Been playing with edna’s new service for Aussie educators, me.edu.au. Kerrie Smith alerted me to its launch the other week and although I am an infrequent user of educationau online services, I wanted to have a closer look. Basically, it’s social networking for teachers and it doesn’t seem restricted to only Australians as you can see if you look carefully in my image. There’s a whiteboard and a tab that allows you to join various community forums. I found Jo McLeay in my wanderings, and tonight I added Simon Brown and Russel Montgomery from my twitter network. It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes and whether any educators who spend their online time within this walled garden will branch out a bit more onto the open web.
Hi Graham
Well, I joined up. http://me.edu.au/p/johnlarkin
I think this is a great idea. It will be neat to connect with other teachers locally. There are not many bloggers in my neck of the woods. I hope this initiative will provide another avenue for reaching like minded souls.
I dropped Edna an email. Basically I shared some ideas. Overall it is a great idea but I think the Communities tag cloud will become unworkable as interests are added at the Profile level by members only to discover that they already exist under a slightly different spelling or acronym on the Communities page. Look at the various technology and elearning communities that have already been set up.
The profile image is distorted on the full profile page. It is downsized to 100 x 100 pixels upon upload only then to be upsized to 200 x 200 pixels on the full profile page. The resulting image is pixellated.
The Add Feeds page needs to be made user friendly so that the data entry field also recognises RSS feed addresses that begin with feed:// as well as http://
I am presently wearing a t-shirt that says “Grumpy Old Man”.
Best wishes
John Larkin
Hey Graham,
Good to see you checking out me.edu - tis a modest start but with big plans. Sorry to hear you call it a ‘walled garden’ - I know the team would welcome feedback on specific ‘wall-ness’. Have a play with the RSS features (both in and out), the aim is certainly to be open.
While you are at it, take a peek at the web2ools community I have created (me.edu.au/c/web2ools). Would value your thoughts on how it might evolve to present a list of current/popular/useful web2.0 tools for educators less enlightened than yourself.
Take care
Fang - Mike Seyfang
Mike, I hope that John’s feedback above in the comments is useful and certainly reflects more thought than my post. Hmmm… the “walled garden” comment is interesting in that in it does depend on your own interpretation of that phrase. I have only really starting playing with this new tool so I thought that it would be hidden from the open web like a number of the SNS tools with which I have some familiarity like FaceBook and Ning, (because I was logging in with my edna ID) but looking closely now I can see that I am wrong. Goes to show my prejudices flare up before I’d taken the time to evaluate things properly!! And it is a tool that I can use to point out at things - I will continue exploring and your diplomatic assistance is appreciated.
Hi Graham,
Thanks for your thoughful post. I’ve written some notes that may interest you: http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/nlothian/2007/12/30/meeduau-feedback/