Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://www.reload.ac.uk/plex/index.html
Exciting stuff, the first beta of the Plex tool is available for download now. The Plex tool is being developed at the University of Bolton by Phillip Beauvoir, Mark Johnson, Oleg Liber, Colin Milligan, Paul Sharples and Scott Wilson and is the output of the JISC-funded Personal Learning Environments project. Scott Wilson has also posted a powerpoint presentation on the new tool as well. – SWL
I’m feeling kind of silly today, so… via a chock-a-block wiki page from the always fabulous Jenny Levine came a link to the great community building exercise, the Librarian Trading Cards flickr pool (collect them all!), which in turn led to the amazing set of flickr toys and specifically the trading card maker that’s been used to create all these nifty cards (you know, my english profs used to just slam me for run on sentences, but I don’t care, it’s more fun this way!) And I just couldn’t help myself,, so here’s El Guapo‘s card (the photo for which was taken by my 6 year old son, it’s amazing how few photos of myself I actually have on my computer, oh yeah, those run on sentences again…) – SWL
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2006-04-10-12/
Lots of value here for decision makers and others struggling to make arguments for the adoption of open source in higher ed (and lots of ‘Stevenote’ inspired presentations for those tired of reading lots of text on slides). Too many to really go into detail, but I quite liked “Your Open Source Strategy Sucks!” (catchy title!) and really appreciated the honesty that was apparent in James Dalziel’s Lessons from LAMS: The highs and lows of going open source. – SWL
Apologies for these administrative posts – my email’s back up. Thanks to those who tried to work around the outtage. – SWL
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/
“This short paper analyses their content and shows that a requirement to deposit research output into a repository coupled with effective author support policies works in Australia and delivers high levels of content. Voluntary deposit policies do not, regardless of any author support by the university.”
Kind of says it all. Or does it? A lot of people interpret the lessons of Web 2.0 to be “only services which allow people to do what they already want to do (and don’t make them do stuff they don’t want to do) will be successful.” This seems fine to a point, but isn’t it possible that sometimes there do need to be behaviour changes? Or is it that any solution that requires coercion to get behaviour changes hasn’t found the right value proposition for its users? – SWL
http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/
2006/03/do_students_act.html
Glenda Morgan points to an article which questions the moniker of ‘podcasts,’ as apparently 80% of downloaded recordings never make it off the desktop and onto a mobile device (or worse, are never listened to at all).
I think ‘personal publishing’ is a great thing, whether it be blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, etc. What has really annoyed me, though, about podcasts as a phenomenom and as hype, especially in the context of podcasting ‘lectures’ or other ‘knowledge transfers,’ is that it replicates what is already not a very good model of how to distribute information/learning – the synchronous spoken lecture.
So sure, having a recording means you don’t have to actually be in the classroom. But the assumption this rests on is that if you had been able to be in the classroom, that sitting there listening to someone drone on was actual a useful or effective or efficient way to learn anything. So you can fast forward the recording to find the good bits – have you ever tried to listen to something in that way? Unlike say video, where there are cues you can conceivably process at high speed that something has changed which might warrant checking in again (say a ‘scene’ change) most audio, and certainly most recordings of someone just talking monotonously, don’t avail themselves easily to such high speed scanning.
I will get more excited about podcasting as voice recognition and search technologies, and automated voice transcription technologies improve – podcasts then become a rich source to mine with tools that can allow you to zone in on what you need without having to sit through lots of what you don’t. And maybe the fact that we’ve attached them to RSS feeds will allow for rich and relevant recommendations to emerge as we are starting to see in the blogosphere (especially if they get SHORTER!). (It sure to hell ain’t going to happen by asking people to write reams of metadata about their podcasts!) And maybe I’m just a grumpy old git (this is entirely possible) who needs to get an iPod and start commuting to work, or develop partial shared attention skills at my desk, to appreciate the value that podcasts can bring to my life. Maybe. Never say never, right? So maybe this isn’t the only post on podcasts I will ever write. But it’s the last one for now. I have to go back to what this post distracted me from. – SWL
http://www.downes.ca/hiatusfaq.htm
Just had to chuckle at this – given Stephen’s readership I can easily understand the need for this, as his abrupt announcement likely triggered an avalanche of concerned emails, but I’m not sure that Gandalf issued an FAQ (this now being my new mantra, not “What would Sun Ra do?” but instead “What would Gandalf do?“) Although if he had, it would likely be as cryptic as this one 😉 – SWL
Scott Wilson’s recent presentation on “SOA and web 2.0 things” is well worth it even for you grizzled remix veterans of the blogosphere, if only for the most succinct and helpful explanation of the e-Framework I’ve yet to read (“A collaborative effort by JISC, DEST, SURF, NZ MoE and others to make sense of web services in education“).
But what really blew my mind was the link to the above service, Postgenomic. If I understand it correctly, in essence it is a service which provides a registry for, and then search across, academic blogs dedicated to life sciences topics. It does so in order to give users a view on what topics are being talked about in those communities, what sites are being linked to, and what academic articles are being reviewed. And the only effort required to participate, as far as I can tell, is the use of a small ‘review’ microformat (that’s right, isn’t it?) that helps the service identify which posts are ‘reviews’ of specific academic papers.
What this means is that researchers, academics and students in a variety of life science areas can follow which stories their community is finding important, what tags members of their community are using most, (this is a lot closer to what I was writing about last week, though not search based), and get feeds of papers reviewed in their community.
This isn’t the mythical eduglu, and maybe this is something that a system like aggrssive could facilitate for other communities or maybe I’m confused and this is duplicating something already there in more general systems like technorati (though I think not). But hot damn was this exciting for me to see. – SWL
http://webtools.allegheny.edu/gnosh/
So the other gem for me from Bryan’s Educause article was the above Gnosh from Allegheny College. Actually, I’m not sure that it was this tool that excited so much as the idea it inspired.
One of the things that has always bugged me about broad tagclouds like the one on del.icio.us or flickr is that, well, they are really broad – there is nothing connecting all of the words appearing in the tagcloud other than that they were used by any user of one of these services, and the userbases on these services are totally heterogenous. So sure, I can see generally what the popular tags for all flickr or del.icio.us users are, but why should I care? What I do care about is what the tags used in my particular community are.
How many departments webpages or college portals provide search boxes to Google (or even their own sets of pages)? Lots, right? In both cases, the users using these search boxes have lots more in common than the entire set of users across flickr or del.icio.us, and in fact in cases like portals we typically can get real specific about group memberships and affinities. So if instead of passing their searches directly through to the search engines we first capture locally what the terms they were using, all of a sudden we can build tagclouds of search terms that are locally relevant to that community of users.
So as someone in the Faculty of Science taking this specific Biology course, I might come to my campus portal and beside my personalized search box see a tagcloud of terms that other people in the Faculty of Science had recently used (including my professors). Sort of like displaying the attention of my particular affinity group, and potentially opening up interesting terms I may not have thought to search on.
Probably not very 2.0’ish, and likely someone will scream ‘oh the invasion of privacy’ (though nobody is forcing you to use this search interface) but what I like about the idea is that it is imminently doable right now with almost no new tech – whether it be this gnosh piece or one of the other tag cloud pieces emerging out there, the only other piece would just be a small script that wrote the search term to a database table before passing it on to whatever search engine you were using (that could be configurable). Someone please tell me if this already all exists and I’m just being dense before I go off and spend the little time I have free to using my terrible development skills to hack this together, please….
(And as an afterthought – why can’t I see all of the tags used by myself and people I list as friends in flickr – or can I? how about all of the tags used by members of the same group? Maybe this is something that is already being done through the API?) – SWL
I love that both Rob Wall and D’Arcy referenced Gandalf descending into the mines in regards to Stephen’s announcement that he is on hiatus. It brought to mind a Gandalf quote:
“You can only come to the morning through the shadows.”
(Though my favourite Gandalf quote still remains “He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.” I wonder if our Gandalf feels that way.)
See you on the other side Stephen. – SWL
