Life Long Learning

Week one tasks for the EVO Openwebpublishing session involve opening accounts on: WordPress, Bloglines, Flickr, 43Places, 43Things and 43People , Community Walk and Suprglu.I already have some experience with “playing around with some of these accounts on four. The ones I had heard about but never looked are the 43 ones – an interesting phenomena but not really my “thing” as they say. I can’t quite understand why I would need to make my goals or private holiday photos public but even if I did I can really not contemplate why anyone else would be interested in reading or looking at them! I am aware that many think otherwise (my teenage children for a start). Anyway, I have spent a bit of time clicking and reflecting and here are my 43 thoughts on what I have noticed about the various platforms, what they have in common and how they differ.They all offer a FREE web presence and space for the user to upload text, images, sound, links, RSS feeds. They are based on the concept of interconnectedness in that you can import/export to and from them and between them. The content is user-generated and personal but these are SOCIAL tools in that each user can connect to others. The success of these platforms I feel depends firstly, on the recent technological developments. For example, the RSS revolution has brought about a complete change in how we can and how we do interact with /on the Net. Secondly, that they create new communities from people who want to find good walking paths in their area to scholars who are researching new ICT outcomes. Thirdly, the concept of TAGS and categorizing is an essential element throughout for systematically classifying uploaded content or web feeds and links and leads to advance SEARCH options. These tools allow us to contribute to the web, share and access web content without any HTML knowledge. I perceive open and participatory environments as being very USER-FRIENDLY, very PRACTICAL and very DYNAMIC. They encourage an ACTIVE and COLLABORATIVE web experience and create ORDER where there was previously CHAOS. You can aggregate all your favourite sources of information together and peruse them on one page. You can manage who you invite to comment or view your pages so there is PROTECTION (useful for blog comments or deciding who gets to see those holiday snaps!)There are a lot of other rich features that these platforms offer. Not all offer the same ones. Most have multi-lingual versions.  Bloglines is both a BLOG and a FEED AGGREGATOR hence a Blogaggregator. WordPress is BLOG with blogroll features but not a fully functional feed aggregator. It has many widgets that can be dragged into the side bar to connect to photos on your Flickr account or Saved links on your del.icio.us pages. SuprGlu gathers content from a number of these platforms and brings it together, simply. I found it very slow to load. No technical issues with any of the others. They all allow a certain amount of personalisation. Bloglines is really rather basic in “look” but logical. The 43 suite has extra characteristic like “cheers” which are a way to support other users by giving cheers (you have a handful of cheers you can use everyday) and you can obviously get cheers too (this relates back to the point I made in my opening paragraph – who has time for this kind of stuff? I can see it being useful for learners because the activity would be similar to ranking and comparing and admiring other learners but I don’t think most professionals have time for this type of support. I think blog commenting is more supportive lets say for webheads or teacher trainees. The common feature is definitely TAGS and TAGGING.