Frances Bell’s Blog

I am currently at AMCIS 2008 in Toronto, and meeting lots of new people. I attended a Microsoft Popfly masup workshop and had limited success because I couldn’t get myself a Live-id password (some wireless problem in Sheraton hotel).
Once I did, I found it very easy to create a little mashup. Popfly has a visual interface that lets you connect and configure ready made blocks, then adapt them if you are feeling adventurous. Mark Frydenberg (@checkmark on twitter) from Bentley College not only gave the workshop but has also provided lots of lovely teaching resources at http://www.popflywiki.com/teachingpopfly.ashx - thanks Mark.

Here is my easy-peasy 3 block first attempt - choose your search term and click Show Images!

I had problems editing this blog post in Firefox once I had inserted the script reference, but the mashup does seem to work in Firefox.

AT the popfly site, there is also support for creation of games - probably worth a look!

Jack Schofield asks the question “Which women bloggers are worth a look?”

with regard to the current Blogher conference in San Francisco. He uses the term ‘influential’ that is an interesting one - Does it mean most significant influence? in terms of quality or quantity?

Blogher demonstrates that there are plenty of women bloggers, most of whom couldn’t care less about whether or not they are deemed to be influential in terms of an award. They probably do care about their audience (whatever its size) however.

Here are a few women bloggers who have influenced me (and reinforced their paid work along the way):

1. Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne http://www.masondixonknitting.com/ who met on knitting forums, got together via blogs, have a blog and a funny/useful book on knitting (new one out soon) and a large and faithful following. If you don’t believe me google or search flickr.com for Mason-Dixon. You are in for a visual treat and an object lesson in media convergence - not to mention some inspiring images of colourful and functional dishcloths.
2. Josie Fraser http://fraser.typepad.com/socialtech/ who blogs about digital literacy, digizens and other important issues for young people and those who care about them.
3. danah boyd http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ whose blog ranges around her current interests – recently health, politics, but mainly the use of social networking by youth (her PhD topic).
4. Kath Sierra http://headrush.typepad.com/ whose immensely popular and influential blog ceased as of 7 April 2007, as a result of nasty personal attacks.

On a personal note, what I find encouraging is that women are being effective in using emerging technologies to organize themselves, communicate and even make a little money (cf mommyblogs, ebay and etsy.com). However, women’s voice in public discourse is open to question – an issue that cannot rely on technology alone. People ….. society ……. history …..

I am responding to Cris’s picture meme in Evolve, as she challenges us to share a picture that represents our views/experiences on social software in schools and institutions!
My picture is of a broken down wall between the tended part of my garden and the wild part. This wall roughly delineates where we stop weeding. You can see the cow parsley growing beyond the wall, and a fern that is not quite sure if it is a weed, growing on the boundary.

But of course, nothing is quite as simple as it seems. Even if the wall were not broken down, it is easy for seeds to blow across between the wild and the tended parts. As I am quite a lazy gardener, there are often weeds in the tended part. Three years ago we converted a pond in the wild part into a bog garden and so now we have a little oasis of order in the wild. The wall within my garden is broken down but I do have walls and fences around the property boundary.

I can hear you asking what this has to do with social software in schools and institutions. Depending on the breadth of your definition of social software, I think that a similarly complex situation is revealed when we look at social software inside and outside the institutional wall. What makes for complexity is the wonderfully resourceful behaviour of learners and teachers. They can use the order of organised groups like virtual learning environments (VLEs) to exchange contact details with their friends to meet up in the wild, creating areas of order and purpose as well as unruly spaces. Even the most unadventurous VLEs allow links to the web (in content areas or forum posts). Learners are inventive and adopt the channel and locus of communication most suited to their purposes, not just the one(s) we offer them.

Good teachers inspire their students to learn away from the classroom as well as in it – thinking is the first mobile technology – the question is how do institutions learn about what is appropriate support for learners and teachers using social software. As danah boyd said, walls are not always a bad thing, http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/02/05/about_those_wal.html

I’ll just leave you with a link to one of my favourite walled gardens. It is a new modern design within an old walled garden, and it contains a viewing hill , where you everything in the garden, and quite a lot beyond it, http://www.scampston.co.uk/metadot/index.pl?id=2484;isa=Category;op=show

I noticed that sales of Spam have increased http://www.dailyyonder.com/spam-sales-soar-shoppers-look-cut-costs and the reason given is that consumers may be ‘trading down’ to Spam.

I have an alternative hypothesis - Gmail is inadvertently (I assume!!!) marketing Spam. One of my little tasks when I visit my Gmail account is to visit my Spam folder and clear it. I have noticed that whenever I do this I get Gmail (context-sensitive) adverts for Spam (the food) whilst I am deleting Spam (the devil’s spawn ruination of the Internet). So my hypothesis is that Google in particular and the Internet in general are raising the profile of Spam by linking to delicious little recipes for Spam, the luncheon meat product.

So when I am deleting the Spam in my Gmail account, I get links to Spam recipes.

Could this be linked to the increase in Spam sales?  All those Gmail account holders tempted by delicious Spam recipes, like Spicy Spam kebobs in the screen shot above.

I loved this picture from the BBC news site. We had a bit of snow in Macclesfield though it was already melting by the time that I got out of bed at 8.30.

If you go to the flickr page for this photo http://flickr.com/photos/francesbell/2355361074/ and click on the note you can see the daffodils in flower amongst the snow.

It has been a strange early Easter with daffodils in flower early (and pulmonaria and corylopsis, see below, and my beautiful Magnolia Stellata that is just peeking into flower), whilst the snow is still on the ground.