Seb's Open Research
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Friday, June 04, 2004
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Boiling kettle
Daniel Lemire is on a roll. Here's a researcher who has clearly
accumulated a few things he wanted to say over the years, and has found
an outlet. Things you don't often hear about, fresh air in the academic
hallway, all in one convenient location. A few choice quotes:
 2:45:09 PM
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Into the fray
(the Three Amigos as I like to call them) are conducting an interesting experiment in preparation for their talk at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference 2004 (NMC 2004). Basically, they have asked a bunch of edubloggers to participate in a wiki, weblog and chat-mediated debate. (Yes, the whole fruit salad!) I think Robin Good explains it best, so go there if you don't quite get it.
It's a big thing and it can be a little hard to follow the action, but
if you want to watch just one place, make that Stephen Downes' continuing coverage page (get a webfeed here). If you want posts of yours to show up there, make sure your RSS feed is in Edu_RSS and use the "NMC 2004" shibboleth in a post. (As you may have noted I'm trying it out right now.)
Now, participants have to pick positions and it seems that the centralist position
is in most need of defending right now. So I'll try my hand at it. Note
that I may not actually believe everything I write here.
Decentralized solutions are always more work for end users. They have
to spend time choosing and installing the tools that will enable them
to plug in, and all too often only once that is done do they realize
they're missing such-and-such capability that others have, and are
necessary to fully participate. It thus makes much more sense to
implement a solution at a central point and ensure everyone uses the
same. Even if you choose to decentralize communication, e.g. by
providing personal weblogs, you're better off centralizing the
implementation, ensuring everyone uses the same tools and can access
the same powerful features. Look at how well-developed the centralized
LiveJournal system has become; by comparison the social features of
blog tools in the wild are quite limited, new bloggers feel much more isolated, and many Livejournalers don't even think of going outside even after having taken a peek.
OK. Now you argue against that.
2:14:45 PM
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Lemmings no more: the rise of personal knowledge management
A recent lunch conversation with Yan Simard - who's been keeping an eye on trends in the management literature - and Lilia Efimova's recent pointer to a KM Magazine feature on personal knowledge management
made me realize that the individual-centered approach to knowledge
management is finally breaking into the mainstream, meaning that it is
about to get management buy-in in organization settings. Obviously I
think this is very good news. I don't
believe this is happening simply because the fruits are ripe but rather
because people are finally getting hungry - the demand, not the supply,
is the dominant factor here.
I've been
trying to identify a deeper cause of this transition; here are my
thoughts.
For anyone working within an organization or
institution, there are tremendously strong incentives to "act normal".
Going along with what everybody else is doing - following "best
practices" and all - has been an almost surefire way not to get in
trouble. But what's happening now is that change is accelerating in
many aspects of business and in society in general.
Many organizations are
under intense pressure to adapt to changing conditions, but are built
in a way that does not make them very adaptable. In many cases, their
functioning has become out of touch with reality, and the behavior
norms that exist within them have become useless or even detrimental.
There
comes a point for each individual when the cognitive dissonance between
what the world has become and the assumptions that underlie
organizational norms becomes just too intense to bear. They
decide that the accepted way of doing things simply doesn't make sense
anymore and choose to break apart from the norm, prepared to risk
marginalizing
themselves with respect to their group. They start taking
personal responsibility for their view of the world.
Once that "breaking out" step has been taken they have
probably already begun building some kind of personal scaffolding to
organize their thoughts, but not yet found any existing group that
shares their new models. You could say they are at the "atomisation" or
"disintegration" stage. Personal knowledge management methods and tools
come as natural supports at that point, because they give us the freedom to organize things and think about them on our own.
I think what is
happening these days is that growing numbers of people are living
through the pattern I've just outlined, popping out of accepted wisdom
and seeking a more sensible way of dealing with their knowledge work.
People in management positions are often the last to "question the answers" offered by the
existing norms, because they typically got to where they are by doing
the opposite. But in the face of mounting organizational anxiety and instability, they
are themselves increasingly thrown into a process of questioning, and
are thus ripe for embracing personal knowledge management - sanctioning
what many of their employees have been discreetly doing for a long time.
10:31:06 AM
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Wednesday, June 02, 2004
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"Send highlighted text to del.icio.us" bookmarklet
If you're a user of the fantastic del.icio.us linklogging system
and, like me, you often annotate with a memorable quote from the page
you're bookmarking to facilitate later retrieval, you may find this
useful.
Drag this del.icio.us
bookmarklet to your links bar, then edit it by replacing USERNAME with
your username. Clicking it will send the text you've highlighted to
your linklog along with the URI and title of the page you're visiting. (Tested in Firefox and Internet Exploder 6. Mad props to Bowen Dwelle.)
Update: and this simple variant will display your tags and recent bookmarks on the submission page.
4:02:47 PM
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Weblog research roundtable
  Excellent multiparty interview with weblog researchers Cori Dauber, Kaye Trammell, Jill Walker, and Alex Halavais. I especially liked Alex Halavais' insight into the future of weblogs:
"I suspect that over the next few years we will see a lot of calls
suggesting that blogging has died, and I suspect that in a sense they
will be right. The act of keeping a "Weblog" as a separate entity will
become something of an anachronism. The broader world of collaborative
Web publishing will continue to grow and converge with other
technologies, including IM and e-mail. Imagine asking someone today if
they are an "e-mailer." That question made sense, among a certain
group, 15 years ago, when you weren't sure if someone had e-mail or
not. I have a feeling that the production of public media -- whether in
the form of Weblogs, wikis, collaboratively filtered lifelogs, or some
form that I am too shortsighted to predict -- will be the moving force
of a new era."
1:07:31 PM
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Who owns a weblog's content?
For a year or so the Invisible Adjunct weblog
has provided a forum for academics to (mostly) discuss issues relating
to campus politics and working conditions in academia. Last March the anonymous author
decided to leave the profession and sign off from her weblog.
The only problem is that over time a real community has gathered around
that weblog, and those people clearly want to continue talking - as the
200-odd comments on the sign-off post attest.
I figured some of them would rather switch boats than go down with the sinking ship, so I created an Invisible Adjunct channel on the Internet Topic Exchange
to aggregate relevant posts from members of the community. Much to my
pleasure the channel has been put to good use by interested parties:
about a hundred posts have appeared on the channel so far.
But another threat is looming on the horizon - the IA is planning to take down the site a week from now. This means all the content will vanish. The site hasn't been indexed by the Internet Archive since June of last year. (Ironically, the last post that shows on the Wayback machine is precisely about the loss of archives!) And the IA hasn't allowed mirroring.
Of course many participants wish to preserve the memory, but it is
unclear who's calling the shots at this point. Who wrote the site?
Granted, the IA wrote all the front page material by herself, hundreds
of posts. But there are also thousands of comments in there that have
been contributed by readers. A commenter raises the issue in those terms:
"I believe the comments form the bulk
of the site overall (correct me if
I'm wrong), and that much of the value comes from the conversations
that took place under IA's supervision. In some sense she's not the
"author" of the site, but rather the caretaker of an online community.
"
I have no idea what's going to happen to that content, but I guess the
moral here is "use caution before you invest significantly
in a site that you don't control". A lot of commenters might now find
themselves wishing
they had commented on their own site so that their words wouldn't go
down
with the rest.
9:16:31 AM
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Dyson on user-generated content
Esther Dyson: "All joking aside, the rise of user-generated content marks a huge shift in the media business."
Why pay people to produce content, when you can get tons of users to do it for free?
7:43:58 AM
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Tuesday, June 01, 2004
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Poll: Where do you live?
The future is not evenly distributed, but perhaps my readers are? (I'd be surprised) Click here if you don't see the poll just below (it won't show in many aggregators):
1:22:24 PM
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"Search highlighted text in Google" bookmarklet
I made a little Google it
bookmarklet that lets you search Google for a chunk of text that you've
highlighted. Just drag the previous link to your links bar, highlight
some text, and click the bookmarklet. Tested in Mozilla Firefox. (I
know Firefox has a "web search for..." that appears upon
right-clicking, but it doesn't seem to work in my setup.)
This one
works too, and opens results in a new window; the only problem is that
its requests seems to get intercepted by Firefox's popup blocker. If
anyone know how to get around this, thanks in advance!
11:38:42 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:18:18 PM.
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