learnandteachonline.com

I captured something that made me giggle when I checked Facebook this morning. It illustrates how college high school and college students are using Facebook just for fun.

Related links:

- RIP Bakers Square FB group

- My post from last year about the uses by FB's original audience doesn't mesh so well with business use and getting things accomplished

My OPML blog has been down since sometime yesterday.

I'll post here if there's something I have to say. I think I feel something bubbling up. It's political.

I'm making a fresh post to nominate another work-narrating blogger. Maybe I should be doing this in Del.icio.us or Technorati like the others, because I don't see any tagged blog posts showing up yet in Udell's Yahoo Pipes combined feed. I guess we'll see.

Anyway my friend Hillary Talbot is a puppet and prop maker, illustrator, set designer in Canberra, Australia. Here is her Spirits Dancing blog. [Feed]

An example of a "this is how I do it" post, this one about her preference for sculpting first as a prelude to making a pattern. She illustrates each step in a Flickr set.

I'll say what I always say when I comment on Hil's work. She's the queen of whimsy.

Jon Udell is collecting feeds from blogs that narrate work in a variety of walks of life.

Here's one: Parking in Bitterman Circle, Aron Michalski's blog. [Feed] He's a roadie for some big rock artists.

If you want to contribute to the listing, tag a post or bookmark with "professionalblog."

Howard Owens talks (among other things) about the value of trying small seat-of-the-pants ideas that can move a media property forward. Yes.

Insistence on applying metrics stops these little efforts, Owen says. I think there's also a print mindset that likes things always finished, which is antithetical to the mind of the online tinkerer, who perpetually works in draft, and likes it that way.

Print editor: Is it done?

Online editor: No, it's never done. Isn't that great?

Print editor: I hate that part. How can you stand it?

Online editor: Well, the downsides are balanced by all kinds of joys. The least of them: can you snatch back your magazine out of the reader's inbox?

Concreteness and product and sure bets versus flux and process and experimentation.

New Nokia 810 has a full qwerty keyboard. Yup, that might finally move me to consider some kind of teeny computer. I wouldn't go for anything with a smaller screen because I'd want to read ebooks on it.

"Learning 2.0" is the 2nd highest-ranked Technorati search this morning. Huh!

Have you been following the blogosphere conversation about Techmeme, its new leaderboard, piling on, and groupthink?

Seems like everybody who's complaining also visits regularly. Me too, but I do agree it incents bloggers to behave like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

Maybe that's the trouble with relying on algorithms. They can seek out items like other items, but math has a harder time detecting something original and new (while also being important or consequential). You need human judgment for that, just like you need people to intervene in the social problem of juvenile and rude behavior in comments, even though the techies keep saying identity systems are the answer.

Human brains and machine brains dividing the labor in a smart way. Calacanis isn't all wrong when it comes to that part.

The Chronicle of Higher Education held a chat about the University of New Orleans presence in Second life and published the transcript.

"Our hope is to attract students who are taking Internet courses, but miss the 'presence' and the sense of community found in a regular classroom," said Merrill L. Johnson, a university administrator.

I've attended lectures in Second Life, but it's always struck me as a waste of the benefits to sit around and listen and watch. I think the real promise for training in Second Life-type environments is to teach activities requiring physical activity and interacting with objects. OSHA requires training in lockout/tagout procedures, for example. It's a system for shutting down machinery and notifying others to prevent accidents. Training is often accomplished with video, but that's passive. Think how much more effective it would be to get virtually hands-on and watch the effect of not following the procedure.

I suppose there's not much interest among web developers to build things for a blue-collar crowd.