Seb's Open Research
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Friday, April 16, 2004
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Weblogs enter New Brunswick school
Seeing as Jacques Cool has already broken the news to the French-speaking crowd over on ConstellationW3, I guess I ought to write about it now...
Todd and I have been working with elementary school le Centre d'@pprentissage du Haut-Madawaska in northern New Brunswick in order to provide weblogs to all of their students and teachers. We took inspiration from the excellent project that started earlier this year at Institut St-Joseph in Quebec and welcomed support from the good folks at the provincial Department of Education.
Some classes have already started blogging in full force and others
will follow. Roberto Gauvin,
the principal (and school webmaster), is behind this like you wouldn't
believe. He has turned the home
page for the school into a weblog. He's jazzing up the teachers,
evangelizing, fiddling with templates. He's pushing out post after post
explaining what's happening inside (and sometimes outside) his school.
It's nice to build something and
see it get used like this!
One of the things I find slick about this deployment is that by providing
per-class OPML files, we have been able to practically effortlessly build a
public bird's eye view of what's happening in the space using
the Bloglines aggregator. I think it might function as a gateway
drug to the RSS way of life for some of the teachers and parents.
Anybody know of good French language feeds that could be of interest to them?
(I'm thinking along the lines of French equivalents of BBC news
feeds, Word of the Day, etc.)
(Technical caveat if you want to replicate this: Bloglines apparently won't import an OPML
file if you just give it a URL. You have to save the files to your drive then send them over.)
So NB doesn't have to envy Quebec anymore, it's got its blogging school
too now! And with the energy they're putting into it I wouldn't be too
surprised to see other schools dive in.
 8:10:50 PM
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"Introducing disruptive technologies for learning" symposium
Don't know why I didn't get the good news out earlier. The symposium
proposal that seven co-conspirators (across three continents no less)
andI prepared was accepted for the ED-MEDIA conference.
One interesting meta-note about the development of the proposal: it was built in a collaborative manner over a few pages in my personal wiki. The proposal document went through dozens of updates. (See the revision history.) The process went quite smoothly, undoubtedly more easily than it would have gone if we had been passing revisions around by email.
Many thanks to Sebastian for leading the preparation of this proposal! Here's Seb's post -
I am very pleased to announce that an international collaborative proposal for a symposium at EdMedia 2004, Lugano, Switzerland, was accepted yesterday.
The symposium with the title "Introducing disruptive technologies for learning: Personal Webpublishing and Weblogs" will include the following contributions:
Paper 1: Personal Webpublishing practices and conversational learning
 Sebastian Fiedler
Media Pedagogy, University of Augsburg
Germany
 Gabi Reinmann
Media Pedagogy, University of Augsburg
Germany
Paper 2: COLLABOR: Cooperative Learning and publishing
Hans Mittendorfer
Department of Data Processing in Social Sciences, Economics and Business, University of Linz
Austria -
Paper 3: Integrating Webpublishing tools in higher education
 Priya Sharma
Instructional Systems, Penn State University
USA -
Paper 4: Observational Learning in Personal Webpublishing Networks
 Sébastien Paquet
E-Learning, National Research Council Canada,
Canada -
Paper 5: What can be learnt by reading weblogs?
 Lilia Efimova
Telematica Instituut
The Netherlands -
Paper 6: Weblogs and learning culture
 Oliver Wrede
Design, Aachen University of Applied Sciences
Germany -
Paper 7: Blogging and reflective learning
 Adrian Miles
Media Studies, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Australia
1:57:04 PM
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Maciej plays naturalist at PC Forum. " I was in the state that Zen masters call " beginner's mind ", and that employers outside of academia call "gross negligence". "
12:31:28 PM
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Thursday, April 15, 2004
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"Make me one with everything."
- Buddhist to hot-dog vendor
(The hot dog vendor prepares the hot dog and gives it to the monk. The
monk pays him and asks for the change. The hot dog vendor says: "Change
comes from within".)
7:15:56 PM
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Squashing consensus
Could it be? Pejman Yousefzadeh on the blogosphere as a self-correcting system:
"beyond the ability to make cogent and effective critiques of more established
and influential institutions and individuals like Big Media and powerful
politicians, the Blogosphere is able to do something that is at times far more
difficult -- criticize itself. [...] While Big Media consolidates its various outlets -- promoting too much of a "get
along, go along" philosophy that is oftentimes not consistent with the need for
self-correction -- the Blogosphere is made up of so many different blogs with
different outlooks that the ability for self-correction is built into the
practice and system of blogging."
I think the blogosphere is a rare example of a large-scale "organism"
that is rich in connectivity but whose pieces are largely independent -
as opposed to, say, a large corporation. Observe that it does not need
to be "of one mind" in order to thrive. Are there other examples of
this?
(link via Kairosnews)
12:38:11 PM
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John Seely Brown on stories and knowledge flows
Jay Cross points to a terrific Seth Kahan interview with John Seely Brown,
touching on storytelling, innovation, creative abrasion, and
the dissemination of ideas. He quotes this incredibly clear paragraph on
the connection between stories, emotion, and personal change:
"Why storytelling? Well, the simplest answer to your question is that
stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. You can't
talk a person through a change in religion or a change in a basic
mental model. There has to be an emotional component in what you are
doing. That is to say, you use a connotative component (what the thing
means) rather than a denotative component (what it represents). First,
you grab them in the gut and then you start to construct (or
re-construct) a mental model. If you try to do this in an intellectual
or abstract way, you find that it's very hard, if not impossible, to
talk somebody into changing their mental models. But if you can get to
them emotionally, either through rhetoric or dramatic means (not overly
dramatic!), then you can create some scaffolding that effectively
allows them to construct a new model for themselves. You provide the
scaffolding and they construct something new. It doesn't seem to work
if you just try to tell them what to think. They have to internalize
it. They have to own it. So the question is: what are the techniques
for creating scaffolding that facilitate the rich internalization and
re-conceptualization and re-contextualization of their own thinking
relative to the experience that you're providing them? Put more simply:
how do you get them to live the idea?"
On
why, somewhat counterintuitively, strong internal social capital in a
group is not always all good because it can result in the buildup of a
membrane around that group and push members into "us vs. them" thinking:
"We all talk about social capital,
but some of the worst labs that I've ever been in had extraordinarily
high social capital within the lab. But social capital can create the
feeling, "I'm better than anybody else," and this creates dysfunctional
work relationships. It creates the idea that "you're a bad guy." One of
the best ways to build social capital is to have a common enemy. If
that enemy is in the outside world, then guess what? You'll have a very
hard time transferring ideas from the inside to the outside. So, social
capital can work against you. Communities of practice are not
necessarily very open. They can become very rigid structures, just as
rigid as hierarchies. Look at the guilds in medieval times, like the
stonecutters. They were very exclusionary. They were seats of absolute
power. They were evenable to challenge the church!"
Speaking of JSB and stories, there's a page I've been
meaning to link for months now. I figure if I don't do it now I'll
never get around to doing it. It's a great bike-riding story he told that illustrates tacit knowledge. Read it - I promise that you'll be surprised.
11:36:15 AM
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Two cornucopias
 I had read Dan Bricklin's illuminating essay "The Cornucopia of the Commons"
(key quote: "increasing the value of the database by adding more
information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own
benefit"), but just discovered another one by David Bollier with the same title
that is equally interesting. It draws parallels between the gift
economies of the NYC community gardens that sprang up in abandoned lots
in recent decades, of the hacker and science communities, and of blood
donation. The self-interest angle is in there as well - here's a quote from the conclusion:
It is
a mistake, also, to regard the gift economy simply as a high-minded preserve
for altruism. It is, rather, a different way of pursuing self-interest.
In a gift economy, one’s “self-interest” has a much broader,
more humanistic feel than the utilitarian rationalism of economic theory.
9:29:54 AM
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Wednesday, April 14, 2004
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Jon Udell on musiclogging
Jon Udell has been watching the recent going-ons around closing the loop in musiclogging, and seems as enthusiastic about both the specifics and the general vision as I am.
I'm not much of an audiophile, to be honest, and there are lots of
other people who will get more deeply into music-blogging and
playlist-sharing than I'm likely to. But the process at work here is
deeply fascinating to me, and generalizes to other realms. Every kind
of digital experience can thrive in the virtuous cycle of the
blogosphere: use it, capture part of it, link to it, write about it,
search for it, read about it, aggregate it, rinse, lather, repeat.
Udell quotes a post in which Jefferson Provost (correctly, in my view)
observes that since "consolidation has turned music radio into a
steaming pile of crap", word-of-mouth recommendation is pretty much all that serious listeners have got left to find the good stuff. I wholeheartedly agree.
I've been collaborating with Lucas and Alf (okay, rather coaxing them into working things out) to make the experience tighter among Winamp (the player I use), Webjay, and feedroll
so that bloggers can easily post their finds, promoting good free music
and musiclogging itself at the same time. Once things get nice and
usable enough I think we'll be close to having a decent model case for
the open, collaborative media filtering and recommendation networks of
the future. I'll probably post more about it tomorrow.
9:30:47 PM
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Kottke: beyond syndication
Jason Kottke foresees the rise of structured blogging:When more people start publishing content that
doesn't fit the title/description/url format (recipes, movie reviews,
photos, music playlists, etc.), "standard" formats will start to spring
up (some have already)
and the browsers will need to support them in some fashion. (This
requires that the publishing tools support these new formats as well,
which they eventually will. The whole ecosystem -- readers, publishing
software, publishers, browsers -- will move along in fits and starts,
just like it did with RSS.)
8:56:57 PM
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Page 23
Picked this meme up from Ni vu ni connu.
"Actually all that matters is what you are now, today, how you actually behave, not only outwardly but inwardly."
Here's what the meme suggests you do:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
You can have a look at the hundreds of other infected people's sentences.
2:38:37 PM
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Marc Canter interview
Read/Write Web features a great interview with colorful visionary Marc Canter. A good snapshot both of where the dude has been and where he's going. Choice quotes:
The evolution of tools has brought us to the point where the entire business models
are changing and the essence of what tools are has shifted from something a professional
uses, to something everyone will need to know how to use. A key part of that is the
amateur stuff we alluded to earlier. Everyone takes photos, corresponds, has vacation
videos, baby pictures and albums - the list goes on and on. So the content in our lives
will get treated like content from Hollywood, World news, sports, etc. Disseminating
this, making it easy to author and store, indexing it, applying knowledge management
techniques to humans - is all part of it. New kinds of tools.
[...]
This has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with white males.
As the infrastructure and technology becomes more and more of a commodity and the vested
interests of these white males line up with the needs and goals of Interactive media
(read: greed) - then it'll happen. It has to happen. It'll be decentralized - but made up of hybrid, meta networks - that still rely upon
centralized servers. It'll be open source and new, yet it will always have some degree of
proprietary-ness - how else does someone make a buck? It'll be a model where amateur
stuff (like Hot or Not and VoyeurWeb) can sit along side Hollywood stuff.
But MOST importantly it's something that enterprise and government/education adopts,
because that's the only way we'll achieve REAL critical mass and lower the costs of the
infrastructure - so that EVERYONE has broadband and that huge mega terabyte servers are
in everyone's homes.
By the way, the interviewer, Richard MacManus, runs a terrific linklog; I've decided to make it a guestblog in the right-hand column of my blog's front page (which means you won't see it if you're reading this in an aggregator).
12:54:48 PM
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Tuesday, April 13, 2004
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"People do not manage knowledge; knowledge manages people."
8:47:49 PM
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Quantum computing weblogs
Back in the day I spent a little while doing research in the area of quantum information processing
under the supervision of Gilles Brassard. I've gotten into other things
since, but remain fascinated by the ideas that are in there. New
quantum computing weblogs have been cropping up on my radar
lately and I figured I should post the collection for the benefit of
Googlers
out there. So here's my updated list of bloggers who offer windows into
that exciting (if still a little exotic) area of research:
And I learned by way of Hein Roehrig that the arXiv preprint archive now offers RSS feeds; here's the quant-ph feed.
12:42:24 PM
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Playlistlogging in Wired
Wired: Music Gurus Scout Out Free Tunes
After receiving e-mails from friends filled with lists of URLs pointing
to songs on various websites, programmer Lucas Gonze thought there
oughta be a way to listen to the tunes in one continuous stream.
An idea was born.
Never mind the article's title - WebJay is for all the regular folks out there, not just "music gurus".
12:15:01 PM
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On opportunities for innovation
Clément Laberge: "Les innovateurs ne sont pas rares... ce sont les conditions propices à
l'innovation qui le sont. C'est cette rareté qu'il faut combattre."
("Innovators are not in short supply... the proper conditions for innovation are. It is that scarcity that must be fought.")
10:54:29 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:18:14 PM.
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