Tek4L

Just playing with a developer download of Flock - a tagging/blogging tool devloped using Firefox.

Typing this entry up in Flock and hopefully submitting it via the xmlrpc interface into plog.

Just been implementing a simple tagging function similar to http://del.icio.us within an elearning platform and am excited about the potential for this to help open up the large amounts of content traditionally locked away into restricted course sites to wider groups of users. Having spent some time in the past constructing systems to allow the construction of centrally controlled category hierarchies for the storage and retrieval of learning materials, and never being happy with this approach, I will be interested to see how lecturers/students find the more devolved, less structured approach of 'tagging'. My guess is that the students will take to it more than the lecturers

.. study shows that students' most powerful learning experiences for most occured outside of the classroom. The most common theme
across the 200+ experiences was a sense of relationship, of making a
meaningful connection to another person or group. http://ncepr.org/ncepr/drupal/node/20

Perhaps this supports the view of many that social software applications have more to offer elearning than existing LMSs which just duplicate traditional classroom structures.

Feedbooks - great concept, and would be relatively easy to implement.

Great discussion over at slashdot about the recent gobbling up of webct by blackboard. Struggled to find anyone saying, boohoo, I hope this doesn't spell the end of our beloved webct