Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise

Everybody's doin' it now... 

Link to Why Wikis Are Conquering The Enterprise

Well, 50% anyway...or that is what the projection is. Wikis are definitely catching on. Some are starting to stall a bit but this suggests that this may be more than just a fad.

Face reading in videoconferencing

 Some interesting comments...what do we actually get out of the video part of videoconferencing.

Link to #a1552

Aside from the fact that we are still having little challenges with getting it to work smoothly, there are now examples out there of very high resolution, low lag vconf systems.

What do we actually need? What is it we like about video? Do the wee eyeball webcams convey anything?

Enquiring minds want to know...actually, Lorraine Carter and I will be looking into this shortly so keep your eyes on this blog. We might be looking for volunteers for a small study.

Microsoft Live Search Released

Supposed to be a wonderful new upgrade... 

Link to John Battelle's Searchblog: More Notably-- Live Search Released

I've played with the beta a while ago and was underwhelmed...I hope it's improved...waddya think?

Why Two Browsers are Better than One

 Wondering which web browser you should use?

Link to TIME.com: Why Two Browsers are Better than One -- Page 1

Both Microsoft and Firefox have just pushed out upgrades to their web browsers. This article gives a brief overview of the strengths of both...and why you may well want to have both on your computer. Not much reason not to for starters...they're both free.

What You Need To Know About Vista Upgrades

A piece from PC Magazine about how to get an upgrade to Windows Vista if you buy a new computer from now on. 

Link to What You Need To Know About Vista Upgrades

So, after all the back and forth about release dates, it looks pretty certain that Vista will not actually be available till next year. For those of you who have been wondering about whether to get a new computer now or wait until Vista comes out, this might help a wee bit. The article tells you about how you can get a free upgrade to Vista for your new hardware, when Vista does ship.

This article is not about whether you should upgrade to Vista. Nor is it about how to do the actual upgrade when it arrives.

I'm not so sure about the wisdom of  buying a machine now and then do an OS upgrade in 3-4 months. For somebody who rarely customises anything or installs more than the basic suite of programs, this might be ok. But then that person is also not likely to care about upgrading to Vista either. For those of us who do like to use cutting edge tools, many of us do a lot of optimising of our computing environment. Software settings, tweaks, shortcuts etc.

Now most of those should not be affected by an OS upgrade. Sadly, what I have found in the past is that much more is affected than I would like and therefore, after an OS change, I often have to reinstall and re-customise. At 3-4 months of owning a device, I usually have it tweaked to the point where it is singing along nicely. I'm not yet running into the challenge where I have DLL conflicts, programs fighting with each other and stuff like that. So...if it's working well at that point, why fix it?

I think I'll wait. The options suggested in the article is helpful for those people who have to get a new machine (hard drive dying, changing jobs etc)...but otherwise, I would wait.

830! How a carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever. - By Stefan Fatsis - Slate Magazine

Wow...who would have thought that Scrabble games are analysed so intensely? 

Link to 830! How a carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever. - By Stefan Fatsis - Slate Magazine

While this is an amazing score, the analysis that it provokes is equally intense.

Working invisibility cloak created at last - tech - 19 October 2006 - New Scientist Tech

Working invisibility cloak created at last - tech - 19 October 2006 - New Scientist Tech

Aha, the Romulans should be worried now! Cloaking in action - well at microwave frequenices, anyway. This group has figured out a way to bend microwaves, using a lens with negative refractive index, so that the microwaves bend around the object so that it disappears.

In search of non-gratuitous 3D

Jon Udell: In search of non-gratuitous 3D

A couple of examples of 3D world virtualisation...and about will actually be useful.

Education and the long tail

 Initially this post seems scattered and marginally relevant to education. But the points raised are good ones.

Link to 2 Cents Worth » A Landscape for Good and Evil

Why are we still chained to a limited set of approved texts in education? Yes, they might be approved but does that equate to evidence that they are accurate, relevant or current.

Of course, the challenge with the long tail has been find the good stuff. This is certainly easier now with all the tools at our disposal. But the most important tool, and often the least used, is the one between our ears. Along with adapting our teaching to the influence of the long tail, it will continue to be important to teach and use critical appraisal skills.

Why email continues to be a poor project management tool

 In this context, regard just the simple act of getting things done as "project management".

Link to McGee’s Musings » Why email continues to be a poor project management tool

Contains a reference to the 10-to-1 rule for email communications, which is worth perusing in itself.

Things you really need to learn

 Quite a lengthy and philosophical post.

Link to Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~

Worthy of consideration by educators everywhere...what should we actually teach? After all, we know that the majority of facts that we teach are of limited usefulness, limited shelf-life and limited scope.

"Teach a man to fish..."

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog

Just a short post on this one... 

Link to Lorcan Dempsey's weblog

This blog may be interesting to anyone who follows stuff re online libraries, catalogs etc. Quite dense complex but high quality stuff for librarians.

Professors, Start Your Blogs

 Here's a thoughtful piece on why blogging can work well in an academic environment.

Link to Dan Cohen - Digital Humanities Blog - Professors, Start Your Blogs

Initially, the article appears self-defeating or self-deprecating. But there are some useful points for those who are thinking about getting into the blogging world themselves. Tackles some common misconceptions.

EDUCAUSE 2006 Annual Conference | EDUCAUSE 2006

Very useful conference for anyone involved in eLearning. 

Link to EDUCAUSE 2006 Annual Conference | EDUCAUSE 2006

It's big. Well, not as big as AAMC or some of the truly huge conventions...but still way bigger than what I'm used to.

Very efficiently organised. Some great speakers. Ray Kurzweil, as I just posted; Also Vint Cerf - father of the Internet. Many of the sessions were also excellent. Some sadly were along the lines of "weren't we clever to solve this problem we had...unfortunately, it is not generalisable to you..." - oh well, take the rough with the smooth.

Some useful new toys, software, educational systems etc. Continuing interest in Open Source material...although also some caveats about expectations. There was a great quote about it: "It's free...free like a puppy...no initial cost but expensive to maintain and needs lots of love to keep it happy".

Adobe have taken over Macromedia - it was very useful to get the lowdown on what will happen to the Macromedia product line. In short, it will all continue. (this was a requirement of regulatory compliance from the Monopolies Commission...hang on, what do they call it in the States...sorry, sleep deprived...can't remember...no, we were not partying...had to get up at 0345 for a flight home). Anyway, the Macromedia product line will all continue - even some of the older technology like Shockwave. There is a new version of Director coming out in the spring. Some products will be renamed to align with Adobe offerings eg Breeze Meeting will now become Adobe Connect; Breeze Presenter will become Adobe Presenter; stuff like that. Some nice new changes coming in the new upgrades due out this month.

Microsoft were showing what the new Office 2007 suite and associated servers can do. Much improved maintenance - a lot of improvements if you are a Microsoft shop, as we are. The collaboration and connectivity bits are much to the forefront. In fact, all vendors are incorporating this kinda stuff in their wares.

Smart Technologies, the SmartBoard people, had some nice new hardware to show. Apple is really pushing iPods, and iTunesU as an educational paradigm. Well integrated. Just not sure how comfortable I am with them making forays into academia with a proprietary format. See earlier posts from me and Jon Udell on this a few weeks back.

Datatel were talking a bit about their upcoming changes and how they will be using more of a SQL back-end, and SharePoint Portal Services to support their offerings. Moving away from their old style databases, which were very fast, but would not play well with others. Given the general shift towards web services, SOA, and interconnectivity, I think they have seen the writing on the wall. Time to chance direction...or run aground.

Lots of other stuff. Lots of attention to security and identity management - lots of competing offerings...which may not be a good thing with identity management because it would sure be nice if these systems would talk to each other.

Educause keynote by Ray Kurzweil

 Yesterday morning at Educause, we were treated to a presentation by Ray Kurzweil

The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Education and Society -

Source: Detailed Conference Agenda

Well known as a futurist and pundit of accelerating change, he gave a great overview of current trends, exponential change and what is predictable. For anyone familiar with his writings, especially his stuff in 'The Singularity is Near', some of it was stuff he has said/written before.

In making his predictions, which have generally proven to be remarkably accurate, he is careful to extrapolate from current data and not do the wishful thinking bit. What makes his stuff seem incredible is that we don't allow for the exponential increase in the rate of change - we all tend to extrapolate linearly based on current experience.

He talked about trends in computing, miniaturisation towards nanotech, artificial intelligence, genomics and longevity. Quite the panoply of topics. Very entertaining and yet also insightful. If you ever get a chance to listen to one of his presentations, grab it.

He runs an interesting web site: KurzweilAI.net - worth taking a look at. You may find some of his stuff rather far fetched - most people do...and his predictions have been decried many times over the decades...but he has been accurate in many many areas.

Half an Hour: What's The Number for Tech Support?

A lengthy but interesting piece by Stephen Downes.  

Link to Half an Hour: What's The Number for Tech Support?

The title is misleading. The thinking in his piece on how our brains do the thinking and the parallels with computation is very thoughtful and informative.

The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper

So what's the scoop with Institutional Repositories? 

Link to The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper

Here at NOSM, we are currently working through the process of getting an institutional repository into place. And what the heck is an Institutional Repository you ask? Well, the link above is to a seminal paper on the topic that has been widely quoted. Warning: very dry reading. However, this whole topic is pretty important in this new era of online educational informatics.

If you want more crisp synopsis of what IRs are all about, check out Dspace at http://www.dspace.org/ - interesting how they call it the Dspace Federation - sounds like trekkie talk. But there is a reason for this - a federation of repositories that can all share and link to each other and search each others' material would make them all much more useful.

And, boy, do they need something to make them more useful. Now I am taking a bit of a devil's advocate stance here to try and provoke some discussion - I'm really not against them in principle and think that they are a wonderful idea...in principle. But I do wonder if they have been set up the right way. And why do I say this?

IRs have been around for several years now. In a recent survey conducted by the AAHSL, 42% of institutions had implemented an IR. Good. But the average number of users at each was in the single digits! Mostly they are being populated by librarians. Now I don't want to decry the valuable work of our colleagues - this is a very laudable role they are playing. But one of the points about IRs is that they should be a tool for self-archiving of material. To quote the SPARC article above:

"While institutional repositories necessitate that libraries-as their logical administrative proponents-facilitate development of university intellectual property policies, encourage faculty authors to retain the right to self-archive, and broaden both faculty and administration perspectives on these issues, they can be implemented without radically altering the status quo. "

So this self-archving is not happening. Now maybe the word hasn't gotten out yet...but I just came from Calgary, where they have been running Dspace for a while. Nice implementation. But despite quite intense "marketing", it has not exactly taken the place by storm.

Maybe there is too much focus on "archiving" - i.e. the tucking away of old dead stuff. Maybe we should focus more on using these for current and evolving material? Since many of us now work on multiple computers and from multiple locations, being able to get to our files from anywhere should be attractive. On the other hand, since these IRs are essentially open, who wants to air their dirty linen in public? It seems we've got a bit of a dissonance here. By the time we are happy to air it, it might be old hat.

Does the IR then become a graveyard of material that did not make it to publication? (Ooh, them's fightin' words, David - that should get a response if anyone actually reads this stuff). Another way to look at this is to examine the reward structures - what upside is there for faculty to post their stuff in a repository? This is touched upon quite eloquently in this article: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november02/johnson/11john...

which is a commentary on the SPARC article. In this commentary, the author notes:

"The principal author benefits of online open access to their research pertain to enhanced professional visibility. This visibility and awareness is driven by both broader dissemination and increased use."

But where is the visibility? This reward structure might come into play when there is federated search across these repositories. Will they let Google and the searchbots in to play? and of course, if Promotions Committees start to consider such material then that might help.

To really be devil's advocate for a moment, maybe we need to take a look at the phenomenon being seen in the non-academic world. Look at how Flickr, Digg and YouTube have really taken off. There's a corpus or two that has content coming out of its ears. No problem with empty shelves there.

Admittedly, much of it is rubbish...but you can also find some stellar stuff there...and that is one of the points, you can find it. The one thing that they have done well is to make it brain-dead easy to post stuff. Login (which after the first time is automatic), give a brief description, some tags, and upload it. You're done. Couldn't be easier.

I think the really big difference here is this extremely easy way to upload material and simply index it.  

No these are not fully formed articles etc. Not the style at all. But some really useful objects in there nonetheless. And some sites like Flickr have looked at the IP issues and do encourage the use of Creative Commons.

Looking more at the ease of uploading an indexing, take a look at this nice little Captivate screencast (they call it a viewlet) created at UofC on how to upload a piece to their Dspace:

https://dspace.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/1880/43053/2/...

This is a very nice little screencast, which patiently takes you through the steps of uploading a viewlet. But there are about 127 steps...ok I exaggerate...but you get my drift. There are way too many steps to this for anybody but the most dedicated. It's gotta be simpler. You can see this with the single digit user numbers.

The Screening Room | Windows Live Writer

Want to know more about some of the more powerful ways of creating re-usable content e.g. for blogs etc. Take a look at this screencast from Jon Udell where he has a conversation (30 mins) with the dev team for Microsoft Windows Live Writer.

Worth spending some time on if you are into this stuff. The first few minutes is pretty standard stuff and I almost stopped watching...but then they get into all the things that are possible with this new approach. In particular, I thought the bit about incorporating links to live calendar events into your blog was very useful. A good example of how we will be able to re-use content without a lot of work on the part of blog authors.

Link to The Screening Room | #9 | Sep 2006 | Windows Live Writer

As usual, Jon Udell does a great job of interviewing. Because it is a screencast, you can see exactly the steps needed to do things and what it will look like.

Constructive Interference » Folksonomies, taxonomies and population thinking

Starts off quite benignly...more thinking on tagging systems, indexing etc...but gets into some quite dense stuff in ontological theory.  

Link to Constructive Interference » Folksonomies, taxonomies and population thinking

Makes some excellent points about how folksonomies have an interesting secondary effect, where the items tagged themselves start to define the scope of the tags. Plus, suggestions are made about how others have tagged the same item, much in the same way as the popularity ratings of Digg and Amazon. (People who bought this book also liked...) Reverse engineering of these folksonomies will enable a deeper indexing based on democratic semantics.