OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
January 20, 2005

Memeorandum and Newsmap and...
Newsmap is of less interest to me, and it has been around for a while, though the use of graphical elements is creative. But I like Memeorandum a lot. Basically, the idea is to take a set of major news stories and to run the story with a headline and a short summary along with the posts of some leading bloggers about that story. What I like about it is the explicit drawing of links between related blog content. I am doing something similar with the next version of Edu_RSS (sneak - and sometimes non-functional - peek here). By Will Richardson, Weblogg-Ed, January 18, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Social Consequences of Social Tagging
Some of the doubts I've expressed about things like Technorati Tags surface here in thsi article questioning social tagging in general. For example: "It’s certain that some people will try to game the system, deliberately tagging their photos to misdirect people." One possible solution? "A system by which people can form epistomology gangs who decide to share tags, and declare a concensually [sic] decided-upon meaning." The author presents readers with the ESP game, covered in these pages last May. It turns out that social tagging, in this context, isn't all it was made out to be. There isn't room to explain this, but: the product of a collaborative network is not the same as a product of each of the individual members. Collecting evryone's tags doesn't produce an Ubertag, it produces something that is not a tag and should not be used as a tag. Collective phenomena are emergent, not compositional. If you want a taxonomy to emerge from a collective process, you have to look at something else being done by the members of the group. What? Ah, that is the problem of Network Semantics. By Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Corante, January 19, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Tim Wang's Education Blog
Scott Leslie introduces us to a new education blog, Tim Wang's. wang's focus is on e-learning in China, as this item suggests, or this item about the China Japan Korean Open Source Software Initiatives. Good stuff. By Tim Wang, Tim Wang's Education Blog, January, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Frameworks: Work in Progress
Brief discussion and some links to the E-Learning Framework project being undertaken by JISC, Industry Canada, Australia's DEST and others. My take is similar to Scott Wilson's: "the work-in-progress ELF website's current incarnation does look an awful lot like another giant system architecture on initial glance, especially as very few outputs from JISC's projects have been linked in yet." As I've suggested to these organizations before: build something simple and extensible, rather than the One True Framework, and let people add on to it. Funny thing. The ELF site is built on Zope, Plone and Python. The example of the sort of thing they should do is, literally, right under their noses. By Scott Wilson, Scott's Workblog, January 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Like It or Not, Blogs Have Legs
This is a survey article, but I liked this expression: "the blogosphere has evolved into a sphere of memes and ideas that are constantly shaped by the millions of web users who write, read and comment on blogs. In a sense, it operates in a similar fashion to open-source code, where a loose confederation of programmers tinkers with software, adding to it and sharing contributions with anyone who is interested." By Adam L. Penenberg, Wired News, January 20, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

The Online Audio Interview Recorder: Skype Recorder vs. iVocalize
Robin Good sends along this article offering another way to record online conversations, the iVocalize Online Interview Recorder. This is the system he used to interview me a few weeks ago. This isn't Skype, which means there are ongoing licensing fees. But I have no doubt it's a lot easier to set up. By Robin Good, Kolabora, December 25, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Games Help You 'Learn and Play'
The article is a bit light-weight, but it does offer a glimpse into the teaching capabilities of games. By Unattributed, BBC News, January 18, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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