Sunday, July 25, 2004

When Blogs Soar (Like a Pb Balloon?).  ...In our system, there is pretty much a solitary focus on email as the primary means of sharing information. Some recent surveys have shown that people "want more information" about projects, ideas, etc but at the same time say, "we get too much email". At the same time, e-mail is the only channel most people tune into on a regular basis, even if they are just tossing messages without reading them. Worse, e-mail is the only way people are sharing resources, events, projects- what I have labeled "email attachment disorder" -- and there are major programs and projects in our system well worth sharing that lack any sort of web presence at all.  ...What are the intrinsic self-motivators for people to blog consistently, on a regular basis? It takes some sort of OCD trait to keep up that pace. Blogs that I followed daily a year ago are sputtering, with a frequency posting on the scale of weeks rather than daily or even hourly like it seemed long ago. (see Where Have All the Bloggers Gone?)  ... So this mornings philosophical question is, can blogging be sustained by a wide range of people? Or will it be the realm of the compulsives only?  [cogdogblog]  -- blogging is like the reading the newspaper habit in that when it works if fits into the day because it replaces other news spots that enable one to keep up with the world (intranet or internet).  For ogranizations the network of producers and subscribers needs to be the first channel of choice for keeping up on projects.  Initially the subscription lists could be designed form usage patterns on the institutional phone system.  Also like the institutional phone system everyone needs to have a presence on the system.  In fact one reletively easy implimentation would be to use the phone system to make available an audio (text-to-speech) or voicemail version of the internal blogs so that it is possible to listen the late breaking local project news (filtered as seems personally appropriate to accomodate personal interests).  Over time the organizational systems usage patterns and personal subscriptions lists and searches would provide a rich organizational resource making the present local telephone book seem quite primitive especially in the case of academic organizations.  The presently difficult part is making the blogging part of the screen integrate well with the rest of the workflow including the telephone system.  The Gush p2p implimentation of targeted blogging coupled with instant messaging seems to me to be a step in the right direction for selective information sharing supported by normal real time modes of communicating.   Ultimately the system needs to become workable from a cellphone but this will take some progress in speech recognition as well as the development of strong organizational norms around appropriate use coupled with appropriate screening/filtering options to control the volume.  -- BL 10:15:19 AM      Google It!.

UPPER SADDLE RIVER, N.J., June 29, 2004 - Pearson Education, the world's largest education company, today announced the acquisition of Knowledge Analysis Technologies, a privately held Boulder, Colo., company that provides products and services based on proprietary and patented machine-learning technology for text understanding. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The company will become a business of Pearson Education and will operate two divisions, The Knowledge Analysis Technologies Institute and Pearson KAT. It will continue to be based in Boulder. The current management will remain, including founder and president Dr. Thomas K. Landauer, who will report to Douglas Kubach, president and CEO of Pearson Educational Measurement. Knowledge Analysis Technologies' flagship product, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, is designed to automatically analyze and score standardized writing assessments. "We're very excited to add the knowledge and expertise of the KAT organization to our portfolio of solutions for the educational market," said Douglas Kubach. "We believe KAT's proven, valid and reliable technology offers Pearson many potential applications across the enterprise." -- This is an application of Latent Semantic Analysis technology that produces similarity scoring between submitted essays and standard marked essays and has been demonstrated to be as reliable as instuctor marking of essays.  With the move to Pearson the impressive technology may become much more widely accessible and make a difference in instructor workloads enabling more extensive use of writing assignments in mainstream higher education. --  BL 8:26:02 AM      Google It!.

Government project to boost e-learning in the UK - e-Consultancy. Starting in September, The Distributed eLearning programme will aim to forge links between schools, colleges and universities to foster 'progression' into higher education, while endorsing the Government's targets for expanding the participation of e-lea [Online Learning Update] government greasing the wheels of education in what may well be an effective manner. -- BL 8:06:01 AM      Google It!.

3D Sound by Creator of MP3 [Slashdot:] 7:55:15 AM      Google It!.