Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

The fun, yet overwhelming and time consuming, aspect of my R&D gig for Ocotillo is all of the options available to play with Blogs, Social Bookmarking, RSS aggregators, and other “gluing” tools. However, as happens with any type of research, we do take into account our context and resources…ie, what we have access to. For example, I would really like to play a little more with open source course/content management systems; however, that also requires a heavy level of planning with my CTL technology folks. Not impossible, just planning that I’m not organized or motivated enough to do, as of yet! But with the numerous “free” interactive programs available on the net, I’m at least good to go for this semester.

Since I have already been playing with blogs for a year, I felt very comfortable running all of my different courses with a different blogging program. Since pretty much all blogs have RSS feeds (kinda the basis of their technology), I was pretty much open to playing with anything. However, I did get requests from my CTL this time. They first asked if I would test run the blogging option available in the newer version of WebCT; however, they were not able to make that upgrade in time for the fall semester. Guess what I’ll be playing with next spring? But they were willing to install some instances of WordPress for one of my classes. I used Uniblogs last spring and summer, and Uniblogs switched, or glitched, their servers in the summer…which was not pleasant during five week courses! However, I had liked WordPress (what Uniblogs used)…so we’re trying it at school. I decided to also to test run Live Journal, an older blogging program, as well as Blogger. Although I like Bloglines because of the built in RSS aggregator, the blog does not allow replies (or at least the last time I looked it didn’t).

Now my social bookmarking choices were a little more bias and contextual driven. I am very biased towards Furl because it has such a robust annotating options, including the fact it actually saves the page. However, Del.icio.us is the more “popular” (as in more widely recognized and adopted) and I think it does a better job of the “social” aspect…networking topics, entries, individuals, etc. My final option? Of course you would think I would do a little research and see what is the buzz and what is currently being applauded as a “good” bookmarking service. But NOOOO…instead, my choice is based on the fact that Ma.gnolia is one of the bookmarking services that already has a flake option in Pageflakes. Since I wanted students to use Pageflakes, I made sure they say “familiar” names (Pageflakes also had Del.icio.us and Furl options).

And all of this to say (basically I need to wrap this blog entry)…context matters! People need to recognize a variety of things influence the adoption of technologies (or textbooks, or…). And I think that is ok, we just need to be aware of what is influencing us.