There's been an interesting discussion, summarized in a Ross Mayfield post on Many2Many about Wikipedia and authoritative knowledge.
Ross proposes some research:
I’ve been quitely[sic] forming a group of journalism schools, media centers and experts to engage in the Wemedia Project, which begins with a formal Wikipedia Article fact checking excercise and publishing findings. The USC Annenberg Center has already announced their support and next month we will begin the collaborative research process within a Socialtext Workspace. Without getting into defining truth, you can separate issue of fact, value or policy. The approach is to apply a formal fact checking process to a sample of articles to gain a baseline measure of factual accuracy and explore issues of reputation.
Good discussion follows the article too.
We've played around a bit here with Skype so I thought I'd note that they've launched Mac OS X beta client software.
...via Dan Gillmor
Stephen Downes, who's been a blogger for a long time, has a thoughtful article in Educause review, "Educational Blogging". The whole thing is well worth reading. Here are a few interesting excerpts:
In one sense, asking why anyone would write a weblog is like asking why anyone would write at all. But more specifically, the question is why anyone would write a weblog as opposed to, say, a book or a journal article. George Siemens, an instructor at Red River College in Winnipeg and a longtime advocate of educational blogging, offers a comprehensive list of motivating factors. In particular, he notes, weblogs break down barriers. They allow ideas to be based on merit, rather than origin, and ideas that are of quality filter across the Internet, “viral-like across the blogosphere.” Blogs allow readers to hear the day-to-day thoughts of presidential candidates, software company executives, and magazine writers, who all, in turn, hear opinions of people they would never otherwise hear....
Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting. If a student has nothing to blog about, it is not because he or she has nothing to write about or has a boring life. It is because the student has not yet stretched out to the larger world, has not yet learned to meaningfully engage in a community. For blogging in education to be a success, this first must be embraced and encouraged.
From time to time, we read about the potential of online learning to bring learning into life, to engender workplace learning or lifelong learning. When Jay Cross and others say that 90 percent of our learning is informal, this is the sort of thing they mean: that the lessons we might expect to find in the classroom work their way, through alternative means, into our day-to-day activities.
Blogging can and should reverse this flow. The process of reading online, engaging a community, and reflecting it online is a process of bringing life into learning. As Richardson comments, “This [the blogging process] just seems to me to be closer to the way we learn outside of school, and I don’t see those things happening anywhere in traditional education.” And he asks: “Could blogging be the needle that sews together what is now a lot of learning in isolation with no real connection among the disciplines? I mean ultimately, aren’t we trying to teach our kids how to learn, and isn’t that [what] blogging is all about?
Jakob Neilsen talks about Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design:
Behind a website's superficial appearance lies its fundamental understanding of user behavior in an interactive service. Choices such as whether the "buy" button is red or orange or whether the navigation menu runs across the top or down the left side are much debated, but make at most a few percent difference in usability. In contrast, the design ideology can make or break a site.
...via elearningpost
I can't quite figure out why anyone would want an RSS Screen Saver. And yet, it's kind of intriguing:
One of my favorite features of C# Express is the built-in RSS Screen saver Starter Kit. If you've never built a screensaver before, or if you have never written code that uses RSS, then you'll find the RSS Screen saver a great way to start programming.In a nutshell, the RSS Screen saver is a screen saver that lets you select and validate an RSS feed, select a background directory for images to loop through, and the screensaver will loop through the items in the RSS feed.
...via The Shifted Librarian
Judge Richard Posner is guest blogging this week on Lawrence Lessig's blog. There's lots of good discussion going on, but I'd particularly point out the Judge Posner's comments on fair use, which judging by a couple of discussions I've been involved in recently, many people misunderstand (at least in part because many copyright holders overclaim copyright).
For example, in a post entitled 'Fair Use and Misuse'
Here is a very worrisome problem concerning fair use. It has to do with a dichotomy long noted by legal thinkers between the law on the books and the law in action. They often diverge. And fair use is an example of this divergence. As I said in an earlier posting, fair use often benefits rather than harms the copyright holder. However, it doesn't always; moreover, even if a copyright holder is not going to lose, and is even going to gain, sales from a degree of unlicensed copying, if he thinks he can extract a license fee, he'll want to claim that the copying is not fair use; and finally, because the doctrine has vague contours, copyright owners are inclined to interpret it very narrowly, lest it expand by increments.The result is a systematic overclaiming of copyright, resulting in a misunderstanding of copyright's breadth. Look at the copyright page in virtually any book, or the copyright notice at the beginning of a DVD or VHS film recording. The notice will almost always state that no part of the work can be reproduced without the publisher's (or movie studio's) permission. This is a flat denial of fair use. The reader or viewer who thumbs his nose at the copyright notice risks receiving a threatening letter from the copyright owner. He doesn't know whether he will be sued, and because the fair use doctrine is , he may not be altogether confident about the outcome of the suit.
There's lots of other good stuff, too.
Here's something from Common Craft on why a weblog is not a message board:
Perhaps the most compelling difference in weblogs and message boards is the locus of control. Weblogs are individual or small group resources- the control of content and value is driven by a single person or small group. Message Boards are group resources- the control of content and value is shared equally across all users.
...via elearningpost
Feedster has an Olympic blogger aggregator
Yeah, I'm kind of late on this since the Olympics has been going on for awhile. What can I say, I'm slow....
...via blogcount
I have to admit that I don't really get wikis. I expect this would change if I ever used one for a project. Among their big strengths, though, is that a wiki is easy to implement and easy to use. And anything that gets used is ipso facto of higher value than anything that doesn't.
In any event, here's a case study on using SocialText for product development:
Socialtext provides Stata with a shared environment to develop product specifications and work out problems as they arise. "If we have better specs up front, we have better quality software." Stata uses Socialtext to develop specifications, documentation, record agreements, solve problems.Communication is particularly important with a distributed team. The wiki lets the right people contribute, even across time zones. When the team is developing product specs, "you get halfway through and realize that another person needs to participate -- by having it on the wiki it becomes much easier to rope that person into the process and get the context quicker." Getting the right specialties involved counts.
Duncan Watts at Slate talks about Decentralized Intelligence:
In 1997, the Toyota group suffered what seemed like a catastrophic failure in its production system when a key factory--thesole source of a particular kind of valve essential to the braking systems of all Toyota vehicles--burned to the ground overnight. Because of their much-vaunted just-in-time inventory system, the company maintained only three days of stock, while a new factory would take six months to build. In the meantime Toyota's production of over 15,000 cars a day would grind to an absolute halt....The big question was: How? How does one rapidly regenerate large quantities of a complex component, in several different varieties, without any specialized tools, gauges, and manufacturing lines (almost all of which were lost), with barely any relevant experience (the company that made them was highly specialized), with very little direction from the original company (which was quickly overwhelmed), and without compromising any of their other production tasks?...
Nevertheless, they succeeded, but not in the way one might have expected. Rather than relying on the guidance and coordination of an inspired leader (control mode), the response was a bewildering display of truly decentralized problem solving: More than 200 companies reorganized themselves and each other to develop at least six entirely different production processes, each using different tools, different engineering approaches, and different organizational arrangements. Virtually every aspect of the recovery effort had to be designed and executed on the fly, with engineers and managers sharing their successes and failures alike across departmental boundaries, and even between firms that in normal times would be direct competitors.
Within three days, production of the critical valves was in full swing, and within a week, production levels had regained their pre-disaster levels. The kind of coordination this activity required had not been consciously designed, nor could it have been developed in the drastically short time frame required.
Among Watts' points--when a disaster strikes it can seem natural to opt for a 'command and control' mentality where all parties wait on orders from on-high. Most disasters, though, are beyond the scope of a single person to solve and, in the one-person-in-charge-of-everything mode, requires tremendous communication channels to get the word out to all the people sitting and waiting for orders from above. Most organizations, though, have intelligent skilled people all over the place. Of equal importance, these intelligent people have built informal networks that can create expert teams on the fly.
Judith Boettcher in a Syllabus article on Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?, provides some rules of thumb
...via elearningpost
First Monday has an article on seeking an educational commons by Gary Hepburn:
Public schools and other educational institutions need to become more familiar with some of the opportunities that are emerging as a result of open source projects. Leveraging the potential of the Internet as a collaborative medium, open source development projects are producing software and other resources that have the potential to meet many needs of schools. As educators become aware of open source resources, they will immediately recognize the advantages of low%u2013cost alternatives to many commercial products that schools currently use and find expensive. They will also notice that open source resources lack some of the usage restrictions that characterize commercial resources. The low cost and flexibility of open source products makes them very attractive, but no less important is the way in which these resources align with some core educational values. In this article, I illustrate this alignment by exploring the promise that open source resources hold in supporting the ideal of an educational commons.
New Scientist reports on stealth wallpaper to keep company secrets safe:
A type of wallpaper that prevents Wi-Fi signals escaping from a building without blocking mobile phone signals has been developed by a British defence contractor. The technology is designed to stop outsiders gaining access to a secure network by using Wi-Fi networks casually set up by workers at the office.
...via BoingBoing
Knowledge and information are not the same and it's much easier to manage information than knowledge. For one thing, information is the same for everyone whereas knowledge can differ markedly depending on whose brain it's being processed through.
Amy Gahran at Contentious takes a stab at explaining knowledge vs information:
What's the difference between knowledge and information?
- Information generally includes facts, observations, sensations, and messages. Information is content which informs our minds. It's fuel.
- Knowledge, in contrast, is the human experience of information – it's what our minds DO with all that content. It's the fire in the forge.
...via elearningpost