Blimey, it’s been two years!
Stephen Powell is looking back at the work I (and he) did in my sabbatical in Organisational Blogging – Ultralab 2 year retrospective which has made me realise how poorly I documented everything along the way, a case of me not eating my own dogfood there. Maybe it has needed the time away from it though, to be able to reflect on it too.
At the time, I believed that Ultralab’s value was in the discussion that took place there. Lots of companieslike Nortel, BBC, Oracle and Apple all paid good money to be involved in our musings and debates, some in the form of projects and others used to just come and drink coffee and soak it up.
Ultimately, I wanted two things to happen, for those great debates to do some hard marketing work, to share with a wider audience the sorts of things Ultralab were doing. Secondlyy, I wanted to shake up the technological/pedagogical dogma with regards to technology and “play a little” with new genres of communication, to explore new ideas.
Of course, the job I was tasked with but managed to avoid, was to improve the communication between the New Zealand office and the UK office using the number of FirstClass postings as a measure. But because I perceived First Class to be part of the problem for all sorts of reasons, mainly that it is a “closed” system which in my opinion leads to creative stagnation. Anyway, I had different priorities, I was much more concerned with…
- Empowering the NZ team so that they could, on a whim, create a “learning environment” such as a shared blog.
- Empowering the NZ team to be in control of their own dissemination and marketing efforts, using a blog for their main web site – rather than emailing edit requests to the webmaster in the UK.
- Not only disseminating blogging to NZ but enabling them to be able to evangelize blogging down under themselves.
- Being able to “own the debate” for educational issues important to them, such as “Delightful Learning”.
- To be able to benefit from all the open-source tools available (drupal, wordpress, wikis, calendars, zope, php etc.) and learn how to adopt the “good enough” approach to hacking tools into loosely-coupled emergent systems.
- Being able to create learning tools that supported the creation of relationships that didn’t all fall apart when the pilot project funding ended, something I’d seen so many times before and that I thought was plain wrong.
- Being able to create educational “tools”, or more like “approaches” that could be passed on… like Hypercard in the old days.
Regarding how all of our blogging efforts had an impact on Stephen’s main project, Ultraversity, Stephen says ..
This is significant in that it moves us away from the preferred relationship of control that Universities typically enjoy with their students. Clearly, the institution is still in the position of power, but students do have far more flexibility over whom they work with and how they chose to learn using a range of technologies €“ the embryonic practice required for the vision of a personalised learning environment?
I’m working on very similar projects now, having learned a lot about both what works and what doesn’t. The book is coming real soon.
