Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Today I started a new blog, this time not at Blogger, but at Wordpress. I'm happy with Blogger, don't get me wrong, but I want to experience the difference. And above all, for the new blog I want to be able to postdate articles so they automatically get published on a future date.

So far I find the service very similar, with a little more ease of use for Blogger. Time will tell which one I like more.

The purpose of the new blog called 'Quizman's Quiz Qlog (QQQ)' is to promote one new quiz per week. It's one of the initiatives I'm taking to make the site more well known. After building the basics in 2007, the focus for 2008 is going to be on growing it and getting people to visit, use and like the site. (And I'll keep improving it naturally.) Today I got the nicest compliment from Diego, a friend from Argentina who visited my site: "Its not just for fun, its like a drug!!!! hahahaha. Excellent site! and im learning a lot too!!Hugs back ". And that's indeed what's it all about. (The learning and fun, not the drugs thing.)

Labels: about2findout, blog, blogger, quizman, wordpress

I'm a monkey: spot the 5 differences.

The most controversial speaker here at Online Educa Berlin was no doubt Andrew Keen, the author of 'The cult of the amateur'. Every hype or (r)evolution needs its Antichrist, and Andrew Keen is very good at crying out his disgust on the monkeys and children that are running the show in the web 2.0 world, instead of Harvard professors, and the danger of sites such as Google and Wikipedia - all founded by hippies. I actually enjoyed his keynote. A story is not complete without its other side, and he certainly is good at counterbalancing all the euphoria around web 2.0 and the democratization of the Internet. "The monkeys are running the show."

In my humble opinion, what is going on here is the defense of relevance of expertise. For a very long time, expertise has been a monopoly, decided by the ones-who-knew. Publishers and others decided who was an expert and who was not, and what was worth hearing and what was not. It's a logical flaw to think expertise will necessarily bring greater truth to the table in that model. I'm a Belgian in a foreign country at the moment, and not a day goes by without people asking me about the political state of Belgium (don't worry, we have 6 other governments that still work, just the federal one takes a long time to take off, it will happen, don't worry.) I've only seen correct facts and analysis of that in the Dutch newspaper, other even quality journals like the New York Times get facts all wrong. So that is the world of expertise.
That world now has a competitor: the monkeys that blog, write Wikipedia pages etc. Competition is good. Expertise shouldn't have the monopoly on the truth. To me what Andrew Keen's point is about is the defense of the expertise against the wisdom of the crowds. I like the new world where both have their place and will compete for relevance. Hey, the experts have a cost disadvantage and a quality advantage. It's a fair fight. In the first years of this 2.0 thing traditional expertise-relying business share will drop, but it will remain relevant next to us monkeys. We are just finding a new balance in a competition for relevance. Personally, it excites me.

So I'm one of the monkeys... I blog, therefore I'm a monkey.

Labels: andrew keen, blog, cult of the amateur, online educa

How much is your blog worth?
Another funny and completely useless site is this one. It calculates how much your blog is worth via the Technorati API and some algorithm. Anyway, mine is estimated at $1,693.62. Cool, anyone want to give me that? :-)

Labels: blog, Technorati

I've moved the forum at my http://www.6C-learning.org site to a new blog. Over the next months, I'll migrate all entries in the forum and then it will be closed down.

The new blog is not hosted on my own site anymore, but on Google's own blogspot.com. The reason is that I can't get dynamic 'widget' data in my template unless I host the blog there. It's a 'blogger in beta' site. The advantage obviously is I get the 'labels' displayed at the right hand column, and it is also the only way to make use of the new visual template designer. (see pic) The disadvantage is I have lost some control on how my template looks as it is harder to integrate your own HTML code in there at exactly the place you want.

Summary of my 2 blogs:

• http://www.about2findout.com/blog : my journey to find out what web2.0 and learning 2.0 means and the resulting web site project
• http://6Clearning.blogspot.com : articles on learning in the broad sense of the word, labeled according to the 6C learning framework

Hope you enjoy!

Labels: 6C Learning, blog