Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/powell/
From the latest issue of ARIADNE, comes this article by Andy Powell and Phil Barker detailing the development of a LOM-based application profile and the sharing of these resources using the OAI-PMH. Lots of good references, and I found the sections regarding their vocabularies and the issue of identifiers quite helpful. – SWL
http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/cover_page.htm
This paper, titled “Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization” is offered by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education as a “layman’s introduction to latent semantic indexing.” It does start to go into the specifics of how LSI works, but fortunately at an introductory enough level that most of us can grasp. This paper has it all: metadata…ontologies…visualization … what more could you ask for! A helpful introduction to an overlooked technology. See also the NITLE’s LSI project page for pointers to PERL-based LSI software. (Thanks to Bruce Landon for the tip.)- SWL
New to me was this search engine that focuses solely on sources of scientific information and returns results either from qualified web sites or from only scientific journals. It points to a different strategy for finding learning resources – highly constrained and vetted search catalogs that instead of relying on metadata simply use good search engines on the already qualified catalog. Some might claim that this falls into the same human scalability trap as Yahoo-style directories, but in my mind it is actually the happy medium between such directories and full-scale internet searching that has little or no knowledge of the quality of the information and relies on (falliable, vis a vis the ‘pagerank blog effect‘)algorithmic techniques like ‘pagerank‘ to calculate the relevancy of a resource…
Continue reading “Scirus – science-specific search engine”
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
Not specifically ‘ed tech’ but pretty nifty – you can now keyword search the wayback machine. Here’s an old project I worked on when I was at The Banff Centre that I thought was otherwise lost forever. – SWL
– via [ResourceShelf]
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3718
Short thought-provoking piece about whether we will see a reduction in the role currently played by relational databases, specifically in relation to issues like indexing, because of the ever onwards march of processing speeds. Indexing systems are inherently less efficient then structured searching, but at a certain point that may appear to matter less in the face of insane processing speeds. – SWL
Via Mark Oehlert’s mailing list e-clippings (there must be some reason he has for keeping that list and his blog separate?) comes reference of this immensely cool Flash demo of a ‘visual search engine’ (I’m not sure what else to call it). Once you get through the flash intro, click on the ‘Camera Finder Demo’ on the bottom of the left-hand nav. It doesn’t seem like much until you start changing the parameters in the search menu to the right.
These guys are building apps fro visualizing financial data as well as product catalogues like this. They seem to be working at the nexus of XML and Flash. – SWL
o.k., last one from this site, I promise, but this really tickled my fancy – at the top of their monthly newsletter the folks at Web Lab highlight “This month’s weirdest Googling that brought people to the Web Lab site.” Not only is this a funny use for this underused data that most of us get from our web usage analysis programs, but by citing the exact words again on their site they basically increase the likelihood of being found again with this bizarre terms (though David Lynch seems to rank supreme as the ‘czar of bizarre’) – SWL
This isn’t directly an educational technology issue, but the Google toolbar has become such a major part of many web searchers interfaces that this might be generally of interest. In addition to many of the now expected search features (constrained catalogues, multimedia searches) the toolbar also allows you to search zip codes, area codes and use the babelfish translation service). – SWL
– via [ResourceShelf]