Keeping Individuality While Building Communities of Communities
Posted by Paul Allison on June 5th, 2006
A big thank you to all of the individuals who came together on this webcast that we did on Wednesday, May 31, 2006.
Susan Ettenheim managed the stream for this live webcast at The Webcast Academy. Along with Susan, Paul Allison and Teb Lock hosted guests Bud Hunt and Chis Sloan. And if you’re counting, you will realize that when Susan tried to include Karen McComas and Richard Stohlman into our skype conference, we started having problems. Eventually Jeff Lebow from World Bridges and The Webcast Academy opened up a skypecasting room where many others could join including a student from Scotland and Harron Stone. I’ve edited out most of the skype crashes and other problems, but the sound quality is still not great in places.
The day after the webcast, Bud emailed me that he had “a blast,” and Karen told me that she “had a lot of fun,” so the connection happened. I hope some of the content comes through on this highly edited podcast. It’s half as long as the original, but I’ve left in a few minutes each time there was a crash because the process of doing these webcasts is one of the contents. Susan and I would like to apologize to Richard, Chris, and others who weren’t able to make it into our Skype conversation. We are working on a plan for including as many voices as possible, while avoiding crashes and drifting.
For more about what we were talking about, take a look at the post just below this one, and don’t miss Richard Stohlman’s response. There’s a lot there! Also, you can find links to the blogs, podcasts, and wikis that we talk about in this podcast on a list to the right.
June 6th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Fascinating discussion! I was particularly interested in the bits about public/private life toward the end.
I’ve been working with teachers on wiki assignments and one of the things that I think is critical for students to understand is that things on the web may not go away EVEN if they want them to go away. Web content is cached by various services. It can be saved by individuals. Once you post something publicly online you might as well consider it public for good.
So one thing that I require in my work is that students do not post their real identities online. What will it mean for a 16-year-old if her musings about political issues are available publicly ten years from now? How comfortable would I be if my writing from age 13, 14, 15, 16 were publicly available? (Not very!
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I think this is a big issue for web-publishing assignments. I’m wondering what you and your readers think about this?
June 7th, 2006 at 10:11 am
Andrea,
I agree with you. The students I have talked with about this do not seem to realize what they put on the web is permanent or could be. I have tried to use “The Wayback Machine” website (http://www.archive.org/index.php) to show them how things are being stored.
Any ideas about how to get this point across to students in my system will be greatly appreciated!