Ten Reasons Why

Back in my former life as an English prof, I worked with many of the people who edit (or edited) Kairos, a quality peer-reviewed online journal “exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy.” Now they’ve launched Kairosnews, “a news site and online community for discussing [surprise] rhetoric, technology and pedagogy. Sadly, I don’t recognize any of the names associated with Kairos anymore, except Mick Doherty. Been out of the rhetoric biz too long, apparently. [link via SiT]

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The “blog about blogs,” Blogging News (from the same people who put out MicroContent News) is pretty good about pulling together all the daily news references to blogging.
Similarly, Blogroots, from uber-bloggers Meg and Matt seems to be attempting something similar, but not as thorough. (It’s also tied to promoting a book.)

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Dave Winer (CEO of Userland) asks “So this leads me to the next question — does my software ever save anyone’s life?” And concludes “There’s no doubt that weblog software and news aggregators can save lives. . . while it may seem grandiose to think of software as life-saving, it isn’t really a huge stretch.” His rationale? If the FBI, CIA, et al used Userland’s weblogging tools to improve information sharing (which itself is an imaginary result with questionable support), then the software would be “saving lives.” That’s faulty logic of the most absurd sort — might as well attribute the success to Windows because they couldn’t run the Userland software without the OS. Let’s give Gates a medal!!
He’s wrong. It is grandiose and is a huge stretch. Cripes. I mean sorry you’ve been sick, Dave, but having a heart condition doesn’t make you a national hero. I really oughtta stop reading Winer’s blog, but he does frequently come up with good links to excellent resources that sometimes make all the hyperbole and self-promotion bearable. Sometimes.
Thank god for Winerlog, though. Everyone ought to have someone parodying them. :-)

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WebReference provides analysis of AlltheWeb’s claim that their index is bigger than Google’s. So what? Even if AlltheWeb’s claim is true, the size of the index doesn’t matter much without effective search algorithms. I haven’t found that AlltheWeb or Teoma generate results that are more on-target than . They are comparable for most things, but Google still helps me more when I need to get down to the nitty-gritty.
I’m glad that someone is going after Google, though; competition is necessary to keep a good company on their toes.

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The previous post made me remember that 15 years or so ago, when I was briefly studying linguistics, I got all jazzed about the very Tolkienish idea of making up a language. Never did it though. But wouldn’t you know it — a lot of other people have. Plus, there’s software for generating languages (not web-based, unfortunately). Pair that with the Alphabet Synthesis Machine — and, hell, with the Hero Machine! — and you’re ready to create a super-hero from the planet Ojibalos and his spooky alien language and alphabet. kaa xeadhjei krhtiur mu-repu! (Word making is fun!)

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The The Alphabet Synthesis Machine (Introduction) takes an initial glyph that you provide and evolves a graphically coherent set of symbols around that glyph. You control lots of parameters of the evolution (weight, line, segments, crossover, etc). The result — “the possible writing system of your own imaginary civilization.” Best of all — you can save your imaginary alphabet as a TrueType font. Use it in all your business correspondence! [link via xBlog]

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Okay, I’m a geek. It’s official. The Hero Machine takes me back to those 11-year old winter afternoons when I would spend an entire day making up super-heroes, super-villians, and complex histories for them.
Crap. I wish I’d grown up to be a comic-book writer.

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homoLudens ponders, “[I]t’s about what CMS shore you first land on. Problem is that so many are getting shipwrecked on high-priced, user-infantilizing Microsoft / Blackboard / webCT coastlines. I still don’t get why there’s no major educational foundation funding development of open source (or cheap source, a la Manila or p-Machine or whatever) for schools. [link via SiT]
Pat makes the erroneous “CMS leap” — while Manila is a content management system (CMS), Blackboard and WebCT are course management systems (also, confusingly, CMS) …. which by the way are not the same thing as an LMS (learning management system) or LCMS (learning content management system). Too many acronyms in the industry. Course management includes content management, but vice versa is not true.
In any event, there is one obvious shining example to PatD’s question about open source alternatives: MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative. But the obvious example (or, more appropriately, exception) of MIT aside, the reasons educational institutions don’t take on open source development of CMS’s are fairly simple and straightforward. (Caveat: I work for Blackboard, one of PatD’s examples, so while these comments are my own personal ideas and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s position, they may be biased. Salt to taste.)

1. As online teaching and learning becomes more important to the mission of educational institutions, the insitutions want scabable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class software. When you have potentially tens of thousands of users (or more, in some cases) relying on a mission-critical system, it doesn’t make sense to rely on v0.94b of Joe’s Online Course System that you pulled off SourceForge last night just because it’s open source. (Note: before you get your or Richard Stallman’s knickers in a twist, this statement isn’t meant to imply that open source software can’t be scabable, secure, cross-platform, usable, or enterprise-class. Just that there aren’t any open source course management systems (yet) that meet those criteria.)

2. Scalable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class course management systems are notoriously resource-intensive to develop. This ain’t a three-man job. It either takes an organization with existing knowledge and resources of an MIT or a big, honking chunk of cash to pay for those resources. (Note: again, before your free software panties start bunching, this is not meant to imply that the open source approach can’t generate scalable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class software because of resource constraints. E.g. witness Apache. However, let’s not forget that the resources that go into open source projects are not free-as-in-free-beer — they are donated, either out of someone’s personal time or out of an employee’s time — so there is a cost associated. That’s important to the next point.)
3. Educators are interested in course management systems; open source developers, in general, are not. I believe the massive failure of open source software to compete effectively in user-facing markets is due to lack interest from open source developers, not lack of skills. “User-facing markets” are those markets where the user of product is a typical consumer, e.g GUI operating system interfaces, office suites, browsers, and, yes, course management systems. Most open source software depends on developers wanting to “scratch their own itch” — e.g. they have to be self-motivated, because no one pays them to do it (because no one has found an effective way to make revenue off open source yet!). E.g. see Kottke’s comments regarding Mozilla, the open-source progenitor of Netscape 6.
   This is what Clay Shirky has called the “interest horizon.” (Yours truly also ranted about this.) Commercial software projects have a “resource horizon” — a time or money limit by which the development is no longer economically feasible for the company. Open source software has an “interest horizon” — since it’s frequently volunteer work, the development is limited by the developers’ interest in the project. Put simply: if it bores them, they’re not going to code it. That’s why we have great open source operating systems, compilers, databases, etc — those tools interest the geek set who programs them. Spreadsheets and virtual classrooms don’t.

The exception to this is organizations like MIT, where there are both enough resources and interest to fund and drive the development of an open source initiative that would never emerge organically on its own.
So to summarize: there are no scalable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class course management systems because it’s (1)complex, (2)expensive, (3)not of interest to the vast majority of unpaid open source developers. :-/

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After the many, many articles about blogging, Meg Hourihan of Megnut finally gets one published that makes sense:

“If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share — the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.”

Now if only the other people writing about blogs will read Meg’s article first. [link via Blogroots]

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I wish I came up with things like this. More importantly, I wish I actually did things like this. [link via Listen Missy]

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