eChalk2.0 - another walled garden?

[Paul Reid]

Thanks Mike, Russel and others for kicking eChalk2.0 off.

But okay - so call me a party pooper if you like, but I like to keep my critical thinking hat on when we venture into the unknown. There are questions that need to be asked.

I have joined in other Nings and found Classroom2.0 the most engaging and varied in it's user community. However, what irritated me most is that the dialogue, as good as it was, remained removed/protected from Google webbots etc and thus did not merge hypertextually with the wider discussion on the web. Policy makers were not aware these conversations were/are going on to a large extent. This in effect creates a walled garden that rest of world is barred from smelling it's roses so to speak.

The other issue is that the Google ads in the sidebar make money for Ning and the owners of the IP do not benefit financially while Ning the company .

Is there a way that the discussions that go on within this Ning could be opened up to the world at large. The reason I set up Digital Chalkie was to pull some of the excellent conversations out of the walled garden of the eChalk email list and into the wider edublogosphere - while we have had some dialogue with Edubloggers worldwide it has mostly been a failed exercise due to the infrequency of postings and lack of understanding of what it as an open group blog will do for the writer. However the topics of those conversations do appear high in ICT in education related search results.

It is in this hypertextually that I believe the semantic web works best and not behind walled gardens. "We need to learn to contribute and disagree in safety." - Jimmy Wales

Whilst Ning has some interesting features I also believe an EdNA group with the new me.edu.au functions offer similar and is linked to accounts Aussie teachers already have - no ads - all the functionality of Moodle etc.

I sound like one of the grumpy old conservatives I frequently bump into in this field - but must say I truly am excited by this move by so many eChalkies.

Worth checking out is "The Macnine is Us/ing us" puts forward this view more - unless we are in hypertext we are not in context.

So I guess my question is - is there a way of making the conversations open to the web and if so do we want to engage with the wider dialogue via this venue? How will this add value to what we already do on eChalk?

Have fun :-)
Paul

[Jean Anning]

Hi Paul… and others

I am still very pleased to see this ning – it’s not perfect but I believe that it is a step in the right direction. I can put up with the Google ads if this ning provides some users the chance to explore a more interactive networked experience. Who knows where that may lead!

I too would prefer to use the EdNA me.edu.au … but as a wise man once said to me – work with the living ;)

[Russel Montgomery]

Paul

You raise some great questions.

1. The adds stuff. Can't we just pay some money and turn that around so that it starts making money for us?

2. The walled garden, lack of hypertextuality thing. Hmm a bit tougher. Even though this is a public Ning, its not open to the search engine bots, right? Can we fix that? Can we tweak a bit of code to let the bots in?

Or... maybe we just see this as a launching pad.... eg. This could be a safe place to get people beyond the email mentality and then get people writing on a echalk group blog... like the the classroom2.0 blog http://blog.classroom20.com/

Just some thoughts. Anyone else?

Russel

[Penny Coutas]

me.edu.au needs to make it possible to embed stuff on the "whiteboard" so it's not a "writeboard" though :( i still get frustrated by it... but that may be because i had high expectations and it doesnt quite meet them.

[John Travers]

Several people have mentioned me.edu as a possible discussion and sharing site. For those not familiar with me.edu, here is a link to a little movie I made about some of its features: http://screencast.com/t/r002cQvAB I work on me.edu so am not exactly dispassionate. It is quite modest in functionality so far, and will be adding some writing capacity for members by early April, which will be a significant upgrade.

I wrote a blog about the dilemma for me in social networking: how much is just right? Too few functions is limiting, too many is overwhelming. The Goldilocks Effect

[Paul Reid]

Thanks for responding to the questions I posited regarding the eChalk Ning being another walled garden.

I have waited to see how things went here before I replied. The conversations going on around here speak for themselves - they are great. I have been keeping the Ning open in a FireFox tab and enjoying reading the open discussions and personal conversations between us.

So in this way we are engaging with the kinds of tools our students are using and what better PD can we have than learning here by doing.

I would still love us to try an EdNA group as part of an ECAWA conference. All eChalkians already have logins. I oversaw an EdNA Group for over 150 teachers last year and we had some terrific live chat sessions, wiki shared knowledge building and journal keeping. EdNA Groups allow us to embed basically any web object. VoiceThreads as Jean has ably demonstrated and also to pull on RSS feeds. RSS mash-ups are immensely empowering for group knowledge sharing. For example: anyone who used the social tag SLICT would have their 10 second mini-metadata input contribute to the whole group knowledge by having the RSS feed for that tag appear in the sidebar.

As Penny points out me.edu.au does not embedding however groups do. I see me.edu.au as a EdNA's Twitter of sorts.

As Russel, and Mike other have stated this Ning is launching pad be it a walled garden or not.

Have fun :-)
Paul