Martin was a bit peeved at not getting an RSS Feed for the “NMC Continuing Coverage” blog aggregator provided by Stephen Downes (and he gets the concept).
Then Martin still was not satisfied when we provided him a URL for an RSS feed for Stephan’s tool, found with a few minutes of rummaging around EDU_RSS. Martin also missed the concept that Stephan’s tool was out of our realm of control (though he created it on request)– that we are “loosely” joined to it.
Martin wants things wide open a.k.a. DeCentralists (he wants the weblogs open to the world to edit, a behavior of wikis but rather rare in blogs) but he seems to want all information for our session provided in a comprehensive single site, tailored just for him, an almost rather ironic Centralist concept.
I am not writing to ridicule Martin but to help provide an example what the “Small Pieces” approach is all about.
Doing things the “Small Pieces” way means being resourceful and tapping into your networked community to find answers or solutions. It means doing a bit of digging before throwing your hands up in despair. It means accepting that the solutions are rarely provided as neatly organized 1-2-3 form, but will require some initiative. It means that everything is fluid and change-able.
Martin could have jumped write in the wiki and changed what we created, or posted a comment askign for what he wanted, or even done the digging and shared an answer.
But we did it instead. See the bottom of Small Technologies Loosely Joined, under the Follow heading. As most things net, there are multiple solutions that overlap in results. Human cognition and analysis is required.
Here are options including and addition to Stephen’s service to track the net activity related to Small Pieces Loosely Joined using the pieces available from Feedster, Technorati, Google (and Google Alert for RSS):
- EDU_RSS Monitor the dynamic feed of content using a special EDU_RSS feed via Stephen Downes ::
- PubSub watch on “NMC 2004” ::
- Feedster watch on “NMC 2004” :: View ::
- Technorati watch on “NMC 2004” :: View
- Google watch on “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” +”NMC 2004″ :: View
- GoogleAlert watch on “Small Pieces” +”NMC 2004″ :: View ::
Now that is the small pieces way…. How’s that look Martin?
PS I do not know Martin and am not trying to pick on him- and as I wrote him, my tone is meant to instigate participating in this event, and sometimes as Edward Abbey said, you have to stir up the stew…
I have commented on this on my blog –
http://www.criticalmethods.org/collab/2004/6/news.htm#1086615224270
… and I replied there. Your bouquet of roses in apology are on the way.
I was conducting this as an experiment to see if people would really take this seriously– there is just too much literal interpretation of what is written on web sites, when it is written so quickly (and full of typos if you are like me).
The point was not to get into a pissing match with Martin, it was to see how social interactions move across the small pieces.
Enough of the kicking sand around– the real question is (again), why the #^$& is no one jumping into and editing our wiki?