Social annotation comes handy in online research
February 20, 2008
The “proverbial” quest for “needle in the haystack” finds application in social bookmarking, Rebecca seems to imply on wildapricot.com.
Without leaving out the benefits of social bookmarking, Rebecca wonders whether “the usual social bookmarking services really are the best possible tool for organizing that flood of online information, [when it] comes to online research and collaboration?”
“Diigo.com takes social bookmarking to a new level of usefulness,” Rebecca writes. “It’s all about social annotation. Highlight text or leave a note, right on the web page itself.”
Picture: Flickr
Online learning may be flat but also deep, if demand is high
February 20, 2008
Increasing demand for higher education is becoming difficult for traditional campuses to meet. Fortunately, there is Internet and Web 2.0, which will eventually lead to Learning 2.0, write John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler in their paper “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.”
“The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0,” the paper reads “has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people.”
Web 2.0 facilitates the social learning, peer to peer, and scientist to scientist as well as combinations of these. “Understanding is socially constructive,” the authors write. At the same time, online education has a “long tail.” “Whereas traditional schools offer a finite number of courses of study, the “catalog” of subjects that can be learned online is almost unlimited.”
In their lengthy paper the authors present thoroughly how the demand-driven education involves more passion and, thus, better quality knowledge. “This new form of learning begins with the knowledge and practices acquired in school but is equally suited for continuous, lifelong learning that extends beyond formal schooling.”
Picture: Connect.educause.edu
Futurist looks at computerized policy-making, to tackle engineering challenges
February 20, 2008
Daniel W. Rasmus discusses on his futuristic blog some of the Grand engineering challenges identified by a select committee from the National Engineering Academy (NEA).
Mr. Rasmus stressed the necessity of grassroots model of policy making in order to tackle the listed challenges. “I think we need a more distributed, organic method that integrates public policy makers, citizens and the organizations that co-exist in a given area.” He points out the possibilities of technology in policy making. “[S]cience can help depoliticize the planning process and providing transparency into how various constraints: natural, technological and political, were handled in the various models.”
The 14 challenges identified by the NEA are: “Make solar energy economical; Provide energy from fusion; Develop carbon sequestration methods; Manage the nitrogen cycle; Provide access to clean water; Restore and improve urban infrastructure; Advance health informatics; Engineer better medicines; Reverse-engineer the brain; Prevent nuclear terror; Secure cyberspace; Enhance virtual reality; Advance personalized learning; Engineer the tools of scientific discovery.”
Picture: NEA
Censorship of online whistle-blowing ignites outrage
February 20, 2008
Following a Californian court decision a Swiss bank, Bank Julius Baer, obtained a restrictive order against Wikileaks, a whistle-blower site, reported various news agencies and blogs. The move had caused a massive outcry in the blogosphere and among free speech rights defenders.
“Although other versions of the site can still be accessed via mirror versions in India, Belgium and Christmas Island, the ruling has caused a wave of outrage around the world,” writes Antony Loewenstein on his blog. “The owners of the site remain defiant.”
The author digs out a quote, cited by Wired: “Julie Turner, a Californian attorney in California who has previously represented Wikileaks, told Wired that: “It’s like saying that Time magazine published one page of sensitive material so (someone can) seize the entire magazine and put a lock on their presses.”
Recently Mr. Loewenstein sees an alarming number of internet censorship cases. “The last few years have seen a steadily growing number of cases featuring wealthy litigants threatening, and often succeeding, against owners of websites that publish uncomfortable truths. Exiled Iranian blogger Hoder is a recent example.”
Nate Anderson writes on Arstechnica blog that “the restraining order against Wikileaks is temporary, and in the order Judge Jeffrey White notes that the group can fight the block during a February 29 hearing. Wikileaks says that it has several lawyers in San Francisco willing to work pro bono on the case.”
Picture: Flickr
Knowledge simplified to extreme: Adages and Ignorance 101
February 19, 2008
Michael H. Goldhaber, expands on his blog on the various degrees of nowadays ignorance, disguised as broader knowledge. “We might view expanding knowledge as a yeasty sort of bread — the faster it expands, the bigger the holes all through it,” Goldhaber writes. The web, and services like Wikipedia and Google allow people to “know less and less about more and more.”
Goldhaber argues that of course the web, and new technologies, impact the way knowledge is understood, yet one “would have to select on the basis of prior knowledge, and the incompleteness and holes in that knowledge are precisely why neither of these tools can be assumed to provide [one] with effective knowledge, or effective lack of ignorance.”
“Instead, the best [online repositories and the web] can do is little more than make us more aware of the very breadth and depth of our ignorance. As they enlarge every day, our ignorance only grows,” the author writes.
Another impact of ever developing technology that Goldhaber points out lies in the very nature of tech development. Technicians have little interests in “maintaining mundane stuff,” thus helping the depth of knowledge, when, instead of having Internet, for instance, running seamlessly, they could be working on development of new things “that potentially could be of interest or even value to millions.”
Picture: Flickr
Intangibles add value to free Internet data, making it sellable
February 3, 2008
On his The Technium blog, Kevin Kelly reflects on the paradox of free-data, money-generating economy. He filters down and illustrates eight things that can be sold and add value to the free, and endlessly replicated, data in “our networked economy.”
Kevin calls them “generative values. A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured.”
“Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.”
Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, Findability – these are the generatives that Kevin identifies and explains in an illustrative and trustful manner.
Picture: KK.org
Monarchic speaker presides in oversimplified PowerPoint chair
January 29, 2008
PowerPoint presentations lead to disrespecting the audience, writes Edward Tufte in his recent Wired article. The author complains about the oversimplification of data and the imposing emergence of the speaker over its audience. “Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience,” the author writes.
Although PowerPoint presentations make the life of the speaker easier, and have a ready-to-grasp appearance, they transform the once coherent finished sentences into “infomercials” and “pitchable sales.” “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple,” Tufte writes.
The Blogosphere seems to show solidarity with Tufte on this issue. Lennox pointes out in his Blurgl Blog entry the similarity between numerous but, alas, less quality desktop publishing and the abundance of PowerPoint bulleted presentations. “The problem here […] is that using PowerPoint is likely to continue to be the easiest and quickest route for most people. And they don’t really care about how well you remember it or even if you had a good time,” the blogger writes.
Picture: Flickr
Banned books on digital display
January 28, 2008
Surprisingly or not, many authors that are labeled “classics” nowadays, went through banns, censorship and other suppresses of their works, on the grounds of obscenity, adult language, and other social claims. A Banned Books Online listing exhibits books’ censorship and prohibitions and some history of the letter-related violence.
Neither Shakespeare, nor Twain are strangers to book censorship, according to the listing, let alone works like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Voltaire’s Candide, to name just a couple.
Picture: Flickr
Gutenberg galaxy lags behind the shapeless web world
January 28, 2008
“Billions of web sources” sounds abstract. “Billions of stars” sounds like a universe. John Naughton points out in his Observer article how the Gutenberg universe evolves into a much less-known and difficult to envision world of web. The web transformed the processes of thinking and knowledge-gathering in a rather more dramatic way then even the Gutenberg bible did, Naughton writes.
Alan Moore reacts to the Observer article on his Communities Dominate Brands blog, and raises new challenges to the understanding of the digital world. “The point is,” Moore writes, “that our once familiar analogue world, which we understood, no longer exists in our digital universe.”
Picture: Flickr
Virtual worlds translate into palpable computing
January 25, 2008
When the first books were printed, the presses had little to debate whether they should use paper or energetic fields. There were simply no energetic fields. Today, computing is at a similar crossroads for the uninitiated, ICT Results seems to imply.
Palpable versus ubiquitous, as in computing that is complex and sophisticated yet transparent and fully comprehensible versus invisible computing. Morten Kyng, a researcher at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, stands for the palpable, leading a pan European team of researchers, who develop and implement palpable open source models. Their products currently range from large events monitoring to disaster alleviation and critical health interventions solutions.
Leaving aside the importance of computing per se in such areas, the user should be put in the center of technology and participate at its adaptation, while the ubiquitous technology would simply stay invisible to a user, the website argues.
Photo: Flickr