances in Learning and Instruction,

Description Over the past ten to fifteen years the international scene of research on learning and instruction has witnessed the emergence of important and promising developments. New theoretical frameworks, design principles, and research methodologies focusing on the construction, implementation, and evaluation of powerful learning environments have been put forward, coming from three intersecting subdomains within the broader field of research on learning and instruction - namely instructional psychology, instructional technology, and instructional design. Although it is obvious that the developments in those three subdomains are characterized by similarities and convergencies, there are still important differences. Therefore, there is a great need for scientific debate and attempts to integrate, or justify, the contrasting theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and empirical outcomes.

A European research network, coordinated by the Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology of the University of Leuven, has been set up to work towards this end. The present volume is the first collective output of this European research network, and focuses on unravelling and identifying basic component and dimensions of powerful learning environments. It is based on the presentations and discussions that constituted the "piece de resistance" of a first meeting of the research network.

Contents General Perspectives on Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments. Identifying and Measuring Components and Dimensions of Powerful Learning Environments: Experiences and Reflections. Design and Application of Technological Tools to Support Learning in Powerful Learning Environments. The Role of Peer Tutoring and Collaboration for Promoting Conceptual Change and Intentional Learning in Different Content Domains.

Bibliographic & ordering Information Hardbound, ISBN: 0-08-044275-7, 266 pages, publication date: 2003 Imprint: PERGAMON Price: Order form USD 85 EUR 85 GBP 56.50

KnowNet leads a european project called SIGOSSEE - a mouthful I know but the acronym makes sense: Special Interest Group for Open Source Software for Education in Europe. One of the project's key activities is a set of working groups which will report on aspects of open source for education. I'm responsible for the working group on standards and architectures. In June I wrote a draft report, which is available on the SIGOSSEE site. Since then one of my jobs has been to furiously collect and catalog resources relevant to the issue, with the preparation of a final draft report in mind. Last week I built the tag cloud for that resource base into the WG's area of the SIGOSSEE site, and together with Al Harris wrote a presentation to introduce the resource base and outline the benefits of doing things like this in the 'content outside', web2.0 way. I blogged about it to the project news blog:

Al Harris is presenting a talk to the Conference on Open Source for Education in Europe, announcing the Standards and Architectures Working Group's resource base. This weblog post introduces the resource base, links to an online version of the presentation, and has a printable pdf version attached.

(By the way, the SIGOSSEE Project jointly organised that conference... see www.ossite.org for more info). My project news post just pointed to the resource base tag-cloud page and quoted its introductory paragraphs:

A large part of the work entailed by the Working Group's report is the comprehensive collection and categorising of web reseources related to standards, architectures and open-source in education. Mike has been seriously collecting, tagging and annotating resources for the WG since July, and we now have a very substantial and growing resource-base.

Most of the resource-base is back-ended by Mike Malloch's del.icio.us account, with others in Connotea. See Mike's main weblog, elearning2.0, for other materials and writings which explain why we are using external services to host the WG's resource-base, and about the theory and practice of architecting for education with open source and open standards. Please send me any links you think belong in the resource-base: if you are a del.icio.us user, add the tag for:Mike_Malloch- otherwise email mike AT theknownet DOT com. Because the resource-base is backended by well-known, open services, we can collaboratively build on it, and anyone is free to aggregate from it using del.icio.us and Connotea's rich and flexible APIs and RSS. You can also subscribe to my del.icio.us stream's RSS - all tags and queries are also avilable via RSS.

Below is a "tag cloud" showing the relevant categories in Mike's del.icio.us account. Click a tag to see the resources tagged with it along with a list of related tags.

Sadly I don't have the time to explain any of the groovy details or implications here. There are many benefits from accumulating resource collections using the lightweight public services, and soon I'll try to write about them here :o) In the meantime, the presentation is worth reading / viewing if you are interested in resources the web2.0 way.

A printable pdf version of the talk is available as an attachment to the SIGOSSEE post. Links: Stds Archs Talk Printable [ Download ] (stds_archs_talk_printable.pdf - 10.49 Mb ) Preview . An online version is available as a Flickr slideshow of the presentation.

KnowNet leads a european project called SIGOSSEE - a mouthful I know but the acronym makes sense: Special Interest Group for Open Source Software for Education in Europe. One of the project's key activities is a set of working groups which will report on aspects of open source for education. I'm responsible for the working group on standards and architectures. In June I wrote a draft report, which is available on the SIGOSSEE site. Since then one of my jobs has been to furiously collect and catalog resources relevant to the issue, with the preparation of a final draft report in mind. Last week I built the tag cloud for that resource base into the WG's area of the SIGOSSEE site, and together with Al Harris wrote a presentation to introduce the resource base and outline the benefits of doing things like this in the 'content outside', web2.0 way. I blogged about it to the project news blog:

Al Harris is presenting a talk to the Conference on Open Source for Education in Europe, announcing the Standards and Architectures Working Group's resource base. This weblog post introduces the resource base, links to an online version of the presentation, and has a printable pdf version attached.

(By the way, the SIGOSSEE Project jointly organised that conference... see www.ossite.org for more info). My project news post just pointed to the resource base tag-cloud page and quoted its introductory paragraphs:

A large part of the work entailed by the Working Group's report is the comprehensive collection and categorising of web reseources related to standards, architectures and open-source in education. Mike has been seriously collecting, tagging and annotating resources for the WG since July, and we now have a very substantial and growing resource-base.

Most of the resource-base is back-ended by Mike Malloch's del.icio.us account, with others in Connotea. See Mike's main weblog, elearning2.0, for other materials and writings which explain why we are using external services to host the WG's resource-base, and about the theory and practice of architecting for education with open source and open standards. Please send me any links you think belong in the resource-base: if you are a del.icio.us user, add the tag for:Mike_Malloch- otherwise email mike AT theknownet DOT com. Because the resource-base is backended by well-known, open services, we can collaboratively build on it, and anyone is free to aggregate from it using del.icio.us and Connotea's rich and flexible APIs and RSS. You can also subscribe to my del.icio.us stream's RSS - all tags and queries are also avilable via RSS.

Below is a "tag cloud" showing the relevant categories in Mike's del.icio.us account. Click a tag to see the resources tagged with it along with a list of related tags.

Sadly I don't have the time to explain any of the groovy details or implications here. There are many benefits from accumulating resource collections using the lightweight public services, and soon I'll try to write about them here :o) In the meantime, the presentation is worth reading / viewing if you are interested in resources the web2.0 way.

A printable pdf version of the talk is available as an attachment to the SIGOSSEE post. Links: Stds Archs Talk Printable [ Download ] (stds_archs_talk_printable.pdf - 10.49 Mb ) Preview . An online version is available as a Flickr slideshow of the presentation.

I'm starting to realise just how big the communications challenge is for us 'elearning2.0' advocates and developers. This stuff seems obvious to those of us who have invested years of painful development effort in artefacts like heavyweight learning objects repositories, and who have since have come to prefer loosely coupled, lightweight services for our own working practices. But I am discovering that web2.0 is counter-intuitive and even repellent to a lot of other people in the educational technology business. It takes time and practice for people to become happy with the web2.0 way of getting things done. We need to start spreading the word about compelling practical examples and vividly written explanations.

Scott Wilson has been producing some great, "gettable" figures and presentations lately. In this post I discuss a presentation he recently gave in Norway in which he reflected personally on the failure of the Big Standards approach, and the opportunities opened up by web2.0 with its smallscale standards and services and largescale emergent benefits.

A powerpoint presentation I gave yesterday in Norway - eduresources (PPT, 8.6Mb). Apologies for the file size, I included a lot of screen captures! If you'd prefer a smaller file, or just have problems with the powerpoint, I've also got an archive of JPEGs: eduresources.zip (ZIP, 3Mb)

I've attached a conversion of his ppt slides into a pdf on white background for printing. (Scott, this version has corrected the oversize text in the one I emailed you originally; I've made a little KeyNote theme to handle that in future conversions). As you might guess from that, I like to read things like this offline. And just about the only real chance I have to do so is when I'm on a train, which thank heavens has been seldom these days. Yesterday I finally gave Scott's presentation my full attention, and realised what a great resource it is for communicating these opportunities and issues to ed-tech folks.

I particularly liked his slides 10 and 11:

• So, we can create libraries of learning objects, and assemble them in all kinds of combinations to suit any need, all a teacher need do is select the correct combinations for their context.

• But there is one small problem...

• It doesn’t work

Scott goes on to qualify and explain that dramatic assertion, and to introduce some of the services and architectural styles that make the web2.0 approach to using learning resources so attractive. He also develops some ideas about other ways of approaching the issue of using resources. See for instance:

• slide 41 : using resources; the repository view
• slide 42 : using resources; the web view
• slide 46 : using resources; the web2.0 view
• slide 39 : so how are we to share [1]?
• slide 67 : so how are we to share [2]?

Now, I guess I should fess up about 2 things which explain some of my personal delight at reading those words:

1. In the mid to late 90's, I was a committed advocate of the approach I have since come to call Big Standards: people like me used to go on at great length about how wonderful these 'learning objects' were going to be, and why heavy-duty structured metadata and object repositories were essential to realising our vision of open, active elearning
2. Since the late 90's, I have opposed the Big Standards approach: It became clear to me that there were not going to be many highly interactive learning objects (in the object-oriented programming sense) and that we had all just bought a lot of snake oil.

I have spent the years since 1999 increasingly convinced that:

• concepts like "learning objects", "learning objects metadata" and "learning object repository" have lost their ambition and become overblown ways of denoting low-tech concepts like 'web pages', 'categories' and 'database'
• the reality of Big System / Big Standards elearning for almost all its users has been disastrously bad
• fundamental breakthroughs in the collaborative web were needed before organised online learning was of any use to learners

In fact, that pretty much sums up the mission of KnowNet: work hard to try to exemplify and explore those much-needed improvements to the collaborative web. (For instance, see this Online EDUCA 2001 paper).

And ( no thanks to us :o) improvements have started to appear. The web is much more collaborative now than it has been, and extremely rich new functionalities have started to emerge from an ecology of simple services, rich interfaces, massive uptake and easy re-use.

The web is smart because of the richness and variety of the interactions people have within it, not because its content is getting any smarter. Resources do not have to be smart for the system - the whole wild web and its real world users - to be rich and interesting. We do not have to regulate and contain the resources that learners use; on the contrary, our job is to add value to the system by making it even easier for people to interact meaningfully with each other, single, in groups or in emergent communities.

Thus, although it's been a long time since I've had any interest in Big Standards Learning Objects Repositories, it makes me very happy to read Scott's sharply-put words helping the rest of the ed-tech community to 'think out of the repository'.

Technorati Tags: elearning, elearning2.0, learning-resources, web2.0, repositories

Looking over our referrer logs for the KNowNet site, I noticed the other day that we still get hits from people searching for the Skills Review program. My apologies to those who may have sought without finding: you can try out an online version of Skills Review on our old website (you cannot save your answers in this version, so should print the reports before closing the browser window). We have also converted the Skills review application into a Plone content type so that it can be shared as a saved-answer application, but have never released this as a finished product. Contact me (at my i-name =Mike.Malloch) if you want to know more about the Plone version.

I've spoken with Alan Brown, who created the wonderful questions-set for Skills Review, and he's agreed to participate in writing a 'review of the review', which will be appearing in various blogs over the next few weeks ( any new content will be linked-to from this weblog entry as it is posted, so watch this space ). I hope that we can develop a plan for taking Skills Review on to the next stage.

In the years since Skills Review was created there has been a growing 'buzz' about personal-development-planning (pdp) tools and - especially in the past year or so - e-Portfolios for developing and sharing personal development plans and skills profiles. Skills Review was a small but very good example of a pdp tool, and deserves to be remembered, learned from and built upon. KnowNet has many plans for extending knotes to help people to create, maintain and share e-Portfolios and social-software 'presences'; I hope that personal skills reflection and planning applications like Skills Review will fit nicely into that upcoming work.

The Skills Review Program was originally developed as a skills self-assessment tool for employees in small businesses, based on questionnaire content development by Alan Brown of the University of Warwick. KnowNet collaborated with Alan and the University of East London in 2001 to produce an online version which proved popular and usable. Alan's questions were so compelling that we could not get people away fromn the application once they had started it! Below are a few screenshots:

See the extended text for this entry (ie view the full entry) for more screenshots and content about Skills Review.

First, let me say that I'm in favour of conserving Joshua's bandwidth and cycles, so I am not recommending this as a permanent solution or for high-traffic sites. What follows is in the spirit of experimenting with these great service-oriented functionalities to see how we can make it easy for real authors to effectively mash up their own links and content.

OK. We've been planning to do some work, starting with simple Plone content types, to help editors, authors and site-managers to pull social bookmarks into their content. Since del.icio.us, for instance, delivers wonderfully flexible RSS, it is pretty easy to bring bookmarked links into portlets or RSS-feed objects. In other words, it is easy to include delicious RSS wherever a separate content object might be expected.

But real-world authors want to be able to include links within their content, not in separate objects. So much so that they will hand-edit links into their page content even when those links have already been collected into tags or containers. We here at KnowNet developed our 'indexFolder' Plone container/content-type to help authors with similar issues, but it is a tad demanding of their awareness of containment (see the NGRF site for plentiful examples of bringing listings into page content). We're well-aware that this style of 'object-wise' editing does not appeal to people without computer science or engineering degrees. Developers must find ways to make it easier for ordinary editors and authors to create the content they want and benefit from the goodness of logical links-objects.

The editors of the NGRF site have been 'getting' the power of social-bookmarking lately, and have started to assemble a useful resource at their del.icio.us account. While drafting an email to them about options for leveraging that resource within the NGRF site, it occurred to me that a very easy technique already exists for bringing 'live' links lists into discursive site content, using the del.icio.us javascript linkroll feature. This post explains how to do that.

Two more caveats before explaining the technique:

• It depends on javascripts which fetch content from del.icio.us before the rest of the page loads. Thus it can sometimes be a bit slow, and sometimes appears a bit wonky, and will only display if javascript is available and enabled ( fallback is to link to delicious/tag etc )
• It requires editing "raw html". If you are used to a WYSIWYG editor like kupu, you'll have to go into 'raw' editing mode briefly to paste the special code. In kupu and ecto the link for 'raw editing mode' looks like "<>".

In its favour though, the technique is completely independent of your content-publishing system - you can use it anywhere you can edit web content - and very easy to place in a particular context within your own words and pictures - just choose where you paste the special code. It also has the great merit of working now, with absolutely no further work needed to get some useful content brewing. Read the rest of this entry for a full explanation and to see some rather arbitrary examples.

Technorati Tags: social-bookmarking del.icio.us structured-blogging elearning2.0 elearning web2.0 content2.0 authoring how-to

First, let me say that I'm in favour of conserving Joshua's bandwidth and cycles, so I am not recommending this as a permanent solution or for high-traffic sites. What follows is in the spirit of experimenting with these great service-oriented functionalities to see how we can make it easy for real authors to effectively mash up their own links and content.

OK. We've been planning to do some work, starting with simple Plone content types, to help editors, authors and site-managers to pull social bookmarks into their content. Since del.icio.us, for instance, delivers wonderfully flexible RSS, it is pretty easy to bring bookmarked links into portlets or RSS-feed objects. In other words, it is easy to include delicious RSS wherever a separate content object might be expected.

But real-world authors want to be able to include links within their content, not in separate objects. So much so that they will hand-edit links into their page content even when those links have already been collected into tags or containers. We here at KnowNet developed our 'indexFolder' Plone container/content-type to help authors with similar issues, but it is a tad demanding of their awareness of containment (see the NGRF site for plentiful examples of bringing listings into page content). We're well-aware that this style of 'object-wise' editing does not appeal to people without computer science or engineering degrees. Developers must find ways to make it easier for ordinary editors and authors to create the content they want and benefit from the goodness of logical links-objects.

The editors of the NGRF site have been 'getting' the power of social-bookmarking lately, and have started to assemble a useful resource at their del.icio.us account. While drafting an email to them about options for leveraging that resource within the NGRF site, it occurred to me that a very easy technique already exists for bringing 'live' links lists into discursive site content, using the del.icio.us javascript linkroll feature. This post explains how to do that.

Two more caveats before explaining the technique:

• It depends on javascripts which fetch content from del.icio.us before the rest of the page loads. Thus it can sometimes be a bit slow, and sometimes appears a bit wonky, and will only display if javascript is available and enabled ( fallback is to link to delicious/tag etc )
• It requires editing "raw html". If you are used to a WYSIWYG editor like kupu, you'll have to go into 'raw' editing mode briefly to paste the special code. In kupu and ecto the link for 'raw editing mode' looks like "<>".

In its favour though, the technique is completely independent of your content-publishing system - you can use it anywhere you can edit web content - and very easy to place in a particular context within your own words and pictures - just choose where you paste the special code. It also has the great merit of working now, with absolutely no further work needed to get some useful content brewing. Read the rest of this entry for a full explanation and to see some rather arbitrary examples.

Technorati Tags: social-bookmarking del.icio.us structured-blogging elearning2.0 elearning web2.0 content2.0 authoring how-to

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

I'm involved as a consultant in a bid being developed for the ESRC/EPSRC Call for Research on Technology Enhanced Learning. The word-count restrictions on these proposals are quite severe, so my constribution to the text has been undergoing some pretty radical condensing (if only I'd had time to write half as much in the first place :o)

In order to save some words in the bid itself, I'm making this post in order to pull together some links I wanted to include with my text. These links should prove useful if you want to explore definitions of, and introductions to, web2.0, social bookmarking, and current ideas about Personal Learning Environments. Mostly, the links are to tags I have used in my own social-bookmarking:

• web2.0/intro (my del.icio.us bookmarking of introductory materials on web2.0 - currently 80 resources)
• web2.0/defining (my del.icio.us bookmarking of definitions of web2.0 - currently 14 resources)
• ossite.org/research/standards/library (tag clouds organised into 12 main topics, covering about 800 tags and 2000 resources related to web2.0 and learning technology)
• microformats (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about microformats - currently 20 resources)
• elearning/personalised (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personalised learning - currently 103 resources)
• PLE (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources about personal learning environments - currently 23 resources)
• webtech/MASHUP (my del.icio.us bookmarking of resources illustrating "mash-ups" - currently 26 resources)
• connotea.org/tag/social-bookmarking(introductory materials about social bookmarking, also covering emergent systems effects in tagsonomies)
• REST : Representational State Transfer(wikipedia entry on the web architectural principle 'REST')

I've included - in the extended text for this entry - the text of my contribution to the bid (as of this morning - yet more shortening is threatened :o)

The Work and Learning Partners project is having its startup conference today. KnowNet is a partner in the WLP project, mainly responsible for developing and maintaining web presence and online tools for the partnerships' activities.

We have erected a new site for the project, and included the weblogging for site comments feature in this site from the start. We have high hopes that this will encourage active and productive discussion!

See the KnowNet area in the partners branch of the site for further updates.

A little over a year ago, I proposed some work towards a middleware and services architecture which we provisionally called moomie and knase. This was meant to be part of a collaboration within the e-compete european project, which recently ended, but for various reasons the practical collaboration never really took off.

This was very disappointing, since the proposed work was - I still think - very good, and potentially quite important. It's about time we at least documented the outlines of that proposed work, and that is what this weblog entry is for. I've made a Flickr slideshow from my presentation to the ecompete partners, and also attach a printable pdf version:

In a nutshell, moomie is a proposed layer to broker object-to-object messaging in a lightweight, easy to implement way, and knase is a proposed set of APIs for requesting and delivering services and tools to complement moomie-aware applications. We intended to do initial experiments towards moomie object messaging in FlashCOM technologies, applying lessons learned there to other web-application clientside platforms such as JAVA and browser-based javascript/DOM. A major initial application of moomie was to have been multiple-instance and multiple-view support for simulations. We planned to experiment with two Knase services: an event-aware graphical chat tool and a 'knowledge-snippet' repository.

Neither moomie nor knase was a completely new idea; for instance in the early days of the IMS Project, middleware for multi-user JAVA applets was seriously proposed. What we considered new were the advances in other new technologies, such as the flashCOM server and standards-savvy web browsers, which might provide a way to creating limited middleware support for more interactive elearning activities in an extremely lightweight and incremental manner. Since we made our proposal, service-oriented architectures for elearning have become quite a buzz, and lightweight standards have also started to gain awareness and credibility. Similarly, there has been a growing understanding of the need for more engaging and interactive web-based learning activities. I have a hunch that the moomie / knase proposal would be very timely if we had the time to make it. :o)

The presentation (see links above) explains our motivation, rationale and planned approach in more detail than I can provide in this weblog entry; please refer to it for more information.

I will try to get back to this issue soon, and write a more substantial explanation of the proposal here sometime in July. We've been very busy over the past year working on knotes and other enhancements to Plone; now that we've made some real progress on those fronts I would dearly love to kick off some practical work on the middleware and services we proposed last year.

Technorati Tags: moomie, knase

This is the kind of audio content that could make a podcasting convert out of many here in the UK. The BBC has announced a trail of podcasting. A list of BBC audio feeds has been posted. The programmes will only be available for 7 days after broadcast. The list itself may not please everyone: there are rights issues, apparently, preventing some of the more popular shows from being podcast. An FAQ page is available:

Can the BBC offer the Archers as a download and podcast?

Unfortunately the rights situation is very complex for all radio drama, including the Archers. Therefore we can't offer any radio dramas as downloads and podcasts as part of the current trial.

We've been working towards podcasting in knotes and RSS-2 feeds from knotes. Watch our knotations blog for more news on that front next month.

This is the kind of audio content that could make a podcasting convert out of many here in the UK. The BBC has announced a trail of podcasting. A list of BBC audio feeds has been posted. The programmes will only be available for 7 days after broadcast. The list itself may not please everyone: there are rights issues, apparently, preventing some of the more popular shows from being podcast. An FAQ page is available:

Can the BBC offer the Archers as a download and podcast?

Unfortunately the rights situation is very complex for all radio drama, including the Archers. Therefore we can't offer any radio dramas as downloads and podcasts as part of the current trial.

We've been working towards podcasting in knotes and RSS-2 feeds from knotes. Watch our knotations blog for more news on that front next month.

This is the kind of audio content that could make a podcasting convert out of many here in the UK. The BBC has announced a trail of podcasting. A list of BBC audio feeds has been posted. The programmes will only be available for 7 days after broadcast. The list itself may not please everyone: there are rights issues, apparently, preventing some of the more popular shows from being podcast. An FAQ page is available:

Can the BBC offer the Archers as a download and podcast?

Unfortunately the rights situation is very complex for all radio drama, including the Archers. Therefore we can't offer any radio dramas as downloads and podcasts as part of the current trial.

We've been working towards podcasting in knotes and RSS-2 feeds from knotes. Watch our knotations blog for more news on that front next month.

Somehow this slipped through my net for a year. Which says a lot, since for years and years I followed Scripting News daily (it would have been the first feed I ever consumed, sometime in the last century :o). I guess I stopped listening when we got fed up developing in a proprietary and obsolescent platform and made the arduous move of all our web applications from Frontier to Zope/Plone. Still, this has got to be good news. I just wish it had been made about 4-6 years earlier, when Frontier was world-beating. We might well all have the benefit of a richer, more diverse web by now.

The beginning of a new era?

OK, "new era" may be a bit over the top, but Frontier contains an incredible combination of features, thanks in part to a vibrant community of active contributors for over a decade. UserLand will carry on with their "website and weblog publishing tools". Will a new community form around Frontier's general-purpose scripting environment? (It's starting.) Will the old fogey's come back? (Some have!) Will a new generation discover the power of an integrated, customizable development and runtime environment with persistent storage and ubiquitous outlining? Kudos to Dave Winer and UserLand for the decision.

I am a fan of Dave Winer. I always have been, and I do not care who was in the right in the little skirmish that led to atom, I always will be. It was his imagination, practicality and devotion to simplicity that gave us RSS, web-logging, XML-RPC, remote-posting APIs, etc etc --- all the best service-oriented, distributed, content-free-ing aspects of the web we live in.

But I well remember our own deep frustration with the direction that Userland Frontier went in the late 90's and early 00's. For years Frontier had been a de fact open platform for experimentation in web applications and services. It had not been 'free software', but it had been 'free of charge' and made a lovely plug-in-able platform for evolving conventions and motifs for the two-way web. Then Winer went and decided everyone needed to pay money for it! We were all shocked at the time, but we here persevered and purchased development copies, hoping that the ancient free versions would suffice for others wanting to run our apps and frameworks.

In a way, I think I was waiting and hoping for Dave ( can I call him Dave? ) to change his mind and declare Frontier to be open-source. Of course he would eventually: he had led the way in proposing the simple, small / loose open standards that built weblogging, it was clear that philosophically he was 'open'... Sadly, my own waiting went on too long, and in 2004 KnowNet laboriously ported all its work to Zope and Plone. I suspect something similar happened to a high proportion of former Frontier-based developers.

Well, here we are. We've moved to Zope, Frontier has moved to open-source. Will we ever meet again? Will anybody care enough to really push at the core of Frontier to make it into a modern framework for object-oriented application/service development? I'll tell you one thing: I've subscribed to Scripting News again :o)

I've been meaning to dig into wikisource more closely for a while. Inspired to have a look by seeing this noted in the de.lirio.us: entries RSS feed. Ahhh... the Levellers. For some reason this resonates like DADGAD tuning for me, I guess thanks to the punkfolkistas of the same name, and of course to the sublime World Turned Upside Down (by Leon Rosselson) so powerfully rendered by the great Dick Gaughan.

It seems appropriate. Wikipedia, wikisource and similar efforts are modern examples of mass democratic movements, 'great levellers'. And they work! Amazed and delighted, me...

The Agreement Of The People. The Levellers' Manifesto, printed 30 April 1649

Oh - and it turns out I've been wrong all these years trying to play TWTUD in DADGAD :o) Dick comments on all the tracks in Handful of Earth at footstompin.com, including notes of tuning and capo. His remarks about peaceful revolutions and violent counter-revolution are worth reading as well!

So much has been written in recent years about this period of English history that there's not much I could add here.

The English Civil War, which was in fact simply a Bourgeois Revolution, left many of its early supporters feeling cheated and betrayed.The Diggers were Christian, pacifist and could be described as primitive communists.

The conclusion of the song, in my interpretation, is that, as they were not prepared to defend themselves, they were annihilated. The evidence of history is that revolutions are usually peaceful - but the resulting counter-revolution is usually extremely bloody and ruthless. Anyone who believes that any ruling class will give up power without extreme resistance is living in a different dimension.

The guitar tuning used here was DADDAE with a capo at the 2nd fret

Technorati Tags: political folk music, social software