Announcing BlogWalk Amsterdam May 2007

After a long hiatus, it is my tremendous pleasure to announce BlogWalk Eleven for May 2007 in Amsterdam!

Date, venue nor focus have been decided yet, so there is still plenty of opportunity to add your thoughts to the discussion. The date will most likely be Friday May 11th 2007, or Friday May 18th 2007.

With this BlogWalk the series will undergo some changes. Having toured Europe, North America, and Australia with BlogWalk in the previous years we are partly consolidating the format. We have decided to do two fixed BlogWalk sessions per year, one of which will be in Amsterdam in the spring, the other in southern Germany in the fall. Next to those two fixed sessions there will be room for one or max. two ' travelling events' for which suggestions are welcome.

Otherwise we will keep the sessions as they used to be, bringing twenty-odd thinkers and practitioners together for face to face conversations around a social software related theme. Using free or sponsored venues, an after-lunch walk through town, and generally keeping to a zero-budget. As always in the end participants will decide on the spot how the event takes shape, facilitated and moderated by Lilia Efimova, Sebastian Fiedler and/or me. As in the previous BlogWalk events, participation will be by invitation only. But remember, invitations are not meant to make things exclusive, but to make sure everybody knows up-front who is coming. So make yourself known if you want to be there.

For now suffice to say:

BlogWalk Eleven is taking place for certain, in May in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Feel free to add your thoughts and suggestions, here in the comments, or in the newly styled blog and workspace where all BlogWalk related information can be found. We will start working on finalizing the date,venue and focus, before moving to the program, and the invitations for participants. On all three points your input is welcomed.

Sebastian, Lilia and I are looking forward to meeting you in Amsterdam next May.

Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 15, 2007 05:49 PM)

Knowing Knowledge

(Cross posted from Elmine and my newly opened Bookblog.)

Knowing Knowledge

I have been following George Siemens through his blog in the past years. Last fall his book Knowing Knowledge was published and I was asked by a Dutch association for e-learning, to review the book, shortly before it went to the presses. This review has been published in Dutch as well as English, so you can have a read overthere. In the book he explains what he calls Connectivism as a learning strategy.

Suffice to say here that what Siemens identifies as the list of skills one needs to deal with the massive abundance of information and knowledge fits completely with my own thinking on dealing with information overload and the shifting nature of knowledge work. A worthwile book. And while you're at it, have a look a these videoclips as well.

Summing up Connectivism: Knowledge now means to be connected, learning now is connecting and building networks.
The book can also be downloaded for free. The illustrations are available through Flickr. But I find that owning it helps, as the format invites consulting it often, browsing and jumping back and forth. Not so easily done on screen. Discussion is invited on the Knowing Knowledge website.

Also there is currently an on-line conference underway with daily interesting presentations. Sheets and recordings are available as well, as well as discussion.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 8, 2007 03:42 PM)

The Book Project

Elmine and I almost always buy books we want to read. I used to have a library card, but as I was always late returning the books, buying them in the end was cheaper than the mounting library fines. Since we are also both avid readers, our house holds quite a number of dead trees with stories printed on them. When we moved house last year the movers planned a full extra day just to pack up our books.

In my blogpostings I regularly refer to books I own or have read, and there is a (sleeping) section in the right side bar giving some hint of what I am currently reading. However I would like to be able to refer to books more easily than always having to hunt down the link to Amazon again.

So I have opened a book blog, where I post books from our book case with a little description of what I think about it, or where I got it. They all link back to Amazon sites or the Dutch Bol.com site, so if you buy a book through here, I will get a few cents. Let's see if we can top the 17$ I made last year on Amazon referrals :) I also put the last 2 postings in the right hand side bar.

There is not a lot there yet, it will be a slow process I guess, and most of it is currently SF, as I started with a meter of those. But it will grow over time. Slow time that is, as discussed in the latest Bookblog posting about Eriksen's book Tyranny of the Moment.

(Excerpt:)


Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age
Continue reading "Tyranny of the Moment" »

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 5, 2007 05:27 PM)

Learning Drupal

Drupal is a good and versatile open CMS, that enjoys a large community of developers and enthusiasts. Elmine and I are currently learning how to adapt and administer Drupal. This because Drupal will be the new basis for my corporate web presence, as well as the community platform for one of Elmine's clients.

We are happy to know people like Roland Tanglao and Boris Mann (of the Vancouver based Bryght company. Check them out if you are looking for Drupal hosting services) as well as Gunnar Langemark, so that if we have questions concerning Drupal help in finding pointers to a solution is only a Skype-call away.

The learning path is not without obstacles though, as can be expected.
Installation is a breeze, no problems there. But finding your way around the CMS takes some getting used, as you have to familiarize yourself with the implicit structure in the CMS. Finding your way around the likes of Modules, Blocks, Nodes and especially how they correlate to eachother. One thing I find is that the documentation on the Drupal.org site is mostly geared towards the developing communities, and there seems to be little along the lines of a 'How To' geared towards a 'normal' CMS user.

Another part of the learning that is not very easy, is creating themes. And again there is not much in the way of accessible documentation for finding your way as a CMS user. And what is there is mostly text. So an overview of how CSS lay-out blocks are nested, for e.g. the Zen theme I started out with, is not available. Or at least it wasn't until we drew one ourselves to serve as a reference while tinkering with the style of my testing-site:

I am slowly getting the hang of it though. It is that way with all tools, and probably once I am past this initial stage of confusion I will soon forget how awkward those first steps were. That is why I will be trying to chronicle some of it before I forget there were such things as difficult first steps.

Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 4, 2007 12:33 PM)