My Ph.D. thesis defence is scheduled for Friday, May 2, at 2 PM, in room 5340 of Pavillon André-Aisenstadt (see picture) at Université de Montréal. The title of my thesis is "A Socio-Technological Approach to Facilitating Knowledge Sharing Across Disciplines", and my talk (in French) will chiefly be about the interdisciplinary knowledge sharing problem and how such tools as weblogs, wikis, and ontologies may help alleviate it. Everyone is welcome to attend!
I'm glad to report that Professor Tommaso Toffoli of Boston University has accepted to act as external examiner for this thesis. He himself will be giving a talk (in English, I think) at 3:30 PM on Thursday, May 1, either at room 5340 or 3195, entitled "A Knowledge Home: Personal knowledge engineering for normal people". Here's the first paragraph of his abstract (which you can find in its entirety near the end of this page):
We have started crafting and disseminating the elements of a new cultural package (tools, skills, and traditions) which will help ordinary human individuals---ie, not only nerds and geeks---cultivate and enjoy an extended personal information space---a "knowledge home", as it were. The computer will materially help manage this extended space by providing storage capacity, software tools, and processing power. But these resources will have to be matched, on the human individual's side, by substantial new competencies---a "computational literacy", as it were---whose acquisition, like that of ordinary literacy, will be encouraged and made possible by the Knowledge Home culture.
This sounds really interesting (and a little Spike Hall-ish, might I add).
In case you're near Montreal and are interested in attending my defence or Prof. Toffoli's talk, here are pictures detailing how to get there by car and by subway.
Dan Bricklin has been contemplating the entrails of the Creative Commons licenses, and advises us to be careful about the responsibility that is entailed by their use.
The Creative Commons licenses say, in effect, "After checking, I guarantee no one will sue you if you copy my work, with some restrictions". What many casual webloggers really want to say is "I guarantee I won't sue you if you copy my work, with some restrictions".
Think of an organization as a single-celled animal. Blogs increase the surface area of the cell, help nutrients flow across its membrane, and promote multicellular cooperation.
My Ph.D. thesis defence is scheduled for Friday, May 2, at 2 PM, in room 5340 of Pavillon André-Aisenstadt (see picture) at Université de Montréal. The title of my thesis is "A Socio-Technological Approach to Facilitating Knowledge Sharing Across Disciplines", and my talk (in French) will chiefly be about the interdisciplinary knowledge sharing problem and how such tools as weblogs, wikis, and ontologies may help alleviate it. Everyone is welcome to attend!
