What an idiot journo.

Need I saw any more?

Ok I guess this is just one question and one thought, backwards.

Question: I read an interesting post about PLEs and users’ abilities to mashup widgets in this widget infrastructure. What do you think about the idea of PLEs, whatever they end up looking like, and folks being able to even develop their own widgets for them? IGoogle sorta does that.
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2009/10/exploring-personal-learning-environments/ read Tobias Nelkner

I understand the need to mete out invitations to avoid technical issues on beta software, but they have the ‘Labs’ page which for years they have slowly leaked apps that have grown in use (or not, I guess) more ‘organically’ if you will, which seems important in Wave’s case, for, as a lot of people have noted, it’s pretty hard to use a *collaborative* tool without any of your regular network to collaborate with!

Anyways, it strikes me that this odd roll-out/hype cycle has something to do with dumb stories like this one, and I just hope that it doesn’t end up causing a backlash at what could be a potentially useful technology.

I am with you on being upbeat about the wave potential, waiting to see how it pans out. There should be no reason why wave functionality cannot find its way into all sorts of platforms, but still consider it a radical change from the way we think of web content, because it is not “fixed”, it is always flowing. I’m also trying to think what happens when one has an influx of rather than 10 wave, like 100 or 1000 or when you get waves with hundreds of participants.

We are living in one of those Chines curse “interesting” time

We use Moodle at SBC, not blackboard, but it will be interesting to see if wave gives a lot more flexibility. I’m an outlier, probably, because I don’t like moodle and don’t use the CMS for the same types of functions as most of my peers do (for example, I don’t do quizzes, so that feature is not a loss for me.)

My hunch was based on two things: how the embedded function could be used to teach students in a dynamic fashion how to do effective research online, and whether the students would find to be more efficient and useful a CMS-like platform that lives closer to where they do most of their on-line work. One problem I’ve run into with traditional CMS is that many of the students want a single portal (not their words, but mine). I teach political science, and the embed function could prove to be a useful way to handle live events (like state of the union etc). The key words, though, are “might” and “could.” As the original post said, it remains to be seen.

It seems one of Wave’s main strengths is how it could be embedded inside software easily, so it looks to me more as an enhancement than a replacement.