Seb's Open Research
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Friday, August 01, 2003
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Unblogged again?
Yes folks, my copy of Radio still being bound to my desktop for now, I won't be able to blog here for the upcoming week. However, I might contribute to the SoSo weblog, or in my ultra-secret Drupal personal blog, over at the (currently dormant) group-forming community. Later!
 9:54:17 AM
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Great interview with thinker and publisher Tim O'Reilly (via Scripting News) "I'd also say that you don't just want to pay attention to companies, but to individuals. There's a kind of technology progression, in which individual hackers -- the folks who are comfortable enough with computers to make them do what they want, and who aren't dependent on vendor-supplied solutions -- show us future directions. Eventually entrepreneurs take what the hackers have done and make it more accessible for ordinary users. And then someone figures out how to turn it into a platform on which the cycle can repeat at a higher level."
9:07:49 AM
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Uhm, what he said.
I was meaning to blog this overview by Jim but Stephen beat me to the punch.
A Look at Recent User Level Activity in the RSS World. The point of this interesting survey is to look at RSS adoption in the corporate and consulting community. Thus we see technology analyst firms, such as Forrester and Jupiter Research, using the format, as well as publishers, magazines and businesses. Writes the author, "Perhaps what's notable here is the shift in focus to actually thinking about increasing the value to customers." The item concludes with some links to speculation about the future and long term impact of RSS. Good article, many links. [OLDaily]
8:41:57 AM
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Sebastian teaches webpublishing and learning
This is great news. Sebastian will be teaching a course on personal webpublishing and learning. I can't think of anyone better positioned to give such a course. Hopefully a lot of the material will be on the Web (and eventually translated into English (or French)!)
Gathering ideas for a course on personal Webpulishing.
It is set. This fall I will teach a course titled "Personal Webpublishing Systems and Weblogs in the context of learning, teaching, and knowledge managment" in the Media Pedagogy program at the University of Augsburg, Germany. [...]
The major challenge will be to construct an environment and some events that will allow for the exploration of personal Webpublishing tools and practices while working on some authentic learning tasks. The results of these activities should be documented through the production of artifacts that can be published, shared, syndicated, and that would serve a purpose beyond the course.
So far so good... will need to start planning this out in the coming weeks. If you have worked on something similar, have some ideas to share, tales to tell, tips and suggestions... just let me know either through email, comments to this post, or your own personal Webpublising outlet. [Sebastian Fiedler]
8:38:27 AM
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Thursday, July 31, 2003
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Documenting blogger behavior
Do read the whole thing - it's worth it.
Dave Pollard: THE BLOGGING PROCESS. "A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day.
And then a description of what's needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation."
For some bloggers, just writing is enough. For most of us, though, we're looking to the blogosphere to provide us with useful and interesting information, education, entertainment and/or inspiration for our writing, and feedback, a critical audience, and help with the creative and publishing process. That process looks (to me at least) something like this:
[...]
9:41:07 AM
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Knowledge Management as a monster
Ton has a great post on how the genuinely revolutionary brand of knowledge management (KM) might only make its way into organizational culture somewhat covertly, in a bottom-up fashion. His starting point is an article titled "Exorcising monsters: the cultural domestication of new technologies", by technological philosopher Martijntje Smits. Ton says implementing KM-as-it-should-be might actually turn out to involve unlearning the term KM, as well as displacing cultural boundaries.
A must-read, which reminds me of a passage on culture change I blogged back in October, under the title: Shift happens. One person at a time.
8:27:42 AM
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Another online teaching testimonial
This from Blogosphere.us:
I've taught a class for two semesters in an online environment though, and I've been thrilled with the results. I think it has to do with our format. We don't follow the "teacher as signal student as receiver" model. As we planned our courses, we saw the mistakes being made by so many other online instructors who treated the Web as if it were merely another text book. And so when it came time to actually implement our courseware, we actively rejected the notion. [...]
But it was only a major paradigm shift for us, the instructors. It seems the students were only all too happy to work together, help each other out, and seek out information to share with the rest of the class. It was amazing. The collaboration and sense of community growth among the students (and the instructors — we were certainly involved after all, just not in the traditional way) was much greater than would be expected in a regular classroom setting. When it comes to online courses, we haven't looked back.
8:07:59 AM
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Wednesday, July 30, 2003
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Phases of social networking
Rob describes a pattern of social insertion - first an orgy of discovery and furious networking, then a discernment phase where the finite capacity for close relationships operates a selection; and finally a consolidation phase. Sounds about right. I think some people have a heavier churn rate for their inside network, while others form a much more stable net. I wonder if that affects their ability to innovate and adapt.
Tired of blogging? Matt and Paolo are wondering if they are tired of blogging after a year. I too seem to have hit a one year wall. I want to shrink my blogging world. Why? [...] [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
9:14:20 AM
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Montreal, here I come (back)
Looks like I'll be spending next week in Montreal. Following Eugene Eric Kim's timely advice I will attend the Extreme Markup conference. If you should know who I should really speak to while I'm there (for instance, wiki and weblog connaisseurs), please do leave a comment!
(And if you thought I left Montreal in too much of a hurry and would like to take the opportunity to meet, just send me an email.)
8:52:10 AM
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Metadata for mortals
Metadata, Mark II - excellent article on metadata. [GeoURL via Puzzlepieces]
Excellent indeed! The first two pages give clueful background information on metadata and why it has trouble picking up steam. The rest of the article focuses on specific metadata standards, and the author had the good sense to choose to talk about simple - but relevant and/or promising - standards first.
Page 3 covers GeoURL, and gave me the nudge I needed to get my very own  button just below my  (RSS) buttons.
Page 4 introduces Dan Bricklin's SMBeta business metadata initiative and links to the related Overall.com metadatabase. If you're curious to see what SMBeta looks like, here are small businesses with a zip code that starts with 9.
Page 5 gives a bird's eye view of the Dublin Core metadata initiative, which over the years has metastasized its way into many different other specifications.
Page 6 painlessly introduces the infamous Resource Description Framework (RDF) by way of a meaningful example (a description of the article itself).
Finally, page 7 describes the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary and concludes by wishing good luck to all of these standards in gaining widespread adoption.
I'm pretty sure articles like this (and this introduction to RSS) will actually turn out to help that.
8:42:14 AM
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The cluetrain classroom?
Rob Paterson reacts on yesterday's post on collaborative learning, telling a bit about his own experience teaching online at the University of Prince Edward Island.
"With a class of 20 we get about a 1,000 posts in a 6 week half semester. Very soon we shift gears up from the abstract to how each of us can make a difference. We leave the world of the case studies and we look at ourselves. By week 4, we have lost the academic voice and we are in Cluetrain territory where all of us are revealing a great deal about who we really are as people. The material has become an excuse to explore our lives.
If we are lucky a student goes very deep and this stimulates the rest of us to open up as well. So the content is really only a catalyst. We have gone back to the Socratic method and it is hard to tell the prof from the student."
Which makes me wonder, how much does the teacher's (perceived or actual) need to control what goes on in the course influence the quality and variety of the individual learning experiences?
6:28:18 AM
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Tuesday, July 29, 2003
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Globally positioned blogging
Roland Piquepaille summarizes a TechRepublic article on the merging of GPS systems and the web.
Suppose you're standing somewhere in the middle of a foreign city with a couple of friends. Everyone's getting hungry and you had better find a good place to eat. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to instantly look up, say, all restaurant reviews within a 1000-feet radius of where you are? And then intersect the results with your personal web of trust to increase your confidence in the info?
10:44:45 AM
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Online communities in classrooms?
Charlie Lowe reflects on the following question: "my classes are the perfect size for forming online communities -- more than a dozen but not over a hundred. Why then, do online communities not form?"
Charlie asks the opposite question - why should they form? "Won't an online commnity form only if the class is extremely collaborative-based learning oriented in which students are granted more agency than many instructors are willing to give?"
9:58:50 AM
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If you can't beat 'em...
Wifi, Personal Calculators, and the Backchannel. Clay Shirky: "What both optimists and pessimists believed, however, deep down, was that their opinions mattered. "Someday," each of them thought, "someone is going to ask me what we should do about these here calculators." What the adults didn't understand, but me and my 5th grade posse did, was that calculators, having arrived, were never going away." [Corante: Social Software]
9:49:49 AM
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Weblogs: the Readers' Digest analogy
Joseph Hart: Blogs as Electronic Readers' Digests. "So what does it mean that modern blogs resemble the old Reader's Digest? I'm not sure, but readers of blogs and readers of the Digest seem to share some commonality of intent and purpose in their rapid absorption of quick, bite-sized information and entertainment."
Joseph lists similarities and differences between Readers' Digest periodicals and weblogs. One crucial difference he missed is that blogs have yet to send sweepstake junkmail packages to subscribers. (Thank goodness!).
8:50:30 AM
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Enabling collaborative learning
Sebastian has found Martin Terre Blanche's wonderful blog. He quotes a good post on obstacles to collaborative learning.
- Students and lecturers are more familiar with a knowledge-transmission model of education and don't always understand what is expected of us in a more constructionist environment.
- We have too little information about lecturers' and students' backgrounds, networks and skills - so often we don't realise that there is somebody in the group who could teach the rest of us a lot about some aspect of what we're studying.
- No or very limited mechanisms for students to talk back to the lecturer and (especially) to talk to one another.
- Inadequate 'course memory'. Lecturers often are the only bridge for this year's students to the knowledge created by last year's group - students don't get to see what last year's group did. There is no mechanism for students who want to stay in the group after the course is officially over (and who could be a useful resource for next year's students) to do so. [Martin Terre Blanche]
Reading through this list made me realize that the people who pioneer new modes of communication in hi-tech conferences these days are in the process of fixing these issues - through backchannelling and real-time blogging, the product of which most often gets turned into permanent, hyperlinked, googlable archives for the benefit of those who aren't there.
Here are some more obstacles elicited from one of Martin's readers.
8:05:45 AM
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Monday, July 28, 2003
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Franklin P. Adams. "I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." [Quotes of the Day]
11:20:58 AM
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Who's qualified to recognize life and beauty?
Tom Portante has found a pair of pieces from the New York Times that give an impressionistic overview of celebrated/scornfully dismissed architect Christopher Alexander's work on pattern languages. I always thought most of what he wrote made plenty of sense.
Among computer programmers, he has attained near-guru status. Will Wright, the creator of "The Sims," the nation's most popular computer game, routinely cites him as a major influence. And he's an unlikely inspiration behind a powerful movement in software design known as object-oriented programming. [...]
Some of the more nuts-and-bolts patterns, however, have become architectural rules of thumb: ''Balconies and porches that are less than six feet deep are hardly ever used''; ''When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms that have light on two sides.'' In a profession that seems indifferent to the concerns and delights of ordinary life, Alexander has always been a humanist, a proponent of window seats, sunny spots and arcades. [...]
TO make his case, Alexander repeatedly uses a flexible and eloquent tool: he presents two images -- a pair of buildings or drawings or household objects or country roads -- and asks the viewer to choose the one that has the most ''life.'' (Sometimes he asks which one is ''a better picture of the self.'') The quintessential pairing asks people to choose between a diner-style saltshaker and a bottle of the best-known brand of ketchup. According to Alexander, 80 percent of the people asked choose the saltshaker, and his experiments with other pairings along these lines yield similar results; when asked to pick which of two images looks most ''right'' in some vague way, a great majority of respondents gravitate to one -- which does make you wonder if the question really is as vague as it seems.
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