I like to see that Nate has done somehting with the idea of collecting threads, but I have one question about his solution – how is it more accessible to the non-bloggers? Those of us who subscribe by RSS can get updates and even make changes to the wiki but what about others who are still more comfortable with subscribing to an email list?
Nate is probably right that the overhead would be a major burden to – and yes, it might possibly even kill – my journal idea, but just because we have an option does not mean that we have addressed all the concerns. That is what needs to happen at some point if we are to find the right balance in this type of communication between groups within our group (AECT).
I found another idea over at Weblogg-Ed that looks promising. There is a link there to a conversation tracker at blogpulse by Inteliseek. Unfortunately I have not been able to get it to work. I am thinking that they only track a subset of blogs, but if the tool could be used for AECT related blogs or Education related blogs it would be a very interesting start.
On another note, I am starting to wonder if I should take a sabbatical (as a student) to work on this stuff for a while without having to worry about classes. Any ideas? 🙂
The advantage of the wiki is that it’s a website. A link can be made from any place that makes sense for the delayed adopters to find. The digerati will have memberships on the Overlay to begin with. In between there are a lot of graduations in the spectrum.
My problem with conversation tracker is that you need to know what the conversation IS before you can find it. Am I missing something?
I mean, I suppose we could “can” the conversation queries and put them into links on a page someplace so people who don’t know what’s being discussed can track them down and so that new additions to the conversations get added automatically.
But this isn’t really THAT much more than techonorati/tags is it? I need to play with it some more to see.
I agree that the conversation tracker is not the answer for exactly the same reasons you cited. We could use it to make sure that we are including all the elements of any particular conversation.
I’m still playing as well.
Keep thinking on it, David.
There’s an answer here someplace … It may be in aggregation. It may be in wiki. It may be something else. Frankly I’m not sure that the wiki idea has enough legs … altho, that’s probably what they said about wikipedia, too.
Hm. You mean like this?
AECT
Not exactly. That pulls up a list of AECT posts by various people, but none of them are conversations. None of them include conversations. I am talking about having a page that lists conversation seeds so that if I list your post Stature and Zero Sum Games I would get this. I admit that this is a very shallow example, but you can see the potential power of it if you look at the conversation tracker examples like this.
OH! More like?
EDU-train
Yes
What I wish we had was the engine to the conversation tracker. I think we could have a powerful – and easily maintained – solution if we could have a wiki where we entered the seeds of threads as a hyperlink so that when people click on the link it brings up the results of the conversation tracker, live rather than canned.