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It simply connects people based on hashtags in tweets to connect freelancers with people who might have work, or people looking for freelancers. So if you are needing, say, a CSS guru or a 3D animator, you just tweet something that has #havework, and if you are someone with skills like Flash Programming or Game Design, you tweet #wantwork, and Micro.Vois tries to put them side by side.

This is compelling because (a) it is simple, and (b) the “posting” can be done in the flow of your regualr twitter communication (which we all know everybody does these days, right?) Yes, it means not having to create another account at some other site, log in, etc to engage in matchmaking.

So I wondered– what if someone created a Learning.Vois? People who have knowledge skills to tweet might send messages with #haveknowledge and people looking to learn something specific can tweet #wanttolearn (note- this is a total mockup, don’t go looking fir it til TechCrunch sez it’s so..)

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Now this may not really be a fantastic idea, but I am more after the probing of why academic dont get out of their vertical silos and leverage these channels. Or they can wait until it gets “integrated” inside some “safe” “secure” closed wall LMS. Bleccch.

I speculated a number of years ago what might happen if educational organizations used some sort of Amazon.com-like recommendation system– e.g. “People who liked Newtonian Physics also did well in Laplacian Transformations” or “25% of people who registered for ENG 101 also signed up for Art History 159″ or “Students who successed in Political Science 212 also achieved top grades in Sociology 322″.

Actually I have seen a little of this at the Open University– Tony Hirst has sharing some info about a course he taught and there is s spot that says “Students who studied this course have also studied at some time:” with a linked list of said courses:

Yet in continuing to think about data– Universities (and colleges and welding schools) have information sitting inside their vaults on course offered, when they were offered, numbers of students who took them, even performance information (e.g. grades- detach from IDs of course), which this links out to other courses people have taken offering all kinds of analysis, linking, visualizations… all of this data, data, data, sitting idly, doing nothing.

Not a web of data happens in education, we are a few isolated locked cupboard drawers.

Ain’t much 2.0 in education at all. It’s been 1.0 for 100+ years.

WordCamp Ed is a WordCamp focused entirely on educational uses WordPress — in schools and universities. The inaugural WordCamp Ed will be held at George Mason University on Saturday, November 22nd featuring a morning of pre-planned speakers, and a barcamp-style afternoon breaking into smaller discussions and sessions.

Oh I am envious of those in the area that can show up. I will be a bit too far away, even farther than Arizona. But I really like that Dave is doing this- I got to meet him only briefly at WordCamp in August in San Francisco — but he is doing some very cool stuff with ScholarPress- plugins for WordPress that are of use to educators.

I had a great time at WordCamp but felt it was really dominated by all the people trying to make a living selling WordPress development services (like 400 of them)- a WordCamp for Educators is an awesome idea. They are doing more unconference stuff than WordCamp main, and even better, registration fee is by donation:

There’s no mandatory registration fee for WordCamp Ed, but we’ll pass around a hat at the conference to help defray the cost of shirts and food.

I already see Cole Camplese and Patrick Murray-John are signed up, but where is the Reverend EduPunk?

Anyhow, I hope the WordCamp Ed concept takes off with more of them (look how many WordCamps there are, and all but San Francisco are locally organized). I wonder how many I could get to my cabin for WordCampEd Strawberry?

And of course the wp-fanboy-plugged-in cherry on top was going to the speaker’s dinner the night before and being seated across from Matt Mullenweg, who remembered sneaking in on my session at Northern Voice. Matt described that they only plan the San Francisco WordCamp, and the other 15 or so that go on around the blog are locally organized– he says he likes to show up un-announced to check out what people are doing who use his company’s wares.

Yes, it was through a connection via James Farmer that I got invited to do a presentation on Education and WordPress (somehow in the program that was handed out 20 minutes before show time) it was labeled as “WordPress and the Future of Education” quite a larger scope than I had planned. But hey, it is “camp” and we can diverge.

My stomach tied a few knots when the day before I saw the list of other presenters and found myself a minnow among some big fish. And then Matt said more than 400 were registered! And.. he gave me an opening slot. Wow. Woah, Neo, Wow.

The 30 minute slot I had was devoted more to a quick smorgasbord sampling of the varied ways educators were using WordPress now, collected from people who tagged stuff and added links to my wiki — what I pitched as It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner available as an annotated flickr set.

Matt Mullenweg opens WordCamp with my title slide in background!

I do have an audio recording below, and hoping I got in all the shoutouts that were deserved. Here is where I gauged the connection of my topic with the audience by asking to let me know how many of them went to school ;-)

and then how many of them used the web in school…

And then I went into full spring mode. I found later there was a guy, Andew Mager, in the front row who was live blogging everything for ZDnet (and got a super glamorous photo of me. Not). I saw his tweet:

And of course, what I showed is a gross undersampling of all the possible examples out there. So below is an embedded slideshow of my screens I ran through (again, the entire thing is an annotated flickr set). I was this close from running the presentation in PicLens from this flickr set, but had a last minute worry about the volume of net activity going on a blog conference, so I paced through the same set in iPhoto. I had a second set as an iPhoto slideshow with music, which was rocking out before the show started (this embed seems to be not behaving, if not try watching it on slideflickr).

Sing along! “EduBlogging! Where It’s At (Got Two Plugins and a WordPress Blog…)”

If you are interested in the audio:
It’s All You Can WordPress at the EduBlog Diner [31:07 25.1 Mb MP3]

Some more WordCamp takeaways in part deux…

%NOCP%

A few weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Joe who I had met at Northern Voice. He was developing a plugin that would connect blog posts automatically to related content in a site called DonorsChoose.org– I had never heard of it, but what a great concept. Teachers (and/or students) submit ideas for learning materials or activities they don’t have, and the site connects them with people willing to help them get what they need. Donors can choose which project to contribute directly to.

DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning materials and experiences in our public schools. We believe this inequity is rooted in the following factors:

1. Shortages of learning materials prevent thorough, engaging instruction;
2. Top-down distribution of materials stifles our best teachers and discourages them from developing targeted solutions for their students; and
3. Small, directed contributions have gone un-tapped as a source of funding.

DonorsChoose.org will improve public education by engaging citizens in an online marketplace where teachers describe and individuals can fund specific student projects. We envision a nation where students in every community have the resources they need to learn.

According to Joe, the site has over 14,000 developed lesson ideas, and his concept was to create a system where blog posts would automatically by linked to relevant content at DonrsChoose.

I was a little curious since I really doubted the rants and whinges I post would have some correlation in a school project database, like when I use words like “cat piss”, but he said apost I made about the Learning 2.008 conference had a great amount of correlation.

What was interesting was he set this up as a project in a site called The Point that “lets anyone start a campaign to organize, fund raise, or persuade.” The DonorsChoose project was set up in the Point so that the plug-in would get done only if at least 10 bloggers signed up there and agreed to try it out on their blog.

What the heck? I said. So today Joe e-mailed that his project made his 10, so I was able to get the Possibly Related Classroom Projects plugin (as are you, it’s public).

Joe wrote today:

I can’t wait to see the plugin in action on your blog — and you’re def. welcome to share it with your readers. I wonder if this donorschoose campaign, which features “Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type” will be recommended for your most recent post :)

He is referring to my post on moo cards- so let’s see what was picked up. Hmm, no click-clack moo. But I got links to:

So at first maybe not a match. But the first project includes a request:

My students need 3 copies of a set of Favorite Transitional Book CD Read Alongs, and one Minnie and Moo Go To Paris CD Read Along Set.

And there it is in the second project- a second grade teacher in Arizona (hey I live there) is wanting reading materials that will act as magical literacy pills, asking for funds to help purchase:

My students need 17 different elementary level books from Harold and Purple Crayon to Click, Clack, Moo to Where the Wild Things Are in order to build upon their fluency and literacy skills.

Bingo! Joe is right on target.

And ironically, earlier in the summer I bought myself a copy of Click, Clack, Moo since it is such a great story.

And Where the Wild Things Are was such a favorite book for me as a kid… now I am feeling an urge to contribute….

And the third project is also a match, no moo, but a speech therapist is asking for a card reader to help kids learn sounds– so that match works well for all the times I mentioned “card” in my post.

So Joe, I would say you have done this plug-in well. I was scanning the titles of the projects thinking the matches were as bad as the cuil web search, but when you read the projects the match is spot on.

Lastly Joe also shared an interesting Google doc that describes that happened in the development of the plug-in, which to me, as as much fun as watching the extras on a DVD.

What a great way to build software and what a great thing to do to bring people to a site that will help teachers.

Let me know what you find from the DonorsChoose links that now appear here.

offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons publishes essays, reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources.

It may even make coffee, be a desert, and a floor-wax (sarcasm aimed to cheer up a sad Canadian).

You can suggest I have a stake in this as I am hovering on the list of Board Members, at the gracious invitation of Michael Roy from Wesleyan College. What does a Board member do? I am still waiting to find out, but it is an impressive group listed. I’ll see if my lack of Ivy or grace or proper spelling or extensive literature references keeps me on board.

I’ve had bad conference luck trying to meet up with Michael, though he is slated to visit Phoenix in December, and given our off and on email exchanges on learning objects and such, I think he deserves a trip to Los Dos Molinos. I have a ton of respect for his work at the Wesleyan Learning Objects Program, a gorgeous site with high end objects.

Okay, enough babbling, what is at the Commons? There are many pieces, and it has a blog-like feel to content, meaning there is a database and time stamped content arranged in multiple categories. It is well stocked with dynamic sidebar contents and good amounts of RSS feeds top level and down through the sections. And Creative Commons is everywhere.

The main part of the COmmons is a quarterly e-publication of the major sections of the site: Essays, INterviews, Hardware/Software Reviews, Project Showcases, and Vignettes…

The August 2004 edition features Technology & the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom: an interview with University of Illinois-Chicago’s Jerry Graff, Copyright 101 by Richard Lanham, The Dangers of Just-In-Time Education by Michelle Glaros, to name a few.

The Center for teaching and Learning tab leads to a pointers to relevant topical areas external to the commons, while the Developer’s Tool Kit has a number of places to exchange project ideas, code, technology reviews, etc. The Library offers search and browse access to a range of resources, and has places for people to toss new ones into the mix. And the LoLa Exchange (go ahead and try and read that without hearing the Kinds singing ion your head) is a place to find and share learning objects. A few things there, but hey, we need more repositories.

All in all at quick glance, it is a well designed and integrated site. The key for all of these is getting flow of people to and from the COmmons, so we’ll keep an eye (easy to do with RSS) on the action.