fredag 25. juli 200311:55:32 AM #
opensourceCMS.com
This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is refreshed on the hour, every hour. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here with no fear of messing anything up. I hope opensourceCMS.com is useful in your quest to find the right software system for your needs.
11:47:14 AM #
9:05:03 AM #
Palm's New PDA Gets Rave Reviews. Palm's new Tungsten T. Also: The wireless industry's latest sidekick in the (losing) battle against local number portability.... Americans prefer cheap cell phones to fancier, more expensive handsets.... all in Unwired News. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]8:52:10 AM #
8:51:19 AM #
An interesting looking course in using blogs & wikis [via carvingCode]
[Later: Let me rephrase that, this is absolutely excellent... a must visit for anyone interested in the use of personal publishing tools in education!]
[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]8:49:52 AM #
torsdag 24. juli 20039:31:26 AM #
tirsdag 22. juli 2003
Thanks to Alf's amazing TouchGraph Audioscrobbler Browser, a dream of mine has come to life. I can now pick a number of bands that I like and find not just the sets of artists that relate to those bands individually, but also identify new artists who are in the intersection of these sets. Play around with it - it's great fun!
In the same vein: this and this.
[Seb's Open Research]3:31:42 PM #
- it is increasingly difficult to keep up the notion of "obligatory curriculum" because of the pace of production of concepts and artifacts, a growing individualization of needs and purposes, and a fragmentation of knowledge domains in general
- we will face more and more situation where there is nobody around who would "set the agenda and to decide what knowledge might be considered and in what sequence"
- in emerging knowledge domains it is not quite clear yet what "comprises the knowledge, skills, and values of the educative experience that meet criteria of excellence that make them worthy of study"
- it is then very hard or impossible to find expert teachers who are "well versed in both the material and the criteria of excellence used in the area of study"
- because of the individualization of learning needs and a growing dependance on digital artifacts it is increasingly difficult to actually design, and therefore control, the "milieu" or context in which learning experiences take place for others
So, what do we do in a situation like this? Do we simply want to sit back and wait until "teachers" or "curriculum" comes to rescue us? How can we deal with all the uncertainties and the lack of guidance we are confronted with? This is where personal Webpublishing offers some interesting potentials for the self-organized learner... [Sebastian Fiedler]
[Seblogging News]3:26:23 PM #
fredag 18. juli 200312:43:02 PM #
onsdag 16. juli 2003Quote: A device that attaches to a normal mobile phone and allows patients to check their breathing and heart rate has been developed by researchers in the US.The device combines an antenna and sensor which can pick up respiratory and heart activity when connected to a mobile phone and placed in front of a patient.
The information could then be sent to a remote health monitoring centre using the existing telephone network.
9:12:52 AM #
In this issue:
Views --
Falling Water, Crashing Windows: Making Computers More School Friendly
Classroom teachers should not have to put up with the architectural equivalent of leaky roofs. By Mary Burns http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/m_burns_1.html
Economies and Diseconomies of Scale in the Information Society
An assessment by means of Situation Room Analysis
By Adamantios Koumpis and Bob Roberts
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/a_koumpis_2.html
8:58:43 AM #
Bits and Bytes May Encode Nature's SecretsIf nature is indeed a set of preprogrammed bits, the Big Bang birth of the Universe may have more in common with a supercomputer downloading gigantic bytes of information than with a massive explosion.
8:49:51 AM #
Mistral Software Private Limited of Bangalore, India, has developed an inexpensive digital handheld device said to be ideal for e-learning applications. It has a color LCD, a 200-megahertz processor, and scalable architecture, and will sell for about $200--less than half the cost of similarly equipped products from Compaq and Palm, the company said.
Quote:It can be used in applications as varied as navigation, health care, games and logistics.Her kan du lese pressemeldingen fra Mistral Software"PDA (personal data assistant) makers the world over have seen a decline in the adoption of their products with cost and functionality being the primary inhibiting factors. This prompted us to design a product with scalable features with significant cost benefits,"
Quote:The device has been designed with a scalable architecture, which can enable manufacturers to customize the features by adding modules like GPS, GSM, 802.11a/b, BlueTooth[dot accent], MP3, PC-MCIA, Hard Disk, Camera etc., while ensuring most of the software and basic hardware remains unchangedThe ultra-sleek basic module, at a thickness of 11mm, runs Embedded Linux on a Samsung ARM9 processor
8:37:02 AM #
mandag 14. juli 200310:28:48 AM #
I want to read this again. Sebastian Fiedler's blogging paper. Wonder if it's changed much from the first draft he put up?
[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]10:28:03 AM #
10:27:37 AM #
10:26:07 AM #
lørdag 12. juli 2003Comment: I just realized that I'm going to be on the road at that time. Fiddlesticks. Nevertheless, check out the wiki. [Serious Instructional Technology]
10:30:56 PM #
New Blog: COP^2: "Smatterings of thought about communities of practice, instructional technology, virtual communities, technology-based training, collaborative learning environments, e-learning, organizational learning, and performance improvement." Part of a series of research projects funded by Masie Center.
[elearnspace blog]10:30:10 PM #
In my paperPersonal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning I speculated that personal Webpublishing could possbibly serve as a proto-language to converse about personal learning processes and collaborative meaning construction. I wrote:
In its rather short history, personal Webpublishing as a practice has already produced an, albeit rather small, vocabulary of its own. Every single day more people get familiar with terms like Weblog, post, permanent link, title, item, category, RSS feed, aggregation, syndication, referrer, time stamp, archive, editor, authoring, topic, trackback, meta-data, comment, outline, and so forth. The dynamic development of the entire field of personal Webpublishing frequently adds new terms and concepts to this emerging mini-language. It might be too early to speculate about the long-term effects of this specialist language on the way we converse about projects of individual and collaborative meaning construction. Nevertheless, I suspect that this growing vocabulary of personal Webpublishing might serve as a proto-language for the conversational construction of a personal language for learning. Its current vocabulary is certainly too limited to model the construction of new meaning but it might provide some conceptual "handles" that could be merged with other existing vocabularies. I am thinking here of Ausubel's (1963) notion of Meaningful Learning, von Glasersfeld's (1995) Radical Constructivist ideas on meaning construction, Piaget's (1972) notion of Perturbation, Assimilation, and Accommodation, Kelly's (1955) Personal Construct Psychology, Harri-Augstein & Thomas' (1991) Learning Conversations framework, Schön's (1987) description of the Reflective Practitioner, and Novak's (1998) Human Constructivism, and other theoretical models of human meaning construction. This issue certainly requires more thought and discussion...
Do you think that this is a notion that merits further thought and discussion? [Sebastian Fiedler]
[Seblogging News]10:29:15 PM #
10:27:52 PM #
fredag 11. juli 2003Quote: "Now this has a lot more going for it than at first meets the eye. For a nano publisher, Google AdWords is magic. It is totally self-help, and can be started with no more than $10. Now, I must admit, it took ne several weeks to work out how to use AdWords and get it really going for me, but now that I have worked out the process of testing a set of keywords and then refining my advertising text, it is really starting to work for me.
AdWords gives me the option to display my advertising to an Australian audience only. And with this focus, I can then drill down to a niche-of-a-niche so that only those people who in Australia use five or six or ten sets of phrases or keywords will be shown my advertisement. Targetting can be so good that you can get the fifteen people each day, of which ten of them will buy what you are offering. However, to get to this place, it will take several weeks to refine and build your keywords and advertising copy to be this effective.
I have been very critical of the Google AdWords program -- it is difficult to learn, difficult to get going, and difficult to really make it work. Get over those difficulties, and you can get magic results. I even have the price of each click I receive down to AUD0.10 -- that it right 10 cents. I even have one set down to five cents per click and getting good results. In some areas you may have to go to $1.50 per click, but then you need to look at the ROI and see that you are converting a reasonable number.
...is the only option that really makes sense for nano publishers. ++ [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocBlogger]
9:48:47 AM #
torsdag 10. juli 2003Evaluation of Corporate Applications for Online Teaching and Learning at Deakin University. It is good. Via someone (sorry!). [Serious Instructional Technology]
9:30:42 PM #
9:26:26 PM #
Right, this is my final draft of my entry on weblogs for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. I think I've got the most important things in, though I'm aching to write much more about lots of it - the social aspects and the network in particular - but I think this is probably what I want in a 500 word for people interested in narrative theory. I've added more about the style of writing and the soapbox aspect, as some of you suggested, but I've left in the first sentence about the formal qualities of the genre because I think that's important. Anyway, I'll read through it again in a few hours when I've packed and mowed the lawn and then I'll send it off. :)
Weblog
A weblog, also known as a *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader sees the most recent post first. The style is typically personal and informal. Freely available tools on the World Wide Web make it easy for anybody to publish their own weblog, so there is a lot of variety in the quality, content and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-nineties and became more widely popular as simple and free publishing tools such as Blogger.com became available towards the turn of the century.Examples of the genre exist on a continuum from online *diaries that relate the writer[base ']s daily activities and experiences to less *confessional weblogs that comment and link to other material, discuss a particular theme or function as soapboxes. In addition to the dominant textual form of weblogs there are experiments with adding sound, images and videos to the genre, resulting in photoblogs, videoblogs and audioblogs.
Each entry in a weblog tends to link to further information. Weblog authors also link to other weblogs that have dealt with similar topics, allowing readers to follow conversations between weblogs by following links between entries on related topics. Readers may start at any point of a weblog, seeing the most recent entry first, or arriving at an older post via a search engine or a link from another site. Once reading a weblog, readers can read in several orders: chronologically, thematically or searching by keywords. Weblogs also generally include a blogroll, which is a list of links to other weblogs the author recommend, and many weblogs allow readers to enter their own comments to individual posts.
Weblogs are serial and cumulative, and readers tend to read small amounts at a time, returning hours, days or weeks later to read entries written since their last visit. This serial or episodic structure is similar to that found in *epistolary novels or *diaries, but unlike these a weblog is open ended, finishing only when the writer tires of writing.
Many weblog entries are shaped as brief, independent narratives. Some weblogs create a larger frame to these micro-narratives by using a consistent rule to constrain their writing. Francis Strand connects his stories of life in Sweden by ending each with a Swedish word and its translation. Other weblogs connect frequent but dissimilar entries by making a larger narrative explicit: The Date Project documents a young man[base ']s search for a girlfriend, Julie Powell narrates her life as she works her way through Julia Child[base ']s cookbook while Flight Risk is about an heiress[base ']s escape from her family.
Further Reading
Anonymous (2002) The Date Project. http://thedateproject.blogspot.com/
Lejeune, Philippe (2000) [base "]Cher écran...[per thou] Journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Strand, Francis (2003) How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons. http://francisstrand.blogspot.com/
V., Isabella (2003) She[base ']s a Flight Risk. http://shes.aflightrisk.org
Powell, Julie (2003) The Julie/Julia Project. http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/(500 words)
[Should be revised before publication as more relevant literature will probably be published in the next year or so. Uncertain about including references to actual weblogs [^] since URLs may well change, perhaps it is better to simply give the author and title in the text, and readers can search themselves to see if the weblog is still online? Could raise question of fictionality at end of this entry (readers assume authenticity, anger at fictions, hoaxes, discussions about obligation to tell the truth and so on) but to do that I[base ']d need to cut out something else. Isabella V. is the pseudonym of the woman who writes Flight Risk, or depending on how you see it, Isabella V. is the name of the narrator and the author is anonymous [^] so I[base ']m not sure how to cite that reference?] [Jill Walker]
Here we go... a Weblog definition from Norway. What do you think? [Sebastian Fiedler]
9:16:08 PM #
Mind Share
BLOG SPACE: Public Storage For Wisdom, Ignorance, and Everything in BetweenQuote: "In a space organized around connected minds, however, the search for wisdom becomes more promising. The Web remains a space of functionally infinite data, but that space is increasingly mapped by human minds, linked in ways we're only beginning to imagine. If it's wisdom you're looking for, you couldn't hope for a better guide."
9:42:32 AM #
The impact of digital games in education by Begona GrosQuote:"This paper is based on the idea that virtual learning is central in current society, and that the key aspect of this kind of learning is not so much technology itself but the interaction of the learner with the technology. Virtual learning environments offer many advantages: Flexibility, distribution, and adaptability. However, there is another domain with tremendous potential for reaching, motivating, and fully involving learners: The world of games. We believe that games constitute the most interactive multimedia resource in our culture today."
9:15:36 AM #
onsdag 09. juli 200310:27:29 AM #
9:22:26 AM #
9:15:30 AM #
Why New Ideas are Both Disruptive and NecessaryManagement consultant Laurence Prusak on Idea Practitioners, organizational fads, and where to look for new ideas (surprise! It's not on the Net).
9:09:57 AM #
9:07:07 AM #
8:59:23 AM #
tirsdag 08. juli 2003The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?.
"It's like a dopamine squirt to be connected," said Dr. Ratey, who compares the sensations created by constantly being wired to those of narcotics [~] a hit of pleasure, stimulation and escape. "It takes the same pathway as our drugs of abuse and pleasure.""It's an addiction," he said, adding that some people cannot deal with down time or quiet moments. "Without it, we are in withdrawal."
12:33:26 PM #
Screens With a Clear View. Dette er det 3 av 5 om design av eLæring i The eLearning Developers Journal. Skrevet av Michael Allen, far til Authorware som senere ble en halvdel i Macromedia.One of the most important jobs of the e-Learning designer is to give learners a clear picture of their tasks. In this week's article, Screens With a Clear View (which is Part 3 of a Design Techniques series), Michael Allen argues that the principles of good learner interface design go far beyond the guidelines that apply to Web sites and software applications. Find out how to make your interfaces transparent and help learners achieve their goal.Han har også skrevet boken Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning. Building Interactive, Fun and Effective Learning Programs for Any Company. Kanskje en burde lese denne, det er jammen ikke mye e-læring som det er morro å lære med! Nettstedet hvor du kan bestille CD-romen som tilhører boken finner du her.
Ta en titt på Authorware 7
Ta en titt i Macromedias Learning Objects Development Center
9:52:24 AM #
mandag 07. juli 2003... There are lots of good reasons for using a wiki, of course, instead of a trackbacked weblog conversation. Though both weblogs and wikis support conversational patterns, weblogs are "conversation as published comments" while wikis are "conversation as shared editing." Weblogs tend towards polarized or divergent views, while wikis tend towards convergent ones, which is just what you want for a conversation around standards.
But there is a second reason, under the surface but possibly more important -- wikis denature personality. Echo exists not because there are things wrong with the RSS markup -- there are, but they could be easily fixed. Echo exists because there are things wrong with the RSS process. RSS is having not a technological crisis but a constitutional one, where who decides what concerning RSS is not clear, and will never be clear, because the people doing the deciding don't even see themselves as being part of a decision making body... [Clay Shirky]
This article talks about a recent initiative to "develop a common syntax for syndication, archiving and an publishing API". Clay Shirky also manages to sketch out some important differences between Weblogs and Wikis...
[Sebastian Fiedler]
10:30:15 AM #
10:28:43 AM #
Sebastian Fiedler has a point; we'd better remember the physical and emotional realities, the real system complexities, that we hope our students will master by the time they're through with school. In short, let's not forget the profound things we must teach. To name a few of the primo curricula from which to graduate:
- self understanding
- using legitimate means of persuasion
- making and maintaining friendships
- choosing good over evil action in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances
- distinguishing between nurturant, neutral and destructive social systems
- deploying active and adaptive learning skills
With those pay-offs in mind let's listen as Seb explains the nature and limitations of digital learning objects.
Seb finishes by asking that we use our digital connections and systems to bring the world, fully-fleshed--not abstracted , and the learner in closer contact.It is important to note that Illich's idea of "educational objects" does not map entirely on the notion of "(digital) learning objects" that is currently quite popular with educational and instructional technology researchers and developers. "David Wiley", for example, offers the following definition of Learning Objects in his chapter "Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: A definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy" in the online book The Instructional Use of Learning Objects:
Learning objects are elements of a new type of computer-based instruction grounded in the object-oriented paradigm of computer science. Object-orientation highly values the creation of components (called [base "]objects[per thou]) that can be reused (Dahl & Nygaard, 1966) in multiple contexts. This is the fundamental idea behind learning objects: instructional designers can build small (relative to the size of an entire course) instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. Additionally, learning objects are generally understood to be digital entities deliverable over the Internet, meaning that any number of people can access and use them simultaneously (as opposed to traditional instructional media, such as an overhead or video tape, which can only exist in one place at a time). Moreover, those who incorporate learning objects can collaborate on and benefit immediately from new versions. These are significant differences between learning objects and other instructional media that have existed previously. [David Wiley]Illich on the other hand looks at things [as opposed to digital abstractions of things, emboldening is mine, Spike Hall] as basic resources for learning. This is a much more radical point of departure. We then have to think about the educational value of artifacts and their accessiblity in a given environment. Illich writes:
... in the city rich and poor alike are artificially kept away from most of the things that surround them. Children born into the age of plastics and efficiency experts must penetrate two barriers which obstruct their understanding: one built into things and the other around institutions. Industrial design creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their meaningful setting. [Ivan Illich]I think that Illich makes a very important point here. Sure, we can use digital representations of all kind of things and processes. We might even be able to create giant (and distributed) repositories of these digital learning objects (see, for example, Stephen Downes proposal for design principlesfor for such a network). What I don't agree with is the current, almost exclusive, fixation on digital learning objects. Illich righfully calls for a different orientation:
The general physical environment must be made accessible, and those physical learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments must become generally available for self-directed learning. [Ivan Illich][Seblogging News]We have made an awful mistake if we disproportionately fixate on what we can teach with digital representation--this is far too small a subset of necessary and central learnings in the curriculum of living. We must target our developmental and instructional efforts upon these important, personal world-making, capabilities and teach them things in ways that we know to work.
With great teachers to interpret and guide (Virgil to the learner's Dante) immersion in the world of the real as a preparation for deep, effective life participation is, IMHO, still, and by far, the more proven and the more consequential of the prerequisites for teaching profound things. [Spike Hall]
I am glad that Spike took the time to elaborate on my post. There is so much to think and write about in this context. Yes,"we disproportionately fixate on" digital representations without a deep reflection on our very concept of "representation", we increasingly confuse information with knowledge, we ignore the conntection between knowing-thinking-acting, we ignore the "embodiment" of human knowing and its physical and emotional qualities, and we are in love with information-processing metaphors because they fit so nicely with the world of machines that we have built up. It sounds trivial... but knowing always requires a knower... and humans, as other living systems, construct knowledge for adaptive reasons in the contact with the world around them. It would be hard to imagine how anyone could build up the simplest concepts like "in and out" or "up and down" without a body operating in time and space... and with real physical objects to interact with. There is loads of evidence that we are literally "thinking with our hands" on many occasions... and that much of what is often called "implicit" knowledge cannot easily be externalized, represented, and encoded in abstract sign systems. I am a bit tired of all the knowledge capturing, knowledge sharing, and knowledge distributing bla bla that is floating around in the knowledge managment literature. What exactly are you capturing? what is shared with whom? and what is supposed to happen when what is distributed? ... will try to write about this in a more coherent manner in the next few days.
[Sebastian Fiedler]
10:25:07 AM #
Reference Guide for Instructional Design and Development via Ray...good resource detailing an instructional design process (based on the Dick and Carey Model). Of particular value are the resources that detail questions to ask, information gathering processes, learner characteristics, etc., and a series of links to additional resources. Quick side note: for additional info on various instructional design strategies, see Instructional Design in Elearning [elearnspace blog]Mer om evaluering av digitale læremidler se PLUM: Evaluation Methods and Procedures for studying learners' use of media
10:23:12 AM #
I have recently cited Ivan Illich in posts like Technologies for deschooling society? and Learning Webs. Among other ideas Illich suggests reference services for educational objects as one of four approaches
"...which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource wich may help him to define and achieve his own goals." [ Ivan Illich]
It is important to note that Illich's idea of "educational objects" does not map entirely on the notion of "(digital) learning objects" that is currently quite popular with educational and instructional technology researchers and developers. "David Wiley", for example, offers the following definition of "learning objects" in his chapter "Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: A definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy" in the online book The Instructional Use of Learning Objects:
Learning objects are elements of a new type of computer-based instruction grounded in the object-oriented paradigm of computer science. Object-orientation highly values the creation of components (called [base "]objects[per thou]) that can be reused (Dahl & Nygaard, 1966) in multiple contexts. This is the fundamental idea behind learning objects: instructional designers can build small (relative to the size of an entire course) instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. Additionally, learning objects are generally understood to be digital entities deliverable over the Internet, meaning that any number of people can access and use them simultaneously (as opposed to traditional instructional media, such as an overhead or video tape, which can only exist in one place at a time). Moreover, those who incorporate learning objects can collaborate on and benefit immediately from new versions. These are significant differences between learning objects and other instructional media that have existed previously. [David Wiley]
Illich on the other hand looks at things as basic resources for learning. This is a much more radical point of departure. We then have to think about the educational value of artifacts and their accessiblity in a given environment. Illich writes:
... in the city rich and poor alike are artificially kept away from most of the things that surround them. Children born into the age of plastics and efficiency experts must penetrate two barriers which obstruct their understanding: one built into things and the other around institutions. Industrial design creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their meaningful setting. [Ivan Illich]
I think that Illich makes a very important point here. Sure, we can use digital representations of all kind of things and processes. We might even be able to create giant (and distributed) repositories of these digital learning objects (see, for example, "Stephen Downes"'s proposal of some design principles for for such a network). What I don't agree with is the current, almost exclusive, fixation on digital learning objects. Illich righfully calls for a different orientation:
The general physical environment must be made accessible, and those physical learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments must become generally available for self-directec learning. [Ivan Illich]
Could we use (networking) technology to built reference services that make physical objects and processes accessible to people who want to learn about them? Digital learning objects might offer some nice entry points for a personal learning project. But wouldn't it be great to be able to locate a local company or individual that provides some junk bike parts one could actually try to work with after the review of a couple of digital learning objects on the topic of "repairing a bike"? We should not forget that physical things are basic resources for learning, too.
[Seblogging News]10:18:11 AM #
Dave Winer, Starting Weblogs at Universities:
"Here's how you get weblogs started at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth. First, know that universities thrive on having their experts visible outside the university. Not just publishing in academic journals, which most alumni don't read, but being called in as experts on radio talk shows, esp NPR....So how do you get your professors on the radar, as acknowledged experts who can communicate to everyday people? With a weblog of course."I think the key phrase there is "at a university like Harvard or Dartmouth." My gut feeling is this approach won't work at a institution that's not a "blue chip" university. This approach (as well as a load of other Ivy League approaches) isn't going to translate to John Doe Community College or Southwest Backwater State University.
It's odd that there's so much going on with education and weblogs -- more than I've seen at any point in the past -- but Dave seems totally oblivious to it. He's still thinking like a software company CEO and programmer, not like an educator. Or maybe he's hanging out with too many lawyers! ["Greg Ritter"]
Greg is right on with his comment here, I believe. Of course, Universities and the people who work in these organizations have public relations needs and can greatly benefit from using personal Webpublishing technologies. But then you really use the technology to support the business side of higher education. You want to sell yourself, your department or institution to the larger public?... ok, that's a valid use... I will not argue against it... but that has only little to do with all the hard and creative work of the people who actually try to enhance teaching and learning processes with personal Webpublishing technologies.
[Sebastian Fiedler]
10:09:35 AM #
Last Thursday's post on wikis generated quite a bit of good feedback. Comments from a number of readers offered pointers to more wiki related materials.
Doug Holton, a graduate student at Vanderbilt, offers these three wiki-specific entries from his blog (which looks to be a useful reference in general):
Here are some more thoughts (and actual research) on wikis: http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001181.html http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001172.html http://edtechdev.org/blog/archives/001173.htmlBill Seitz is experimenting with a cross between a wiki and a weblog he calls a WikiWeblog. He points to his notes there on self-organizing aspects of wikis at Wikis for Collaboration Ware.
Denham Gray gently reminded me of his KmWiki which was the first wiki I ever posted anything to and is a wonderful resource of KM related materials. Denham is a zealous advocate of the collaborative opportunities found in knowledge work.
Jonathan Smith points to Joi Ito's wiki experiments and an evolving section on Wikis vs. Blogs
Jenny Levine at Shifted Librarian posts a pointer to Blogging, RSS, and Wikis - Presentations, Papers, and a Pathfinder
Elwyn Jenkins at MicroDocBlogger throws his 0.02 in with Blogs, Wikis, and Knowledge Building. He offers the interesting notion that "blogs turn people into webpages" and "wikis turn communities into webpages."
And finally Ross Mayfield reminds me of the work he is doing at socialText.com which is both a source of great info on wikis and social software in general and an ongoing experiment in the same.
Obviously blogs and wikis are not an either/or proposition. I see them both as examples of grassroots, bottoms up approaches to making knowledge work and knowledge workers more effective. If you lower the barriers to participation and make it easier for individuals and teams to narrate their work, then you start to get the possibility of getting knowledge management as a desirable side effect.
Instead of trying to cram a centralized knowledge management system down everyone's throat, you focus on helping individuals and teams do their own work more easily and more effectively. If you give some thought to how you design and shape the environment, the benefits of knowledge management sought by vendors of solutions in search of problems will emerge from the work itself. [Jim McGee]
More food for thought on the Wiki-Weblog relationship. Can anybody point me to implementation and evaluation projects of Wikis within formal educational settings?
[Sebastian Fiedler]
9:33:43 AM #
Wikis are now on the radar screens of many of us grappling with using technology effectively in knowledge work. Ward Cunningham's book,The Wiki Way:Quick Collaboration on the Web, has been on my bookshelf for some time now and I've visited a handful of public wikis. Lately there's been a spate of posts in the blog world about wikis. I've gathered up and made a first pass at organizing the ones I've encountered into what might be a reasonable order (based on my current level of ignorance).One thing that did help me get a better grasp on wikis was listening to David Weinberger's talk at Seabury Western two weeks ago. David was drawing attention to the collaborative effort to produce the Wikipedia, which is essentially an open source model effort at creating an online encyclopedia. I had always been puzzled by the free-for-all editing capability inherent in the wiki technology. The analogy that finally made it clear for me was to a whiteboard in a conference room. Those frequently become shared design spaces as markers change hands. Wikis are the same idea moved to the web, which suggests to me that they are likely to be more useful inside organizations than elsewhere.
- Why Wiki Works - [link courtesy of Corante: Social Software, which has been following the Wiki discussion in depth]
- Why Wike Works/Not
- Why I Don't Like <s>Wikis</s> Email - [Also from Corante: Social Software] - Some interesting observations about visual presentation in wikis and email vs. better laid out web pages and how this interferes with the usefulness of wikis (at least on the public web).
- Email Doesn't Self-Organize - [from Ross Mayfield] - quoting Ward Cunningham
Cunningham also points out that you can go away from a wiki and come back at any time to pick up a conversation without much inconvenience, which isn't the case with e-mail-centric group discussions. "E-mail doesn't self-organize," he emphasizes.- The Cunningham quote comes from What's a Wiki? an overview article by Sebastian Rupley at Extreme Tech.
- Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool [via Sebastian Fiedler] - which appears to be a good overview with lots of links.
- From the other Seb in my aggregator (Sebastien Paquet at Seb's Open Research) comes Why Meatball Matters.
Meatball Wiki is a little-known gem in the jungle of online community-related material on the Web. What is it about? A whole lot of fascinating stuff - in founder Sunir Shah's words:
It philosophizes about the nature of hypertext, government, and identity. It talks about user interfaces, community building, and conflict resolution. But it also contains technical analyses of indexing schemes, wiki architecture, and inter-wiki protocol design.Sunir has recently been busy writing up a nice summary of what's significant about Meatball, as part of a work portfolio he's preparing to get into the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.I believe Sunir understands Wiki philosophy better than anyone else I know. His contributions to framing the concept and patterns of soft security that underlie the social architecture of Wikis are what made me an early convert to Meatball. If only Sunir had kept a blog instead of a home-brewed diary page, he'd surely be well-known in social software circles today.
Hopefully, as the Wiki way slowly seeps into the mainstream Internet mentality, its perceived weirdness will subside and collaborative hypermedia communities like this one will get the recognition (and linkage) they deserve.
Jim shares another one of his link-rich, topical posts. I am looking forward to unpack this nicely wrapped up package as soon as I get home...
[Sebastian Fiedler]
9:33:11 AM #
Some of you already know that I am particularly interested in non-institutionalized, informal, self-organized forms of (adult) learning. Tonight I was thinking about the role personal Webpublishing could play - or might already play for some of us - for the shaping of a personal "learning domain."
Traditionally, a learning domain is often perceived as the sum of all the learning opportunities an educational environment or workplace has to offer. Of course, this limited view already excludes many resources for learning that are waiting outside of school or the company you happen to work for.
Now, if I am following my own learning project beyond institutional boundaries I am facing the task of defining, developing, and refining my personal learning domain without the support of some educational (or training) authority. My learning domain contains ideas, concepts, know-how,etc. which might be represented in books, documents, Websites, videos, courses, and so forth. I will create a conception of my learning domain based on all the possibilities and resources I am currently aware of.
This is where externalizing my growing and expanding understanding of a personal learning domain via Webpublishing and the search for Webloggers with similar and apparently overlapping interests can prove rather benefitial. Not only that these people can either directly or indirectly point me to valuable sources and resources, they often can become part of my personal learning domain themselves, too, serving as important human resources for my ongoing learning. If I am lucky they might even be willing to create special learning opportunities for me based on their experience and knowledge... or at least, they might help to define how, what, and where learning opportunities might be created for me.
Can a traditional learning domain be in conversation with itself? Hardly, I would say. But what happens if a personal learning domain is inhabited by a good number of available Webloggers who read, listen, elaborate, repeat, amplify, mix, and contextualize materials in a constant flow? I have feeling that such a loosely coupled network of people who share some overlaping areas of interst can accelerate and qualitatively alter the necessary shaping of a personal learning domain?
What do you think? [Sebastian Fiedler]
[Seblogging News]9:32:03 AM #
9:28:55 AM #
fredag 04. juli 2003
Fra elearningpost: Discover: A CHAT ROOM LIKE NO OTHER "In the prototype version of There, which is a lot like being inside a cartoon world, triggering emotional expressions with a keyboard is not all that different from typing them in a chat room. The software translates common emoticons and other abbreviations (such as LOL for "laughing out loud") into gestures and expressions. It also automatically parses a small subset of words: If you type yes, your avatar will nod its head..."8:59:07 AM #
8:51:21 AM #
torsdag 03. juli 2003Mr Murfitt from Mekon said many firms were now looking at installing systems that make it easier to collaborate on documents and that log who did what.[BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]He said banking and legal regulators imposed strict working practices on firms that force them to record the life histories of documents that result in new products or are involved in court cases.
But, he added, other firms were putting in place document tracking systems to help teams work together.
Often these systems use a single copy of a document that workers comment on, correct or annotate before a final edit.
"That's where collaboration becomes really useful," he said.
2:28:14 PM #
Virtuelle fingre
Reaching Through the Net to Touch. Scientists are developing devices that let people share their sensation of touch with anyone connected to the Net. It's perhaps creepy, but the technology could have wide applications."We've been running a telemedicine program here, and the biggest problem we find is that physicians here can't palpate the patient. It's the major problem for accurate diagnoses in telemedicine we've encountered. So I started looking into how we might do that."By Daithí Ó hAnluain. [Wired News]
"A doctor's hands are two of the most important diagnostic tools he or she has, allowing the physician to detect subtle signs of disease or injury just by touching a patient.Exercising that expertise always has required the presence of two individuals in the same physical space at the same time: doctor and patient
Until now."
2:26:17 PM #
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8:46:25 AM #
onsdag 02. juli 20031:08:16 PM #
1:07:00 PM #
Mer om prosjektet finner du her
1:02:42 PM #
Via elearnspace.org: Visualizing Information. Visualizing Information
Quote: "Information visualisation is about to go mainstream. While it may not be the killer application some expect, [base "]infoviz[per thou] is going to help users to manipulate data in wholly new ways."
Comment: Information visualization is about showing how information relates to other information (i.e. how information is networked). This article provides several good examples of infoviz use (see Map of the Market in particular). Also lists Grokker...a visualization tool (a trial version isn't available at the site...but they promise one soon). [elearnspace blog]
Her kan du selv se hvordan produktet fungerer
Map View: Research is converted into intuitive Grokker knowledge maps. The Grokker maps can be filtered, edited, saved, and shared.
11:04:59 AM #
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tirsdag 01. juli 2003
Hydra er et samtekst program for OSX: Hydra is a collaborative distributed text editor, combining the simplicity of TextEdit and the power of Rendezvous. It allows to share documents on a local network (with Rendezvous) or on the internet. Every participating user can type simultaneously and see what others are typing. You can even follow others users to see what they are up to. Hydra features true simultaneous editing for multiple users. Text changes are highlighted in a different color for each user, allowing easy identification of your coeditors' changes. The scrollbar indicators give you a quick overview where others are working in the document. In addition to its rich networking capablities, Hydra does everything you'd expect from an advanced text editor. Encodings and line endings are handled seamlessly. Programmers benefit from customizable syntax coloring and function pop-up, bracket matching and indenting.
8:52:17 AM #
© 2004 Trond Kristiansen
Temadesign ved Bryan Bell
