learnandteachonline.com

I captured something that made me giggle when I checked Facebook this morning. It illustrates how college high school and college students are using Facebook just for fun.

Related links:

- RIP Bakers Square FB group

- My post from last year about the uses by FB's original audience doesn't mesh so well with business use and getting things accomplished

Dave's been refining his experimental Flickr 2 Twitter app.

The picture part is a new wrinkle in TwitterGrams, a way to send an audio tweet -- by uploading an MP3 file, or much more easily by phoning it in using a gateway enabled by BlogTalk Radio.
It would be nice if the picstream had a little player like Blogger's Blogger Play.

I did make a no-Flash player for the audio TwitterGrams. I'm not sure I'd know where to start with a slide player (but might think on it! ;-) )

Kara Swisher reports on reaction to her post (s) about silly Facebook apps.

Yeah. Well. I guess.

True, so many of the apps are juvenile. The groups are silly and fanciful, too. When you consider that FB is still very much a place for college students -- some only five years weaned from Nickelodeon -- to kick back and distract themselves from the seriousness of their real work, it makes all kinds of sense. "Serious use of the site" is exactly what they don't want.

It's Sunni and Shiia in there, so I'll play Joe Biden and say "Balkanize the thing."

Facebook could make broad channels for the different worlds, built on top of the existing structure of groups and networks. Each segment would be more pleased.

(A loose federation would oversee the fair distribution of oil ad revenues, of course.)

Brent Schlenker muses on a Facebook TV show trivia quiz and how it might be a step closer to a Facebook LMS. (Facebook login required for that quiz link.)

He wonders why and ends up thinking why not. I'm not sure either, but I still think an assignments widget might be a good place to start with marrying the two related but conflicting types of applications.

Danah Boyd's story of how one company came to understand the viral power of the web just by watching something unfold.

Doc Searls is listing all the cars he's ever owned.

Thanks, that reminds me that my OPML car roll would be a good file to use to understand the search feature of GrazrScript, whenever I finally get around to studying it.

I made it to demonstrate the inclusion properties of an OPML directory, and referred to it on this draft OPML Editor support site page, and in my ebook about OPML. (Also mentioned docnography in the book.)

When I link to the car roll I usually point to it on Dave's Worldoutline but it seems to be down at the moment. Here it is in a Grazr:

I was so immersed in OPML for a while that I burned out on it a little, but lately it's been popping up unbidden. Something made me think when I was driving to work the other day that it might be a good format for resumes, especially as they could be used after landing a job. A company could make a nice browsable qualifications database with OPML.

P.S. I had an Austin America, too. Never knew anybody else who owned one. They were pretty cute, a little like a Mini.

Still noodling with this online sexual harassment compliance course.

The California lawmakers did a smart thing by not allowing me to just write up some content and call it a qualifying course. They require that a lawyer or trainer experienced in discrimination be on hand to answer questions within two days. That's a good thing. I think a lot of times online courses are seen as the easy way out for trainees -- and for the corporate types contracting for it. Buy it, forget about it, and maybe it's all too easy to be worth much.

So... what if, instead of hiring or partnering with qualified trainers to enable this kind of hand-it-off thinking, I made an online course with which the organization's HR folks remained involved, and acted as the question answerers?

On larger HR staffs, there would be a qualified expert in discrimination. They could even do it as a team with a training specialist and an employment law specialist. It even seems like having the staff remain involved would be a plus if it came down to proving the company really tried to inform an employee who caused a harassment suit, wouldn't you think?

The social constructionist learning philosophy behind Moodle would lend itself perfectly to interaction in the built-in forums. I'd set up a section for each organization, and maybe think how to allow some interaction among the groups, or at least aggregate the fruits of previous discussions somehow.

I don't see any courses like this. Google searches are jammed with competing offerings (with all those California employees to train), but on a cursory review they look quite similar and not too inventive. What do you think? Would HR folks go for staying involved?

Via Webware I see that the crazy funny Ask A Ninja video podcast now has its own social network. Well, that's smart, I thought, on first consideration. Hmmm. Targeted socnets. Maybe that's the wave of the future.

Or not, quickly came the second thought. Is this much different from the 1999 movement to put forums on every website?

I signed up for Google Apps for one of my personal domains this morning. I'm tapping my foot now while the CNAME record goes through and Google verifies I own the domain.

It occurred to me after hearing about Google's plans to build social networking on top of its existing properties that Apps already provides something like a closed-circuit network if you wanted to use it that way, a little like Marc Canter's PeopleAggregator .

I thought I might use this as my header.

Oops. Nope. Realized almost immediately that Google marks are not allowed, so I guess I'll have to take out that "M." Don't suppose they can trademark the use of different faces and primary colors within a word, though.

Later: You have to mess with MX records, then wait up to 48 hours for them to resolve, too. I'm not very adept at those sorts of things, always seem to get one little thing wrong and I never know which little thing. It's still very arcane, isn't it? I suppose that's the way the organizational mail server admins like to keep it.

One thing: if Google does build social networking on top of its other services, it might be a comfortable place for grownups.