According to a recent survey conducted by Jupiter Research, American's top online activities consist of:
Women were more likely to send e-greetings, while men visited sports sites and free software download sites more often. Age gaps occurred in the amount of time spent instant messaging, visiting health sites, and chatting online.
Syllabus discusses PDAs in the Classroom
Applications include recording experimental data, interactive feedback, and limited notetaking.
Carnegie Mellon has received a 2.1 million dollar grant from NSF to build an online forum for citizen deliberation.
Among the objectives are to learn about how online communication affects participants and how it can contribute to the quality of their decision making. Developments could be used to develop ways to conduct effective public hearings, community organizing and problem solving.
MIT, which last year announced plans to put all their courseware online, is set to publish the first set of courses on September 30th. Subject matter includes:
Anthropology
Biology
Chemistry
Economics
Linguistics and Philosophy
Ocean Engineering
Urban Studies and Planning
John Patrick talks about bringing power to the people, where a group of residents have formed a cooperative, specifically, the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association, to bring broadband service to their area.
According to a recent article in Wired, wireless connections at Dartmouth College are:
subtly but profoundly altering teaching techniques, social interaction, study habits, and personal security. In spite of its remoteness, the college has long been one of the most wired places on earth, fashioning its campus into the prototype of the fully wireless, always-connected community: a microcosm that provides a peek at what our residential neighborhoods and office spaces may look like in a few years.
One student says, when asked what the difference is between Dartmouth and Skidmore, "Nobody here knows anyone's phone number."
Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove has started a weblog. In this article, he talks about Why?
As in why collaborate, why communicate, why web logs?
According to an article at ZDNet, spam is now 36 percent of e-mail traffic
The Web Credibility Project at Stanford University is designed to study what makes people believe the information they find on the web. Based on the research they've conducted so far, the project has published 10 guidelines for web credibility
They include:
The Theban Mapping Project is a Flash enabled website which contains archeological and image databases of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Visitors to the website can click on any of the mapped tombs and get a guided tour complete with historical references.
Boxes and Arrows has a review of Dave Weinberger's book Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.
My interest in this book is fairly high at the moment (ordered, haven't read it yet), because I'm just starting to 'get' the importance of the 'loosely joined' part. We spend a lot of time talking about developing, implementing, and managing systems on the web--content management systems, knowledge management systems, communication systems.... But excepting, possibly, Yahoo, people don't want one place to go. Or, really they want their place to go, a place that has the best of everything they want, and most important all the contacts they need to build their own social and knowledge network.
One reason people like Google so much is because it doesn't just give them pages with random appearances of important words, it gives them important pages as determined by PageRank. And, and this is important, it doen't attempt to control the information or even how the information shows up.
The Web, says David Weinberger, is about more than just inforamtion retrieval and e-commerce (well, yeah, this is what I was fumbling around trying to say above).
What's really important about the Web? Words? Buying stuff? Using words to buy stuff?
Some of Weinberger's thoughts on the subject: