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Thursday, December 30, 2004 |
Bleary Days for Eyes on the Prize. The part of popular culture that most resembles
education is the documentary. And the cost of making
documentaries has been rising dramatically because of
increased licensing costs. Eyes on the
Prize, for example, "the landmark
documentary on the civil rights movement, is no longer
broadcast or sold new in the United States" because
rights to news clips and other media have expired. This
same scenario, writ smaller, is playing out throughout the
educational community today. Via ArtsJournal. By Katie
Dean, Wired News, December 22, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
10:51:52 PM  Google It!.
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More Free, Open Text. In addition to interesting initiatives such as WikiBooks to publish free content, comes this interesting announcement from the giant Internet Archive:
International Libraries and the Internet Archive collaborate to build Open-Access Text Archives
Today, a number of International libraries have committed to putting
their digitized books in open-access archives, starting with one at the
Internet Archive. This approach will ensure permanent and public access
to our published heritage. Anyone with an Internet connection will have
access to these collections and the growing set of tools to make use of
them. In this way we are getting closer to the goal of Universal Access
to All Knowledge.
By working with libraries from 5 countries, and working to expand
this number, we are bringing a broad range of materials to every
interested individual. This growing commitment to open access through
public archives marks a significant commitment to broad, public, and
free access. While still early in its evolution, works in dozens of
languages are already stored in the Internet Archive's Open-Access Text
Archive offering a breadth of materials to everyone.
::
Technology allows us to provide more enhanced access to these
materials. First would be to offer similar access to Amazon.com's
trademark Search Inside the Book system for public domain books.
Therefore library users would be able to find books that mention
relevant words and phrases without having to have the catalog reflect
each topic.
Beyond those uses, however, we see a new type of library user-- one
that uses computers to analyze and compare materials. Imagine being
able to analyze the changes to the English language over time. Imagine
being able to use the hand translated versions of past books as a way
to train automatic translation technologies so we can more effectively
translate any book into any language. Imagine being able to analyze the
interrelation of papers through their footnotes and links to find new
patterns of thought. Each of these projects is already proceeding using
the digital holdings of the Internet Archive by researchers. As the
Text Archive grows, these researchers will be able to do this over a
much broader range of texts as the public domain is added to the Text
Archive.
Re-read that last paragraph- an exciting vision indeed- the
unbundling of content, enabling the ripping and mixing of content into
new forms...
See the Internet Archive Text Archives for a taste so far [cogdogblog]
9:02:09 AM Google It!.
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Feed2JS Updates: Has Its Own Feed (published via MT). Thanks to some good feedback from suers, I've been able to make some needed corrections to our Feed2JS
(RSS Feeds rendered via JavaScript). Like a Homer Simpson Doh! slap
across the forehead, I realized that while I was faithfully adding to
the main page's history, it certainly could use an RSS Feed to publish
news of its updates.
Now it is there: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/content/feed2js.xml
But a story behind the story.
I could have sat down and hand edited an XML file. I've done it
before. But that is a pain, and getting the dates in the right format
is a double pain. So my conniving scheme was to use MovableType as a
cheap tool for posting new history links as well as auto generating the
feed. It is a simple blog with no web site itself, and no archives- in
fact it exists to publish 3 things- the content file used for the main page
(s text file with merely everything on the page that is not header,
navigation, and footer). This entire site is one PHP file and a
directory of content files that are popped into the template. Just for
grins, my updates now have comments available (keep those cards and
spam coming).
The "blog entries" are the 3 most recent items that are listed as
bullets at the bottom under "Updates". The rest of the blog entries
are spit itnot another content file for the "history" page (all entries after the 3 most recent), and the RSS feed.
So now, when I make an update to my code, I merely publish a new
entry to the mini blog, and it updates the necessary parts of the site.
This is even faster then the older method of manual editing of the
content files.
Using ecto took me about 30 minutes to post the 20 or so entries needed to fill it out.
If you can grasp what blog software can publish, if you can wrestle
and mostly master the templates, then you can exploit it to do all
kinds of web publishing tasks- not your average blog.
[cogdogblog]
9:01:15 AM Google It!.
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College Prep Help That Goes With You.
If you are looking for a way to encourage a teenager to prepare for the
SAT or the ACT, Kaplan has one answer: software that runs on hand-held
computers, cellphones and smart phones. By By THOMAS J. FITZGERALD. [NYT > Education] I th9ink that this is going to be part of the future educational platform mix in a big way -- BL
9:00:30 AM Google It!.
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Flickr: The Land of 10,000 Memes. Pontification on the meteoric popularity of Flickr
is a common past time-- and it makes all the sense in the world of
network hubs, preferential attachment, link fitness, etc (see Thinking About Links...).
Flickr was hardly the first photoblog site (I danced a bit with fotolog and buzznet before flickr even hit the seen) but flickr's design and myriad of uses have made it the Google of the bunch. Well earned.
I was also thinking of some of the blog "memes" that have passed
around, those ideas that spread virally across a social network (What's a neme?). Recent examples include:
* Your personality in 25 links (A-Z): What web sites pop in your browser for each letter of the alphabet?
* 40 questions about 2004 : personal reflections (who has time to answer all of those?)
* My Not So Greatest Playlist : create a party shuffle (random mix) from your digital music collection.
* Grab Book Page 23 Sentence 5 : greab the nearest book you are reading and share the 5th sentence from page 23.
Is there a purpose to this? They are fun and perhaps revealing when put into a larger pool. Why are some bigger and more rampant?
It has all to do with the amount of exposure they get on hubs, and
perhaps how simple they are to join/add to. I was willing to cut and
paste a 10 song list but less eager to write out responses to 40
questions.
Which brings me back to flickr. It's free form tagging tied to
visual, personal images make it the über center for creating memes that
are easy to join. What are flickr memes? Just follow the tags.
* Photos of road signs.
* Photos of cemetaries.
* The 2004 election meme.
* Photos of Eclipses.
* Storytelling.
* Heck, even overweight cats have a meme!
The number of memes here is mind boggling (if your mind is boggled
by memes)- and it is so easy to pitch into a flickr meme. The immense
number of internal flickr links as well as the valuable ways you can
tie your web sites in and out of flickr are key at making it grow into
one of those network hubs that are so critical to scale free networks.
[cogdogblog]
8:58:18 AM Google It!.
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A del.icio.us study (Ideant).
Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this
study attempts to identify some of the information management and
meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification
(a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically,
this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices
that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one
another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group,
apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent
taxonomy. [Edubloggers Links Feed]
8:49:06 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2005 Bruce Landon.
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