Purchased too many chairs at IKEA last month. Chairs sit in living room for three weeks before finally listing on Craigslist. Portlander purchases chairs with her roommate earlier this week.

Few days go by.

Long-time climbing friend from high school contacts me out of the blue today via SMS. Haven’t talked to him in four years or more. Knows I’m living in Brooklyn. He’s living in Brooklyn too. Tells me story of how one of his friends purchased chairs on Craigslist. Is asked whether, off chance, he knows Daniel Bachhuber.

Boom, small world.

Head upstairs into my apartment.

Another friend txts and asks whether I want to get roommate birthday pizza in West Village and then hit the bars. Feeling social again. Take subway back into the city. Arrive at Numero 28 before others and request a table for five. “Oh no, six,” my friend clarifies, “one other dude is going to join.”

Wait at the table 10 minutes.

Boom, up walks long-time climbing friend. “Oh, no way. Do you know Tyler?”

Even smaller world.

Money quote on Romenesko today from a Chronicle article covering the techies doing it in-house.

In preparation for the upcoming semester at CUNY, we’re putting together a guide to popular web collaboration tools and identifying ways they might be used in the classroom.

In house, we’ll offer blogs for student and classroom use from a WordPress 3.0 multisite instance. On the main website, we’ll have a customized version of BuddyPress with groups, profiles, status updates, and activity streams to start, and courses, assignments, etc. later on. We also have a pretty extensive PBwiki site, and might possibly offer a hosted version of Etherpad.

The guide will offer a concise introduction to these tools, as there’s no use in reinventing the wheel. What I think is more important, though, is offering ideas of how the tools might be used and examples of related experiments at other universities.

For instance, students might use Etherpad to collaboratively take notes and share links during a class, and then publish those notes to the class blog at the end so that everyone has access to them for studying. Once published, those notes could be automatically pulled into the wiki page acting as the living course syllabus.

Other ideas that came to mind this morning:

• Students can write an introductory post at the beginning of the course detailing their background and what they hoped to learn in the coming semester. The class could use all of these to collaboratively develop the syllabus while also identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each human asset.
• Professor could post requirements for upcoming assignments and students can ask questions about it. The questions get answered once publicly, instead of a dozen times by email, and are stored in association with the assignment.
• Professors can use the blog to pull in learning materials from other sources and spark conversation on top of the content. Instead of duplicating efforts, they should focus on what they do best.
• Students can use the blog as an open research notebook, or for updates on a story in progress, and people both within the school and outside of the school can give feedback or offer suggestions.

Being able to point to examples, however, will be the secret sauce.

Howard Rheingold has a wiki for his Comm 182/183 classes that includes learning expectations, information on assignments, pages for each class session, and group project pages (behind an authentication wall).

Suzi Steffen’s J361 class uses a WordPress.com blog for posting assignment requirements, posting story ideas, posting updates on stories in progress (especially valuable: things learned along the way), posting completed assignments, and media analysis. They also use Twitter as a light-weight backchannel for the class:

Related to this, Clay Shirky held a public brainstorming session at the beginning of the year on designing college from scratch that generated several useful suggestions and is worth reading through for inspiration.

What ideas and examples are we missing?

Late Wednesday night, well technically the first thing on my birthday Thursday, we tagged Edit Flow v0.5.1. It’s a maintenance release fwithor things like backwards compatibility with WordPress 2.9.x, no email notifications for posts with status “auto-draft”, and having the editorial calendar follow normal WordPress user capabilities for editing posts (fixing this). It also means we’re going to start work on v0.6: support for custom post types, a more powerful editorial calendar, and custom post tasks a bit like Basecamp.

Bora Zivkovic, A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem:

What Seed Media Group should be doing, what every media group should be doing, is become a tech-oriented company (one of the reasons PLoS is successful is that it is essentially a technology-rich publishing company, with an incredible and visionary IT/Web team working with the editorial team in driving innovation).

Quite similar to what Michael Young of The Times said in March. You are not a newspaper, you are a news organization. You are not a media company, you are a technology company.

Photos are awesome. I’ve been meaning to set up a dedicated photoblog for quite a while now so that I could help contribute to the wider pool of imagery on the web. It was going to be a WordPress install with a super minimalist theme, functionality to pull out EXIF and other photo metadata, and even use a custom plugin for posting from Tweetie using the TwitPic API. Media assets would be portable throughout the web with oEmbed. All of my data would be structured, on my server, and completely under my control.

Alas, this is a project yet to be completed. The long-awaited iPhone 4 arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted a functional solution right away. Thankfully, Flickr holds the same libertarian data portability views as I do. They also have a slick iPhone application where I can add metadata to my heart’s content.

Feel free to track my world in pictures.