Welcome to JudyBrown.com

When I grow up, I want to be just like Judy Brown. Judy is the “Emerging Technology Analyst in the Office of Learning and Information Technology (OLIT) at the University of Wisconsin System Administration.” Cool. “Emerging Technology Analyst,” how does one get a job like that? – SWL

Resources comparing different forms of computer mediated communication?

(I’m not really expecting this post to generate any answers, as this site still isn’t quite ready for prime time – I rushed it out the door to fulfil a portfolio requirement for a job I had applied to. Still, I like the idea of posting questions to one’s blog (rather than findings or opinions) as potentially the audience could be quite distributed, diverse, and unknown to you. this last part is probably one of the more fascinating aspects of blogs and knowledge building/collective intelligence. I guess the old time Usenet newsgroups were similar in being able to ask a question to a large audience you didn’t know, but even there you did some pre-selection in the groups you were posting to. Maybe some of the community sites offer similar functionality. Anyways, I digress)

 A colleague sent me an email asking if I had any references he could cite to pieces that argue for the use of web-based discussion forums over email-based mailing lists. My first reaction was to email him my opinion that these shouldn’t be an either/or question, and that the best solutions allowed one to use either mechanism to interact with a discussion. And I am very much a believer in this – it first became clear to me when I saw the hypermail interface to majordomo, and probably should have clicked earlier simply based on how Usenet worked – one could interact with it through an email client or through a ‘news’ client, but the important thing was the discussion.

But all of this got me wondering – where does one find good resources comparing the various CMC/CSCW methods for efficacy? Any starting points truly appreciated. 

(I will get the ‘Comments’ feature working real soon, but if someone does actually read this and want to contribute, they can email me at leslies@island.net) 

reply to Joe Hart’s post on Inspiration Software, Cognitive Maps, and the Web

Joe Hart, who runs the informative EduResources site, posted an interesting piece on the possible use cognitive maps to (as he says) “organize the many web sites that [he’s] identified that relate to higher education online instructional resources. What I want to do is categorize and organize the resources so that the EduResources portal that I’m designing will be easy to use; I want the portal web site to be an effective entryway to online instructional resources for faculty and instructional designers.”

I started drafting a response to Joe directly in email, but then decided it made more sense to just post it here.

Joe’s probably well aware of this movement, but it strikes me that what he is trying to do is similar to what others are trying to accomplish by visualizing Topic Maps, concept maps and other taxonomy visualization projects.

I only follow these peripherally, but my sense is that these things have been evolving for years, and certainly are far more real than when I was first introduced to the techniques and technologies in the early 90’s. But what I find exciting is what I perceive as a movement towards the more organic creation of order, and visualizations that are not pre-set drawings into which we can locate resources and knowledge, but instead representations of semantic meaning that are created dynamically on the basis of some replicable and (eventually) recognizable algorithm or patter and that further improve with use.

In any case, Joe’s post prompted me to dig back and find some URLs that might be of interest on the topic. I definitely appreciate his motivation as I too find myself swamped by the sheer mass of information and the immense inter-connectedness of the various knowledge spaces and domains I work and play in, and long for good visualizations of this complex knowledge. – SWL

Topic Maps

The TAO of Topic Maps – http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html

Easy Topic Maps – http://easytopicmaps.com/index.php?page=TopicMapFaq

LiveTopics for Radio – http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/outlines/liveTopics.html

Ten Taxonomy Myths – http://www.montague.com/review/myths.shtml

Taxonomy and other visualizers

Touchgraph Link Browser – http://www.touchgraph.com/browser/LinkBrowser.html

Wordmap (Taxonomy mapping software, a bit expensive) – http://www.wordmap.com/index.html

Antartica Visual Net (hierarchical directory visualization software, also likely expensive) – http://antarctica.net/products.html

Conzilla (Prototype Concept Browser) – http://www.conzilla.org/

WebOnto (neat Java-based taxonomy browser, not sure of availability or release status) – http://eldora.open.ac.uk:3000/webonto

and finally, for a completely different kind of blog mapping:

Blogmapper – http://www.blogmapper.com/

‘Through the Web’ Editor Widgets

Really useful reference on WYSIWYG web page editors that are usable over the web (much like what I am writing in right now in Radio8!) More and more there is no excuse for any application that uses forms to create web content not to include this – many are free or cheap components that one can just include in larger applications. – SWL 

The Mail Archive

You can get RSS feeds for mailing lists here. Cf. The Amphetadesk help guide: “If you get a lot of email from mailing lists hosted at Mail-Archive.com, you’re in luck. With over 2500 different lists available, simply find the archive page for the discussion in question and add maillist.rdf to the URL. The result is an RSS feed for AmphetaDesk.”