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Friday, October 06, 2006 |
Intute Reviewed by Stephen Downes in Innovate. The UK site Intute is thoroughly and positively reviewed in this Innovate article by Stephen Downes. (Accessing Innovate does require registration.) _____JH
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"Places to go: Intute" by Stephen Downes (Volume 3, Issue 1, October/November 2006). Stephen Downes examines the features of Intute, an online service that provides free access to a wide range of well-selected Web resources for educators and educational researchers. The simple layout of the site belies an innovative approach that separates it from other repositories: In addition to resources screened by editors and lists of services, Intute includes blogs and the Harvester, an automated computer program that contacts remote databases and retrieves records of newly created resources. Downes encourages educators and educational researchers to explore this promising forerunner in a new generation of learning object repositories. [Innovate] [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
12:54:27 PM 
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Test Post from Writely. Well, Novak blew my mind the other day by introducing me to Net Vibes, an online portal that takes advanctage of AJAX's capabilities. Imagine a portal where you can drag and drop the channels to different locations on the page. VERY cool. Of course, this program I am using now, Writely (www.writely.com ) is also quite a find. The purpose... [Michelle's Online Learning Freakout Party Zone]
12:48:50 PM
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Classroom Response Systems. One of the committees I am currently serving on is evaluating Classroom response systems, AKA "clickers". There has been a lot of activity in this space here at UBC, particularly in Physics. My colleague Jim Sibley has been posting about these tools quite a bit lately in advance of our deliberations. I ran across a very interesting site from Vanderbilt... [Michelle's Online Learning Freakout Party Zone]
12:46:54 PM
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Google Reader updates (and a video too!). Wow, just read this over on TechCrunch that Google Reader has been updated and they put up a video too. Nice! But I’ll still go over and do a more in depth video. I’m also downloading it and will see if it gets me to switch off of my favorite NewsGator.
UPDATE: I’ve loaded all my feeds into it. It’s quite nice. Works fast, clean UI. Does what you’d expect a news reader to do (brought in my OPML file from NewsGator without complaining).
Some things I’m still missing. Is there a “river of news” option here? That’s what I’m looking for. I want to just have a continuous scroll where I can go through my news feed. No folders, just a chronilogical view of all my items. OnFolio used to get pretty close to that, but I haven’t see any company really change the news reader metaphor very much. I’d also love to see a reordering of the list of feeds based on who publishes most (right now it’s just alphabetical). Or, who has the most links according to Google BlogSearch. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Some problems exist. I clicked on “email” at the bottom of a feed item and it gave me a “Bad Request” error. “Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request.” I’m using latest version of Firefox.
I don’t understand what the “Share” icon does at the bottom of each item. I click on it and it just changes to “Unshare.” OK, I guess I gotta go do some homework about where that gets shared to. It’s a mystery to me. But, what do I know? I’m blonde.
Oh, yeah, where’s the integration with Google Blog Search? One of the most powerful things I’ve been showing audiences lately is you can track anyone in the world who says anything on a blog. Say someone says “Scoble sucks” on a blog, even one without any readers, well, it could show up in my Google Reader. I don’t see a way to build a “search subscription.” NewsGator has that built into its online reader. NewsGator also has a community ranking feature built right in. Imagine if Google were going to build its own “Digg-style” community? In fact, there’s a URL where you can star things, but it’s not clear that there’ll be a site where I can subscribe to everything that people have “starred.”
It’ll be interesting to read the reviews about this and see where it goes.
[Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger]
12:25:30 PM
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Readers per URL among blogging services: is it important?. Microsoft Live Spaces has something like 75 million spaces, and about 125 million unique visitors a month (at least those were the last numbers I saw shared).
Wordpress.com, according to Automattic’s CEO (that’s the company that makes Wordpress), Toni Schneider, in an interview I had with him yesterday, has 400,000 Wordpress.com blogs, but has 25 million unique visitors per month.
Which service is going to be more attractive to advertisers? Which one builds a better business?
I wonder if anyone is doing a comparison of readers per URL among all the blogging services (and MySpace and FaceBook too)? Anyone doing research on these kinds of metrics?
[Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger]
12:22:29 PM
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Report: Google to buy YouTube for $1.6B. (InfoWorld) - Google Inc. is in discussions to acquire YouTube Inc. for about US$1.6 billion, although the deal is far from done and the talks could collapse, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing an unnamed source familiar with the matter.
Google's reported interest in YouTube would reflect a sense of urgency on the part of the search engine giant to improve its position in the red-hot online video market.
Google entered the market in early 2005, at about the same time YouTube was founded. But so far the success has gone to the scrappy startup, not Google.
In September, YouTube nabbed almost 46 percent of all U.S. visits to video Web sites, while the video section of News Corp.'s MySpace.com came in second with 21.2 percent, according to Hitwise Pty. Ltd. Google Video came in third with 11 percent, followed by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Video with 6.8 percent and Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo Video with 5.6 percent.
YouTube, in typical startup fashion, approached the market aggressively, opening up their service to anyone wanting to upload their videos, and quickly became a phenomenon. It embraced tagging and sharing features, creating the most popular online video community.
Meanwhile, Google took a much more conservative approach, at first only featuring videos obtained through formal agreements with professional production houses. Consequently, users had to pay to view many of the videos in the catalogue. Months later, it added an upload feature for regular users, but closely policed submissions. It wasn't until recently that it opened wide the service's door and added tagging and sharing capabilities.
Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL LLC are also playing catch-up to YouTube, whose model these large Internet companies are adopting.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL need a strong position in this market, due to the increasing popularity of online video. Collectively, traffic to the top 10 video Web sites increased 164 percent between February and May of this year, according to Hitwise. As traffic to online video sites increases, so does the interest of advertisers, who in turn generate most of the revenue for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.
For many years, online video remained an unfulfilled promise, hobbled by high broadband prices, inferior image quality and reluctance by TV networks and film companies to put their shows and movies on the Web. However, in the past 18 months, video on the Web has gained momentum, helped by a critical mass of users with broadband access, improved quality and a willingness by production companies to distribute their films and programs online.
Neither Google nor YouTube immediately responded to requests for comment. By Juan_Carlos_Perez@idg.com (Juan Carlos Perez). [InfoWorld: Top News]
12:06:53 PM
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Thursday, November 10, 2005 |
UNESCO Virtual Conference--Lawrence Lessig on the Creative Commons. Here is Susan D'Antoni's introduction of Lawrence Lessig to the Conference and his initial background posting
about the Creative Commons. ______JH
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Dear Colleagues,
One of the issues that has been raised already in our forum is that of copyright. And there have been a number of references to the Creative Commons. This is an important development, and a brief description of it is attached (much of which is based on the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Today I would like to introduce the founder and Chairman of Creative Commons, Professor Lawrence Lessig of the Stanford University Law School. He is also the Founder and Director of the Center for Internet and Society, which "brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry". He will tell us a little about the Creative Commons and how he came to found this important initiative. Then we can open the discussion to explore copyright considerations and the development of Open Educational Resources.
Professor Lessig, the floor is yours,
Susan
Susan D'Antoni, Virtual Institute, International Institute for Educational Planning
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Thanks, Susan, for inviting me to say something (short!) about Creative Commons.
The aim of Creative Commons is to give _authors and artists_ a simple way to mark _their creative work_ with the freedoms that they intend their creativity to carry. "Authors and artists" marking "their creative work": It is a project to empower creators, by giving them a simple means to give others freedoms that by default the law of copyright does not grant.
Which freedoms? Well typically not all freedoms: Creative Commons licenses give authors the ability to give away some rights; most keep some rights to themselves. Thus, an author can permit a work to be shared for noncommercial purposes, but reserve to herself commercial rights. Or an author can permit a work to be shared so long as no changes are made to the shared work. Or an author can permit a work to be shared so long as others who transform that work release the transformation in a similarly free way. There are basically three questions we ask authors in our licensing engine: (1) Do you want to permit commercial use? (2) Do you want to allow modifications? (3) If you allow modifications, do you want the modifications to be released in a similarly free way? [1] Those three questions produce six core licenses [2].
Why would an artist or author ever want to release for free any of her rights? Well my answer to this question depends upon the author. If the author is an artist, or (for a reason that will be clear in a moment) a non-scientific creator, the answer is, "because sometimes it helps." The band Wilco, for example, released their album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" on the net for free under terms equivalent to our noncommercial license, after its record label rejected the album. The buzz that release produced was so intense that another record label picked up the album, and then released in the traditional way -- through the sale of CDs. Even though the album had been available for free, Wilco sold more CDs from that album then they had ever sold before. Granting some rights for free meant these artists could better achieve their objectives.
But with scientists, I think the story is different. Creative Commons has a sister project, the Science Commons project [3]. The Science Commons operates under a very different ethic. I would never say an artists "ought to" release rights. I would say that about a scientist. In my view, the ethical obligation of a scientist is not just to discover knowledge. It is also to make that knowledge universally accessible. Thus, Creative Commons licenses are used by such open access projects as the Public Library of Science, to assure that all of the research published in those journals is also available perpetually for free.
In both cases, CC licenses make it easier for artists and authors to achieve what they want (or with scientists, should want). Yet that's not to say that they're right for everyone -- Madonna does quite well in the "All Rights Reserved" world. But I do believe they're right for the vast majority of creators and authors using the Internet to spread their work. By adding a simple layer of freedom to an uncertain and restrictive default of copyright, CC licenses aim to make the spread of creativity and knowledge easier. Not by rejecting copyright, but by giving creators the ability to exercise their copyright in ways that help spread creativity.
[1] http://creativecommons.org/license/ [2] http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses [3] http://sciencecommons.org/
-----
Lessig
Stanford Law School
Ass't: Elaine Adolfo <mailto:a2lessig@pobox.com>;;;
<http://lessig.org>;;; [on the web]
<http://lessig.org/blog>;;; [comments in general]
<http://free-culture.org>;;; [my latest book]
<http://creativecommons.org>;;; [our project to free culture]
<http://publicknowledge.org>;;; [framing policy in DC]
<http://eff.org>;;; [fighting for truth, etc.]
<http://plos.org>;;; [freeing science] [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
8:24:04 AM
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DNA Chips Spot and Help Track Antibiotic Resistance. A DNA chip, or DNA microarray, is a small glass slide that can reveal the presence or absence of particular DNA sequences in a sample. This tool has allowed clinicians to test for genetic mutations and diseases in people. Now, ARS microbiologists Jonathan Frye, Charlene Jackson, Mark Englen, and Paula Cray have developed a DNA microarray that detects more than 100 antimicrobial-resistance genes in many types of bacteria. [Science Blog -]
7:47:07 AM
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Good enough for government work. If effective communication within and among governments and citizenries required these big guns [Word, OpenOffice.org] then we'd have to find ways to accommodate them. But it just isn't so. A mere fraction of the power of these multihundred-megabyte behemoths suffices for basic communication; the rest is overhead. Software delivered as a service through the Web -- simple, lightweight, and universally available -- is clearly the better way forward.
...
Once we have an open document format -- and given XML's protean transformability I don't much care which one -- perhaps we can move on to the real challenge. I expect that Web-based software can meet all of the key requirements that are driving this debate, and should do so in ways that are native and ubiquitous. Governments advocating on our behalf should expect no less. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio]
7:42:34 AM
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Dan Bricklin: "I'm working on a new product called wikiCalc." [Scripting News] interesting approach to navigating the information flow with the use of row and column mapping. I would be interesting to continue the metaphor to logitude and latitued mapping to allow for points on the planet mapping in connection with google maps -- BL
7:30:45 AM
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Google's Tough Call. The search giant must decide how to handle the battle over its latest great idea: Google Print. This could change the internet as we know it. By Lawrence Lessig from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
7:21:14 AM
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Wednesday, November 09, 2005 |
Open University going Moodle - eGov Monitor. The Open University builds student online environment with Moodle and more.The OU’s expertise in supported distance learning has always meant it being a leader in developing the best technology to support its students. Now, The Open University’s Learning [Online Learning Update]
10:52:07 PM
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The Essential Guide to ePortfolios Services. Video of the workshop Peter Rees Jones and I led at the 2005 Alt-I-Lab last summer is now available from IMS in Europe. Given that the workshop was help in a room without air conditioning in ninety degree F heat before the effects of the lighting the video guys set up, we don't look half bad. I'm amazed the participants were able to stay as engaged as they were through most of the three hours. Because the workshop was being taped, Peter and I did a lot more talking than we would have under other circumstances. It's difficult to capture group interaction, and participants are likely to be less open when they know they're being taped. During the whole group discussion portions of the workshop, speakers had to wait for a guy with a boom mike to rush over to them before they could speak, making for somewhat stilted conversation.
I like the interface the producers of the site have constructed. It makes it easy to navigate to the part of the video in which you're interested. The complete workshop is quite long, making this feature especially helpful.
[National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research blogs]
9:32:44 PM
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Tuesday, November 08, 2005 |
How-to Links: Video Podcasting. Although I haven’t had the good fortune of bringing home an iPod video, I’ve been excited about RSS-based subscription video for a while. Readers of this blog may recall my preference for FireAnt, a video and audio aggregator/player that was around long before iTunes began supporting subscription media. (I prefer the Mac version of FireAnt, but primarily use the Windows version to watch videos on my PC laptop.)
The recent launch of the iPod video has led to renewed interest in RSS-based subscription video, and some in higher ed are taking the plunge. Karine Joly at Collegewebeditor.com highlights this trend in a nice post about admission video podcasting efforts via iTunes at Savannah College of Art and Design.
So, what does it take to pull this off? The quickest path is to use a miniDV recorder, a simple editing/conversion program such as iMovie (Mac), a blog, and an RSS feed. Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi provide a free screencast tutorial showing how to put all the pieces together. I’ve done it; it’s extraordinarily easy, and fun. The video quality you can get from relatively inexpensive cameras (such as this Panasonic 3-chip model) is simply astounding.
Want some behind-the-scenes information from a serious practitioner? Andrew Baron, creator and producer of Rocketboom, a popular daily videoblog, was recently interviewed on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (link via Micro Persuasion). He talks about details like video compression–something you’ll want to consider if you decide to get into the business. He also talks about the hardware and software he uses to watch videos himself (hint: not iPod video, and not iTunes).
[Syndication for Higher Ed]
5:37:30 AM
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Monday, November 07, 2005 |
IM on the Desktop. Just a reminder that if you want to offer instant messaging on your public workstations but you don’t want to install software or your IT department is worried about the security of IM apps, you can always put desktop shortcuts and quick links in the browser to the web-based versions of these IM clients and/or Meebo. Your patrons will lose some of the great functionality of the full clients, but it’s a start, and it might be a stepping stone to offering more down the road if you’re meeting resistance. In addition, it looks to me like you circumvent some privacy issues, too, because no transcripts of conversations are saved on the hard drive. Granted, information may still be in the browser’s cache, but hopefully you’re already addressing this issue with software that clears it out after each user. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:46:45 PM
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Sunday, November 06, 2005 |
Blogs Vs. Wikis Presentation. This afternoon, I’ll be co-presenting a session with Steven M. Cohen (people, make sure you spell his name correctly – I’m just saying!) about blogs versus wikis. We’ll look at the Open Internet Librarian Blog and the Internet Librarian Wiki and compare what’s working and what isn’t for both types of tools. The session will be a bit improv, but here are the thoughts I plan to share: Advantage: blog - Easy to post information
- Chronological order
- Automatic RSS feed
- Comments can be attached to each post
- Only blog authors can edit the content of a post
Why might the blog work? Because it gives non-bloggers a place to post thoughts and it could be easy to audioblog.
Why might the blog not work? Because bloggers already have a place to blog, and non-bloggers don’t want to blog. Advantage: wiki - Anyone anywhere can contribute
- True equalized collaboration (when accounts aren’t required)
- Can create any order/flow to the information (sometimes chronological order doesn’t work well for the type of content)
Why might the wiki work? Because anyone at the conference or offsite could add content.
Why might the wiki not work? Because no one is sure what to put there (versus somewhere else) and wikis are still a little difficult to use (see Meredith Farkas’ advice?). Plus, they need a password to edit it, which might be too much of a barrier at this point. Personally, I think the tool that ended up working the best in this situation was Technorati. It was the one spot everything was pulled together. Advantage: Technorati (view the IL05 tag) - Automatically brought together all pieces that were posted anywhere (as long as they were tagged and the sites pinged Technorati)
- Made it easy to find things; one-stop shopping
I would also argue that we’ve had a lot of fun and socialness with Flickr. Of course, you had to know about Flickr, have an account, and know what you could do. I wish we could have done a whole session just on Flickr. :-P Advantage: Flickr (view IL05 photostream) Technorati tags: IL05, IL2005 [The Shifted Librarian]
11:05:27 PM
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Google Patent for User Targeted Search Results.  [Slashdot] The idea is good the notion of patenting personized applications is not good. Intelligent Personal Proxies offer another layer style approach in addition to the greasemonkey customizations in the browser. There is a lot of efficiency to be achieved by individualizing the user interface to meet the need of each user. -- BL
1:11:30 PM
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Saturday, November 05, 2005 |
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