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Friday, April 16, 2004 |
The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google. I seem to be into a search engine focus this week so I'll pass along
this article that I first saw in Stephen Downes' OLDaily. The author,
Terence Brooks, provides a more technical analysis of search engine
operations and issues than the introductory NPR audio pieces. JH
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Interesting link sent to me by the author,
Terrence A. Brooks, describing some of the tricks and
tactics used to register content in the Google search
service. The author employs the term 'lay indexing' to
describe the 'plebiscites' used to organize and rank pages
by link freuqency and page rank. The end of the article
looks into the question of the 'meaning' missed by Google,
both because there are areas of the deep web it still does
not harvest, and because the semantics of language do not
translate into a purely text-based search. Interesting.
More papers are
available from the April edition of Information Research,
which came online today. By Terrence A. Brooks,
Information Research, April 13, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
1:46:10 PM  Google It!.
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Updated "Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of eLearning Environments". http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/
VLEFullReport08.doc
Presented as an 'update' to an earlier 1999 report of the same title, it seems actually both an update and a re-working, and in my opinion greatly improved.
After an overview of the current (2003) state of affairs in VLE
adoption in the UK (interesting in it's own right) the authors gone on
to explicate their framework. They base it on two theoretical models of
teaching and learning - Stafford Beer's
Viable System Model (coming from a cybernetic perspective) and Diane
Laurillard's conversational framework. The explication is a bit of a
slog but worth the read, and critical if you were going to buy into
their framework.
They then go on to establish a set of evaluative questions built
around the structural or recursive levels of "The Module," "The
Learner" and "The Programme." Finally they look at a number of current
systems in the light of this framework, including WebCT Vista,
Blackboard Academic Suite
Granada Learnwise, FirstClass, LAMS, COSE and Moodle. These last three
are particularly interesting as all have been heralded for the ways in
which they challenge conventional VLE/CMS models. As a credit to the
report, if not the framework, it manages to recognize the innovations
in these systems and the value they bring without forsaking the
important developments in dealing with enterprise level problems that
the larger commercial CMS have been focusing on.
Finally, they sum up their findings and point to some of the key
developments in VLEs since their 1999 report, including: increased
programme level support, a greater level of flexibility, more thought
given to supporting pedagogical innovation, a greater variety of
student tools, more "Open systems" and some improvement in
accessibility. All of which seems about right. - SWL [EdTechPost]
9:09:46 AM Google It!.
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Wi-Fi on Steroids Heads for U.S..
Residents of Bozeman, Montana, will test a broadband wireless data
service called iBurst that blows away existing offerings. If people
like it there, the service could expand to other parts of the country.
By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]
8:49:53 AM Google It!.
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How to make counting downloads count. Jonas Holmström, The Return on Investment of Electronic Journals - It Is a Matter of Time,
D-Lib Magazine, April 2004. Abstract: "Libraries and publishers are
increasingly using download statistics to measure cost-effectiveness.
Proponents of open access have also used download statistics to prove
that open access journals are more cost-effective than subscription
based journals. In this article, I argue that these calculations are
misleading since they do not consider the age of the articles
downloaded. Some implications and recommendations for standards of
measurement are discussed." [Open Access News]
8:45:44 AM Google It!.
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OA to gray literature. Marcus Banks, Connections between open access publishing and access to gray literature,
Journal of the Medical Library Association, April 2004. Excerpt: "The
potential of open access publication to increase accessibility to
peer-reviewed literature is cause for celebration. As we celebrate, we
should not lose sight of the longstanding challenge of providing better
access to the gray literature that provides an essential complement to
peer-reviewed findings. We do not need to launch an open access
movement to obtain this material, due to its lack of commercial
significance. Instead, the challenge is to develop bibliographic
resources of comparable depth as those available for the peer-reviewed
literature....Despite the challenges ahead, open access will inevitably
become the norm for scholarly communication. In the print-only era,
publishers provided the indispensable function of distribution. In an
electronic age, this indispensability is no longer true. Once a
critical mass of scholars publishes in open access journals, their
colleagues will follow. This is the time when viable business models
for open access publishing will emerge....Just as open access to
clinical literature is only possible in an online era, the CNLP's
research highlights the power of computers to improve access to gray
literature. Health sciences librarians should perceive these challenges
as opposite sides of the same coin: open access removes economic
barriers, and improved indexing of gray literature removes
bibliographic barriers." [Open Access News]
8:40:44 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
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