Top 10 Podcasts for the Technophile

Photo by Flickr user e-magic, CC-licensed

About two years ago I had to change the way I got to work. I used to take the train and would spend all that time reading. Suddenly I had to drive a car and it felt like I was wasting my time. That is until I found out about podcasting.

I have about ten hours of listening to fill every week and do that with the following podcasts (not in any particular order):

Leo Laporte has single handed created his own Netcast Network: TWiT. It is proof that it is now more than possible to create professional sounding audio (and lately even video) without breaking the bank. He does all his interviews over Skype, produces hours and hours of shows each week and is highly successful (some of his shows have around 200.000 listeners) without being big media. I listen religiously to four of his shows:
- this WEEK in TECH (feed URL): This is the leading show that gives its name to the network. Laporte talks about the week’s tech news with luminaries like John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton from Tekzilla, Will Harris from Channelflip and many others. The show is often hilarious with some great insights, although I can imagine it might feel like a lot of inside baseball when you don’t listen very often. My favourite regular guest is Jason Calacanis from Mahalo. He always seems to bring some outrageous humour to the show, but is also often one step ahead of the game when it comes to really understanding how business is changing because of the Internet.
- FLOSS Weekly (feed URL): This is a show about Free, Libre, Open Source Software with Randal L. Schwartz. The show usually consists of an interview with the project lead(ers) of a big open source software project. It is a great place to learn about new projects and to get a better knowledge of how open source software development works.
- net@night (feed URL): This show has Amber MacArthur sharing links of new websites that she encountered. Often there will be an interview with a founder of some new web 2.0 start-up. The show can be a bit light on content sometimes.
- Security Now (feed URL): If you really want to get a better understanding of how computers work, than this is the show for you. Steve Gibson is a real old hand in the IT world (the back-end of his website is written in assembly language if I am not mistaken). The show has two types of episodes: one where Steve dives deep into a particular security related topic and one where he answers questions from his listeners.
Search Engine with Jesse Brown (feed URL new feed url at TVO.org): “A blog and podcast about the Internet. But not boring.” This is the podcast that I would love to make. Jesse Brown uses his audience to find stories in which the Internet has profound social effects. He really understands the Net and has the most wicked loops and intros of any podcast in this list.
Guardian’s Tech Weekly (feed URL): Aleks Krotoski and other Guardian journalists go through a week of tech news. It is a smoothly produced show with some interviews, a start-up elevator pitch, short news segments and sense of humour. The British focus can be refreshing.
Guardian’s Science Weekly (feed URL): Alok Jha must be the funniest man in science journalism. Only Brits can make a show that is incredibly entertaining and very intelligent at the same time. You can feel the love for science and the joy they have in making the show.
Digital Planet (feed URL): This BBC world show takes a much more international look at how technology is changing society. It has many features on the developing world and has a true journalistic BBC attitude. The resident expert Bill Thompson is a great technology critic who brings something extra.
These two Dutch podcasts are interesting too:
- Radio Online (feed URL): This long running radio show always manages to entertain me. The combination of sceptic Peter de Bie and hardcore Internet journalist Francisco van Jole really works.
- ICT Roddels (feed URL): Brenno de Winter and Gonny van der Zwaag produce this podcast. I have a lot of respect for Brenno who has his very own fearless interviewing style and is a journalist with principles. His Bigwobber site is pushing hard for open government. The audio quality is less then the other shows that I have described but it is good enough.
Finally, as a bonus, two extra podcasts:
- LugRadio (feed URL): The awesome foursome have stopped producing this great Linux show. They were completely irreverent and had some insanely hilarious segments, but also always managed to have very thoughtful and deep discussions about open source software and the open source community. It is well worth listening to the archives.
- Ricky Gervais Podcast (available at Audible): This has nothing to do with technology, but it is probably the best comedy that is available on audio anywhere.

I use Amarok (not the KDE4 version!) to download these podcasts and sync them with my iPod. Amarok really deserves a plug as it manages the podcasts on my iPod perfectly. Podcasts continue where I left them, get downloaded automatically when new ones arrive, get deleted from my iPod when I have listened to them completely and show the little image of the show.

I am always looking for new things to listen to and would appreciate any recommendations.

Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards

I have been a moderator inside the Dutch Moodle user community for quite a while now. It doesn’t require a lot of work from me: everybody is completely civil and all I occasionally do is make sure that no questions stay unanswered.

Very soon I will be responsible for moderating a group of learning professionals inside a large multinational company. The community is brand new and is currently in a start up phase. I decided to spend some time this weekend reading Patrick O’Keefe’s Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards, to see whether I could get some advice that would be useful for that new task.

O’Keefe apparently has a wealth of experience running forums like KarateForums.com and phpBBHacks.com through his iFroggy network. The book has a companion website and he writes a blog about managing communities.

His community forums are out in the open and probably require a different kind of maintenance than an internal corporate network. He spends a lot of time talking about how to develop guidelines for members and staff (he includes useful templates) and about how to ban members. His advice is eminently practical, but it isn’t the type of information I am looking for.

The two (smallish) chapters that were more interesting to me were: Creating a Good Environment and Keeping It Interesting. Both chapters have some useful tips like:

Always personally welcome new users.
Don’t link users to general (unhelpful) sites when they ask a question. Instead take some time and link to the page they really need.
Members will get a sense of ownership of the community: do not make drastic changes without getting them involved in advance.
Share your successes: when you reach a milestone (like a certain amount of posts in the community), make an announcement and thank your users for their support.
If you have enough resources you could run a newsletter as something to add value to the community and keep people involved.
O’Keefe writes about a couple of games you can play in the forums. Survivor and Who Want to be a Millionaire? are explained in detail.
You could start a member of the month program or hold yearly award ceremonies.

All of this advice is very sensible, but doesn’t reach the depth that I had hoped for. The questions I would have like to seen answered are:

What steps should you take to grow a community out of little or nothing?
What is the right balance between seeding a community with (staff) posts and waiting for the wider community to create some content?
What is the right moment to close out a discussion?
What are the critical factors that make a community successful? Does it work very well for a particular group of users? How should your approach be different inside a sports based community in comparison to being inside a tech based community?
Can any topic be central to a community? Where do you do draw the lines of being in scope and being off topic?

It would have been nice if he had tried to tackle these questions too. Do you have any answers to these questions? I would love to hear them in the comments.

Let me finish by quoting O’Keefe on whether it is important to be an expert in the subject of the community:

Have a passion for the community. If you have it, you can succeed. If you have passion for the subject, but no passion for the community or for running the community, you really don’t have very much at all and you’re in for a struggle.

I think that is probably very true!

Moodlemoot UK 2009: What would you like to know?

I will be attending the 2009 UK Moodlemoot in Leicestershire on April 7th and 8th. The conference schedule has been finalised and I have taken a look at it. I plan to attend the following sessions:

Keynote presentation by Martin Dougiamas. I wonder what Martin will talk about this time. Moodle 2.0?
Moodle in the Boardroom, examples of Moodle in the Corporate Sector by Ray Lawrence & Gavin Henrick. In the last months I have been very focussed on how to make Moodle work in the corporate world. I have spent a lot of time at a large multinational company implementing Moodle and building its use. I look forward to the perspective of these two senior Moodle partners.
Moving to Moodle: challenges and opportunities at an institutional level by Jacqui Nicol. I don’t know Jacqui, but she works at the Robert Gordon University which is the Best Modern University in the UK (according to The Times Good University Guide 2009) and to me it is always interesting to hear about larger roll outs.
Informal Learning and Moodle by Miles Berry. Miles has been one of the most focal Moodle enthusiasts in the UK for years now. His perspective as a head of an independent prep school and as website manager of Open Source Schools is always fresh.
10 things to like about Moodle by Hans de Zwart. Unfortunately I don’t think I can get out of attending this session. I have given myself an impossible title as I have no idea about the audience. We’ll see where it gets me.
New Frontiers – Moodle and OLPC by Martín Langhoff. I have been following the OLPC project for years now and am interested to hear what has been happening with the plans to run Moodle on the XS.
Into the Third Dimension with SLOODLE by Daniel Livingstone (while some of my colleagues take notes at the session on Moodle and Mahara). I have never seen a live demo of Sloodle (Moodle integrated into Second Life), so it will be good to finally decide how much value that 3rd dimension adds.
Moodle Makeover – finessing your Moodle courses by Ian Wild. I thought Ian’s book (reviewed here) was excellent, so I look forward to meeting him and having a chat. You can never have enough ideas on how to make your Moodle courses even better. Hopefully I will see some inspiring ideas.
OLPC School Server internals — and building a generic small zero-configuration school server for a million schools out there by Martín Langhoff. Martín is one of those brilliant überprogrammers who likes to talk in conceptual frameworks and thinks faster than he can speak. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.

I will make sure to blog about my experiences at the end of each day, but I would also like you to participate. Are there any questions I should ask during these sessions? Is there anything you have been wanting to know about Moodle? Do any of these titles inspire you?

Please tell me in the comments…

The Proactionary Principle as a Corporate Attitude Towards Technology

Through h+ magazine I encountered the Proactionary Principle. This principle emerged as an alternative to the Precautionary Principle during the Vital Progress Summit in 2004 and is written up by the extropian thinker Max More. Let’s start with the precautionary principle:

The precautionary principle has been used as a means of deciding whether to allow an activity [..] that might have undesirable side-effects on human health or the environment. In practice, that principle is strongly biased against technological progress so vital to the continued survival and well-being of humanity. […] The precautionary principle [..] inherently biases decision making institutions toward the status quo, and reflects a reactive, excessively pessimistic view of technological progress.

The proactionary principle tries to overcome this problem, by nine component principles (liberally reworded from the original article):

Freedom to innovate – our freedom to innovate technologically is so valuable that the burden of proof should be with the nay-sayers.
Objectivity – use a decision process that is objective and make decisions based on science and not on emotions.
Comprehensiveness – consider all reasonable alternative actions.
Openness/Transparency – be open to input from all possible affected parties and keep the decision process transparent.
Simplicity – don’t complicate things unnecessarily.
Triage – give precedence to known risks over hypothetical risks.
Symmetrical treatment – treat technological risks in the same way as natural risks and make sure to fully account for the benefits of technological advances.
Proportionality – only consider restrictive measures if the bad impact of the technological impact is probable and severe, also take into account the benefits of the technology and make sure that all restrictive measures are proportional to the extent of the probable effects.
Prioritize – give priority to risk to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species.

These principles were written with large social and environmental issues in mind. I think some of the philosophy inside these principles can be very useful in a different context: the acceptance and implementation of new technology inside large corporations. Very often these corporations have a very conservative look towards using technology in the workplace. In my field of work, learning technology, this shows itself through an over-focus on integration, excessive rationalizing towards a single platform and only trying out new technology after a long process in which governance has to be negotiated between HR, IT and legal.

Corporations and institutions focus on the problems and risks of new technology without taking full account of the benefits of using it and the opportunity cost of not using it. So here is my resolution: whenever next I am trying to defend the use of some innovative technology I will call on the proactionary principle to try and win the argument.

Let a thousand flowers bloom! By all means, inspect the flowers for signs of infestation and weed as necessary. But don’t cut off the hands of those who spread the seeds of the future.

Presentations on Moodle 2.0 and on Moodle, Mahara and Elgg

My employer, Stoas Learning, organized a Moodle seminar today. I did two presentations in the morning (both of them in Dutch).

The first one was titled: “Moodle 2.0, een sneak preview”. I discussed the new features that will appear in Moodle 2.0 and did a quick demo of how you can use the repository API to pull in an image from Flickr, hand that in as an assignment and then push it out to GoogleDocs for savekeeping. You can find the slides below:

[slideshare id=1165502&doc=090318moodle20-090318180829-phpapp02]
(view at Slideshare or download a PDF version)

The second presentation was titled: “Moodle, Elgg & Mahara – Samenwerkend Leren, Kennisdelen & Sociale Netwerken – Van Formeel naar Informeel”. I tried to use three cases to explain that e-learning can be more than just a web-based, unfacilitated, content to single learner experience. These were my slides:

[slideshare id=1165542&doc=090318watnogmeeralt-090318181552-phpapp01]
(view at Slideshare or download a PDF version)

I do realise that these slides lose a lot of their meaning without my spoken words. When I posted Slideshare presentations previously, I wrote I would try and record the audio for the next time. I guess I failed…. I am sure there will be another chance.