nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

So, to me it all seemed like a craze just 2 years ago, something I thought would fade with time, cause lets face it, who has time to constantly be updating their blogs/tumblogs/tweets/dents/miniblogs, or any other number of the new creed of content names. Well... it seems like just about everyone has at least something to say, which just goes to show the luck of human psyche the twitter folks were able to lock on to (or was it really a caclucated psychological trait?)

Either way 2.0 is here to stay, and you might as well jump on board if you haven't already. So... which ones do you actually get on board with.... cause there is a serious social networking bubble right now... with grwoth rates approaching those of the earlier more general dot com bubble.

Well, I for one would start off with at least a blog... if u dont want u're own site... there are plenty of choices that alllow for pretty nifty changes to layout, look, and feel, and even content. OF course, if you want to have it all, u probably want to be running your own site on your own server... say something like Habari.... (shameless plug), but there is also wordpress which htough does force some advertising on you, its a great choice for the starting blogger... and then there is of course blogger itself, and probably hundreds more, all free and mostly surviving through advertising on thier pages

Now of course thats not elegant, but running your own show might be more elegant, but it certaiinly doesn't mean you'll be making any money from iit. Even if yoiu're an SEM whizz (don't worry if u dont know what the term means.... its just a fanct word for internet marketeter) chances are, the reason for running a blog are passion, and scratching your own itch. The latter is more like a journal. My site started off in this fashion. Rather than having to re-do everything whehever there was a new distro in town or a good reason for upgrading your server. This also lead to people becoming more active in the wikis (especially the Ubuntu and openSUSE ones) which arguably are web 2.0 technology too.

So... if I had my own site, and had chosen between the miriad of open source blogging software, these are the additions I would certainly at least consider attaching (at this point its more like playing with puzzle pieces, where eventually you come out with something beautiful to look at, but that fiuts in all the right places too..

1. Twitter and Identi.ca
- Say what you will, but these 2 are really the beating hearts of the web 2.0 revolution. They hurtle information across social networks at alarming speeds, and though identi.ca is much purer in concept and licensing (its pure open source), twitter, somehow seems to have something that non of the other competitors has,,, its growthg and folllowing are truly phenomenal. I mean, is it really just because they were the first kids on the bkock? Anyway, if it was my site, I'd use both social networks, one as a more general talk about everything kind of place, and the other for more specific group and event based information. I would use twitter for the first, and identi.ca for the second.
There are those that would group ident.ica and twitter to get the same message to more peopel, but I'm a strong belieever that those running identi.ca are also probably running twitter.too unless they're real purists and refuse to run anything that isn't GNU. And there are more of those people than you would imagine at first. But just cause you run twitter, doesn't mean you knoiw identi.ca even exists.... there is the slight irony in this entire debate. But... since you are reading this article, you know they both exist, and server different or the same purpose depending on the purity of the reader. I'll leave up to the readers to guess where I stand :-)

2. Facebook and MySpace
- For the longest time I tried with all my might to avoid both of these, and myspace, at least has not won me over :-) With a slight sigh of disbelief, I fear facebook is actuallly more useful than I once admitted. I still thing its a time waster, but if used correctly if can be a a great tool. But its one of these tools that almost has all the charactersrtics of digital porn/virtual procrastination. I find it difficiult to put words to it.... its like a drug you don't really need, but you think you need, and it makes you feel good cause you have the illusion of being connected. But you see, this is where the entire Matrix symbolism can come iinto play,. Which pill do you take? The one that violently rips you out of the virtual bliss of having 500+ friends with hundreds of updates and thousands of comments, links to applications 50% of which you dont use or even know what their use is.
Myspace came first, and seems to still be a place for musicians to be able to self publish, which I think is a wonderful idea in principle... but perhaps a little ahead of its time, and with the requirement of some serious competition (I suppose this is coming now slowly), but eithewr way... its hard to escape these 2 tools, no matter the personal feelings you might have for them.

3. Deliciious and Digg
- Delicious is a bookmarking service that allows you to create bookmarks that can then be shared with other users or sites, and depending on how one uses it. it can be a great way to generate an interactive links page that will be both useful to you and to others. Similarly, Digg is a way to generate publicity or give rank to existing links/blogs/or general web pages. Though I tend to use digg less than I could, its all a question of time, and right now, I would invest in generating a nice delicisious list which you can then post/share on your blog or website

4. Tweetdeck and Yoono
- These 2 applications are ways of multitasking or compartamentalising the set of web 2.0 faciliities you choose to use. Both have the ability to show a kind of control panel that lets you have an overview of all your web 2.0 applications at work. For example, I use Yoono as a sidebar for my firefox app, that shows me whats going on with twitter, facebook, flickr, gtalk, linkedin, msn, and aim. It would be practically impossible to keep track of so many applications while having the ability to post to one or all of them at the same time. I started of using tweetdeck, which I thought was wonderful, but it has its limitations. For example, it requires adobe air to run, and is not quite as cross platform and robust as yoono, which can be run as a standalone app, or as a side bar to explorer or firefox. I've been using yoono only a short while, but I wouldnt know how to cope without it anymore.

Its quite impressive how quickly dependent we can become to these new social networking apps, be it twitter or linkedin, or more playful ones like facebook and freindfeed. Where once I tried to keep my distance, I now find myself quite immersed in these appsl using them on a daily basis, and wondering what the net was like without them. A more lonely place for sure, but I now believe these web 2.0 apps actually have great financial and business potential. Something that businesses are finding out quickly.

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So I was pondering these 2 little pieces of relatively similar technologies, wondering if there migh be much use for them in collaborative classrooms of tomorrow. It came to me that since tweeting or denting doesn't just need to be focused on the use of text, there could be countless possibilities. All of them involving human interaction, some even being easy open solutions that would otherwise be expensive and even computationally difficult.

Take the class that is studying Spanish, for example, and they want to know how certain words or sentences sound in different Spanish accents. Well, a twitter group that was linked either countrywide or even globally could then tweet the sentence in his/her accent (expaining where they are from somehow, geo location, tagging or whatever), and then a couple seconds - minutes later a reply via twitaccent.com with a reply from someone somewhere else. Such a simple application, with the advent of wonderful collaborative backbones like mesh networking and scalable solutions like ejabberd would allow for little activities to be made. I could imagine an activtiy like this one being quite the hit on Sugar.

Since I gave an example on how to do audio based twitter examples, how about a picture based one. A Biology class goes out with their laptops or mobile phones or cameras. They are told to take pictures of any edible plants they might find in their surroundings, not forgetting to tag their pictures with the area, altitude, near water or not, and other such items. At the end of the class they compile their data and the kids enter their edu-twitter accounts, or twitter-wiki accounts and this data is then uploaded to groups, where people can use that data or compare to that data in the future. Others can even grade the quality of tha data, or if its a professional botanist, tell them their right or wrong and why.

The strength of both twitter and much more so identi.ca is that they allow following and followers, so groupings of people interested in similar material. It would just take the participation of schools together to implement such little experiments to get great results. Identi.ca's grouping abilities as well as its open source platform base obviously make this the ideal choice. And anyone can go out right now, set up a laconica server and implement an idea like the 2 I've just mentioned in a couple of days, make it a web based app, but it would be much nicer to imagine such particular apps on the XOs and on Sugar in particular.

The last kind of activity I thought about was really a video based one, but then it starts to become far to similar to youtube videos and its ilk. Still, the idea that one could localise video streams that are very small (ie, perfect for sending to blogs, mobile phones etc.) and group them according to followers and following might work for ideas like multi-day events, parties, etc.

So to end with, how about a pic based identi.ca/twitter app that shows sugar deployments/OLPC in action around the world? Wouldn't that be quite simple to get updated. Someone at a particular deployment, even a student, takes pictures of the equipment, the staff, the students, teachers, etc, and groups them by tagging. Just tweets the pic with the tags and it goes into is appropriate groupings, which then everyone can look at. We could get an idea of what is going on in deployments around the world very easily this way in a matter of days (with a little coordination of course...)

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