etc@bmc
Thursday, March 30, 2006
How to Blog
On Friday, I'll be conducting a session on how to blog, basically discussing some best practices for blogging. This will be my jumping-off point.
This is definitely not everything there is to know about how to blog. Blogging takes practice and figuring out your voice, who your audience is, and what you have to say. And all of that can change seemingly almost overnight. So consider this a very basic primer.
A Conversation
Blogging is writing, but blogging is also a conversation. So I want this to be a conversation. First, I want to ask what you think about blogging? What is a blog? How does it fit in with existing genres of writing? How does it differ from other forms of writing on the internet (forums, discussion boards, web sites)? What makes it important? What makes it not important?
Picture from Beppie K.
What is a blog
A blog is often defined as a frequently updated website with the most recent material appearing at the top. The media often equate blogs with online journals. In truth, blogs can be just about anything. They can be about politics, literature, knitting, cats, or comics. They can be made up of text, images, sound, video or any combination of these. On the left is a typical blog (click to enlarge).
Here are its parts:
1. Title of the blog.
2. Date of the latest post.
3. Title of the post.
4. Body of the post.
5. Author
6. Time of the post, also the permalink.
7. Comments, serves as a link to both view and post comments.
8. Trackback, shows other blogs that link to this post.
9. Author profile.
10. Blogroll, list of links to other blogs or sites.
Read blogs
If you've never blogged before, it might be a good idea to read a few before you get started. I started by reading the blog of someone I knew in person, and then started reading the blogs that he had linked to on his blogroll. It's a good idea to find a blog or two that you like and follow them and get a sense of their style. Read the comments and submit your own. Become a part of their community. Reading and commenting on blogs is just as important as writing them. As I said, it's a conversation. Without the audience feedback and participation, it's just online publishing.
Picture from mmmazoni
Finding blogs
There are lots of search engines specific to blogs. One of my favorites is Technorati. Others include Google's Blogsearch, Blogpulse, and IceRocket. Both Technorati and Blogpulse show lists of popular blogs, posts and topics.
What to write and how often
Write about what you're interested in. The most interesting blogs are those that relate current events to the author. Most blogs have a personal voice and that's why people like them. One thing to avoid, however, is to just write about the personal stuff in your life (unless you're Dooce, who makes a living doing that). Generally, a blog's topics evolve over time as a blogger finds her voice, so just write!
Try to write every day. In a group blog, you probably don't need to write that often, but a post should appear every day. Fresh content drives more people to your site and in a group blog, gives everyone stuff to comment on and write about.
Linking
Linking is extremely important in the blog world. Links do what any outside source does; they provide some authority for your point of view. If you link to a source, it's a good idea to also quote from it and if you quote from a source, link to it. Linking is also important to give credit where credit is due. Believe it or not, the blog world is pretty ethical in this regard. If you noticed a source at a blog, it's a good idea to note where and link back to them.
How to write
Writing on the web is a little different than writing for print. Remember you have an audience, an audience that talks back. People are slightly less patient on the web, so you have to grab their attention quickly and keep it. All of the things I mentioned above will help. Remember this is not like writing an essay or paper or a newspaper article. The writing can and should be raw. The point is to get something out there fairly quickly. Especially at first, you may be tempted to edit yourself heavily. Don't. Just write. You'll find your way eventually. That's point of blogging. The more you blog/write, the better you get at it. No, not every blog post is going to be stellar, but quite often many of them will be quite good.
Here's some links to more info:
10 tips from A list apart. Their collection of articles on writing for the web are all interesting.
From the book, we've got blog, Joe Clark writes in "Deconstructing 'You've Got Blog'":
It's about the conversation. Here's a picture that shows some aspects of conversation on the web.
(picture from Nancy White's set on Technology for Communities). Why is it important to maintain civility in an online community? How to listen to those within and without the community. This is important in shaping how you write, how you respond to others' writing and how you respond to commentary on your writing. It's a conversation--even if it gets heated.
Some places to start reading and styles
Academically oriented: these blogs tend to have an essayistic form and longer pieces. They are thoughtfully-written, sometimes research oriented, always worth a read.
Tim Burke's (Swarthmore) Easily Distracted
Michael Berube, professor of danger
Adventures in Ethics and Science, a great blog that's gone pro
Crooked Timber, a group blog focused on economics and public policy
Academic, but personal: these are the blogs of academics, but they write more about the connection between their work and their life. Their work also tends to be shorter, but not always.
Playing School, Irreverently
jo(e)'s page
New Kid on the Hallway
Mommy blogs that are much, much more than mommy blogs. They write thoughtfully about political issues, their children, parenting, and whatever happens to interest them. Wonderful reading always.
11D
Half-changed World
Phantom Scribbler
Tags:
On Friday, I'll be conducting a session on how to blog, basically discussing some best practices for blogging. This will be my jumping-off point.
This is definitely not everything there is to know about how to blog. Blogging takes practice and figuring out your voice, who your audience is, and what you have to say. And all of that can change seemingly almost overnight. So consider this a very basic primer.
A ConversationBlogging is writing, but blogging is also a conversation. So I want this to be a conversation. First, I want to ask what you think about blogging? What is a blog? How does it fit in with existing genres of writing? How does it differ from other forms of writing on the internet (forums, discussion boards, web sites)? What makes it important? What makes it not important?
Picture from Beppie K.
What is a blog
A blog is often defined as a frequently updated website with the most recent material appearing at the top. The media often equate blogs with online journals. In truth, blogs can be just about anything. They can be about politics, literature, knitting, cats, or comics. They can be made up of text, images, sound, video or any combination of these. On the left is a typical blog (click to enlarge).Here are its parts:
1. Title of the blog.
2. Date of the latest post.
3. Title of the post.
4. Body of the post.
5. Author
6. Time of the post, also the permalink.
7. Comments, serves as a link to both view and post comments.
8. Trackback, shows other blogs that link to this post.
9. Author profile.
10. Blogroll, list of links to other blogs or sites.
Read blogs
If you've never blogged before, it might be a good idea to read a few before you get started. I started by reading the blog of someone I knew in person, and then started reading the blogs that he had linked to on his blogroll. It's a good idea to find a blog or two that you like and follow them and get a sense of their style. Read the comments and submit your own. Become a part of their community. Reading and commenting on blogs is just as important as writing them. As I said, it's a conversation. Without the audience feedback and participation, it's just online publishing.Picture from mmmazoni
Finding blogs
There are lots of search engines specific to blogs. One of my favorites is Technorati. Others include Google's Blogsearch, Blogpulse, and IceRocket. Both Technorati and Blogpulse show lists of popular blogs, posts and topics.
What to write and how often
Write about what you're interested in. The most interesting blogs are those that relate current events to the author. Most blogs have a personal voice and that's why people like them. One thing to avoid, however, is to just write about the personal stuff in your life (unless you're Dooce, who makes a living doing that). Generally, a blog's topics evolve over time as a blogger finds her voice, so just write!
Try to write every day. In a group blog, you probably don't need to write that often, but a post should appear every day. Fresh content drives more people to your site and in a group blog, gives everyone stuff to comment on and write about.
Linking
Linking is extremely important in the blog world. Links do what any outside source does; they provide some authority for your point of view. If you link to a source, it's a good idea to also quote from it and if you quote from a source, link to it. Linking is also important to give credit where credit is due. Believe it or not, the blog world is pretty ethical in this regard. If you noticed a source at a blog, it's a good idea to note where and link back to them.
How to write
Writing on the web is a little different than writing for print. Remember you have an audience, an audience that talks back. People are slightly less patient on the web, so you have to grab their attention quickly and keep it. All of the things I mentioned above will help. Remember this is not like writing an essay or paper or a newspaper article. The writing can and should be raw. The point is to get something out there fairly quickly. Especially at first, you may be tempted to edit yourself heavily. Don't. Just write. You'll find your way eventually. That's point of blogging. The more you blog/write, the better you get at it. No, not every blog post is going to be stellar, but quite often many of them will be quite good.
Here's some links to more info:
10 tips from A list apart. Their collection of articles on writing for the web are all interesting.
From the book, we've got blog, Joe Clark writes in "Deconstructing 'You've Got Blog'":
It is idealistic in the extreme to counsel bloggers not to concern themselves with an audience. The advice “Write for yourself,” while appropriate for a self-help course, applies poorly to the Web. Before the Internet, you could write all you wanted, but unless you had actual talent and enough persuasiveness to win over an editor, your work would go unpublished, and only you would ever read it.Full Circle: The Conversation
It's about the conversation. Here's a picture that shows some aspects of conversation on the web.(picture from Nancy White's set on Technology for Communities). Why is it important to maintain civility in an online community? How to listen to those within and without the community. This is important in shaping how you write, how you respond to others' writing and how you respond to commentary on your writing. It's a conversation--even if it gets heated.
Some places to start reading and styles
Academically oriented: these blogs tend to have an essayistic form and longer pieces. They are thoughtfully-written, sometimes research oriented, always worth a read.
Tim Burke's (Swarthmore) Easily Distracted
Michael Berube, professor of danger
Adventures in Ethics and Science, a great blog that's gone pro
Crooked Timber, a group blog focused on economics and public policy
Academic, but personal: these are the blogs of academics, but they write more about the connection between their work and their life. Their work also tends to be shorter, but not always.
Playing School, Irreverently
jo(e)'s page
New Kid on the Hallway
Mommy blogs that are much, much more than mommy blogs. They write thoughtfully about political issues, their children, parenting, and whatever happens to interest them. Wonderful reading always.
11D
Half-changed World
Phantom Scribbler
Tags:
Egg-cellent online video
This morning I bumped into something I'd bumped into before but was unable to find again (until today!)--Video Egg. It allows you to import your video, do some simple editing, publish it to a blog or store it onsite. Right now, it works on almost any browser on a PC and Safari with the mac. It really was cool to play with. And I'm sure they'll be adding more features as they go along. It's a great place to store video if nothing else.
They allow you to import video from a file, from a camera (!), webcam, or a mobile device. You have to install a plug-in the first time you use it, but after that it's quite simple.
There are some things I don't like about it. You can't edit video after uploading it (at least not that I could tell). And, well, I do wish it would work with Firefox on a Mac.
This morning I bumped into something I'd bumped into before but was unable to find again (until today!)--Video Egg. It allows you to import your video, do some simple editing, publish it to a blog or store it onsite. Right now, it works on almost any browser on a PC and Safari with the mac. It really was cool to play with. And I'm sure they'll be adding more features as they go along. It's a great place to store video if nothing else.They allow you to import video from a file, from a camera (!), webcam, or a mobile device. You have to install a plug-in the first time you use it, but after that it's quite simple.
There are some things I don't like about it. You can't edit video after uploading it (at least not that I could tell). And, well, I do wish it would work with Firefox on a Mac.
Tags:
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
War on Science
Crooked Timber, one of my favorite intellectually stimulating blogs, sponsored an online conference the other day around a discussion of whether the administration has prevented the pursuit of science. Today they posted the index to all the posts on the topic. I haven't gotten through them all myself, but they are all likely to be thought-provoking.
If you've ever complained that there's no good content on the web, complain no more.
If you've ever complained that there's no good content on the web, complain no more.
Tags:
Monday, March 27, 2006
Classroom as a video game
Dave Warlick uses the terminology of a video game and applies it to the classroom. I especially like the idea of the teacher as strategy guide rather than the boss.
Tags:
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Wanna learn something?
We try to provide training and help, but if you want to learn something that we don't cover or go beyond our skills, there are some places you can get free help.
CNET offers a collection of free courses, covering such topics as scanning and protecting your computer.
Barnes and Noble also offers some free online courses, some in liberal arts and some in "life skills," everything from gardening to making web pages.
CNET offers a collection of free courses, covering such topics as scanning and protecting your computer.
Barnes and Noble also offers some free online courses, some in liberal arts and some in "life skills," everything from gardening to making web pages.
Tags:
Future of computing
Nature has a special issue on the future of computing. And all the articles are free. Looks like interesting reading.
via Slashdot
via Slashdot
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Creating Video for iPods
I am the proud owner of a new video iPod thanks to the coincidence of the demise of my old iPod and my birthday. Naturally, I now need to put the video of my kids on it. It's actually quite an easy process and even if you don't have an iPod, you might want to create iPod-friendly video for others.
In the past week, I've run into three good tutorials for various methods of creating iPod video.
First, via Lifehacker, this About.com tutorial for using iTunes to create video.
Second, a MacWorld article about converting DVDs for the iPod (as well as other sources) using both Quicktime and several 3rd party software apps.
Third, Apple's own tutorial for using Quicktime to make iPod video.
Enjoy! Let your inner filmmaker out.
In the past week, I've run into three good tutorials for various methods of creating iPod video.
First, via Lifehacker, this About.com tutorial for using iTunes to create video.
Second, a MacWorld article about converting DVDs for the iPod (as well as other sources) using both Quicktime and several 3rd party software apps.
Third, Apple's own tutorial for using Quicktime to make iPod video.
Enjoy! Let your inner filmmaker out.
Tags:
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
The Wisdom of Crowds
So far, only one of the sessions I attended has a podcast, though I know they were recording all of them. Here's James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds talk. I'll add some of my own notes later.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Digital Preservation and Blogs
This morning's first panel is about digital preservation. The convener just compared blogs to the personal papers that are collected for "famous" people. They're trying to collect the blog content to preserve blogs around historical events such as the 2004 election and hurricane Katrina. There are issues of being too close to an event, but recognizing that it's important to capture a snapshot of the moment. They're trying to find a balance between preserving blogs that are significant and capturing a "sense" of what blogging is.
What is the archival object when you're dealing with blogs? What questions are people going to be asking 50 years from now? You want to understand what it was like to create and participate in this networked in environment. Greenberg considers things like ads and design are important.
Copyright issues. How is copyright a barrier to preserving culture? Linksvayer from Creative Commons is disturbed by the costs involved in the process.
Are we too late to capture the essence of early blogging? Allison Headley suggests that blogging is going to continue to be popular so it's not too late. If, however, blogs become obsolete next year, then it may be.
An individual post is important to preserve. However, when someone changes their template, it changes the context of the post, so while the text may be the same, it's situated differently.
Cultural environmentalism. About preserving the culture using the same frame as preserving species and habitats.
With digital objects, there is a problem of authenticity. For example, preserving emailed memos. How do you know what's real? Digital information is easy to create, alter, etc. But the mutability is problematic. How do you track authenticity and document it? For example, preservation of the September 11th attacks. Usually collections are created by people over their lifetime and then turn it over to libraries. Now, however, with digital collections, they're dispersed, there are problems with formats, and there's a high probability of losing that data. You need metadata, but often people don't have metadata. Blogs often contain this metadata.
The blog is often a collecting point for such things as social bookmarks, flickr photos, etc. Open file formats: tiff is open; jpeg is not.
Inadvertent archives. Blogs are a form of inadvertent archives. Aggregating individual contributions.
What is the archival object when you're dealing with blogs? What questions are people going to be asking 50 years from now? You want to understand what it was like to create and participate in this networked in environment. Greenberg considers things like ads and design are important.
Copyright issues. How is copyright a barrier to preserving culture? Linksvayer from Creative Commons is disturbed by the costs involved in the process.
Are we too late to capture the essence of early blogging? Allison Headley suggests that blogging is going to continue to be popular so it's not too late. If, however, blogs become obsolete next year, then it may be.
An individual post is important to preserve. However, when someone changes their template, it changes the context of the post, so while the text may be the same, it's situated differently.
Cultural environmentalism. About preserving the culture using the same frame as preserving species and habitats.
With digital objects, there is a problem of authenticity. For example, preserving emailed memos. How do you know what's real? Digital information is easy to create, alter, etc. But the mutability is problematic. How do you track authenticity and document it? For example, preservation of the September 11th attacks. Usually collections are created by people over their lifetime and then turn it over to libraries. Now, however, with digital collections, they're dispersed, there are problems with formats, and there's a high probability of losing that data. You need metadata, but often people don't have metadata. Blogs often contain this metadata.
The blog is often a collecting point for such things as social bookmarks, flickr photos, etc. Open file formats: tiff is open; jpeg is not.
Inadvertent archives. Blogs are a form of inadvertent archives. Aggregating individual contributions.
Tags:
Sunday, March 12, 2006
The future of education
I'm attending a panel on the future of education in the digitally convergent world. There's some information about the Digital Convergent Initiative in Texas here. I think this is the fullest, non-keynote-like session I've been to, which tells you something about how interested people are in this issue. Where does education go as everything goes online? Hopefully, we'll find out something about that in this session.
The convener just asked who was here, but left out educators--just a note. Edited to add: I met Jessica and mentioned this to her. She acknowledged that was problematic. Very nice person and her company looks very interesting.
Official panel information is here.
Apologies for the incoherence below. Live-blogging is hard.
Brainertainment. Educates and entertains your brain. Spears' company focuses on music and art for young children. How digital content will change the landscape of education. Putting audio and video content on mobile devices. Multimodal learning. What she's saying sounds like pretty passive consumption. Customization--but done by the company. Self direction and self pacing, but not creation. Engaging all of the user senses.
Social contract of education. How is the contract changing? Some people have the opportunity to learn. Then, more people have the opportunity to learn. Changing the word opportunity to guarantee. Do all people have a guarantee to learn? The vortex model of education. Tactical requirements. Use the data about how individuals learn. NCLB uses the data as football scores. That's not an appropriate use of data. Use the data to move forward the idea that all learners can learn. Rigor matters. People want success not products, solutions.
Telecampus. Learners to content, learners with other learners, learners with their instructors. Completely ignoring the learners. Basically discussing connectivism. The network can solve some learner issues. The new generation of learners grew up with technology. They don't think of computers as technology. They are just things that they use. Doing is more important than learning. Staying connected is important. The millennial generation expects to learn in multiple ways and expects to learn as much from each other as from the "almighty" instructor.
EnterTech project. About lifelong learning. Helps people who are unemployed or underemployed get the education they need to get a job or get a better job. The project is built around gaming theory. People leave the program with entry level skills.
We're to the discussion part. I'll add key points later.
The discussion was quite lively, touching on concepts such as access, allowing kids to have more control over their learning, and what the goals of education really are. As soon as the podcast is up, I'll link to it, because I think it was a very important discussion.
The convener just asked who was here, but left out educators--just a note. Edited to add: I met Jessica and mentioned this to her. She acknowledged that was problematic. Very nice person and her company looks very interesting.
Official panel information is here.
Apologies for the incoherence below. Live-blogging is hard.
Brainertainment. Educates and entertains your brain. Spears' company focuses on music and art for young children. How digital content will change the landscape of education. Putting audio and video content on mobile devices. Multimodal learning. What she's saying sounds like pretty passive consumption. Customization--but done by the company. Self direction and self pacing, but not creation. Engaging all of the user senses.
Social contract of education. How is the contract changing? Some people have the opportunity to learn. Then, more people have the opportunity to learn. Changing the word opportunity to guarantee. Do all people have a guarantee to learn? The vortex model of education. Tactical requirements. Use the data about how individuals learn. NCLB uses the data as football scores. That's not an appropriate use of data. Use the data to move forward the idea that all learners can learn. Rigor matters. People want success not products, solutions.
Telecampus. Learners to content, learners with other learners, learners with their instructors. Completely ignoring the learners. Basically discussing connectivism. The network can solve some learner issues. The new generation of learners grew up with technology. They don't think of computers as technology. They are just things that they use. Doing is more important than learning. Staying connected is important. The millennial generation expects to learn in multiple ways and expects to learn as much from each other as from the "almighty" instructor.
EnterTech project. About lifelong learning. Helps people who are unemployed or underemployed get the education they need to get a job or get a better job. The project is built around gaming theory. People leave the program with entry level skills.
We're to the discussion part. I'll add key points later.
The discussion was quite lively, touching on concepts such as access, allowing kids to have more control over their learning, and what the goals of education really are. As soon as the podcast is up, I'll link to it, because I think it was a very important discussion.
Tags:
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Book Digitization and the Revenge of the Librarians
Mike Zarro and I are at SXSW this week, learning whatever we can about what's going on in web technology. Right now, he's learning about AJAX and I'm at a session about book digitization. I just went to a session on tagging and I'll write about that later. I went analog for that session so I have to gather my notes. I'm live blogging, so pardon the lack of coherence.
We have on the panel Dan Clancy, manager of the Google book search project, Danielle Tiedt from Microsoft's book search project, Bob Stein from a think tank about the future of the book.
Questions:
1) Once books are digitized, what can we do with the material?
2) Transliteracy.
3) How do we deal with the fear of corporatization of the library and its materials?
4) What's the relationship between book digitization and living documents like the Wikipedia?
5) Is our pool of knowledge actually shrinking because the digital content is only a small part of what's available?
Lawley on concerns:
To what extent is this process an exclusive process? Will the digitized material be available more widely or just via the libraries that have partnered with companies?
Personal information issues? What kind of information on your searches will be tracked? For example, if you log in to book search systems, what informaiton about you do they monitor?
Ranking issues. Who decides what books move to the top? When you do a search, what book gets listed first?
Google Book Search. Clancy describes the program. It seeks to address the problem of a large amount of content that isn't in digital form. Trying to get valuable content available. Lots of students don't go to the library anymore.
Publisher program--get rights from a publisher to digitize a book. See about 10% of the content.
Library program--over 85% of the books in the world are no longer available from a publisher. Partnered with several libraries to create full text searchable index of books. Can only provide full text of books that they've gotten permission for or is in the public domain.
From the audience--asks whether others can use public domain materials to create other content based on what Google has scanned.
Tiedt on Microsoft's book search program--not yet publicly available. A lot of the same reasons as Google's program. Only 5% of the world's information in online which is about 8 petabytes of informations. Microsoft is trying to answer people's questions better via search. In order to do that better, they want to put more of the world's information online. Book digitization is a very long term project. Cost is high--about 10 cents a page. Going to require a lot of community effort. Microsoft joined the open content alliance. The oca is focused on public domain works, helps partner technology companies with libraries. Internet archive--creates three copies--one for the library, one for the oca, and for the company.
Stein says Google always says trust us, we're the good guys, but is that really true? Different models of digitizing books. Has a problem with any corporation controlling the archive of our information. (Mark C., if you're reading this, you would be right in line with this guy.) It bothers him to ceding the collection of our culture to the corporations. Advocates an open source approach. [aside from me, are the universities not doing this because they're opposed to it and they lack the funds to do it?]
Tiedt says, she agrees. She doesn't want to be in the business of digitizing the books, but searching them and providing a great user experience. The ideal scenario is that all the content is already digitized and all they have to do is search it. She understands the concern of having corporations in charge of this process.
Clancy asks how would you have us do this differently? Good question. Further, are you comfortable
Liz: why does it have to centralized? offers the model of wikipedia.
From the audience: federal funding could help fund a distributed model. Need to develop an infrastructure. Need to know what I'm referring to.
Is the perception of people really wanting this information imaginary?
Clancy reassures us that the agreements with the libraries are not exclusive.
Lawley is asked about the role of librarians. She says that librarians are still needed to organize and help people choose the right sources. They will serve as guides to information. Joy of searching vs. joy of finding.
Clancy says the need for librarians is actually increasing because of the proliferation of information. Search is not the end all be all of finding information. The library is still a community. People still need to find community; they want to be around people.
Tiedt discusses the challenge of relevance ranking.
A good panel. Raises more questions than it answers really. They did not address copyright issues--which they said they weren't going to address because it's a huge issue. But, Google and Microsoft are plowing ahead with their projects. So books and other printed material are being digitized and libraries will have to decide how to deal with it and think about how they will participate.
We have on the panel Dan Clancy, manager of the Google book search project, Danielle Tiedt from Microsoft's book search project, Bob Stein from a think tank about the future of the book.
Questions:
1) Once books are digitized, what can we do with the material?
2) Transliteracy.
3) How do we deal with the fear of corporatization of the library and its materials?
4) What's the relationship between book digitization and living documents like the Wikipedia?
5) Is our pool of knowledge actually shrinking because the digital content is only a small part of what's available?
Lawley on concerns:
To what extent is this process an exclusive process? Will the digitized material be available more widely or just via the libraries that have partnered with companies?
Personal information issues? What kind of information on your searches will be tracked? For example, if you log in to book search systems, what informaiton about you do they monitor?
Ranking issues. Who decides what books move to the top? When you do a search, what book gets listed first?
Google Book Search. Clancy describes the program. It seeks to address the problem of a large amount of content that isn't in digital form. Trying to get valuable content available. Lots of students don't go to the library anymore.
Publisher program--get rights from a publisher to digitize a book. See about 10% of the content.
Library program--over 85% of the books in the world are no longer available from a publisher. Partnered with several libraries to create full text searchable index of books. Can only provide full text of books that they've gotten permission for or is in the public domain.
From the audience--asks whether others can use public domain materials to create other content based on what Google has scanned.
Tiedt on Microsoft's book search program--not yet publicly available. A lot of the same reasons as Google's program. Only 5% of the world's information in online which is about 8 petabytes of informations. Microsoft is trying to answer people's questions better via search. In order to do that better, they want to put more of the world's information online. Book digitization is a very long term project. Cost is high--about 10 cents a page. Going to require a lot of community effort. Microsoft joined the open content alliance. The oca is focused on public domain works, helps partner technology companies with libraries. Internet archive--creates three copies--one for the library, one for the oca, and for the company.
Stein says Google always says trust us, we're the good guys, but is that really true? Different models of digitizing books. Has a problem with any corporation controlling the archive of our information. (Mark C., if you're reading this, you would be right in line with this guy.) It bothers him to ceding the collection of our culture to the corporations. Advocates an open source approach. [aside from me, are the universities not doing this because they're opposed to it and they lack the funds to do it?]
Tiedt says, she agrees. She doesn't want to be in the business of digitizing the books, but searching them and providing a great user experience. The ideal scenario is that all the content is already digitized and all they have to do is search it. She understands the concern of having corporations in charge of this process.
Clancy asks how would you have us do this differently? Good question. Further, are you comfortable
Liz: why does it have to centralized? offers the model of wikipedia.
From the audience: federal funding could help fund a distributed model. Need to develop an infrastructure. Need to know what I'm referring to.
Is the perception of people really wanting this information imaginary?
Clancy reassures us that the agreements with the libraries are not exclusive.
Lawley is asked about the role of librarians. She says that librarians are still needed to organize and help people choose the right sources. They will serve as guides to information. Joy of searching vs. joy of finding.
Clancy says the need for librarians is actually increasing because of the proliferation of information. Search is not the end all be all of finding information. The library is still a community. People still need to find community; they want to be around people.
Tiedt discusses the challenge of relevance ranking.
A good panel. Raises more questions than it answers really. They did not address copyright issues--which they said they weren't going to address because it's a huge issue. But, Google and Microsoft are plowing ahead with their projects. So books and other printed material are being digitized and libraries will have to decide how to deal with it and think about how they will participate.
Tags:
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Free Software
Wow! 121Space has an incredible list of software that's available for free. Very useful stuff there.
Via Lifehacker
Via Lifehacker
Archives online
My colleagues and I were just discussing the problem of archiving in the digital age. The problem of preserving and finding the information or artifacts you need is just going to get worse, but I found, via Mark Wagner the Archive Grid. It's actually a creation of the RLG group, which I wrote about before.
Google has also begun digitizing historical film clips.
Google has also begun digitizing historical film clips.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Open Source in Higher Ed
Last week, the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness released a report on the use of Open Source Software in Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed picked up the report and distilled its conclusions in this article. Ars Technica is puzzled by the Inside Higher Ed article, especially its assertion that Open Source is not ready for prime time. They explain, however, that this assertion is made in response to open source software that is made specifically for the higher education market (portals, course management systems, etc.):
I like open source software though and use a lot of it. Our campus uses quite a bit. The entire web site is built on open source software. I'm writing my dissertation in Open Office. I use Firefox and Thunderbird. And I had the experience of installing Drupal, an open source product we're using for blogging. That experience taught me a lot about open source software. For one, something is always a little quirky. The place where you're installing the software may not have all the required components which will cause it to break. However, I discovered that the huge community of users and developers respond quickly when you're having a problem and are eager to help people just starting out. Within five minutes of posting a problem, I had a response. Do you get that kind of service with other vendors?
I think the whole idea of open source software fits well with education, especially liberal education. It is open and collaborative. Using it supports a community of programmers who often work on projects without pay and simply for the experience. Using open source software also encourages a kind of individualism that is sometimes lacking in corporate software applications. (Think of how little control you have over the look and feel of Blackboard.) I'd like to see colleges and universities shift to more open source solutions. I recognize, however, that there may always be some applications that people want to use that will be proprietary.
Here's a link to some resources.
Open source, education
A claim like that is certainly provocative, and in the context that it is expressed in the Higher Ed article, it really isn't defensible. What is not immediately apparent when one reads the article is that those quotations only address software specifically designed for higher education, not open source software in general.I agree that many of the open source course management systems I've seen are not ready for prime time. I've seen Sakai and Moodle. It's not so much that they're not good products. They seem to be. The reason most people choose open source is to customize the product so that it does exactly what your community needs it to. In order for these products to have that functionality, you need staff with java or php programming skills. Not all campuses (especially small ones like ours) have staff with those skills. Those skills aren't necessary for managing proprietary software. Someone else takes care of it. So, I think that's what most people mean by "not ready for primetime": too hard to customize.
I like open source software though and use a lot of it. Our campus uses quite a bit. The entire web site is built on open source software. I'm writing my dissertation in Open Office. I use Firefox and Thunderbird. And I had the experience of installing Drupal, an open source product we're using for blogging. That experience taught me a lot about open source software. For one, something is always a little quirky. The place where you're installing the software may not have all the required components which will cause it to break. However, I discovered that the huge community of users and developers respond quickly when you're having a problem and are eager to help people just starting out. Within five minutes of posting a problem, I had a response. Do you get that kind of service with other vendors?
I think the whole idea of open source software fits well with education, especially liberal education. It is open and collaborative. Using it supports a community of programmers who often work on projects without pay and simply for the experience. Using open source software also encourages a kind of individualism that is sometimes lacking in corporate software applications. (Think of how little control you have over the look and feel of Blackboard.) I'd like to see colleges and universities shift to more open source solutions. I recognize, however, that there may always be some applications that people want to use that will be proprietary.
Here's a link to some resources.
Open source, education
Friday, March 03, 2006
The dangers of Facebook, MySpace?
There have been several articles recently about Facebook and MySpace and the problems they have caused for some kids and the schools they attend. In case you don't have teenagers in the house, here's what they are. Facebook is a social networking site aimed at college students. Students have profiles where they can post pictures and information about themselves. They link to other students by listing them as friends. There are also discussion forums and groups. Staff and faculty (anyone with a brynmawr.edu email address) can have accounts too. If you want to see what it's all about, create an account for yourself (facebook.com).
MySpace is similar, but has appealed primarily to high school students and younger. MySpace does have a blog component (which facebook lacks). More on that later. Recently, MySpace has been blocked from many schools and several students have been suspended because of the questionable nature of some of the content they've posted on their MySpace profile. This Wired News article points out that there are two main concerns over MySpace. One is this questionable content and the other is the sexual predators that lurk there. The article points out that the risk of being approached by a sexual predator online is less likely than it is in other situations. In the cases of problematic content, some of the students are involved in lawsuits, claiming a violation of their free speech. In the case of sexual predators, it's primarily of matter of educating parents. Many parents don't know that MySpace exists and are generally unaware of what their kids are doing online. My own kids, at the ages of 10 and 6, have already had stressed to them that they are not to reveal personal information about themselves and must get permission from us to go online.
Parents also have misunderstood other kinds of technology, such as the Nintendo DS which they believed, through its chat program, could leave kids vulnerable to predators. Of course the predator would have to be in the house for the wireless connection to work, and then they have bigger problems than the chat program.
College faculty should be aware of these sites as well, not so much because of their potential dangers (which are few, in my opinion), but to consider them opportunities for learning. As coursework increasingly goes online, in the form of public blogging or online projects, students need to become increasingly aware of how to create a public persona, to learn how to present themselves appropriately and how to participate effectively in an online community (which leads to appropriate participation in offline communities). Another thing to consider is the familiarity college students have with sites such as MySpace and Facebook. This is their version of online, so if you want them to participate in an online forum or blogging, you may need to break them of some habits developed in those spaces (and which were appropriate there) and teach them more "academic" ways of writing and interacting online. For me, this flack over MySpace and Facebook casts a shadow over more positive online activities such as blogging. Often schools and parents and educators lump blogging in with such sites (especially MySpace which has a blog component), when really, they are dramatically different kinds of activities. Blogging involves reading, writing and thinking critically. For local examples, see WOI and blogs.brynmawr.edu. Further, rather than teaching students how to participate online safely and effectively and guiding them to more appropriate sites, parents and educators respond by blocking them from being online. This is a mistake. We can't keep our heads in the sand forever.
MySpace is similar, but has appealed primarily to high school students and younger. MySpace does have a blog component (which facebook lacks). More on that later. Recently, MySpace has been blocked from many schools and several students have been suspended because of the questionable nature of some of the content they've posted on their MySpace profile. This Wired News article points out that there are two main concerns over MySpace. One is this questionable content and the other is the sexual predators that lurk there. The article points out that the risk of being approached by a sexual predator online is less likely than it is in other situations. In the cases of problematic content, some of the students are involved in lawsuits, claiming a violation of their free speech. In the case of sexual predators, it's primarily of matter of educating parents. Many parents don't know that MySpace exists and are generally unaware of what their kids are doing online. My own kids, at the ages of 10 and 6, have already had stressed to them that they are not to reveal personal information about themselves and must get permission from us to go online.
Parents also have misunderstood other kinds of technology, such as the Nintendo DS which they believed, through its chat program, could leave kids vulnerable to predators. Of course the predator would have to be in the house for the wireless connection to work, and then they have bigger problems than the chat program.
College faculty should be aware of these sites as well, not so much because of their potential dangers (which are few, in my opinion), but to consider them opportunities for learning. As coursework increasingly goes online, in the form of public blogging or online projects, students need to become increasingly aware of how to create a public persona, to learn how to present themselves appropriately and how to participate effectively in an online community (which leads to appropriate participation in offline communities). Another thing to consider is the familiarity college students have with sites such as MySpace and Facebook. This is their version of online, so if you want them to participate in an online forum or blogging, you may need to break them of some habits developed in those spaces (and which were appropriate there) and teach them more "academic" ways of writing and interacting online. For me, this flack over MySpace and Facebook casts a shadow over more positive online activities such as blogging. Often schools and parents and educators lump blogging in with such sites (especially MySpace which has a blog component), when really, they are dramatically different kinds of activities. Blogging involves reading, writing and thinking critically. For local examples, see WOI and blogs.brynmawr.edu. Further, rather than teaching students how to participate online safely and effectively and guiding them to more appropriate sites, parents and educators respond by blocking them from being online. This is a mistake. We can't keep our heads in the sand forever.
Tags:
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Net neutrality
Educause has teamed up with Internet 2 to fight for net neutrality. What is net neutrality? It's the idea that your internet provider can't tell you what to do on the Internet. From the Educause Talking Points, here are some of the things that cable and telephone providers have done that fall outside the scope of net neutrality and are the kinds of things new legislation is designed to prevent:
New network neutrality legislation on its way
Techdirt:Telcos Back Off On Net Neutrality? For A Price.
WSJ.com - Consumers Could See New Web Rates: Use More, Pay More
Techdirt:No Network Neutrality, No Internet... And That's Just What Telcos Want
Techdirt:Verizon Exec Whines About Google Spiking The Kool-Aid At Its Free Lunch
net neutrality
a. A telephone company blocked its broadband customers from usingEducause has some links to more information, plus here are some recent articles:
VOIP telephone service because it could take revenue away from the
company’s phone services.
b. A cable company ordered consumers working from home to stop using
their broadband connection to log into their employer’s “virtual private
network” and tried to sell them a higher-priced alternative service.
c. An Internet provider in Canada blocked access to a web site run by the
labor union involved in a dispute with the ISP.
d. The CEO of SBC told Business Week that companies such as Google,
Yahoo, and Vonage would not be permitted to connect to SBC
broadband customers without additional compensation to SBC.
New network neutrality legislation on its way
Techdirt:Telcos Back Off On Net Neutrality? For A Price.
WSJ.com - Consumers Could See New Web Rates: Use More, Pay More
Techdirt:No Network Neutrality, No Internet... And That's Just What Telcos Want
Techdirt:Verizon Exec Whines About Google Spiking The Kool-Aid At Its Free Lunch
net neutrality
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Searching podcasts
I know we don't all have time to listen to podcasts all the way through. Some of them are an hour long and unless you have a long commute, you can't always listen to the whole thing. Well thanks to Podzinger, now you can search podcasts just like text. I tried a search for "education technology" and what do you know, but this little blog (with its attached podcast) showed up. Really, I didn't expect that.
This looks really cool, though. You can click on any word and play from that point or you can play the whole episode. Unfortunately, this process doesn't work on your portable device. But it will at least help you find podcasts you might find interesting.
via Lifehacker
podcasting
This looks really cool, though. You can click on any word and play from that point or you can play the whole episode. Unfortunately, this process doesn't work on your portable device. But it will at least help you find podcasts you might find interesting.
via Lifehacker
podcasting
