Deirdre, could you compare experiences with the wiki, and with threaded discussions like Ning in more detail? I think I remember viewing your Ning for educators, or was that Nellie Deutsch's?
BTW there are new free wiki sites that have widgets. See link in my Introduction message.
David Millar
Posts made by David Millar
Dear Frank: Loved your protopage. Goodlooking combo of desktop and bookmarks. I have been using Delicious http://del.icio.us/fdmillar for some of the same purposes because I have so many categories (tags), they keep changing, and I need to share them with others on my research team. By the way, Delicious tags can be shown in a tagcloud as on my blog Towards a Moral Economy lower right. Used a Delicious widget to insert the code. Google Pages could be used to create a desktop if one had less info to show than you do. On the other hand, one could just pirate your sourcecode and change the text. If one were a whiz at HTML, that is. ;-)
After reading others' intros I feel less like a fake. I'm no longer teaching, retired therefore no P to D. Didn't really get the "viral" topic title, yes i know it's not a disease but it redoles of unethical marketeering. Now that I (mis)understand it as how can we develop the human side of online social networking I'm happy to join in. Some personal notes:
- with others, I'm trying to develop an multifaith environmental discussion / exchange / action worldwide, using (among other things) a blog Towards a Moral Economy
- ditto with youths, using Facebook and TakingITGlobal groups, may use other social sites too
- just created a wiki Building a Culture of Peace for Canadian Quakers
- creating online groups in French with Forum Ouvert, Vents Croisés, Edupax, often translating in both directions E-F and F-E
- more details in my homepage if you want them
The irony is that I firmly believe that the human being (in person, F2F) is the most effective medium of all. And that everything else is an add-on, extension, emanation, simulacrum, crutch, or whatever. Yet in teaching when more than half the students are tossing burgers to pay their debts, and when most of my environmental contacts are 2 to 17 time zones away, I am forced to the conclusion that asynch communication is better than none.
I see some old friends here, as well as some new ones -- or are you avatars?
Attached is the spreadsheet. You may want to add another column for the question about interaction, why some accept & others reject.
There is some useful discussion of why people accept or reject in http://onlineinstruction.ning.com/forum