Blogging from Flock

So I kind of got away from using Flock's embedded blogging tool. The reason is that it used to create some crazy code and Blogger would freak out on my when I tried to edit the post. This is important to me because I almost always have to go back and edit the post.


So I am going to use this post to try again.

Why do I use Flock you might ask? 

Well I use it because they are working head to make changes and try an improve it's usefulness.  That might scare some away, but I like to see what they have done, how the changed to interface, and what new features they have added.

UPDATE: It worked!

Blogged with Flock

Learning Management from the Browser

Brent's post gLMS is coming - Google Gears discusses how learning can happen in the browser without a traditional LMS. His question about midway through is "Well, geez, why not just build that capability right into the browser?"

I think this is an interesting question. I really felt this way in late 2005 when I first started using Flock. Having a lot of the tools (blogging, Flickr, del.icio.us, feed aggregator) necessary for engagement in one place to consume, produce, and engage in content was really powerful. I still use flock because of this connection. I spent a lot of time considering this model. Incorporating attention XML and other services like Google Gears there is some compelling evidence that a browser-based learning system could work great.

But really, isn't this further extension of out conversation before?

ContentTracking by the LMS
The New LMS
LMS Feedback

A couple of Issues with this model

I agree with Brent the push of Google Gears will help make this new learning system more of a reality and the editable content like wikis will play a major role. I wonder where and how editable courses or learning objects will play a role?

It would seem that this is also part of the PLE conversation that I haven't had time to jump into.

There also seems to be an issue with how learning content is organized within a browser-based learning system (where the browser is the LMS) I still find it difficult to cross reference content topics or memes across services that are built into my browser. For example a blog post that I have written about podcasting with a podcast academy podcast on the same topic. The best approach seems to be to tag everything, but it still requires a lot of work and there is no real search mechanism. Google desktop needs to allow me to tell it what web-based services I use and then link the search across all those services. I realize Flock kind of does this with local search but then it looses anything on local computer, because it is using browser history.

This kind of integration makes some folks scared of giving a single entity that kind of insight to your life. Could it be an open source search engine that links to every service you use? Of course with no business model, we will have to wait for a really intelligent programmer to have the itch to solve the problem and share it with the rest of us.

technorati tags:lms, elearning

Bloggin from Flock

I am trying to blog from the new Flock: http://www.flock.com/release-notes/0.7.13.1/

I hope that it works better then in the past. I have had a lot of trouble with the HTML code within the post. I guess we will find out.

technorati tags:Flock

Blogged with Flock