Hier soir avait lieu, à la Bibliothèque nationale, la troisième remise des prix de l'IREC, l'Institut de recherche en économie contemporaine

Quelques 25 000$ en prix furent offerts aux auteurs de thèses de doctorats et mémoires de maîtrises.

Le premier prix était remporté par le sociologue Maurice Lévesque, auteur d'une thèse qui avait déjà l'an dernier été honorée au niveau canadien comme l'une des meilleures thèses de l'année. Sur la question du capital social, la thèse de Maurice est disponible in extenso sur le site, en plus d'être présentée en résumé en anglais, français et espagnol.

On retrouve aussi sur ce site plusieurs documents importants en plus d'y avoir accès à tous les travaux soumis au concours depuis trois ans, soit quelques 150 mémoires et thèses.

Le capital social, les relations de partenariat dans le domaine de la santé et la concertation interministérielle dans l'élaboration des projets de lois sont parmi les thèmes touchés par les lauréats. Pour dire que l'économie de l'IREC est prise dans le sens large !

9:42:39 PM    

Les vérificatrices nous innondent de rapports ces temps-ci ! Après le rapport fédéral, qui lui aussi s'inquiétait des indicateurs de santé...

• Gouvernance des ressources informationnelles dans le secteur de la santé et des services sociaux
• Certification des indicateurs de santé

Communiqué de presse Rapports du vérificateur général [Gouv Qc]

6:28:11 AM    

Bonne idée Christophe ! En attendant je me tappe le texte  anglais car je voudrais bien introduire (éveiller ?) quelques "veilleurs" de mon réseau à cette tendance

Grande histoire du cybercarnet

Doc Searls: "I see my blog as a kind of fireplace." [Scripting News]

L'article le plus complet et en profondeur que j'aie rencontré jusqu'à maintenant pour documenter le phénomène du cybercarnet. L'auteur y retrace sa conversion au journal web, les débuts du phénomène et les raisons qui assurent la popularité explosive des cybercarnets. On y retrouve entre autres :

• une explication de la symbiose cybercarnet-Google
• le rôle clé des agrégateurs de nouvelles
• quelques statistiques intéressantes sur les trois grands logiciels de carnet et les autres à surveiller (avec un biais très net en faveur de la plateforme Linux)

Une abondance de liens et de documents de soutien. Tout pour éclairer la lanterne de quiconque cherche à comprendre et exploiter le phénomène.
[Co-construction des savoirs à IDITAE]

Bon si je comprends bien, cet article cherche sa traduction francophone  ? :))) Je viens de lui glisser un petit mot pour avoir une autorisation. Ce pourrait être une occasion de "Co-construire" un petit cadeau sur un wiki où on pourrait aussi parler de SPIP ? [xtof. Carnet Web.]

6:28:11 AM    

Rather than quote the whole posting in all its glory, I'll simply point directly to Pat Delaney's post about Net-networking between schools and libraries. It involves blogging, news aggregators, 8th grade poets, jazz, and Love Your Library month (which, BTW, is February, but I hereby grant you license to love your library the other 11 months of the year, too).

Too damn cool. [Jenny Levine]

Ha... I have "quoted the the whole posting in all its glory"... because it is "too damn cool" to be missed. ;-) [Sebastian Fiedler]

6:27:17 AM    

Last week, I completed the teaching of a course called "advanced coding for Manila"... or something like that. We spent the last day going over news items (blogging) and manila's discussion features. Since becoming interested in blogging I have seen potential for secondary instructors, but have strayed from advertising it to elementary educators. One of my elementary school webmasters that was taking the class became very interested in the idea, and after discussing it with him, I became excited as well.

As we have tried to make websites more and more manageable all of the time, we are really past the point of making it simpler, technically. It is now so easy to type your content and hit the submit button, that I'm convinced through experience that if someone isn't doing it, they would not do it regardless of the situation. You could give them a pen and a simple form to fill out and they would be the ones that never would get around to completing it. Once a simple solution for updating web pages has been delivered, it becomes pretty hard to convince me that the reason web pages aren't being updated is because of the solution. So what questions DO you start asking? How about, "was there ever content to go here in the first place, or are we creating houses with no buyers and then getting mad when we can't find anybody to move in?"

Whenever you begin talking development of web sites, the first thing that gets asked is "who is your audience?". I think that same question has to be asked when a content management solution is being provided. Sadly, this is not a question that can be asked of the people to whom the solution will be provided. School administrators nearly always have grand ideas of the content that thier educators will place on the web and want web sites built that are big enough to accomodate it. Teachers also have big ideas and dream of creating their "classroom on the web". In the end however, very few teachers find the time or passion to work faithfully on thier site and even fewer administrators give their time to it.

The simpler we can build a web site, while still providing a place to which teachers can post information, the more successful we can be. The elementary teacher to which I referred earlier, proposed building a front page that was a log format to which all teachers, administration would have access to post announcments, etc. We could then, off of that page, build a couple of static pages that contained school and contact information, as well as a link to their calendar.

I really feel that this model could have great success because it focuses all of the changing content of the site, except for the calendar data, on to one page. This model does not require or encourage visitors to hunt and search the website for some teachers page buried 8 levels deep, but rather constantly provides up-to-date information right on the front page. A page that provided such easy access to news about everything going on would only encourage people to visit the site knowing that they were not going to have to browse around for things.

I hope that we can get a school website following this model off the ground in the next semester and I look forward to seeing how it works, both for the content providers and the content readers. [Brian Fitzgerald]

Brian talks about a really important topic here. The most underestimated challenge is the maintenance of Webpublishing projects over time. Even if a great technical solution has been put into place, the overall publishing process seems to be smooth and easy, it takes time and effort to build up new habits of work and communication.

Over the last few months I have worked with a local community project on a small Manila Website with a set up that is very close to the one that Brian describes above. The site is now mostly maintained by two ladies who had very little computer knowledge when we started. It was interesting for me to see what these ladies had to struggle with. Even after they had already mastered some of the basics of Webpublishing via the Manila interface, it took them a good while to realize how they could use community events, etc. as opportunities for content creation. From my point of view this was more a conceptual problem than a lack of technical skills. [Sebastian Fiedler]

6:27:17 AM    

Working with Movable Type. For the most part it is enjoyable. I just wish developers would put macro script examples in context of the larger template (screenshots). I have had the time going back into my Blogging in the Barrio site and checking out references to other sites and resources that have piqued my interest over the year. I have had pretty good luck in that most sites still exist for the most part. I think my disruptivetechnology site will be about the tools and blog services end and I am thinking of leavign blogging in the Barrio for my stories and rants. http://www.disruptivetechnology.net/blog/ [Albert Delgado]

6:27:17 AM    

cool. A snapshot from the abecedarianGeek Radio blog:

The first two subscriptions are significant. Karen C. and I have started mlkReflections, a private site reserved for our thinking through blog-letizing mlk staff through our library and tech lab. Today, after filming a stunning performance by eighth grade poets accompanied by the SF Jazz Education Program in Bill Settles' classroom, I suggested that we try to replicate such a performance as a culminating event for Library Lovers' Month. On my Radio aggregator I found this news posting from Karen on 'reflections':

Let's use the out-reach band to accompany students reading a passage  from a favorite book.  Students introduce themselves, read the title and author of the book, and state why they chose/like the passage they are about to read.  Jazz music accompanies the students reading! What a great way to promote reading and music appreciation.  An inter-disciplinary activity during the month of February (Love of Reading month!)

'Jazz-ed Readers!' Immediately after that posting, I met with sfpl Teen Librarian Marcel Twizeyemungu. He'll be running a 10 week long "love your library" December through February program for all of our 8th. graders, emphasizing book talks on high school reading list titles and, assisted by us, ensuring that all mlk 8th. graders have valid and cleared library cards before graduation. Oh, and Marcel left with a blog - Jazzing Up Reading, also subscribed to on aG. We'd like to wind up with our 'jazzed readers' performing at the sfpl Main's Koret Auditorium during National Library Week in April.

This is Net-networking at its best - locally rooted, digitally accessible from anywhere. And it's also about partnering, an essential but overlooked ingredient of good learning and good teaching. [Pat Delaney]

Pat Delaney is exploring useful applications of RSS aggregation for collaboration and partnering... [Sebastian Fiedler]

6:27:17 AM    

Via this interesting article on Educational Technology and Academic Labor at Workplace Journal via OLDaily.  The VKP presents teachers and students in a kind of cognitive apprenticeship where the teacher is, among other things, making their learning visible.  Hmm...why do I see weblogs everywhere? B-) [David Carter-Tod]

6:27:17 AM    

If I taught creative writing I would set my students this task: Start a fictional blog or web diary that's about a specific event (the birth of a child, the end or beginning of an affair, jealousy, a new job, a death) or goal (a lover, a new job) or desire. Use The Date Project and Letters Never Sent as examples, but let yourself be creative and fictional. You will need to plan the starting point before posting your first post, but feel free to let the story develop as you go. Write at least a post each day for three or four weeks. Consider taking part in the blogging community by listing your blog in blog or journal directories, linking to other blogs and allowing comments to your blog. Then bring the blog to a close through some means that makes sense in story terms.

I'm intrigued by the idea of time-limited blogs. Project blog. A story that develops according to rules set at the start, or according to daily whims, and yet a story that has a certain direction and cohesion. A story that includes other voices. [Jill Walker]

6:27:16 AM    

How will the concept of blogging or personal publishing evolve over the next few years?

On a cultural level, I think the perception of weblogging as hobby will certainly shift as more people realize that weblogging serves as a powerful news and marketing tool. This does not necessarily mean that webloggers will sell out. Instead, I think that there will be some sort of fork between weblogging and personal publishing. At this moment, these two terms are rather synonymous; in the next few years, we're going to see a focus on microcontent provided by the individual and an emphasis on the tools that will allow us to create and access such content. Technologically, I think we're going to see a greater interest in the Semantic Web and as a result, a need for very simple, yet powerful tools with metadata integration.[sxsw 2002]

This is an interview with the Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, the company behind the personal publishing software Movable Type...[Sebastian Fiedler]

6:27:16 AM