Tek4L

I had a first look at Sun’s project wonderland last week. It is nothing staggering at first look to anyone that has been playing in Second Life, but it has some nice features like the immersive 3D audio, and the ability to hang applications like web browsers and open office docs on the wall and share them with other users. There is also the ability to bring in the real world via audio and video conferencing.

Hopefully we can get our own wonderland server up and running in the next few weeks so we can do some more detailed investigation of its potential in the educational space.

The only drawback at the moment is a lack of Mac support due to the client requiring Java 1.6, and this currently isn’t available for Mac  - but hopefully will be soon.

New buzzword for the week - Glocalization

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/09/05/why_web20_matte.html

A project that you may be worth following
http://www.flock.com/home/
It is apparently a mozilla based 'social browser' designed to make
local editing of blog posts with drag and drop, etc. possible and also
collecting of tags and other 'social software' type functions possible. A pity it is not open source!

The latest version of ELG is looking good. They have a very similar view to the Interact Development team as to where online learning platforms should be heading. The days of the 'LMS' are over.

Off to an Ettiene Wenger workshop today - I'm hoping there will be some good material for transferning into tools for developing and sustaining online communities of practice …

Worth a look
http://apcala.com/
Looking at "how to use social software to assist learning in higher education." from http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000997034419/

Another couple of articles on social interface design, and application design with group behaviour in mind.
http://shirky.com/writings/group_user.html
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Very interested in persuing these concepts in relation to Learning Community Environment design.

Best two articles read this year

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html

I particularly agree with his point that getting the 'social interface' right is more important than the 'user interface'

Just been modifying Interact to include a blog function for the navcon2k4 conference.  Will hopefully integrate it into the main release over the next couple of weeks.

An interesting report on Online Communities in business

http://www.sageway.com/ocibreport.pdf