Wednesday, September 01, 2004

According to News.Com, Philadelphia is considering a city-wide wireless network. Wow. That would instantly make Philly the place to be. I never thought I could possibly say that. Here's another thought for Republicans to consider. Imagine if the trillion dollars we're pouring into Iraq infrastructure had been put into providing across-the-board wireless in every major US city. I bet it wouldn't even cost a trillion. And think about the economic gain. It's the difference between pouring money down a hole, and investing. [Scripting News] 4:59:44 PM      Google It!.

Verizon Starts Selling World Phone to Consumers. NEW YORK (Reuters) - Verizon Wireless said on Wednesday its stores have begun selling a phone from Samsung Electronics 005930.KS that was designed to work on mobile networks around the world. [Reuters: Technology] 3:21:56 PM      .

New ERIC web site. Today marks the launch of the new ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) web site. By my reckoning, ERIC is the world's oldest open-access site, tied with Medline. Coming to ERIC on October 1: "more than 107,000 full-text non-journal documents (issued 1993-2004), previously available through fee-based services only, will be available for free." [Open Access News] 3:20:53 PM      .

ASU Wiki Workshop. Last night, my friend and colleague Tom Foster invited be as a "guest expert" (hah!) for a class he is teaching at Arizona State University, "Social and Ethical Issues in Educational Media". The students were all K-12 teachers, librarians, and media specialists, and they had amazing, heroic energy for a group who had worked all day with kids, then put up with technology stuff from 5-9 PM. The class had already reviewed issues in Copyright and Fair Use, and Tom asked be to take the turn from the messages of what they cannot do in terms of using media found on the web, to one of, what they can do. So I took a cue from Brian Lamb, and set up the who workshop in a wiki, Finding (and Using!) Good Free Stuff. I have been a fan of Brian's approach at UBC of making the wki his presentation outline and activity focus as well. First of all, it is very quick to build. You can easily re-dploy the same content for a different workshop be either editing the titles or copying to a new wiki page. But best of all, you can expose people gently and subtly to the wiki way. Anyhow, the focus of last night's session was to introduce the class to the value of using media resource sites marked by Creative Commons licenses, where the re-usage is more clearly defined. We provided a longer laundry list of media resource sites where they might find relevant media items. Then for an activity, we had them spend time at these sites, locate a media item they can cite as useful in their teaching area, and we had the post a summary to a FoundFreeStuff wiki. I was pleasantly surprises that all 16 of them managed to get one or two wiki items added, despite the freakish things IE was doing to the web pages and the weird things that happen when wiki editing collides (on the spot problem-solving- create a second open wiki page). Some observations: There are a lot of assumptions that just because a web site has the word "Free" in it, or in the URL, that the stuff there really is free to take and use. It is not clearly defined on US Government web sites whether the content truly falls under public domain as being products of the government (more research needed here. None of these teachers knew what a blog or a wiki was. I provided them the URLs for the Stephen Downe's new EDUCAUSE article on Educational Blogging and Brian Lamb's one on wiki spaces. Since they were k-12 teachers, I made sure they saw Will's Weblogg-ed site (it was 9:00 PM when one teacher asked , "What is RSS?"-- that we told her, was another whole class session!). Copyright and use of media is as muddy as ever. [cogdogblog] 9:39:16 AM      Google It!.

Course management software and institutional repositories. Dale Flecker and Neil McLean, Digital Library Content and Course Management Systems: Issues of Interoperation, Digital Library Federation, July 2004. The report of a study group on making course management systems interoperable with repositories like DSpace and Fedora. Excerpt: "With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an ad hoc group of digital librarians, course management system developers, and publishers met under the aegis of the Digital Library Federation to discuss the issues related to the use of digital library content in course management systems. The size, heterogeneity, and complexity of the current information landscape create enormous challenges for the interoperation of information repositories and systems that support course instruction. The group has created a checklist of things that operators of digital content repositories can do to help ameliorate the complexities of such interoperation." (Thanks to Clifford Lynch.) [Open Access News] 9:31:59 AM      Google It!.

Video Game Sales Seen Pausing After Record 2003. Video game sales soared to a record $18.2 billion last year, but the days of strong growth are on pause as players await a new generation of consoles. By By REUTERS. [The New York Times > Technology] 9:20:37 AM      Google It!.

Samsung phones to double as wallets. m-payments thang with Philips [The Register] 9:18:09 AM      Google It!.

Educational Blogging - Stephen Downes, Educause Review. ....In the hands of teachers and students, blogs become something more again. The Web is by now a familiar piece of the educational landscape, and for those sites where personal publishing or chronologically ordered content would be useful, blogs have [Online Learning Update] 9:14:13 AM      Google It!.

Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not - Brian Lamb, Educause Review. ...In 1999, the World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee looked back on the previous decade and lamented: “I wanted the Web to be what I call an interactive space where everybody can edit. And I started saying ‘interactive,’ and then I read in the m [Online Learning Update] 9:13:10 AM      Google It!.

Information routing. In last week's column, I mentioned del.icio.us, Joshua Schachter's "social bookmarking" service. Since then, I've explored the service more deeply in a series of blog entries. Using del.icio.us, I'm now able to process information in dramatically more efficient ways. ... In a March 2003 column, I wrote about the challenges of doing publish/subscribe at Internet scale. David Rosenblum, who was then CTO of messaging startup PreCache, had described to me an optimization procedure he called "filter merging." The architecture of del.icio.us lends itself to just that kind of optimization. The combination of several trusted human filters, with respect to some topic of interest, yields a powerful merged filter. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] 8:44:44 AM      Google It!.