Yesterday, Floyd and I gave our presentation on Extending Information Services through Syndication at the NETC conference. After that, we were on the road all day driving back to Iowa and this is the first chance I've had to blog the presenation and put our Powerpoint slides online.
If you're interested in the slides, you can find them here.
Basically, we talked about syndication (specifically RSS, Atom and Web services that use RSS feeds to exchange information automatically) and how people in extension can use it to extend their information services. We talked syndication from two perspectives--as a tool for finding information and as a tool for distributing information.
Many syndication tools are freeware, free online services, or inexpensive shareware. So, syndication is something that can provide a high impact on content availability at a low cost.
More information can be found at the ACE2004 weblog that I did with Ray Kimsey and Blair Fannin. It's got lots of links to aggregators and articles and other resources.
We had good attendance, lots of good questions and could have spent more time on what other people are doing with syndication too.
From the NETC conference, Floyd Davenport and Dan Cotton are presenting through Breeze to the Iowa State University Extension Annual Conference. The setup is on one computer and then they're connecting via another computer.
It's a demo of Breeze and a discussion of e-Extension.
We're connecting from the Stewart Center at Purdue to the Scheman Center at ISU. Floyd is talking about the technology of Breeze Live. We're just beginning to use this technology at Iowa and plan to use it for online collaborations, program delivery and both live and recorded presentations. The biggest issue that we've had with Breeze Live and are still learning to work with is the lag in video and audio. This lag goes up and down so that sometimes the talking isn't completely related to the video. Breeze Live does allow freezing the video, which sometimes works better (plus cutting down on bandwidth).
Floyd is demo-ing the pieces of Breeze including uploading content, videos, Powerpoint presentations, polling, chat, documents, etc.
Dan is going to be talking about e-Extension, a variation on his keynote talk yesterday. Today's talk for ISU's Annual Conference will be geared less toward the tech side that appeals to the NETC audience and more toward Extension in general. And Dan's talking now...
We've switched to slides/audio only for this portion of the session which eliminates such things as--is he looking at the camera, is the voice and video synced, etc. And it makes the slides larger on the remote screens.
I'm not going to repeat the e-Extension talk here. But I will see if there are any questions and report on those when we get to them...
Questions--
(comment) people would have liked to see a video with the slides (we went to slides only during the presentation (video can be distracting...but no video can be boring...)
(question) can I use Breeze with stuff you don't support (yes, but , remember, if it's stuff we don't support, we don't support it)
(question) can our clients download stuff to use it (there's nothing to download--they just need to know the link to get to it)
(question) ok, missed this one, but the answer has to do with how much bandwidth you need
(question) talk about how to set up a conference--how can people who aren't extension use the system. (deb hopes we're not just going to turn people (non-extension people, that is) loose on it (yikes!) Floyd says we will get accounts for Extension staff and then they can deliver it to their clients, provide information on how to access, etc.)
(question) ok, missed this one too. Something about who gets to be a presenter.
And the presentation is over (or nearly).
I like this live-blogging, kind of fun...
There's been a bunch of discussion around the blogosphere lately on Wikipedia, including discussion of articles in the Boston Globe and the Syracuse Post-Standard challenging Wikipedia's accuracy and it's long term ability to be accurate. David Weinberger recently talked about Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia's, inability to handle complex truths.
Ethan Zuckerman provides some discussion of another issue that Wikipedia suffers from:
Now one million articles strong, Wikipedia is arguably the largest encyclopedia in the world. Its philosophy of radical openness - anyone can add or subtract anything at any time, though changes can be rolled back - hasn't led to chaos, but a fascinating system that corrects many acts of vandalism within five minutes. It's a fantastic gateway project for non-technical people interested in contributing to a large, meaningful Open project.
Amazing though it is, Wikipedia is not flawless. It's got a problem common to almost all peer production projects: people work on what they want to work on. (This "problem" is probably the secret sauce that makes peer production projects work... which is what makes it such a difficult problem to tackle.) Most of the people who work on Wikipedia are white, male technocrats from the US and Europe. They're especially knowledgeable about certain subjects - technology, science fiction, libertarianism, life in the US/Europe - and tend to write about these subjects. As a result, the resource tends to be extremely deep on technical topics and shallow in other areas. Nigeria's brilliant author, Chinua Achebe gets a 1582 byte "stub" of an article, while the GSM mobile phone standard gets 16,500 bytes of main entry, with dozens of related articles.
In the tradition of Wikipedia, a user--Xed has proposed CROSSBOW--Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias On Wikipedia, which is designed to help reduce bias and make the encyclopedia even broader than it currently is.
There's a lot to learn from Wikipedia, particularly with regard to the knowledge of the whole versus individual experts. It's something I hope we'll be discussing in Extension as e-Extension, and everything we do, moves forward.
So, I’m at NETC and if I were a good blogger, I’d have been carrying my laptop to all the sessions and blogging live (there’s wireless and everything). But I am far from the perfect blogger and although I can and do take lots of notes during presentations (mostly questions that occur to me but may or may not have anything to do with the talk at hand) I rarely am able to write my conclusions until I have time to walk away and think about what was said, what notes/questions I’ve written down and how it all works together. Sometimes, unfortunately, I never have time to do formulate conclusions or write them down. Sometimes, I suspect, that’s why bloggers live-blog--write it down and move on--leave it to others to do with it as they will.
But, back to the subject at hand, the keynote speaker for today’s (now yesterday, actually, when this is posted) session of NETC was Dan Cotton who is the new director of e-extension. E-extension is a concept that’s been under discussion for several years, a tool that will help make Extension’s expertise and services available to new audiences in ways that are convenient, immediate, and accessible. It’s a concept that’s been much discussed and much planned and yet, in the way of new electronic things, is still very much an amorphous, not-really-sure-yet-what-it-is thing (and, to be honest, I think that’s its best feature at present).
It’s good stuff and it’s cool that it’s happening and in a time of difficult budget issues, it’s a big commitment by extension to fund e-extension. In addition to Dan Cotton as the new director, Kevin Gamble will be the Associate Director for Information Technology, Carla Craycraft and Craig Wood will be Associate Directors for Content. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what Dan said. If you want to know more details visit the website. From here on in this post, I’m going to talk about stuff I’d like to see in addition to what’s generally talked about in the context of e-Extension.
Three things I’d like to see:
There should be as little governing policy as necessary to do the job (look at Harvard, University of Minnesota Libraries, Sun Microsystems, and Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto
‘Seeking information’ is only a small part of what people are doing online. We cannot be successful simply as a dispenser of information. Or, more accurately, we can be successful if we put a lot of effort into it and do it very, very well, but we will not be astonishing. I want to be astonishing.
We will also be much more successful if we expand our vision beyond what people will receive from us--we must be ready to receive knowledge from them as well. The web is a conversation. e-Extension is our opportunity to embrace that conversation. Dan Gillmor (We the Media) says that the thing it pays for him to know as a journalist--to embrace, really--is that his readers know more than he does. We need to embrace this too. We may have many experts, but if we look at all of Extension’s clientele and at everything they bring to the table, collectively they will always know more than we do. And that’s a good thing.
One reason this is so important is that we don’t know what the next great important thing is that Extension can do for people or that people can do for us. No one knows. Being open, flexible, self-organizing, and emergent will make it less necessary for us to know upfront what the next great thing is--we can’t know anyway; no one knows until it’s there--so our best shot at being successful will be to put in place systems that give us room to try things and see what happens.
It’s about the contact, the conversation, and the community as much (or more) than the content. It is also about putting things out there, encouraging energy, taking risks and seeing what will happen. People won't come to us because we're never wrong, never untidy, and never less than our best. They'll come because they trust us. And they will trust us because they know us, because we're there with things they want when they want them, and because we're engaged in conversation with them everyday.
Dan said today that he wants e-Extension to be a remarkable thing. I want it to be more than that, I want it to be a place where remarkable things happen.
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This is not at all as coherent as I would like it to be and it definitely doesn't include everything I wanted to say (for one thing I want to go on a bit about communities of practice at some later point) but I’ll leave it here for now.
Via Many to Many, Earthlink has released SIPshare, a proof-of-concept peer-to-peer file sharing prototype using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), designed originally for voice and video communications:
EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler --- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.
One of the things we spend a lot of time cleaning off computers is spyware. It's as big a problem as viruses and maybe bigger--especially for people who never met a banner ad they didn't like.
Via The Shifted Librarian, here's a link to a presentation by Aaron (whose last name I don't know because I can't find a place on his site where he tells me) on What You don't know Will Hurt You: Spyware and Computers in Public Libraries (oh, wait, now I see that his last name is Schmidt because he does tell me that in his PowerPoint presentation). The presentation is geared toward libraries but contains important stuff that's good for all.
Along with all the good advice that Aaron provides in his presentation, my best advice is Pay Attention and Read Before You Click.
I've been playing with ecto the last couple of days, which I really like though I'm not yet sure what the specifics are that make it a good and useful program. ecto is a desktop blogging client that lets you manage your blog entries from, well, the desktop:
With ecto you can write and manage entries for your weblog(s). The advantage over using your weblog's control panel is that you can compose entries offline and use the extra features ecto offers, such as spellcheck, creating links, attachments, and much more. ecto is designed to make blogging much more easier and yet give the users as much power as possible to manage their weblogs.
It's more WYSIWYG-ish than the regular Movable Type interface (and also works with Blogger, Typepad, WordPress and others). It lets me capture things from both my browser and my news aggregator. And, it lets me easily work off-line. It also lets me edit posts I've already posted and makes it easy to maintain multiple blogs without typing in new urls or changing pages.
I'm using ecto on a Mac with OSX. My understanding is that it was originally written for the Mac. I tried it once before on Windows and couldn't get it to work very satisfactorily but I'm pretty sure that was right when the Windows version first came out and it looks like it's improved significantly since then. ecto offers a two week trial version. After that it can be purchased for under twenty dollars.
I'm in West Lafayette, IN at the NETC 2004 conference. We're staying at The Union Club Hotel on the Purdue University campus. Today is pre-conference stuff (registration, tours, and kickoff panels). Tomorrow the bulk of the conference starts. Our talk is on Wednesday (which I think I mentioned before, but I'm too lazy to go back and check).
Wired News has an article about Second Life, a massively multiplayer online game, offering free accounts to students when their professors offer their classes online in the Second life environment:
In order to help teachers bring their classes to Second Life, Linden Lab donates accounts for each student, as well as an acre of land in the metaverse for the teacher and students to work and build on. Afterward, anyone wishing to stay a member can do so at half price.
To date, in addition to Delwiche and Beamish, professors from San Francisco State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Vassar College have used Second Life in their courses.
At Rollup, you can aggregate a bunch of related news items into one topic and have them posted to an updated web page. I did a Rollup for Extension sites that had an RSS feed at the time--Extension Daily at Alabama, AgNews at Texas A&M, and my own weblog, Tech, Knowledge and Community. It also includes TechNews (our local ISU tech support news for staff) and ACE2004, which isn't being updated anymore)
I'm leaving tomorrow for NETC (National Extension Technology Conference) where Floyd and I are giving a talk on syndication and I wanted to mark the Extension news rollup so I can find it later. Maybe I'll have some more feeds to add to this when I get back.
Interestingly, it comes up approximately eighteenth on a Google search for 'extension news'.
The Shifted Librarian talks about instant messaging's broader social implications for libraries:
Which, of course, is where libraries come in. Back in the 1990s, libraries debated whether email was a valid use of public computers, and now we're having that same discussion about instant messaging.
And you know what? The answer is the same - patrons using the internet to communicate, connect, exchange information, or just plain chat is indeed a valid use of public terminals. We have to get over this issue now because when we don't let them IM in the library, we're telling them that we don't value their preferred method of communication, whether it's with their friends or with librarians. We're telling them that the library is not a place for instant messaging, so go somewhere else to do it.
Except that they are going to go somewhere else and do it (at least, those that can), and they're not going to come back and they're not going to think of the library when they think of instant messaging. Would your library find that attitude acceptable if we replace "IM" with "email?" How about if we replace "IM" with "telephone?"
I quote the whole long piece above because I don't just think it's applicable to IM and libraries but to where people get their information, who they talk to, who they trust and who they want to bring education and services to their communities. It applies to Extension and to universities. We need to continue to think about weblogs and RSS and IM and email and other ways of distributing information and, most importantly, of having conversations with people. If we don't continue to adopt new methods, even ones we're not completely comfortable with, people will go elsewhere to get the information they want and the expertise, learning, and personal and community development they're seeking.
You know those pictures where the eyes seem to follow you around the room?
Well, it seems research has revealed why that happens:
“The core idea is simple: no matter what angle you look at a painting from, the painting itself doesn’t change. You’re looking at a flat surface. The pattern of light and dark remains the same,” Todd said.
“We found that our visual perception of a picture also remains largely unchanged as we look at it from different vantage points. If a person in a painting is looking straight out, it will always appear that way, regardless of the angle at which it is viewed.”
It was probably cooler when we just thought it was magic...
Louis Rosenfeld has what looks like a great set of information architecture heuristics for search systems)
Searching, he says, consists for most people of the following:
Okay, this is weird, but sort of cool:
The "Gravity" lamp reclines and goes to sleep when you're not in the room. When you enter, it awakens, stands up, and turns on.
...via BoingBoing
David Weinberger posts a draft of his speech about copyright that he recently gave to the World Economic Forum
I'm a capitalist of sorts and a writer of sorts, so I am sympathetic to the idea that creators should be paid for their work. But, I'm also a citizen and a member of cultural communities. So, for one moment, I'd like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they're fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!
Now, I know it takes a Zen-like awareness to keep that one idea there purely, and to beat back the Buts that want to crowd in. And I by no means deny the validity of those Buts. "But if access were free, then artists couldn't support themselves. " I won't want argue with that. "But it wouldn't be fair." I won't argue that either, at least not here. All I want to do is put on the table a value that I think too often is left on the floor because, among commercial media companies, it has no champion: All things being equal, a world that shares art freely is a better world than one where access to art is stifled. And that's at least as important as Sony making its quarterly numbers.
It's probably pretty much a given that organizational culture affects knowledge sharing. In an article at Australian Flexible Learning Community, Maish Nichani talks about the ways that culture can affect sharing knowledge in an organization.
The Shifted LibrarianThe Shifted Librarian points to Ohio's Know it Now:
KnowItNow is a live online information service provided free of charge for the citizens of Ohio by the State Library of Ohio and your local public library. Professional librarians are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to answer your reference questions and assist you in finding information. Once logged on with your Ohio zip code, you and a librarian engage in a "chat" session. The librarian “pushes” high quality, authoritative online resources to your screen. You can watch and participate as librarians skillfully navigate the Internet to find precise answers to your questions. At the conclusion of each KnowItNow session, you will receive a complete transcript of your session via email including links to all the online resources shared during that session.
The State Library of Ohio also offers HomeworkNow and ReadThisNow
...via The Shifted Librarian
I keep sticking things in here in draft format that I want to post or comment on or do something with, but I've been too busy to actually get them published. But I haven't disappeared and I'll get caught up soon....
There's a geek truth that says something along the lines--all applications expand until they include email. The non-geek corollary is that everything you do/receive/respond to on the computer should be able to be accessed through email because that's the first program you fire up in the morning and the last one you shut down at night.
So, it's not at all a surprise that everybody gets way too much stuff in email, that they have trouble keeping track of it, and that people who have no business doing so, spend way too much time sending us things we never asked for and don't want.
Phil Windley says that, really, we need a bunch of other better stuff:
I've been thinking since I got home from a ten day vacation and had to process 2100 email messages about how much of my life is lived in my inbox. Of the 2100, almost 1700 of them were Spam and I'm not too concerned about those. SpamAssassin did a pretty good job and I have a feeling it or other technologies will eventually solve the Spam problem. What interests me are the 400 messages that were not Spam. At least 75% of those were messages that didn't really require my attention or could safely be ignored. Even of the remaining 100, many of them were more about coordination than real information. This has got me asking "what would it take to eliminate email from my life completely?"
I am a huge RSS fan--all those websites I used to click around to all the time--especially the ones that don't get updated very often, now come to me instead. I'm always looking for more information to flow to me via RSS. I've also reacehd a point where I lose stuff in email either because it's been mislabeled as spam or it scrolls off my screen or it gets lost in the incoming flood. So, I think Windley's new apps couple with dashboard idea is potentially pretty nifty:
One problem with moving from a single general purpose tool like email to multiple special purposes tools is split focus. To understand what I mean, think about RSS. RSS has reduced the number of mailing lists I subscribe to and consequently reduced my email traffic. Perfect application, except that now I have to remember to fire up my feed reader in addition to my mail client. I generally treat it as lower priority and so I'm reluctant to get high-priority information delivered by RSS. What happens when there are a dozen special purpose tools managing my workflow instead of just a linear email list?I think the answer to this problem lies in creating a task dashboard and having the various applications, including email, post control messages to the dashboard so that I have a single place to manage the various messages that are coming to me, albeit outside email. I'm envisioning something more flexible that a simple dashboard. I want a rule engine, easy graphics, templates, and so on so that I can customize it to the way I want to work. There's lots to think about here.
On the other hand, one of the primary reasons people lose focus, don't respond, or overload is because there is too much stuff. Organizing stuff better doesn't actually eliminate this part of the problem. We have too much information coming at us, most of us are too busy, and we've created a 24/7 response expectation whether something requires that kind of response time or not (you didn't read your email yet? I sent it to you on Sunday?) Having too much stuff that's really, really organized doesn't eliminate the 'too much stuff' part of the equation. The more I work, the more I see that productivity and creativity would be improved exponentially by insisting that everyone walk away from the computer for at least a ten day to two week stretch once a year.
Yahoo News reports thatthe city of Philadelphia is considering offering free wireless:
For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.
The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters around the city — probably atop lampposts. Each would be capable of communicating with the wireless networking cards that now come standard with many computers.
Once complete, the network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel — including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare.
...via BoingBoing