This blog post is enabled with knowledge building tools. Specifically, this post uses the Progressive Inquiry KB typeset. Feel free to experiment. The comments that contain this KB discussion aren’t a good example of KB, but rather demonstrate the functionality of the Knowledge Building plugin for Wordpress.
Why is PHP so damn ugly?
One reason must be its history, as it started out as a simple function library for one man, who had no academic training on programming language design.
We’d need more people to join this knowledge building session to actually generate some value out of this.
hehe this is fun….
What is the relationship between this conversation and the blog post? Is the idea to update the post as some sort of summary of thoughts that people share here?
Good question. The original idea was that the post is the context for the inquiry. So it would match “Course context” in Fle3. And the actual inquiry is done in the comments.
I dare to use “sicentific explanation” knowledge type in here.
In Fle4 the blog post is the “context” that is presenting the area people are expected to study. It can be a short presentation of something that lead people to set-up “problems” related to it.
We have not thought to update the context post – the blog post but definitely to come-up with some summary of the knowledge building. When the participants have found solutions to the problems their set they may write a new blog post out of the results and continue knowledge building around it.
Öh… uhh… colours and everything. – Teemu
Teemu, you’re using knowledge types improperly. This place is not for chatting, but for purposeful knowledge building and progressive inquiry.
Good going, guys! I really dig the idea that you could use knowledge types within an ordinary blog post. I think it’s important that this type of reflection can be done in a context where ppl are anyway, so that you do not have to log in to some “magical learning environment” to start reflecting..
Hmm… is this now my explanation or evaluation… this is a tough one. Maybe Teemu’s “misuse” of the tool shows that we need types also for chattingandtweetnig! Emoticons are limited…
Well, the whole KB context for this thread is quite vague. Bad pedagogical implementation on the part of “admin”, whoever he is.
But yes, maybe we should add the knowledge type of “metacomment” back. The original reason for taking it out was that everyone tended to use just that. But on the other hand, studies show that a certain percentage of all online dicussions are purely social, and not on topic. So it might make sense to have metacomments… Or even “social comment” might make sense, so that they can be later filtered out when reflecting or analyzing the interaction.
Refactoring the whole database structure, breaking previous comments…
Went and manually edited the previous database info to match the new schema. Now they work again.
We now have support for any and all knowledge type sets exported from Fle3.
Is there any change to have another instance of this running somewhere with the latest additions?
This is the instance that runs with the latest additions. Why do you need something else? I can give you access to the blog admin site, so you can start new posts (and thus, new knowledge building contexts), if you want.
What’s the best way to organize the knowledge building for the student. For example, in FLE3 there was a webtop that students could easily add comments to. If students used something like a wiki as their webtop, is there a way to link a specific comment to the wiki, rather than the whole post?
Each comment has an anchor. Currently you can click on the timestamp of the comment to get a link directly to that comment. There’s no view to look at a single comment, at least not yet.
If it’s needed, we can figure out how to do that.
This is a test.
I have found some information…
I would like to find out why/how…
I am interested in studying why/how…
Testing database functionality…
Ensayando opciones
[...] I then tested the plugin on my Wordpress site. [...]
It looks like pingbacks from other blogs appear in the middle of a KB discussion. Is this good?
We have learned that…
We came up with the conclusion that we want to change the colors.
What are your thoughts about FLE4?
Thanks for asking Dave.
–Well I love it’s look–more visually compact than FLE3,
–easier interface to use
-–doesn’t go to a different page when leaving a comment so I can think more about contribution and less about, ‘where was I now?’.
–Is there an easy way to compact a thread and all responses ‘below’ it (in a heirarchical sense)?
–Is there a way to have a user database, so that only members of a pre-defined class are able to post and then ones username is automatically entered as the poster? This is important for security/accountability.
Thanks for asking, Dave. We already have a UI prototype for sorting the thread in various ways (similar to Fle3). Collapsing of thread parts has not been thought about, but might be useful to add. Thanks for the tip.
This demonstration blog is open for anyone to comment, but nothing stops you from configuring your own Wordpress installation to require authenticated users for commenting. Or even require logging in before seeing the blog contents. And plugging a custom Wordpress installation to use LDAP or other methods to hook to an existing user database shouldn’t be a problem either.
Thanks Tarmo, I’ll look into it. Another couple thoughts, small though they are:
– a bullet list tool is nice–enables people to think/communicate via lists.
– a cancel button that could be used to reverse the cool opening up of the space when you hit the ‘reply’ button. A few students and I were wishing for that functionality when we first started using the plone dialog system.
–is there an easy way for, ideally, the user to set blog width, say in pixels or percent of browser width? If not, how about for the admin? I’ve not yet used word press.
–by putting the Name, Mail and Website fields side by side, information density, in a positive sense, would increase.
– would you provide the same editing capabilities that you had with FLE3? I like to add the word, “Question” to the “problem” knowledge type.
But really, this is an awsome tool. I really love the visually tighter interface. Any way I could integrate this into my Plone site w/out too much customization?
Looking forward to testing this out–where will you post when you are ready for beta testing?
Thanks for asking Dave. Well I love it’s look–more visually compact than FLE3, easier interface to use–doesn’t go to a different page when leaving a comment.
Oops–didn’t mean to start a new thread here but respond to the other…