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You can use the feeds in this mix as the basis for a new mix - create a new mix from this mix.
Virtual World Watch survey call for information [New Window]
John Kirriemuir has issued a request for updated information for his his eighth Virtual World Watch "snapshot" survey of the use of virtual worlds in UK Higher and Further Education.Previous survey reports can be found on the VWW site.For further information about the sort of information John is after, see his post. He would like responses by the end of February 2010.Our period of funding for this work is approaching its end, so this will be the last survey funded under the Eduserv Research Programme. John is planning to continue some Virtual World Watch activity, at least through 2010, as he indicates in this presentation which he gave to the recent "Where next for Virtual Worlds?" (wn4vw) meeting in London:What Next For Virtual WorldsView more presentations from Virtual World Watch.The slides from the other presentations from the wn4vw meeting (including a video of the opening presentation by Ralph Schroeder) are also available here, and you can find an archive of tagged Twitter posts from the day here.I enjoyed the meeting (even if I'm not sure we really arrived at many concrete answers to the question of "where next?"), but it also felt quite sad. It marked the end of the projects Eduserv funded in 2007 on the use of virtual worlds in education. That grants call was the first one I was involved with after joining Eduserv in 2006, and although it was an area that was completely new to me, the response we got, both in terms of the number of proposals and their quality, seemed very exciting. And I still look back on the 2007 Symposium as one of the most successful (if rather nerve-wracking at the time!) events I've been involved in. As things worked out, I wasn't able to follow the progress of the projects as closely as I'd have liked, but the recent meeting reminded me again of the strong sense of community that seems to have built up amongst researchers, learning technologists and educators working in this area, which seems to have outlived particular projects and programmes. Of course we only funded a handful of projects, and other funding agencies helped develop that community too (I'm thinking particularly of JISC with its Open Habitat project, and the EU MUVEnation project), but it's something I'm pleased we were able to contribute to in a small way. Links for 2010-02-05 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
TuentiSpain's No 1 social network amongst teens, and the no 1 iPhone social network app, too Links for 2010-02-06 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
nebusiness.co.uk - News - Science and Technology - Want to see the future? There's an app for thatDespite being out on the market for only a few months, MirrorMe has already been recognised by the gaming industry after recently picking up top prize for the Lifestyle category of the Interactive Media Awards.Jeremiah Alexander, 26, ideas architect at Ideonic, said: "We launched MirrorMe in the final quarter of 2009 and are excited to announce that MirrorMe has already won its first award."We worked really hard developing the MirrorMe application and took risks to push both technical and creative boundaries."It makes it all the more rewarding that we have received recognition from the digital community." TapTale: Bringing literacy to a (iPhone) screen near you [New Window]
TapTale is a new iPhone and iPod Touch app designed as a prototype to help learners build confidence in their creative writing. The Times Education Supplement talks this week about the app, one of the newly launched products whose development I led as Commissioner at Channel 4's Innovation for the Public Fund, working with Derek Robertson at LTS and the clever chaps at Six To Start.The proposition was a simple one: experiment to see what the iPhone and iPod Touch could add to the reading and writing experience. Making it was a genuine challenge for us, for Learning and Teaching Scotland and the award-winning developers SixToStart, whose work on Penguin's WeTellStories made them the best choice to give this groundbreaker a chance:Readers have to work out what they have to do in the story to progress, says Adrian Hon, who created the application and co-founded Six to Start with his brother Dan. The story might say something like the witch went up to the door and knocked three times. The player would then have to tap on the phone three times in order to advance. Or they might read that the house fell to the right and they have to tilt the phone to the right to read about what happens next.The goal is to encourage young people to write their own stories and include their own gestures.Once a tale has been created, users can upload them to the TapTale website, where other registered users can download and read them. Registered users can also provide feedback on any tale via the website, by slotting pre-written statements into a form. The app helps students get started by modeling what it expected, with none other than an award-winning writer to get the creative wheels greased. In 2006, Naomi Alderman won the Orange Award for New Writers, and she now offers a growing selection of exclusive taptale stories, written just for the screen space and gestural potential of the iPhone. They're also available to read on the Taptale website.She's also offered up a selection of free-to-view writing challenges for educators wanting to use the app in their classrooms, or assign challenges for homework on the iPod Touch or iPhone.Brian Clark, working with LTS on trialling the project, describes how it might be used in practice this term:TapTales primary goal is to promote literacy through the reading and writing of tales using the tap, tilt, shake and swipe functions of Apples touch screen devices.When creating a tale, pupils are asked to write chapters using the touchscreen keyboard on the device. In order to progress from chapter to chapter, the reader must use one of the tap, swipe, tilt or shake sequences. It is up to the author of the tale to decide what action must be taken for the reader to see the next chapter.Once a tale has been created, users can upload them via the device to the taptale website. This allows other registered user to download and read their tales directly on the device. Registered users can provide feedback on any tale via the website using a fridge magnet style form. Anyone can read the tales created directly from the site, but of course the tapping and tilting functions are not possible in this view. Fridge-magnet peer-assessmentMy favourite part of this exercise may not even be the iPhone app itself. Rather, the online peer-assessment community we've developed is, I think, a first (though I'm happily corrected). I wanted to see a fridge-magnet approach to student feedback, something that would allow structured feedback to take place but not just in a "tick-box" fashion. I think I also wanted to hark back stylistically to the days of scholastic readers that I had when I was aged four in primary school, learning how to read for the first time. The result is quite a delightful way of helping students - and the general public who stop off by their writings - to learn new ways to provide "two stars and a wish" type feedback to each other anonymously, while maintaining the integrity and safety of a learning site used by young people.The system prompts you to use one of the many critiques that Derek and I thrashed out over a boring train trip or two, to accept it, before pushing up the next set of options. Go and have a play on one of Naomi's stories and you'll see how challenging some of the vocabulary is yet how easy the interface is: struggleware if ever there was any.Criticism of the iPhone for learningAs development work began in the early days of summer 2009, we hit criticism straightaway: "kids don't have iPhones, schools barely allow mobile phones, and in the current straightened times we shouldn't be investing in the most expensive-per-inch handheld technologies around". It was the same criticism hurled back in 2004 when I was making podcasts with and for the students in my secondary school. Fittingly, it is my old education district, East Lothian, that is the first to put itself forward to try out these devices and see what, indeed, they might add to the learning process.We're ready for a resounding tumbleweed to be heard on the question of any educational advances here - no-one's done this before, and we just don't know what it has to offer that paper and pen don't. Likewise, I'd be curious to see what the tactile approach to story reading and writing brings to those kids who have less motivation to read, who have trouble structuring their stories. I also think the online writing community platform we've developed offers a creative, supportive environment that, in brilliant classrooms may well exist, but which is hard to achieve well all the time in every classroom with the timetable constraints we all face.One final really interesting point is that one of the first criticisms of the app from a student has been: "it doesn't allow me to add pictures to my story". Interesting, and perhaps valid in a world where apps are laden with features, features, features.Taptale is relatively simple. It's about making writing and reading as simple as possible, while forcing the hand of the writer into doing certain things: providing constructive feedback, reading for inspiration before writing, thinking about timing and story structure through the gestures.Above all, though, it's about the written word, not the graphic, the design or the picture.If anything, the lack of features is what makes this app special, what's going to make it work well. Children will, lo and behold, have to think about how to describe what's in their mind's eye, not just photograph it with the cellphone camera or Google it, right-click it, save it and insert it. Stripping all that away is, if anything, at least one educational advance we'll have made. Taptale stories are free to view on the website throughout the pilot. The app is free in the UK from the iTunes store.Pic from Anthony Kayaks vs Canoes: George Dyson on how media literacy has really changed [New Window]
The Edge has some brilliant essays from brilliant minds, on how the internet has changed them and will continue to morph our brains over the next decade. George Dyson explains with more clarity than I've ever seen the principal difference in how we deal with information properly in 2010:In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approachesto boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) livedon barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing togetherskeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit(and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels byselecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood untilthere was nothing left but a canoe.TheAleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results maximum boat / minimummaterial by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by theInternet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayakbuilders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemblethe framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to becomedugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to revealthe shape of knowledge hidden within.Iwas a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick.I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don't will beleft paddling logs, not canoes. Personal projects are often worth more than professional ones. What's stopping you? [New Window]
It's all too easy to relegate our personal projects to the bottom of the pile until "the day job" is complete. The result? We nearly always end up having to leave creative, fun, new projects behind in the interest of ticking someone else's boxes, when those same personal projects could be the very innovation that make the difference.Ji Lee was fed up with his life as an ad exec when he decided to engage the public in parodying that very same world, printing out 50,000 speech bubble stickers and placing them over ads around New York City. Over time, the public took the lead in inventing political or comical speech to make the parody. The ultimate parody in this project is, of course, that ad agencies used them to further promote their products. He spins a good yarn in his 99% video.A personal project that took Ji Lee's name to the world and helped him find a seat as Director of Google's Creative Labs.What's your personal project, and what's stopping you just getting on with it?Related articles by ZemantaFinding Inspiration in Cereal (blogs.hbr.org)Ji Lee: 10 Levels of Intimacy (joshspear.com) Links for 2010-02-04 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
michael visocchi - portfolio - GnomonCool real-fake art Tips For Better Ideas [New Window]
A pop-up book guide to (un)structuring your thinking to have better ideas. The one I have to think about more: think first, execute later. You? Links for 2010-02-02 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors - New York TimesApparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.Eetcafé JurExcellent cafe / bistrot in the 'Dam Links for 2010-02-07 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Tories to control Candidate TweetsBad move given they want to expose more people to Tory thinking. Links for 2010-01-31 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Exams watchdog steps in over Facebook protest - Education News, Education - The IndependentThe exams watchdog has stepped into the row over an A-level biology paper which led to thousands of students launching a Facebook protest against the exam board AQA for setting questions they felt were unfair.Ofqual, the newly created independent exams regulator, has ordered the exam board to submit a report on the controversy. The move came as the number of students joining a Facebook page in protest against the paper which they claim failed to stick to the syllabus grew to more than 10,000. The exam was sat by just under 20,000 students on Monday.Britons spent £170m on mobile games in 2009 - TelegraphMore than eight million people in Britain use their mobile phones to play games, according to the National Gamers Survey. Around 3.8 million pay for these games, while around 4.2 million play games that are either free to download or already installed on their phone.iLearn Technology » Blog Archive » Wiglington & Wenks Virtual WorldWiglington and Wenks is so much more than your standard virtual world, it has a rich story line with well developed characters, plot, mystery, and quests. Students are dropped into the story and invited to participate, learning through exploration, problem solving, and critical thinking. The world highlights famous real-world landmarks, historical figures, inventions, culture, nature, and wildlife. Students are motivated to learn more about each as they complete a series of quests. Links for 2010-02-01 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
British Firm Starts iPad App Fund - Digits - WSJNorthern Film & Media said it will contribute as much as 40,000 (about $64,500) to help northeast England teams develop apps.We want the North East to have a place in the rapidly evolving global content market, Tom Harvey, the firms chief executive, said in a statement. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that North East companies have every opportunity to get their products developed, made, distributed and bought on whatever new platforms come along. Whatever we can do to help our companies get to the front of the queue, we will do.Digital TribesEmerging business models to help serve tomorrow's digital tribes. Spotify for Desert Island Discs [New Window]
A lovely, simple idea that combines music and language arts, while introducing new generations to the institution of British radio that started in 1942: Desert Island Discs.Spotify, if you've not banned it in your schools, provides a legal means to look up almost any song you want and play it, immediately. In an age where young people can't do much without having older generations complain about it - not least listen to the music they want to - this would be an interesting way to get under their musical skin, and find out what eight discs (or rather, MP3s) they would take to a desert island with them. Get them to write down their motivations, but then, in a good old fashioned display of classroom presentation, students can interview each other without a script about their choices and listen to the music critically as a group.Classroom activity or dinner party distraction? The choice is yours. As ever, let me know how it turns out.Pic from Mrs Enil Innovations In Learning & Teaching - SGM Conference [New Window]
Innovations In Learning & Teaching - SGM Conference A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:11:00 -0500 Investigation into Challenges, Application and Benefits of Social Media in UK HEIs [New Window]
A New ReportA new report on “An Investigation into the Challenges, Application and Benefits of Social Media in Higher Education Institutes” has just been published. This 28 page document was published by Jadu, a provider of Content Management Systems for public sector organisation.The ProcessSince I am aware there may be concerns in the sector related [...]
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:00:17 -0500 Let the bad times roll: Job losses bite into HE [New Window]
One word for this story..."Ouch"Read more below:Thousands to lose jobs as universities prepare to cope with cuts | Education | The Guardian: "Universities across the country are preparing to axe thousands of teaching jobs, close campuses and ditch courses to cope with government funding cuts, the Guardian has learned.Other plans include using post-graduates rather than professors for teaching and the delay of major building projects. The proposals have already provoked ballots for industrial action at a number of universities in the past week raising fears of strike action which could severely disrupt lectures and examinations.The Guardian spoke to vice-chancellors and other senior staff at 25 universities, some of whom condemned the funding squeeze as 'painful' and 'insidious'. They warned that UK universities were being pushed towards becoming US-style, quasi-privatised institutions.The cuts are being put in place to cope with the announcement last week by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) that 449m equivalent to more than a 5% reduction nationally would be stripped out of university budgets.The University and College Union (UCU) believes that more than 15,000 posts the majority academic could disappear in the next few years. Precise funding figures for each university will be released on 18 March."Difficult times ahead. Could wax lyrical about this being an opportunity for efficiency savings, OER being mainstreamed into education, working smarter not harder, innovating our way out of a restrictive financial climate, opportunities for change etc. But... doesn't the above just suck? Bankers and governments get us into a financial nightmare... and Higher Education gets to pay a significant price as a result.Ouch.
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:39:00 -0500 Experimenting with the Form [New Window]
One of the challenges I’ve set myself this year is to write some sort of book about Yahoo Pipes. Reading Presentation Zen three or four weeks ago, I started to imagine the form such a book might take. What I aspired to was something uncluttered, something that would contrast with the typical confusion of words [...]
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:16:30 -0500 Browse Links in Delicious Another OUseful Prototype Unprediction Comes True:-) [New Window]
Although I subscribe to a lot of online app blogs, I don’t subscribe to them all, instead relying on twitter and subscriptions to other commentator blogs to do some of the filtering for me. This isn’t always reliable, of course, and sometimes I rely on “new” flags to alert me to new features in some [...]
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:29:51 -0500 Winning the game [New Window]
As part of a complex negotiation which took place over the weekend, my son became the owner of a new iPod Touch while I became the owner of a used Asus eeePC 900. Both of us are happy with the deal.The eeePC had languished unused for several months, and with the arrival of the iPod Touch, it was clear that it wouldn't get used any more. The iMac gets used a lot, and the iPod Touch is fine for MSN and Facebook, although of course, the clincher is that the iPT is also a games platform.I, on the other hand, am happier with the eeePC (now running Karmic Koala under the easyPeasy netbook interface). I get Flash, decent browsers and better text entry. Of course, I couldn't survive with the eeePC as my main device, but as my sofa companion for evening online interaction (e.g. tweeting my frustration with TV), it works well.So I guess Steve Jobs' remarks about netbooks need to be filtered through the age demographic. I guess I'm in the netbook generation.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:23:00 -0500 Patterns of publication and library collections as measure of technology shifts? [New Window]
We were pleased to welcome Dr Michelle Alexopoulos from the University of Toronto to OCLC last week. Michelle is an economist whose recent research has focused on creating and analyzing new measures of technical change for developed economies.The abstract of her talk gives a flavor of some of this work, and why it was of interest to us:Can the patterns of library collections be used to measure economic growth and technological shifts? In this talk, Dr. Alexopoulos will unveil new indicators of technical change that, she argues, resolve many of the problems associated with traditional ones (e.g., research and development (R&D) intensity and patents). Dr. Alexopoulos' measures are primarily derived from previous unutilized information contained in MARC21 records (available from the Library of Congress and OCLC's WorldCat database) on new book titles in various fields of technology over the last century. Further, Dr. Alexopoulos will discuss how the indices are related to inputs into knowledge production (such as scientific advances and R&D), and demonstrate that the measures are closely correlated with the commercialization date of new technologies. Finally, she will highlight a number of questions that the new indicators can help answer. [Presentation splashpage] We are very interested to see Worldcat data used in this way, alongside other sources of data about book publication and use (books in print data and sales data). It was interesting hearing Michelle describe some of the reasons why books - and library catalog data - was a good candidate as an indicator:Book publication is linked to changes in knowledge (consider the appearance of manuals, how-to books, ...)The timing is right: there is a good correspondence between the date of commercialization of a technology or process and the date of books published about it. This is supported by commercial interests of publishers in catching interest at the right time. Library catalogs group books into subject classifications which can be useful for analysis purposes. We will make the slides and audio of the presentation available soon. Some further details of the approach can be found in these publications:Michelle Alexopoulos, "Read All About it!! What Happens Following a Technology Shock?" American Economic Review, forthcoming. Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 391 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/391.Michelle Alexopoulos and Jon Cohen, "Volumes of Evidence--Examining Technical Change Last Century Through a New Lens." Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 392 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/392.Michelle Alexopoulos and Jon Cohen, "Measuring Our Ignorance, One Book at a Time: New Indicators of Technical Change, 1909-1949" Journal of Monetary Economics 56 (4) (2009), 450-470. Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 349 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/349.Incidentally, it was also quite interesting for OCLC colleagues to see an economist talk knowledgeably about the MARC format ;-)
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:57:25 -0500 Google Wave in Education [New Window]
Alan Cann, Jo Badge, Dick Moore and Cameron Neylon. Google Wave in Education . ALT-N, Vol. 18, January 2010.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:25:00 -0500 H.264 Format Free To End Users Until (At Least) 2016 [New Window]
Shortly after I published my post on “iPad, Flash, HTML 5 andStandards” it seems that the an announcement was made regarding the licence conditions for Web use use of the H.264 video format. Philip Roy alerted me to a press release (PDF format) which announced that the licence deal for H.264 has just been extended [...]
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:22:48 -0500 Search Mechanics and Search Engineers [New Window]
A couple of days ago I came across the phrase search mechanic in a post on US IT Spending:The budget request calls for launching a new tracking tool with daily updates that would provide the public with the ability to see aggregate spending by agency and also by geographic area as an effort to increase [...]
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:03:42 -0500 Google Apps for Education [New Window]
Many people have already mentioned that the Open University has adopted Google Apps for Education (including the OU official announcement, Will Woods, Niall Sclater, Tony Hirst, John Naughton). My department – the Institute of Educational Technology – hosted a workshop exploring the possibilities on 3 February. These are some notes I made in the discussion.BackgroundOn [...]
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:39:25 -0500 iPad, Flash, HTML 5 and Standards [New Window]
Lack of Flash Support by the iPad – Bad News or Good?A post I wrote in November 2008 entitled “Why Did SMIL and SVGFail?” has been referenced by the Stevie 5 is Alive blog. The post on the lack of Flash support for the iPad device says “Apple: Thank You for Leaving FlashOut“.As the author, [...]
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:11:43 -0500 More famous than Simon Cowell [New Window]
I wrote a blog post on my other, Blipfoto NeedAGeek [New Window]
Try as hard as I might, from time to time my geek invisibility cloak slips and I find myself revealed for my pathetic lack of technical ability.I'm looking for someone to help me parse the output from an api, need someone with Python or Ruby skills, something like that. I think what I want to do is actually rather simple, but, err ... (looks down at ground and kicks dust).I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Well, that and authorship for your contribution to an academic paper. Any offers?OK, sorry If I scared the non edtechies out there.<cloaking device on>Update: I'm very grateful to everyone who responded, we're currently working with someone to develop tools for this project. I can't imagine that anything we develop won't wind up as freely available to all.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:21:00 -0500 Data.gov.uk, Creative Commons and the public domain [New Window]
In a blog post at Creative Commons, UK moves towards opening government data, Jane Park notes that the UK Government have taken a significant step towards the use of Creative Commons licences by making the terms and conditions for the data.gov.uk website compatible with CC-BY 3.0:In a step towards openness, the UK has opened up its data to be interoperable with the Attribution Only license (CC BY). The National Archives, a department responsible for setting standards and supporting innovation in information and records management across the UK, has realigned the terms and conditions of data.gov.uk to accommodate this shift. Data.gov.uk is an online point of access for government-held non-personal data. All content on the site is now available for reuse under CC BY. This step expresses the UKs commitment to opening its data, as they work towards a Creative Commons model that is more open than their former Click-Use Licenses.This feels like a very significant move - and one that I hadn't fully appreciated in the recent buzz around data.gov.uk.Jane Park ends her piece by suggesting that "the UK as well as other governments move in the future towards even fuller openness and the preferred standard for open data via CC Zero". Indeed, I'm left wondering about the current move towards CC-BY in relation to the work undertaken a while back by Talis to develop the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence.As Ian Davis of Talis says, Linked Data and the Public Domain:In general factual data does not convey any copyrights, but it may be subject to other rights such as trade mark or, in many jurisdictions, database right. Because factual data is not usually subject to copyright, the standard Creative Commons licenses are not applicable: you cant grant the exclusive right to copy the facts if that right isnt yours to give. It also means you cannot add conditions such as share-alike.He suggests instead that waivers (of which CC Zero and the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) are examples) are a better approach:Waivers, on the other hand, are a voluntary relinquishment of a right. If you waive your exclusive copyright over a work then you are explictly allowing other people to copy it and you will have no claim over their use of it in that way. It gives users of your work huge freedom and confidence that they will not be persued for license fees in the future.Ian Davis' post gives detailed technical information about how such waivers can be used. Second Life, scalability and data centres [New Window]
Interesting article about the scalability issues around Second Life, What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps GrokMendeley [New Window]
Warning: Lots of UoL politics in this post!This morning we had our UoL GrokMendeley meeting. In the event, lots of people couldn't make it so we were a very small select group. More Jaffa Cakes for me.After a general chat about our perceptions of the differences between Mendeley, CiteULike and Papers, we had a quick look at the Mendeley pdf markup and MSWord tools, which Selina has found to be very attractive to some users.In the end, we decided that the Library will make an application to the Software Panel to get the Mendeley client installed on CFS before Windoze 7 purdah strikes. In order to do this, Alex is going to try to arrange to gather some data about Mendeley by running a short trial on Tagginganna. If we can get the client installed on CFS, we'll let someone else worry about the legal issues around pdf sharing. (Oh, I forgot, I wasn't supposed to say that ;-)And after that? The only thing that is really clear is that Mendeley is going to evolve rapidly over the next few years. While it needs to, this is a bit of a problem because of the difficulties of getting the Mendeley client updated on CFS.As far as I personally am concerned, I'm happy to keep a watching brief on Mendeley. I'll be using CiteULike for the foreseeable future. It's kinda fun though, being on the sidelines and watching the epic Darwinian struggle between these emerging research tools and the dying Endnoteosaurus.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:00:00 -0500 HTML5, document metadata and Dublin Core [New Window]
I recently received a query about the encoding of Dublin Core metadata in HTML5, the revision of the HTML language being developed jointly by the W3C HTML Working Group and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). It has also been the topic of some recent discussion on the dc-general mailing list. While I've been aware of some of the discussions around metadata features in HTML5, until now I haven't looked in much detail at the current drafts.There are various versions of the specification(s), all drafts under development and still changing (at times, quite quickly):The WHATWG has a working draft titled HTML5 (including next generation additions still in development). This document is constantly changing; the content at the time I'm writing is dated 30 January 2010, but will no doubt have changed by the time you read this. Of this spec, the WHATWG says: This draft is a superset of the HTML5 work that is being published at the W3C: everything that is in HTML5 is also in the WHATWG HTML spec. Some new experimental features are being added to the WHATWG HTML draft, to continue developing extensions to the language while the W3C work through their milestones for HTML5. In other words, the WHATWG HTML specification is the next generation of the language, while HTML5 is a more limited subset with a narrower scope.The W3C has a "latest public version" of HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML currently the version dated 25 August 2009. (The content of that "date-stamped" version should continue to be available.)The W3C always has a "latest editor's draft" of that document, which at the time of writing is dated 30 January 2010, but also continues to change at frequent intervals. Note that, compared to the previous "latest public version", this draft incorporates some element of restructuring of the content, with some content separated out into "modules".I can't emphasise too strongly that HTML5 is still a draft and liable to change; as the spec itself says in no uncertain terms: Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways.. For the purposes of this discussion I've looked primarily at the third document above, the W3C latest editor's draft. This post is really an attempt to raise some initial questions (and probably to expose my own confusion) rather than to provide any definitive answers. It is based on my (incomplete and very probably imperfect) reading of the drafts as they stand at this point in time - and it represents a personal view only, not a DCMI view.1. Dublin Core metadata in HTML4 and XHTML(This section covers DCMI's current recommendations for embedding metadata in X/HTML, so feel free to skip it if you are already familiar with this.)To date, DCMI's specifications for embedding metadata in X/HTML documents have concerned themselves with representing metadata "about" the document as a whole, "document metadata", if you like. And in HTML4/XHTML, the principal source of document metadata is the head element (HTML4, 7.4). Within the head element:the meta element (HTML4, 7.4.4.2) provides for the representation of "property name" (the value of the @name attribute)/"property value" (the value of the @content attribute) pairs which apply to the document. It also offers the ability to supplement the value with the name of a "scheme" (the value of the @scheme attribute) which is used "to interpret the property's value".the link element (HTML4, 12.3) provides a means of representing a relationship between the document and another resource. It also - in attributes like @hreflang, @title, - suppports the provision of some metadata "about" that second resource.(I should note here that the above text uses the terminology of the HTML4 specification, not of RDF or the DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM).)The current DCMI recommendation for embedding document metadata in X/HTML, Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements - which from here on I'll just refer to as "DC-HTML". Although the current recommendation is dated 2008, that version is only a minor "modernisation" of conventions that DCMI has recommended since the late 1990s. The specification describes a convention for representing what the DCAM calls a description (of the document) - a set of RDF triples - using the HTML meta and link elements and their attributes (and conversely, for interpreting a sequence of HTML meta and link elements as a set of RDF triples/DCAM description set). Contrary to some misconceptions, the convention is not limited to the use of DCMI-owned "terms"; indeed it does not assume the use of any DCMI-owned terms at all.Consider the example of the following two RDF triples:@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .@prefix ex: <http://example.org/terms/> .@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .<> dc:modified "2007-07-22"^^xsd:date , ex:commentsOn <http://example.org/docs/123> .Aside: from the perspective of the DCMI Abstract Model, these would be equivalent to the following description set, expresssed using the DC-Text syntax, but for the rest of this post, to keep things simple, I'll just refer to the RDF triples.@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .@prefix ex: <http://example.org/terms/> .@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .DescriptionSet ( Description ( Statement ( PropertyURI ( dc:modified ) LiteralValueString ( "2007-07-22" SyntaxEncodingSchemeURI ( xsd:date ) ) ) Statement ( PropertyURI ( ex:commentsOn ) ValueURI ( <http://example.org/docs/123> ) ) ) ))Following the conventions of DC-HTML, those triples are represented in XHTML as:Example 1: DC-HTML profile in XHTML<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/2008/08/04/dc-html/"> <title>Document 001</title> <link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" /> <link rel="schema.EX" href="http://example.org/terms/" /> <link rel="schema.XSD" href="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#" /> <meta name="DC.modified" scheme="XSD.date" content="2007-07-22" /> <link rel="EX.commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123" /> </head></html>A few points to highlight:The example is provided in XHTML but essentially the same syntax would be used in HTML4.The triple with literal object is represented using a meta element.The triple with the URI as object is represented using a link elementThe predicate (property URI) may be any URI; the DC-HTML convention is not limited to DCMI-owned URIs, i.e. DC-HTML seeks to support the sort of URI-based vocabulary extensibility provided by RDF. There is no "registry" of a bounded set of terms to be used in metadata represented using DC-HTML; or, rather, "the Web is the registry". All an implementer requires to introduce a new property is the authority to assign a URI in some URI space they own (or in which they have been delegated rights to assign URIs).A convention for representing property URIs and datatype URIs as "prefixed names" is used, and in this example three other link elements (with @rel="schema.{prefix})" are introduced to act as "namespace declarations" to support the convention. When a document using DC-HTML is processed, no RDF triples are generated for those link elements (Aside: I have occasionally wondered whether this is abusing the rel attribute, which is intended to capture the type of relationship between the document and the target resource, i.e. it is using a mechanism which does carry semantics for an essentially syntactic end (the abbreviation of URIs). But I'll suspend those misgivings for now...).The prefixes used in these "prefixed names" are arbitrary, and DC-HTML does not specify the use/interpretation of a fixed set of @name or @rel attribute values. In the example above, I chose to associate the "DC" prefix with the "namespace URI" http://purl.org/dc/terms/, though "traditionally" it has been more commonly associated with the "namespace URI" http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/. Another document creator might associate the same prefix with a quite different URI again.The DC-HTML profile generates triples only for those meta and link elements where the values of the @name and @rel attributes contain a prefixed name with a prefix for which there is a corresponding "namespace declaration".The datatype of the typed literal is represented by the value of the meta/@scheme attribute.There is no support for RDF blank nodes.For the purposes of this discussion, perhaps the main point to make is that this use/interpretation of meta and link elements is specific to DC-HTML, not a general interpretation defined by the HTML4 specification. The mapping of prefixed names to URIs using link[@rel="schema.ABC"] "namespace declarations" is a DCMI convention, not part of X/HTML. And this is made possible through the use of a feature of HTML4 and XHTML called a "meta data profile": the document creator signals (by providing a specific URI as value of the head/@profile attribute) that they are applying the DC-HTML conventions and the presence of that attribute value licences a consumer to apply that interpretation of the data in a document. And, further, under that profile, as I noted for the example of the "DC" prefix, there is no single "meaning" assigned to meta/@name or link/@rel values.In the XHTML case, the profile-dependent interpretation is made accessible in machine-processable form through the use of GRDDL, more specifically of a GRDDL profile transformation. i.e. a GRDDL processor uses the profile URI to access an XHTML "profile document" which provides a pointer to an XSLT transform which, when applied to an XHTML document using the DC-HTML profile, generates an RDF/XML document representing the appropriate RDF triples.It may also be worth noting at this point that the profile attribute actually supports not just a single URI as value but a space-separated list of URIs i.e. within a single document, multiple profiles may be "applicable". And, potentially, those multiple profiles may specify different interpretations of a single @name or @rel value. I think the intent is that in that case all the interpretations should be applied - and in the case that multiple GRDDL profile transformations are provided, the output should be the result of merging the RDF graphs output from each individual transformation.Now then, having laboured the point about the importance of the concept of the profile, I strongly suspect - though I don't have concrete evidence to support my suspicion - that it is not widely used by applications that provide and consume data using the other conventions described in the DC-HTML document.It is certainly easy to find many providers of document metadata in X/HTML that follow some of the syntactic conventions of DC-HTML but do not include the @profile attribute. This is (currently, at least) the case even for many documents on DCMI's own site. And I suspect only a (small?) minority of applications consuming/processing DC metadata embedded in X/HTML documents do so by applying the DC-HTML GRDDL profile transform in this way. I suspect the majority of DC metadata embedded in X/HTML documents is processed without reference to the GRDDL transform, probably without using the @profile attribute value as a "trigger", possibly without generating RDF triples, and perhaps even without applying the "prefixed name"-to-URI mapping at all - i.e. these applications are "on level 1" in terms of the DC "interoperability levels" document. I suspect there are tools which use meta elements to generate simple property/(literal) value indexes, and do so on the basis of a fixed set of meta/@name values, i.e. they index on the basis that the expected values of the meta/@name attribute are "DC.title", "DC.date" (etc) and those tools would ignore values like "ABC.title", even if the "ABC" prefix was associated (via a link[@rel="schema.ABC"] "namespace declaration") with the URI http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ (or http://purl.org/dc/terms/). But yes, I'm entering the realms of speculation here, and we really need some concrete evidence of how applications process such data.2. RDFa in XHTML and HTML4Since that DCMI document was published, the W3C has published the RDFa in XHTML specification, RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. as a W3C Recommendation. RDFa provides a syntax for embedding RDF triples in an XHTML document using attributes (a combination of pre-existing XHTML attributes and additional RDFa-specific attributes.) Unlike the conventions defined by DC-HTML, RDFa supports the representation of any RDF triple, not only triples "about" the document (i.e. with the document URI as subject), and RDFa attributes can be used anywhere in an XHTML document.Any "document metadata" that could be encoded using the DC-HTML profile could also be represented using RDFa. DCMI has not yet published any guidance on the use of RDFa - not because it doesn't consider RDFa important, I hasten to add, but only because of a lack of available effort. Having said that, (it seems to me) it isn't an area where DCMI would need a new "recommendation", but it may be useful to have some primer-/tutorial-style materials and examples highlighting the use of common constructs used in Dublin Core metadata.I don't intend to provide a full summary of RDFa, but it is worth noting that, at the syntax level, RDFa introduces the use of a datatype called CURIE which supports the abbreviation of URI references as prefixed names. In XHTML, at least, the prefixes are associated with URIs via XML Namespace declarations. The use of CURIEs in RDFa might be seen as a more generalised, standardised approach to the problem that DC-HTML seeks to address through its own "prefixed name"/"namespace declaration" convention.It is perhaps worth highlighting one aspect of the RDFa in XHTML processing model here. In RDFa the XHTML link/@rel attribute is treated as supporting both XHTML link types and CURIEs, and any value that matches an entry in the list of link types in the section The rel attribute, MUST be treated as if it was a URI within the XHTML vocabulary, and all other values must be CURIEs. So, the XHTML link types are treated as "reserved keywords", if you like, and a @rel attribute value of "next" is mapped to an RDF predicate of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#next. For the case of XHTML, those "reserved keywords" are defined as part of the XHTML+RDFa document. They are also listed in the "namespace document" http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab, which itself is an XHTML+RDFa document (though, N.B., there are other terms "in that namespace" which are not intended for use as link/@rel values). For a @rel value that is neither a member of the list nor a valid CURIE (e.g. rel="foobar" or rel="DC.modified" or rel="schema.DC"), no RDF triple is generated by an RDFa processor. As a consequence, RDFa "co-exists" well with the DC-HTML profile, by which I mean that an RDFa processor should generate no unanticipated triples from DC-HTML data in an XHTML+RDFa document.Using RDFa in XHTML, then, the two example triples above could be represented as follows:Example 2: RDFa in XHTML<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:ex="http://example.org/terms/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#" version="XHTML+RDFa 1.0"> <head> <title>Document 001</title> <meta property="dc:modified" datatype="xsd:date" content="2007-07-22" /> <link rel="ex:commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123" /> </head></html>And of course document metadata could be embedded elsewhere in the XHTML+RDFa document, e.g. instead of using the meta and link elements, the data above could be represented in the body of the document:Example 3: RDFa in XHTML (2)<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:ex="http://example.org/terms/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#" version="XHTML+RDFa 1.0"> <head> <title>Document 001</title> </head> <body> <p> Last modified on: <span property="dc:modified" datatype="xsd:date" content="2007-07-22">22 July 2007</span> </p> <p> Comments on: <a rel="ex:commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123">Document 123</a> </p> </body></html>These examples do not make use of a head/@profile attribute. According to Appendix C of the RDFa in XHTML specification, the use of @profile is optional: a @profile value of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab may be included to support a GRDDL-based transform, but it is not required by an RDFa processor. (Having said that, looking at the profile document http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab, I can't see a reference to a GRDDL profile transformation in that document.)The initial RDFa in XHTML specification covered the case of XHTML only. But RDFa is intended as an approach to be used with other markup languages too, and recently a working draft HTML+RDFa has been published. Again, this is a draft which is liable to change. This document describes how RDFa can be used in HTML5 (in both the XML and non-XML syntax), but the rules are also intended to be applicable to HTML4 documents interpreted through the HTML5 parsing rules. For the most part, it provides a set of minor changes to the syntax and processing rules specified in the RDFa in XHTML document.I think (but I'm not sure!) the above example in HTML4 would look like the following, the only differences (for this example) being the change in the empty element syntax and the use of a different DTD for validation:Example 4: RDFa in HTML4<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/html401-rdfa-1.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:ex="http://example.org/terms/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#" version="HTML+RDFa 1.0"> <head> <title>Document 001</title> <meta property="dc:modified" datatype="xsd:date" content="2007-07-22" > <link rel="ex:commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123" > </head></html>3. HTML5The document HTML5 differences from HTML4 offers a summary of the principal differences between HTML4 and HTML5. One general point to note here is that HTML5 is defined as an "abstract language" - it is defined in terms of the HTML Document Object Model - which can be serialised in a format which is compatible with HTML4 and also in an XML format. The "differences" document has little to say on issues specifically related to "document metadata", but it does highlight the removal from the language of some elements and attributes, a topic I'll return to below.As I mentioned above, the current editor's draft version of HTML5 separates some content out into modules. In the current drafts, three items would seem to be of interest when considering conventions for representing metadata "about" a document:The "Document metadata" section of the "core HTML5" document, editor's draft, dated 30 January 2010.The "Microdata" HTML5 module, editor's draft, dated 30 January 2010An updated HTML+RDFa working draft, dated 15 January 2010I'll discuss each of these sources in turn (though I think there is some interdependency in the first two).3.1. Document Metadata in HTML5The "Document metadata" section defines the meta and link elements in HTML5. In terms of evaluating how the DC-HTML conventions might be used within HTML5, the following points seem significant:For the @name attribute of the meta element, the spec defines some values, and it provides for a wiki-based registry of other values (HTML5ED, 4.2.5.2).The @scheme attribute of the meta element has been made obsolete and "must not be used by authors".In the property/value pairs represented by meta elements, the value must not be a URI.For the @rel attribute of the link element, the spec defines some values - strictly speaking, tokens that can occur , and it provides for a wiki-based registry of other values (HTML5ED, 5.12.3.19).The @profile attribute of the head element has been made obsolete and "must not be used by authors"On the validation of values for the meta/@name attribute, HTML5 says:Conformance checkers must use the information given on the WHATWG Wiki MetaExtensions page to establish if a value is allowed or not: values defined in this specification or marked as "proposed" or "ratified" must be accepted, whereas values marked as "discontinued" or not listed in either this specification or on the aforementioned page must be rejected as invalid. Conformance checkers may cache this information (e.g. for performance reasons or to avoid the use of unreliable network connectivity).When an author uses a new metadata name not defined by either this specification or the Wiki page, conformance checkers should offer to add the value to the Wiki, with the details described above, with the "proposed" status.So I think this means that, in order to pass this conformance check as valid, all values of the meta/@name attribute must be registered. The registry currently contains an entry (with status "proposed") for all names beginning "DC.", though I'm not sure whether the registration process is really intended to support such "wildcard" entries. The entry does not indicate whether the intent is that the names correspond to properties of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (i.e. with URIs beginning http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/) or of the DC Terms collection (i.e. with URIs beginning http://purl.org/dc/terms/). Further, as noted above, the current DC-HTML spec does not prescribe a bounded set of @name values; rather it allows for an open-ended set of prefixed name values, not just names referring to the "terms" owned by DCMI. In HTML5, the expectation seems to be that all such values should be registered. So, for example, when DCMI worked with the Library of Congress to make available a set of RDF properties corresponding to the MARC Relator Codes, identified by LoC-owned URIs, I think the expectation would be that, for data using those properties to be encoded, a corresponding set of @name values would need to be registered. Similarly if an implementer group coins a new URI for a property they require, a new @name value would be required.If the registration process for HTML5 turns out to be relatively "permissive" (which the text above suggests it may be), it may be that this is not an issue, but it does seem to create a new requirement not present in HTML4/XHTML. However, I note that the registration page currently includes a note that suggests a "high bar" for terms to be "Accepted": For the "Status" section to be changed to "Accepted", the proposed keyword must be defined by a W3C specification in the Candidate Recommendation or Recommendation state. If it fails to go through this process, it is "Unendorsed".Having said that, the microdata specification refers to the possibility that @name values are URIs, and I think that the implication is that such URI values are exempt from the registration requirement (though this does not seem clear from the discussion of registration in the "core" HTML5 spec).The meta/@scheme attribute, used in DC-HTML to represent datatype URIs for typed literals, is no longer permitted in HTML5. Section 10.2, which offers suggestions for alternatives for some of the features that have been made obsolete, suggests Use only one scheme per field, or make the scheme declaration part of the value., which I think is suggesting either using a different meta/@name value for each potential scheme value (e.g. "date-W3CDTF", "date-someOtherDateFormat") or using some sort of structured string for the @content value with the scheme name embedded (e.g. "2007-07-22|http://purl.org/dc/terms/W3CDTF")The section on the registration of meta/@name attribute values includes the paragraph:Metadata names whose values are to be URLs must not be proposed or accepted. Links must be represented using the link element, not the meta elementThis constraint appears to rule out the use of meta/@name to represent the property in cases where (in RDF terms) the object is a literal URI. (This is different from the case where the object is an RDF URI reference, which in DC-HTML is covered by the use of the link element.) For example, the DCMI dc:identifier and dcterms:identifier properties may be used in this way to provide a URI which identifies the document - that may be the document URI itself, or it may be another URI which identifies the same document.A similar issue to that above for the registration of meta/@name attribute values arises for the case of the link/@rel attribute, for which HTML5 says:Conformance checkers must use the information given on the WHATWG Wiki RelExtensions page to establish if a value is allowed or not: values defined in this specification or marked as "proposed" or "ratified" must be accepted when used on the elements for which they apply as described in the "Effect on..." field, whereas values marked as "discontinued" or not listed in either this specification or on the aforementioned page must be rejected as invalid. Conformance checkers may cache this information (e.g. for performance reasons or to avoid the use of unreliable network connectivity).When an author uses a new type not defined by either this specification or the Wiki page, conformance checkers should offer to add the value to the Wiki, with the details described above, with the "proposed" status.AFAICT, the registry currently contains no entries related specifically to DC-HTML or the DCMI vocabularies.As for the case of name, the microdata specification refers to the possibility that @rel values are URIs, and again I think the implication is that such URI values are exempt from the registration requirement (though, again, this does not seem clear from the discussion in the "core" HTML5 spec).Finally, the head/@profile attribute is no longer available in HTML5. and Section 10.2 says:When used for declaring which meta terms are used in the document, unnecessary; omit it altogether, and register the names.When used for triggering specific user agent behaviors: use a link element instead.I think DC-HTML's use of head/@profile places it into the second of these categories: the profile doesn't "declare" a bounded set of terms, but it specifies how a (potentially "open-ended") set of attribute values are to be interpreted/processed.Furthermore, the draft HTML+RDFa document proposes the (optional) use of a link/@rel value of "profile", and there is a corresponding entry in the registry for @rel values. This seems to be a mechanism for (re-)introducing the HTML4 concept of the meta data profile, using a different syntactic form i.e. using link/@rel in place of the profile attribute. I'm not clear about the extent to which this has support within the wider HTML5 community. If it was adopted, I imagine the GRDDL specification would also evolve to use this mechanism, but that is guesswork on my part.Julian Retschke summarises most of these issues related to DC-HTML in a recent message to the public-html mailing list here.3.2. MicrodataMicrodata is a new specification, specific to HTML5. The "latest editors draft" version is described as "a module that forms part of the HTML5 series of specifications published at the W3C". The content was previously a part of the "core" HTML5 specification, but the decision was taken recently to separate it from the main spec.Microdata offers similar functionality to that offered by RDFa in that it allows for the embedding of data anywhere in an HTML5 document. Like RDFa, microdata is a generalised mechanism, not one tied to any particular set of terms, and also like RDFa, microdata introduces a new set of attributes, to be used in combination with existing HTML5 attributes. The syntactic conventions used in microdata are inspired principally by the conventions used in various microformats.As for the case of RDFa, my purpose here is not to provide a full description of microdata, but to examine whether and how microdata can express the data that in HTML4/XHTML is expressed using the conventions of the DC-HTML profile.The model underlying microdata is one of nested lists of name-value pairs:The microdata model consists of groups of name-value pairs known as items.Each group is known as an item. Each item can have an item type, a global identifier (if the item type supports global identifiers for its items), and a list of name-value pairs. Each name in the name-value pair is known as a property, and each property has one or more values. Each value is either a string or itself a group of name-value pairs (an item).The microdata model is independent of the RDF model, and is not designed to represent the full RDF model. In particular, microdata does not require the use of URIs as identifiers for properties, though it does allow for the use of URIs. Microdata does not offer - as many RDF syntaxes, including RDFa, do - a mechanism for abbreviating property URIs. But the microdata spec does include an algorithm that provides a (partial, I think?) mapping from microdata to a set of RDF triples.Probably the main feature of RDF that has no correspondence in microdata is literal datatyping - see the discussion by Jeni Tennison here - though there is a distinct element/attribute for date-time values.Given this constraint, I don't think it is possible to express the first triple of my example above using microdata. If the typed literal is replaced with a plain literal (i.e. the object is "2007-07-22", rather than "2007-07-22"^^xsd:date), then I think the two triples could be encoded (using the XML serialisation) as follows, i.e. the property URIs appear in full as attribute values:Example 5: Microdata in HTML5<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html> <head> <title>Document 001</title> <meta name="http://purl.org/dc/terms/modified" content="2007-07-22" /> <link rel="http://example.org/terms/commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123" /> </head></html>As for the case of RDFa, microdata supports the embedding of data in the body of the document, so the triples could (I think!) also be represented as:Example 6: Microdata in HTML5 (2)<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html> <head> <title>Document 001</title> </head> <body> <div itemscope="" itemid="http://example.org/doc/001"> <p> Last modified on: <time itemprop="http://purl.org/dc/terms/modified" datetime="2007-07-22">22 July 2007</time> </p> <p> Comments on: <a rel="http://example.org/terms/commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123">Document 123</a> </p> </body></html>My understanding is that the itemid attribute is necessary to set the subject of the triple to the URI of the document, but I could be wrong on this point.Also I think it's worth noting that the microdata-to-RDF algorithm specifies an RDF interpretation for some "core" HTML5 elements and attributes. For example:the head/title element is mapped to a triple with the predicate http://purl.org/dc/terms/title and the element content as literal objectmeta elements with name and content attributes are mapped to triples where the predicate is either (if the name attribute value is a URI) the value of the name attribute, or the concatenation of the string "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#" and the value of the name attribute. So, e.g., a name attribute value of "DC.modified" would generate a predicate http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#DC.modified.A similar rule applies for the link element. So, e.g., a rel attribute value of "EX.commentsOn" would generate a predicate http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#EX.commentsOn and a rel attribute value of "schema.DC" would generate a predicate http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#schema.DCAs far as I can tell, these are rules to be applied to any HTML5 document - there is no "flag" to say that they apply to document A but not to document B - so would need to be taken into consideration in any DCMI convention for using meta/@name and link/@rel attributes in HTML5. For example, given the following HTML5 document (and leaving aside for a moment the registration issue, and assuming that "EX.commentsOn", "schema.DC" and "schema.EX" are registered values for @name and @rel)Example 7: Microdata in HTML5 (3)<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html> <head> <title>Document 001</title> <link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" /> <link rel="schema.EX" href="http://example.org/terms/" /> <meta name="DC.modified" content="2007-07-22" /> <link rel="EX.commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123" /> </head></html>the microdata-to-RDF algorithm would generate the following five RDF triples:@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .@prefix xhv: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#> .<> dc:title "Document 001" , xhv:schema.DC <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> , xhv:schema.EX <http://example.org/terms/> , xhv:DC.modified "2007-07-22" , xhv:EX.commentsOn <http://example.org/docs/123> .It's probably worth emphasising that although the URIs generated here are not-DCMI-owned URIs, it would be quite possible to assert an "equivalence" between a property with a URI beginning http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab# and a corresponding DCMI-owned URI, which would imply a second triple using that DCMI-owned URI (e.g. <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#DC.modified> owl:equivalentProperty <http://purl.org/dc/terms/modified>) - though, AFAICT, no such equivalence is suggested at the moment.3.3. RDFa in HTML5I noted above that, although the initial RDFa syntax specification had focused on the case of XHTML, a recent draft sought to extend this by describing the use of RDFa in HTML, including the case of HTML5.As I already discussed, using RDFa, it is quite possible to represent any data that could be represented in HTML4/XHTML using the DC-HTML profile. So, using RDFa in HTML5, my two example triples could be represented (using the XML serialisation) as:Example 8: RDFa in HTML5<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:ex="http://example.org/terms/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#" version="XHTML+RDFa 1.0"> <head> <title>Document 001</title> <meta property="dc:modified" datatype="xsd:date" content="2007-07-22" /> <link rel="ex:commentsOn" href="http://example.org/docs/123" /> </head></html>Note that the RDFa in HTML draft requires the use of the html/@version attribute which, in the current draft, is obsoleted by the "core" HTML5 specification. As noted above, RDFa in HTML also proposes the (optional) use of a link/@rel value of "profile".In the initial discussion of RDFa above, I noted the existence of a list of "reserved keyword" values for the link/@rel attribute in XHTML, to which an RDFa processor prefixes the URI to generate RDF predicate URIs. In HTML5, that list of reserved values is defined not by the HTML5 specification but by the WHATWG registry of @rel values. So there may be cases where a value used in an link/@rel attribute in an HTML4/XHTML document does not result in an RDFa processor generating a triple (because that value is not included in the HTML4/XHTML reserved list), but the same value in an link/@rel attribute in an HTML5 document does cause an RDFa processor to generate a triple (because that value is included in the HTML5 @rel registry). My understanding is that the RDFa/CURIE processing model is designed to cope with such host-language-specific variations, but it is something document creators will need to be aware of.4. Some concluding thoughtsDCMI's specifications for embedding metadata in X/HTML have focused on "document metadata", data describing the document. The current DCMI Recommendation for encoding DC metadata in HTML was created in 2008, and is based on the DCMI Abstract Model and on RDF. The syntactic conventions are largely those developed by DCMI in the late 1990s. The current document was developed with reference to HTML4 and XHTML only, and it does not take into consideration the changes introduced by HTML5. The conventions described are not limited to the use of a fixed set of DCMI-owned properties, but support the representation of document metadata using any RDF properties.Looking at the HTML5 drafts raises various issues:HTML5 removes some of the syntactic components used by the DC-HTML profile in HTML4/XHTML, namely the scheme and profile attributes.HTML5 introduces a requirement for the registration of meta/@name and link/@rel attribute values; the current DC-HTML specification makes the assumption that an "open-ended" set of values is available for those attributes.The status of the concept of the meta data profile in HTML5 seems unclear. On the one hand, the profile attribute has been removed, but the proposed registration of a link/@rel value suggests that the profile approach is still available in HTML5.The microdata specification provides "global" RDF interpretations for meta and link elements in HTML5.Microdata offers a mechanism for embedding data in HTML5 documents, and that mechanism can be used for embedding some RDF data in HTML5 documents. Microdata has some limitations (the absence of support for typed literals), but microdata could be used to express a large subset of the data that (in HTML4/XHTML) is expressed using the DC-HTML profile. The microdata specification is still a working draft and liable to change.RDFa also offers a mechanism for embedding RDF data in HTML5 documents. RDFa is designed to support the RDF model, and RDFa could be used in HTL5 to express the same data that (in HTML4/XHTML) is expressed using the DC-HTML profile. The specification for using RDFa in HTML5 is still a working draft and liable to change.There seems to be a possible tension between HTML5's requirement for the registration of meta/@name and link/@rel values and the assumption in DC-HTML that an "open-ended" set of values is available. Also, the microdata specification's mapping by simple concatenation of registered meta/@name and link/@rel values to URIs differs from DC-HTML's use of a prefix-to-URI mapping. However, as I suggested above, it seems quite probable that at least some applications using Dublin Core metadata in HTML do indeed operate on the basis of a small set of invariant meta/@name and link/@rel values corresponding to (a subset of the) DCMI-owned properties, i.e. they use a subset of the conventions of DC-HTML to represent document metadata using only a limited set of DCMI-owned properties - to represent data conforming to what DCMI would call a single "description set profile". With the addition of assertions of equivalence between properties (see above), then it would be possible to represent data conforming to the version of "Simple Dublin Core" that I described a little while ago - i.e. using only the properties of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set with plain literal values - using HTML5 meta/@name (with a registered set of 15 values) and meta/@content attributes.Both microdata and RDFa, on the other hand, are extensions to HTML5 that are designed to provide generalised, "vocabulary-agnostic" conventions for embedding data in HTML5 documents. Using both microdata and RDFa, data may include, but is not limited to, "document metadata". RDFa is designed to represent RDF data; and microdata can be used to represent some RDF data (it lacks support for typed literals). RDFa includes abbreviation mechanisms for URIs that are broadly similar to those used in the DC-HTML profile (in the sense that they both use a sort of "prefixed name" to abbreviate URIs); microdata does not provide such a mechanism and (I think) would require the use of URIs in full.Both microdata and RDFa address the problem that DCMI seeks to address via the DC-HTML profile, in the context of a more generalised mechsnism for embedding data in HTML5 documents. Both microdata and RDFa could be used in HTML5 to represent document metadata that in HTML4/XHTML is represented using the DC-HTML profile (partially, for the case of microdata because of the absence of datatyping support). Currently, the documents describing RDFa in HTML5 and microdata are both still in draft and the subjects of vigorous debate, and it remains to be seen how/whether they progress through W3C process, and how implementers respond. But it seems to me the use of either would offer an opportunity for DCMI to move away from the maintenance of a DCMI-defined convention and to align with more generalised approaches. Arcadia Project OU Report Back Presentation [New Window]
Short notice, but then, if I gave more notice there’d have been all sorts of calendar negotiations over a week or two then we’d have rescheduled anyway…Presentation trailerMany OU folk will have already spent an hour or two at the Learn About fair (fayre?) on that day, so you might as well as right the [...]
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:25:54 -0500 Friendfolios in action [New Window]
I've written previously about our concept of reflective Friendfolios based on the social network Friendfeed. And now it's happening. For the past week, I've tried to find ways of sharing examples of the work being done by the students, but I have not been able to do this for confidentiality reasons related to the way the Friendfeed site works. So while I can't share any examples with you, I can share the analysis of the first week.In one week, 140 students (so far) have produced 1542 interactions, including 347 Friendfeed "Likes" and 1195 comments ranging from a single word to several hundred words. In all, they've written over 20,000 words on topics including shared links, housekeeping and deeply personal reflections:The Friday Reflection: At 6pm on Friday evening I posted the following video:We've had about 50 responses so far, posted at all times of day and night - nearly 24/7. And what do the students think of the site? One called it Fakebook. Let's hope it's as sticky as Facebook over the next few months.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:44:00 -0500 Decommissioning / Mothballing Mailing Lists [New Window]
The ContextIn response to my recent post about usage of JISCMail lists Nicole Harris pointed out some evidence of its popularity. It is clear that although in some sectors there may have been a migration to a diversity of communication and collaboration tools, other sectors are still well-served by email lists. This is particularly true [...]
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:00:37 -0500 Readability and linkability [New Window]
In July last year I noted that the terminology around Linked Data was not necessarily as clear as we might wish it to be All the news ... [New Window]
My former OCLC colleague Eric Hellman has become one of the more interesting bloggers in our space. A little while ago he wrote about the acquisition of Liblime by PTFS. He made a general opening comment ...:The library industry has likewise been troubled by misalignment of interests between the owners of the companies and their customers. That's why it's important for libraries to pay close attention to the frequent mergers and acquisitions of the companies that serve them. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League] And goes on to talk about the rationale for open source (primarily to avoid vendor lock-in, Eric argues) and PTFS and Liblime positions in the market. Here, for example, he talks about aspects of the library/vendor transaction from the vendor perspective ...From the vendor's point of view, the sales process is very expensive. Promises to customize the system to address customer peculiarities are common, and these add to the cost of system maintenance. Once the system has been sold, a proprietary system vendor has a guarantee of continuing profits from support contracts. Only the vendor has the system knowledge (and sometimes even the system access) to make even the most trivial changes. It's in the support phase that the vendor and customer interests can become misaligned. The vendor has every incentive to do the least work at the highest price possible. The customer is locked into whatever system they have chosen. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League] .... and here he talks about open source ..The recent popularity of open source library management systems is in large part a search for business models that better align the interests of vendor and customer during the support phase. If the support vendor doesn't perform to the library's expectations, the library can hire a new support vendor without ditching their automation system. If a library wants to add a new feature to their system, or integrate it with a system from another vendor, they can hire a developer based on qualifications rather than access to source. The important thing to the library is not so much the access to source or the cost of the license, it's the absence of vendor lock-in. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League] The entry was informative and interesting. I may disagree with detail or emphasis (other factors are clearly in play in the current interest in open source for example) but - importantly - my thinking has been influenced by it. When I finished reading it I was also struck by how unusual it is to read something like this in the sources where you might expect it, in the library 'journalism'. In general we are not well-served by library journalism (I am thinking of what is published in our 'trade magazines': American Libraries, Library Journal, CILIP Update, ...) when it comes to this type of 'business' analysis. Our discussions are poorer for it.
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:01:18 -0500 Nudge [New Window]
I was going to buy Nudge, which seemed relevant to our Friendfolio work.Then I read the reviews.I can do without another Outliers.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:25:00 -0500 Amplify [New Window]
Over the last week, I've been deluged with an email from a Mrs Trellis of North Wales inviting me to join her network on Amplify. She writes:Dear Dr Kahn,Mrs Trellis recently joined Amplify and has not shared any posts yet.Thanks! -The Amplify TeamTo start Amplifying pages, paragraphs, images and videos you find on the web, add the Amplify bookmarklet to your browser (supports Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera) or if you're a Firefox user, you can install the Amplify Firefox add-on.To unsubscribe from this email, manage your email preferencesThis email is sent to registered users of Amplify.com. To unsubscribe from all Amplify emails, click here.Please do not reply to this message; it was sent from an unmonitored email address. This message is a service email related to your use of Amplify. For general inquiries or to request support with your Amplify account, please contact us at help@amplify.com.P.S. Are you Imran Khan the famous cricketer? If so, could you ask Buddy Holly to join my network on Amplify?So I've watched the demo video and I think I get it. Amplify is in the crowded diigo/posterous/tumblr/etc space and tries to hijack the conversation from sites elsewhere in the web.Is that right? Do I need another destination online? I think I'll pass - unless I'm missing something?A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:35:00 -0500 Openness? No Thanks, Ill Have An iPad [New Window]
After month’s of speculation the iPad was announced yesterday And after a day in which many Twitterers were responding to Steve Jobs’ announcement today we say the headlines in the press. The main photograph on the front page of The Daily Telegraph feeatured Steve Jobs with Apple’s latest creation and in an unusual display of [...]
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:31:25 -0500 Skim.it Like Digress.it, But With Ratings Rather than Comments? [New Window]
A couple of weeks ago, whilst dozing to the ITConversations podcast channel, I started daydreaming around the conversation that was going on in the Mitch Ratcliffe /Booksahead.com episode of Phil Windley’s Technometria podcast. The discussion was on the topic of the future of the book, particularly with respect to annotating books and ebooks (in a [...]
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:43:24 -0500 Am I going to buy an iPad? [New Window]
No. 24" iMac it is then.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:19:00 -0500 Update: Bye bye 2collab? [New Window]
Another major publisher doesn't get it2collab, a product of Elsevier, is no longer accepting new users and will be shutting down in due time.Won't be the last publisher-owned "network" to die.The original source of this information has now been updated, and see the comment from Michael Habib below.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:00:00 -0500 The Imagined Village at DMH last night [New Window]
Difficult second album not as good as the first, but some highlights:A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0500 More Link Pollution This Time from WordPress.com [New Window]
A month or two ago, I posted on the topic of Google/Feedburner Link Pollution, observing how URIs contained in RSS feed link elements run through Feedburner end up with Google Analytics tracking codes appended to them.Well, it seems as if WordPress.com occasionally does a little bit of rewriting of links you might have carefully placed [...]
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:19:54 -0500 "Doing real science" on Friendfeed [New Window]
Our first year Biological Sciences students are starting to do some great work with their Friendfolios. I'd really like to share some of it with a wider audience, but there are issues with revealing identities. So I need suggestions as to the best way to do this. Obviously we could use static screenshots with the names obscured, but I'd really like to find an interactive way of sharing. Some of the students have chosen to create private Friendfeed accounts, so you could argue that they have already made their choice, but I'm still a bit uncomfortable about putting people in the spotlight. I suppose I could reveal my Friendfeed teaching identity and let people draw their own conclusions from the accounts I'm following and my Likes and Comments, but I'm not sure about this.Most of all, I'd like the students who have grokked Friendfeed to be able to interact with the scientific community on the site and realize that real science goes on in this medium, and that there is something beyond the rather sterile, fact-driven scientific education they get from lectures and practical classes (labs). A few students have already joined some of the Friendfeed science Groups of their own volition, but it would be nice to give the high flyers some real science to get their teeth into. A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:31:00 -0500 Links for 2010-01-26 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Why Linked Data for data.gov.uk? | Jeni's MusingsWell argued - and accessible - case for why it makes sense to use Linked Data for government data.A survey of the use of Web 2.0 tools and services in the UK HE sector [pdf]A Shared Infrastructure Services Landscape Study on the current use of web stuff in higher ed. Everyone who uses this stuff knows this stuff. So why do these reports kep getting written? To document what's been happening so we can remind ourselves of the backstory in years to come? A little bit of me thinks I should read these reports as some sort of personal sanity check. But there are so many of them, and very often they appear not to say anything new at all?Six Simple Techniques for Presenting Data: Hans Rosling (TED, 2006)Tips on how to make a data rich presentation engaging rather than confusing or deathly dull...
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:00:00 -0500 Two Variants of Google Blogsearch? [New Window]
Yet more signs that Google is losing the plot… Whilst putting together a quick Yahoo Pipes demo, I called up the Blogs search option from the More menu item in Google websearch in order to pull an RSS feed of blog search results from it… But there was no feed option?Strange, because blogsearch.google.com does offer [...]
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:40:13 -0500 Creating Database Query Forms in Google Spreadsheets Sort Of [New Window]
It’s all very well using a Google spreadsheet as a database, but sometimes you just want to provide a simple form to let people run a particular query. Here’s a quick way of doing that within a Spreadsheet…So for example: Can you help me crowd source a solution?. The problem is as follows:Students will make [...]
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:50:25 -0500 The effects of peer-versus self-editing on learner autonomy in ESL writing [New Window]
Abstract: This thesis reports on an action research study carried out with students attending an English medium university. The action research comprised three cycles, each presented here as a Study. Study One, which investigated the effects of peer-editing on students revised drafts as well as on new essays, revealed that the students did not benefit from peer feedback in improving their revised drafts. However, peer-editing helped them write new better quality essays. Results of Study One led to Study Two, which investigated the reasons for the students failure to benefit from their peers feedback in revising their essays. It showed that the students culture of learning played a major role in their giving and receiving of peer feedback. The insight gained from Study Two led me to modify my method of teaching peer-editing before embarking on Study Three, which investigated the same questions as Study One but with two new aspects: 1) Study Three employed an experimental group which engaged in peer-editing, and a comparison group which practiced self-editing, and compared the effects of peer-editing to that of self-editing on the students writing. 2) It also tested the students ability to correct specific types of language error. Compared to the comparison group, the experimental group significantly improved their writing in revised drafts as well as in new essays. Since both groups received teacher instruction, but only the experimental group had engaged in peer-editing, these results may be attributed to peer-editing. More specifically, the experimental group significantly reduced rule-based language errors in revised drafts but not in new essays. However, non rule-based errors were not significantly reduced either in revised drafts or in new essays. The thesis grounds the results of this action research study in a socio-cognitive theoretical framework of Second Language Acquisition. The study contributes to research by demonstrating the important role of both teacher intervention and peer interaction in developing the students writing skills in a way which may lead them to become autonomous writers. It also has important pedagogical implications for teachers as it reveals the benefit of correcting specific, rather than all, language errors in order to bring about some language development in their students linguistic knowledge.Nuwar Mawlawi Diab, Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Leicester, October 2008. Awarded 3 July 2009.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:39:00 -0500 Use of Web 2.0 in Australian Universities [New Window]
The JISC-funded Shared Infrastructure Services (SIS) Landscape Study has published two reports which describe how Web 2.0 is being used in higher educational institutions in the UK and Australia. The two surveys allow comparisons to be made across these two countries. This work was coordinated by my UKOLN colleagues Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell, who [...]
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:24:43 -0500 (Still) trying to like Mendeley [New Window]
I'm a keen CiteULike user, and although I don't think it's perfect, overall I'm pretty happy with the service. I'm also convinced that Mendeley is a fine product, and I've been trying to explore it for months.But there's a problem. Unlike CiteULike, which is web-based and accessed through your favourite browser, for full service, Mendeley requires download and installation of a (free) specialist client application. That instantly invalidates it from use at UoL, since the CFS police don't like sullying their pristine servers with anything other than Microsoft products (sigh).So far, so bad. But there's a bigger problem. I've had the Mendeley client installed on various machines for months, and I've reached the conclusion that - I don't get it. I've tried and tried to like Mendeley. And failed. When it first appeared, Mendeley was touted as "A last.fm for Research" - maybe that's the problem, I never got last.fm either. Where's the social in Mendeley? I can't find it. Bookmarking? I can do that with Excel. It's social discovery I want, and that's what I can't figure out with Mendeley. Mendeley's roadmap includes an income-generating freemium model (fair enough, although the potential for being charged will put many people off) which includes increased storage space for PDFs (what is it with the obsession with PDFs - shouldn't we be trying to kill PDF?), more detailed stats, and a recommendation engine, which is just rolling out. But it doesn't help me.So I have a proposal. What say we, the great and the good of UoL, get together (with cake) for a Mendeley grokathon? Kick the tyres, snap on the rubber gloves and insert a finger into its orifice and generally give it a good mixture of metaphors? Heck, we could even invite the Rt. Hon. R. Mobbs in his newfound role as God Of All Things Software (just in case we decide we like it). Whaddya think? Eh? Eh? Eh?Update: UoL Mendeley Grokathon will be 11am, Tuesday 2nd Feb, Adrian 232 (off 2nd floor Adrian computer lab). Bring your laptop & come along if you are free.A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:30:00 -0500 STRIDE E-Learning Handbook [New Window]
Last year I received an invitation to contribute to an e-learning handbook which was being produced by the Indira Gandhi National Open University. My contribution focussed on best practices for making use of Web-based slide hosting services such as Slideshare. I’m pleased to say that the handbook, theSTRIDE Handbook 8 on E-Learning, is now available [...]
Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:00:16 -0500 Talking to people [New Window]
I am interviewed occasionally for a report somebody is preparing. Sometimes internal, not for publication, sometimes published. It is always interesting when reading the final outcome to see how and whether my comments were included. My experiences vary. Sometimes I am pleased to see an appropriate trace of the conversation; sometimes I can see no evidence that I was ever spoken to; and sometimes comments are assimilated to a view that I did not really have. Not unsurprisingly, people are variably good at listening. Sometimes a comment will be enlisted in support of a view the interviewer had. Although, I haven't kept track I don't think that people inside the library community are necessarily more faithful interpreters than those from outside. What is surprising - to me anyway - is the number of interviewers in situations like this who like to answer their own questions, or who, in response to the slightest prompt, are keen to talk about experiences on their previous assignments. In my experience, they tend not to produce great reports.
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:19:22 -0500 The right and left hands of open government data in the UK [New Window]
As I'm sure everyone knows by now, the UK Government's data.gov.uk site was formally launched yesterday to a significant fanfare on Twitter and elsewhere. There's not much I can add other than to note that I think this initiative is a very good thing and I hope that we can contribute more in the future than we have done to date.[Edit: I note that the video of the presentation by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt is now available.]I'd like to highlight two blog posts that hurtled past in my Twitter stream yesterday. The first, by Brian Hoadley, rightly reminds us that Open data is not a panacea but it is a start:In truth, Ive been waiting for Joe Bloggs on the street to mention in passing Hey, just yesterday I did x online and have it be one of those new Services that has been developed from the release of our data. (Note: A Joe Bloggs who is not related to Government or those who encircle Government. A real true independent Citizen.)It may be a long wait.The reality is that releasing the data is a small step in a long walk that will take many years to see any significant value. Sure there will be quick wins along the way picking on MPs expenses is easy. But to build something sustainable, some series of things that serve millions of people directly, will not happen overnight. And the reality, as Tom Loosemore pointed out at the London Data Store launch, it wont be a sole developer who ultimately brings it to fruition.The second, from the Daily Mash, is rather more flippant, New website to reveal exactly why Britain doesn't work:Sir Tim said ordinary citizens will be able to use the data in conjunction with Ordnance Survey maps to show the exact location of road works that are completely unnecessary and are only being carried out so that some lazy, stupid bastard with a pension the size of Canada can use up his budget before the end of March.The information could also be used to identify Britain's oldest pothole, how much business it has generated for its local garage and why in the name of holy buggering fuck it has never, ever been fixed.And, while we are on the subject of maps and so on, today's posting to the Ernest Marples Blog, Postcode Petition Response Our Reply, makes for an interesting read about the government's somewhat un-joined-up response to a petition to "encourage the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites":The problem is that the licence was formed to suit industry. To suit people who resell PAF data, and who use it to save money and do business. And thats fine I have no problem with industry, commercialism or using public data to make a profit.But this approach belongs to a different age. One where the only people who needed postcode data were insurance and fulfilment companies. Where postcode data was abstruse and obscure. Were not in that age any more.Were now in an age where a motivated person with a laptop can use postcode data to improve peoples lives. Postcomm and the Royal Mail need to confront this and change the way that they do things. They may have shut us down, but if they try to sue everyone whos scraping postcode data from Google, theyll look very foolish indeed.Finally and perhaps most importantly we need a consistent and effective push from the top. Number 10s right hand needs to wake up and pay attention to the fantastic things the left hands doing.Without that, we wont get anywhere.Hear, hear. Open University Adopts Google Apps For Education [New Window]
…And so it came to pass that The Open University announced that it was going to adopt Google Apps for Education, and in one fell swoop sign up over 150,000 students to the platform.And what bounteous riches would those students henceforth be able to benefit from, with “a service level agreement with higher levels of [...]
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:40:57 -0500 [New Window]
providing a collection that help you enjoy your backyard including party tents and metal sheds to store your outdoor equipment. [New Window]
offering a large collection of products for the hearth including gas logs and wood burning stoves. [New Window]
offering a large selection of outdoor playground and accessories landscape timbers and wooden swing sets. [New Window]
offering a self branded 30% and 50% Glycolic skin peel. [New Window]
offering a 100% natural gout control product since 1998. [New Window]
offering a large collection of backpacks including the High Sierra rolling backpacks , exercise DVDs, the old sled and also football cleats. [New Window]
providing name brand work boots to police and the military. [New Window]
providing theme parties in the form of mystery parties that are packaged in multiple scenarios. [New Window]
offering sterling silver chains from seven to 24 inches. [New Window]
offering a selection of pine wholesale furniture including benches, tables, and mudroom furniture. [New Window]
providing a large selections of superbowl commercials from 1967 to 2009 and see the latest 2010 superbowl commercials. [New Window]
supplying commercial and residential lighting including under cabinet lighting and fluorescent ballasts. On the use of Microsoft SharePoint in UK universities [New Window]
A while back we decided to fund a study looking at the uptake of SharePoint within UK higher education institutions My Significant Drop in Use of JISCMail Lists [New Window]
Back in October 2005 I gave a talk entitled “Email Must Die!” at the Internet Librarian International 2005 (ILI) Conference. The following summary of the talk was published in Elucidate (Vol. 3 Issue 1, January/February 2006 ISSN: 1742-5921 – PDF format):“One particularly provocative paper was from Brian Kelly, Email Must Die!, in which he suggests [...]
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:00:35 -0500 Where are you on the Cool Curve? [New Window]
The Cool Curve - Toby Moores of Sleepydog.net from Toby MooresA.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:39:00 -0500 Comments [New Window]
Apologies to commenters - we had some hiccups. Some were delayed and a couple may have been lost. We will try not to do it again ...
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:22:53 -0500 Literature fail :-( [New Window]
For reasons we won't go into here, for the past few days I've been thinking about the microbiology of climate change.Microbiology - check. Climate change, well that's where I need to do some reading. So like a good geek, naturally the first thing I did was to set up a series of database screens using "appropriate" search strings.And that's where it all goes wrong. Seems that you can't get a paper published these days unless you make a gratuitous reference to climate change. It's part throwaway "dog-on-a-skateboard-at-the-end-of-the-news" lines, but more If we mention climate change we can put that in the next grant application.Sigh. I feel polluted. A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:55:00 -0500 eLearning Pedagogy Speak Generator [New Window]
For those moments when you need to find that latest bit of eLearning pedagogical terminology in an important meeting for high-level funding, I thought you might like my eLearning Pedagogy generator. Feel free to use at will. :o)
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:07:00 -0500 Makers [New Window]
One of the presents I treated myself to at Christmas was Cory Doctorow's Makers, which I've just finished, and overall, enjoyed. In Makers, Doctorow uses fiction to discuss themes such as small is beautiful, blogger as hero (blogger also makes lots of money - dream on Corey!), and to return to his obsession with Disney. (Quite how he's managed to avoid being sued is a mystery to me.)This isn't a work of great literary merit. The characters are ciphers for ideas, avatar thumbnails representing the themes of high geekery Doctorow wants to discuss. I guess blogging doesn't help you much with characterization. For me though, it was an entertaining and surprisingly compelling read, and I certainly intend to read Doctorow's other novel, Little Brother. You're reading this, ergo, you're probably a big enough geek to enjoy Makers. You probably should read it.Related:Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010How the Internet Changed Writing in the 2000sdatadecsA.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:11:00 -0500 Save 1million and Move to the Cloud? [New Window]
University of Westminster Deploys Google AppsBefore Christmas a message on the UCISA-Announce JISCMail list provided details of aUniversity of Westminster goes Google Case Study. The email described how:“When the University of Westminster asked students what campus email system they wanted, 90% requested Google Apps, which lets colleges and universities provide customized versions of Gmail, Google [...]
Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:00:04 -0500 Using Google Spreadsheets Like a Database The QUERY Formula [New Window]
In this year’s student satisfaction tables, which universities have a good teaching score but low employment prospects? How would you find out? In this post, you’ll find out…Whether or not it was one of my resolutions, one of the things I want to do more this year is try to try to make more use [...]
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:21:46 -0500 Followers? [New Window]
In blogging terms, I feel I did a pretty good job with my 2009 New Year resolution. One way I was able to add value to my output was by stopping doing some things - podcasting being a notable example (no-one seems to have missed it). Another was to publish my content using as wide a variety of channels as possible. But at times last year, it did feel that if not dead, then RSS was at least moribund.Each month I crunch the access stats for my blogs, and for the last three months, remote followers have outnumbered direct visitors at all my sites by some margin. RSS subscriptions are up on the year by approximately 130%. The only reasonable explanation is that RSS is starting to penetrate the mainstream. But it's not just RSS. The increase in Twitter-driven visits is even greater, and Facebook-driven reads are going through the roof. That's why our first year students are getting a link to the Facebook page rather than an RSS widget in the VLE.Of course, all this isn't unique to me. The future is adjacent spaces. The contrast in these spaces is slight. I provide full RSS feeds, so the content is available in full to my Google Readers, and via headline extracts directly in the Facebook space. Twitter is different, since direct followers and retweets drive visits to the original sites rather than the satellites. And clearly there are differences in the communities which assemble around the same content in different spaces.So we come to the interesting part. What is my objective when I publish online? Is it the same for all spaces? Do I/should I write the same way for all these spaces? It's not just Who am I writing for? any more, it's Where am I writing?Related:Twitter Drives Traffic to Blogs and Social NetworksA.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:30:00 -0500 Twitter: Part of the Plumbing [New Window]
Part of the PlumbingA tweet from @scilib alerted me to a New Year’s day post entitled “Why Twitter Will Endure” published in the New York Times.David Carr described how his first reaction on encountering Twitter, less than a year ago, was a feeling that “the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion [...]
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:48:19 -0500 Links for 2010-01-18 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
TeachMeet Takeover | edte.chA brilliant idea. Folk take over presentation stands at trade shows for an hour. Brings people onto the stand (not necessarily to hear about your product, but at least it brings them there).I fancy a twist on this idea - flashmobs around a stand where a practitioner goes to a stand selling a product they use, and doing a presentation about the product and its real world use from their perspective to any folk who are interested ;-) Could be done as part of a show and tell style walking tour!
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:00:00 -0500 It's Official [New Window]
Today, I officially start work on the fifth edition of The Book. I haven't actually signed the contract yet, but since academic publishers are people of honour, I have no doubts.The Book has been good to me (and even better to the publisher). The Book goes back a long way (1993), and much has changed in that time. The way I write for one thing. When I wrote the first edition of The Book, the only other thing I ever wrote were formal academic papers. I can remember trying to establish a casual voice for the first edition, and at the time, I felt I had done a pretty good job. Now I mostly write online, and in a very different style. The reviewers for the fifth edition were happy to point this out.The way students read has also changed. The Book needs a rewrite. Or does it? I've spent the last year pondering whether to revisit The Book, or just to move on. So why did I finally decide to invest a large slice of valuable time in a new edition? Because new media transforms rather than eliminates old media, and there's clearly still a demand for books. Sales of The Book have held up surprisingly well, and in many different languages. For many people, delivery of learning materials via social media doesn't cut it (yet). So there will be a new edition of The Book this year.And after that?A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:53:00 -0500 Call for Speakers at IWMW 2010: The Web in Turbulent Times [New Window]
Call For Submissions to IWMW 2010We have recently announced the call for speakers and workshop facilitators at UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW). This year’s event, IWMW 2010, which is the fourteenth in the series of events aimed at members of institutional Web management teams across UK higher educational institutions and related organisations, will [...]
Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:00:49 -0500 Whats The Score? And Whose Score Is It, Anyway? [New Window]
What’s the Score?What was the score in yesterday’s Chelsea versus Sunderland game? The final score was 7-2 – and according to the BBC Web site the score at one stage was simultaneously 5-0, 5-1 and 6-1!I managed to capture a screen image showing this inconsistency. This was slightly cumbersome to do as for my first [...]
Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:46:11 -0500 Links for 2010-01-16 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
The perfect page…Every so often, it's worth just reflecting on those little things that go a long way towards making an effective web page, both in its own right and in the way it links out to/refers to other web pages.So what is it that makes a perfect page? This checklist might help...
Sun, 17 Jan 2010 03:00:00 -0500 Reconfigurations [New Window]
Readers will have noted recently that I have been interested in reputation management and impact, and in how libraries may support institutional goals in these areas. In this context I was interested to read the following in a thoughtful reflection on future directions for research libraries by Susan Gibbons:Another shift in technical service in academic libraries will be towards the facilitation of discovery and access of locally created materials. The rising importance of open access and the growing acceptance of download counts as part of an academic's impact metric will cause higher education institutions to focus on achieving the widest possible distribution of their locally created content. Dissertations, articles, books, working papers, technical reports, and other such content will flood into the campus libraries for curation, description, and distribution. Technical service staff will find an increasing percentage of their work shifted away from the procurement of external content to the care and distribution of locally created content.Another emerging need for the expertise of technical services staff in academic libraries will develop from the expanding importance of the gathering and maintenance of institutional metrics. The need for a higher education institution to demonstrate its impact on society and return on investment to its state, federal, foundation, and alumni donors will drive the coordination and consolidation of institutional data, such as publications, citations, and grant outputs. The library is a natural locus for such operations, in part as a service related to the institutional repository. [Time horizon 2020: Library renaissance PDF]I was also interested in Susan's emphasis on new forms of collaborative sourcing. Ironically, I think the Google Book Settlement will cause a resurgence in the use of the current print collections of libraries as users discover content that was hidden by the difference between searching a full-text index and a MARC record. As these books are rediscovered, there will be a shifting of resources in technical services towards the identification, preservation, and some level of republication of books held uniquely by each library. Regional collaborations around the identification and preservation of last copies, shared off-site storage, and cooperative collection development will open doors towards more formalized sharing of regional skills, infrastructure, and resources. I believe academic libraries will model partnerships which their academic institutions will later need to follow as higher education as a whole retrenches through economic and demographic necessity. [Time horizon 2020: Library renaissance PDF]This has also been a topic of interest in these pages. As libraries begin to think about their collective collection and its collaborative management in more focused ways, the balance between local provision , shared provision in offsite storage, and digital availability in GBS or Hathi Trust will become a major focus of service and policy attention.
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:02:47 -0500 Time For A Blog Revival? [New Window]
Blogging Is Dead?In June last year Brian Clarke described on the Copyblogger bloghow “Blogging is Dead (Again)“. The apparent demise of blogs was also discussed in a blog post (!) published on the Technovia blog in December: “2009 was the year tech blogging died“.The truth is somewhat different than those headlines suggest; indeed the [...]
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:07:38 -0500 Google docs and sharing stored files [New Window]
Just noticed a nice new little feature in Google Docs - the ability to upload any type of file without having it converted to a Google Docs. Now, I know this seems like a pretty minor feature but it's actually going to be a useful little bunny to know about if you don't want Google stripping out the formatting for a document you just want to store and share with others. Okay, so there are better services for file sharing which allow you more than the 1GB / 25oMB per file limit imposed by Google (the superb Dropbox is one which immediately pops into my head), but you have to love the convenience... again... of Google allowing you to just get stuff done via a simple tweak to a service. Stuff which Google has tweaked in Docs lately which has made a difference: 1. File storage without converting your file2. Sharable folders3. Bulk uploads4. Translation of words, phrases or entire pages into any of 40+ languages. What's not to like?Sarah 'I sold my soul to Google but I liked what I got in return' Horrigan :o)
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:50:00 -0500 Google is out of the (consumer) hardware market [New Window]
There’s plenty of comment around on the implications of Google’s announcement about China. Some of these are pretty big geopolitical issues. (For a route in, you can’t do better than John Naughton’s recent posts on what it reveals about business ethics, censorship, and the Chinese Government.)There’s also the impact on technology specifically. Much has been [...]
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:38:18 -0500 Money problem [New Window]
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that some bonehead beancounter was making you spend, oh, I don't know, 967.74, before the end of January.What would you buy?Play it safe and go for the 24" iMac, or get the second monitor for the tower plus a spare netbook?Or what? (Has to be a one off purchase, no contracts)A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:22:00 -0500 Social Media Landscape [New Window]
A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:59:00 -0500 Reflections on CETISs Future of Interoperability Standards Meeting [New Window]
On Tuesday I attended a “Future of Interoperability Standards” meeting which was organised by JISC CETIS. The interest in the subject area can be gauged by the popularity of the meeting with about 40 people managing to arrive at Bolton despite the problems with the snow, with attendees travelling from as far as Belgium, Norway, [...]
Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:30:31 -0500 David's Airbrushed Billboard Generator [New Window]
David's Airbrushed Billboard GeneratorA.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:17:00 -0500 How I Use Creative Commons For My Presentations [New Window]
“Provide Case Studies”Following my recent post in which I highlighted Glyn Moody’s concerns regarding “Threats to Openness” I received a tweet from @Brunella in which she suggested that she would prefer specific details based on case studies as opposed, I imagine, to a generic call to embrace openness.The Spirit Is Willing; The Content is Complex!Coincidentally [...]
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:39:32 -0500 The Trouble with Cloudworks [New Window]
Now before anyone gets upset, let me say that I think Cloudworks is quite good. Which is not to say that Cloudworks doesn't pose a problem for me.We (we being the ALT-C 2010 Web Participation Coordinators - WPCs) have been discussing what tools we would like to support/promote/ignore at ALT-C 2010 - this is an ongoing process with all decisions pending). Cloudworks is on the list, along with lots of other tools/sites. And that's the problem. I don't have a Cloudworks-shaped hole in my life. Not on an average day, and certainly not at a busy conference. I will make room for a Twitter-shaped hole, and if the discussion is of relevance, possibly knock out a Friendfeed-shaped nook for my science buddies. And if enough people nag me, I might even squeeze in the odd visit to Crowdvine. But how could I possibly find space for Cloudworks?It's not the same for everyone. Other people will go Cloudworks first, Facebook second. LiveJournal might even rear it's ugly head. Plus about a million different blog platforms and commenting systems. My point is that discussion is salami-sliced across all these networks. If ALT-C was a 24/7/365 entity, we could even make a play or promote one over the others. But when people roll up in Nottingham on 7th September, they bring their networks with them. And If we want to talk to them, we need to be there too, not expect them to give up their habit and come to us.I've just discovered that there doesn't seem to be any licence information on Cloudworks. Presumably I clicked through a licence that I didn't read when I signed up, but I can't find it again now. So who owns the content on Cloudworks and what rights do they have to it?A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:55:00 -0500 Open Choice? [New Window]
One way or another, I've mostly been thinking about open access this morning. UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) formally launches today. Under other circumstances, I'd be happy about this, but I came to the news via a bruising encounter with Springer "Open" Choice. $3000 per article - are they having a laugh?So rather than doing anything useful for the past hour, I've wasted valuable academic time faffing around trying to find a publication option which satisfies the impact factor requirement of REF and the desire to publish my work openly and available to all. The solution? I shall set LRA on Springer and let them sort it out.Who loses in this situation?A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:14:00 -0500 Links for 2010-01-11 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Flickr and Google street view mashup | New York Public LibraryLovely example of how historical streetview images can be compared to today's street views.
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:00:00 -0500 Cuts will bring us to our knees [New Window]
May 1997 was an exciting time for many – the Labour party back in power after many years in opposition – and one of the key mantras back then was “Education, education, education”. And despite the many failings of the New Labour experiment we did see significant investments in education with even the Daily [...]
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:38:18 -0500 Outside-in and inside-out [New Window]
An 'industry' pattern appears to have emerged which builds a discovery layer over resources available from the library (or from a group library service, at the level of a state or a consortium for example).Three characteristics come to mind. First, there is an attempt to provide an integrated discovery experience over multiple resource types/workflows: bought materials (books, CDs, etc), licensed materials (A&I databases, ejournals, etc), and institutional digital materials (digitised special collections, for example, or repositories of learning and research materials). Second, this 'horizontal' discovery layer is separated from the 'vertical' management systems which may manage those resources: the 'integrated' library system, the variety of systems which manage licensed resources, repository infrastructure, and so on. And, third, API access may be provided.Various issues are being addressed as this model becomes more common. One that is interesting, I think, is that it will show how the three categories of resource I mention above - bought, licensed, and digital - have quite different dynamics in our systems and services.Think, for example, of a distinction between outside-in resources, where the library is buying or licensing materials from external providers and making them accessible to a local audience (e.g. books and journals), and 'inside-out' resources which may be unique to an institution (e.g. digitized images, research materials) where the audience is both local and external. Thinking about an external non-institutional audience, and how to reach it, poses some new questions for the library.Or think about the relationship between the 'locally available' collection and the 'universal' collection in each case. * For bought materials (books, CDs, ...) the library provides access to the locally available collection - the materials acquired for local use - and then may provide access to a broader 'universal' collection through Worldcat or another resource. * For licensed materials, access is first through the broader 'universal' level (in various databases) before checking for the subsect of locally available materials. * For institutional digital materials, access is provided to local repositories but this will not typically be backed up by access to a 'universal' source for such materials (although, one can see attempts to do this, as, for example, where an institutional repository expands a search to Scirus).Of course, if one thinks about other discovery/disclosure channels (Google, for example), these three collection types also behave differently. That is a topic for another blog entry though.
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:11:26 -0500 Sharing is a selfish act [New Window]
Following on from Friday's post Why would I want to share? and Cameron Neylon's comments, I'm still pondering the issue of how to persuade people to share. The altruistic arguments in favour of sharing have intellectual credit (e.g. The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod), but they just don't persuade hard-pressed staff or students to take the long view.Perusing the books on this topic reveals much more short-term, selfish behavior (e.g. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust "two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of social networks to build your brands influence, reputation, and, of course, profits") than altruism.So are there any short term, selfish, academic arguments for sharing?A.J. Cann, Science of the Invisible
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0500 Will The SVG Standard Come Back to Life? [New Window]
In November 2008 I asked “Why Did SMIL and SVG Fail?” The post suggested reasons why the W3C’s Scaleable Vector Graphics standard (which became a W3C recommendation in 2003) had failed to be widely deployed in the market place.In the comments to my post a number of people pointed at the lack of support for [...]
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:28:52 -0500 Nominations for the Shorty Awards [New Window]
On Saturday morning I spotted a tweet from @timbuckteeth nominating me for a Shorty Award:I nominate @briankelly for a Shorty Award in #tech because he is on the ball with new technology http://bit.ly/shortyI had had noticed a number of similar tweets in my Twitter stream, but as I regard Twitter posts as potentially useful but [...]
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 07:08:31 -0500 Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow [New Window]
It snowed yesterday :-) The snow was, of course, predicted. For school children this was an unexpected day off school, with the delights of snowball fights and sledging (the hills surrounding Bath can make this a particular delight). And the snow also provided fun for others, as can be seen from this photo which is [...]
Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:02:26 -0500 Digital content quarterly [New Window]
Digital Content Quarterly is a new publication from the Strategic Content Alliance. In this fast-paced, ever-changing environment the Strategic Content Alliance's Digital Content Quarterly (DCQ) provides a news round-up of digital content issues from around the world, thought-provoking features highlighting key debates in the field and regular columns from leading digital content experts in areas that have most traction in terms of digital content provision: intellectual property rights and business modelling and sustainability. The quarterly is also interactive, complete with video interviews of features and 'top tip' guides as well as a vibrant new design. [Digital Content Quarterly]The video inserts are a nice feature, although as with many publications produced for printing it is difficult to read on the web.It was interesting reading through fifteen or so pages on digitization and digital content services which only had a couple of small references to Google Book Search ;-)
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:10:45 -0500 Reputational survey [New Window]
As university rankings attract more attention and as national/regional policy discussions continue about whether and how to concentrate research excellence, Thompson Reuters have provided a little more detail about their plans to work with Times Higher Education to develop their own framework to support university profiling and ranking. Our aim with the Global Institutional Profiles Project, which includes our work with Times Higher Education's World University Rankings, is to develop a data source that provides the best informed and most effective resource to build profiles of universities and research-based institutions around the world. The Profiles Project will create data-driven portraits of globally significant research institutions, combining peer review, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels, and faculty characteristics in one comprehensive database. Thomson Reuters also brings a celebrated legacy of data transparency to the Profiles Project, operating with clear methodology and data gathering practices. [Global institutional profiles project]They announce their 'reputational survey', to be sent to a selection of researchers soliciting evaluation of institutions active in their research area. This will provide one stream of data among several. Another will be citation data from Web of Science, styled the "gold standard in research indexing".Potentially, this is an important initiative given the influence of adopted metrics on behavior. Appropriate metrics continue to be the subject of debate (see for example the program of this NSF-sponsored meeting on scholarly metrics) of serious interest to research and science policy and funding bodies, as well as to institutions themselves.
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 07:34:41 -0500 An Opportunities and Risks Framework For Standards [New Window]
Future of Interoperability Standards MeetingI have been invited to participate at the CETIS “Future of Interoperability Standards Meeting 2010” which will be held at the University of Bolton next week.I have been invited to submit a position papers providing thoughts or opinions on the experience of developing both formal and informal specifications and standards, working [...]
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:54:07 -0500 Links for 2010-01-05 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Build Statistical Graphics Online With ggplot2 | FlowingDatafor ags i'v ben meaning to try to get my head round R. maybe this will provide an asy way in to what it has to offer, or mayb this will even provide an alternative?
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:00:00 -0500 How Did People Find This Blog in 2009? [New Window]
On 1 January 2010 James Clay published a post on “The Top Ten Blog Posts of20” which gave the top ten posts from his e-Learning Stuff blog according to the statistics for the number of views. The new year provides a useful opportunity for such reflections and for observing annual trends. So I thought I [...]
Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:03:48 -0500 Scanning horizons for the Semantic Web in higher education [New Window]
The week before last I attended a couple of meetings looking at different aspects of the use of Semantic Web technologies in the education sector. It WAS a GREEAT Proposal! [New Window]
UKOLN’sGREEAT ProposalBefore Christmas my colleague MariekeGuy and myself submitted a proposal to the JISC’s Greening ICT Programme. Our proposal was entitled GREEAT (GReening Events through Event Amplification Technologies). Unfortunately although the evaluators felt that the bid had many strengths, it was not funded. A summary of the bid is given below.The Strengths of the ProposalIn [...]
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:13:45 -0500 Europeana [New Window]
My colleague Ricky Erway bravely accepted the challenge to talk as an outsider on the challenges faced by Europeana to a European conference on digitization last year. Her remarks are recorded in an article in the LIBER Quarterly. The organisers of the second LIBER/EBLIDA workshop on digitisation (The Hague, October 19-21) asked Ricky Erway of OCLC to provide a view on Europeana from the US perspective. Erway accepted the invitation with some hesitation, as she was well aware that Europeana is still in its infancy. Her remarks, as reproduced below, were received by her audience as they were intended: as one person's observations at a particular point in the Europeana timeline. But as she drew on her twenty-year experience in related projects and activities, her observations are well worth the attention of Europeana staff and stakeholders. [A view on Europeana from the US perspective]
Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:53:48 -0500 Where are the numbers? The impact of the economic recession on university library and IT services [New Window]
'The impact of the economic recession on university library and IT services' [pdf] is a report by market research company Ipsos Mori for several UK higher education organizations. A summary and a briefing paper are also available. It documents possible approaches to cost saving based on interviews with librarians and directors of ICT services. I was slightly surprised at the bullish tone in the opening sentences of this headline statement about libraries: One thing is clear: most librarians we spoke to are not yet feeling the 'pinch' of the recession on their services. There is a clear sense that the library occupies a protected place as the 'beating heart' of the institution and most feel the impact of the recession has currently been contained to small, easily managed budget cuts - for now. At the same time, however, there is a sense of vulnerability and a growing concern that libraries may be seen as an easy target for savings and efficiencies whenever required by the institution (given their book funds are typically the largest concentration of uncommitted funds within the University budget) while they struggle to meet ever changing student and academic staff service demands. [The impact of the economic recession on university library and IT services PDF]Especially as the summary spoke about "an acute sense" of vulnerability. It notes 'solutions' under the following headings: self-service, consortia, renegotiating contracts and planning subscriptions, shared services and outsourced services, library staff, monitoring satisfaction and impact on students. I didn't notice much discussion of the report when it appeared (September 2009) but I doubt that anybody was very surprised by very much that they read in it. There are a couple of recommendations in the Foreword by JISC which seem a little ahead of practice. For example, it is suggested that among the opportunities that "are at universities' disposal to realise efficiencies and cost savings" is the adoption by HE library consortia of shared Library Management Systems (LMS). It is also suggested that open access "should help mitigate increased costs in journal subscriptions". Neither of these is likely to be an immediate source of cost savings given the current state of play, whatever about the longer term. However, in reading the report I became increasingly aware of a strange gap, particularly in a report prepared by a market research company. There are hardly any numbers. There is discussion of downturn, of shifting investment, of trends - but hardly anywhere is there an attempt to quantify these. Above all, I wondered if there were a sense of how big the discussed budget cuts were likely to be. This may be institution-specific, but without a sense of scale the whole discussion had a sense of unreality.
Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:51:14 -0500 VIAF design pattern [New Window]
A blog entry by Paul Walk - An infrastructure service anti-pattern - drew some attention a while ago. He argues against a model in which a service provider independently develops APIs and a user interface, and in which, accordingly, the APIs are developed in advance of actual use or explicit external requirements. He claims that this model underlies aspects of historic UK higher education thinking, where application to application interoperability was seen as a good in itself and was often built into initiatives from the start in mistaken anticipation of hypothetical future use. His alternative suggestion is that an API should be developed in tandem with real requirements generated by the user-facing application supporting user interfaces. This motivates the API with real requirements and strengthens the chances of being able to support third party application developers who want to write to the API. He suggests a refinement of this approach as follows:An interesting alternative to this is the approach of combining the user-facing web pages and the machine-actionable API into one interface, through embedded RDFa for example:It remains to be seen how this approach is going to work out over time, but we have seen hints of simpler approaches to combining user and machine interfaces in the past, such as RSS being styled to give a decent human-readable interface, or earlier attempts to do interesting things with XHTML. [An infrastructure service anti-pattern] I left a note suggesting that VIAF and Worldcat Identities were architected along the lines of this last picture. For VIAF details, for example, see Thom's posts here and here. Several interfaces - OpenSearch, linked data, user-oriented - are supported by an underlying SRU interface. Here is Paul's response, noted here with his permission:I’m fascinated to see that VIAF merges the human/machine interfaces in two ways: a machine-centric, but with a human-readably styled version if accessed from a browser and a human-centric, get the machine view with a little addition to the URL approach here the second of which is, in turn, also styled for human consumption if accessed from a browser.
Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:02:59 -0500 Institutional researcher pages: an example [New Window]
I have written a couple of times recently (here and here) about institutional and indvidual reputation management. Think, for example, of faculty profiles: the managed disclosure of expertise and research activity. This has often been an informal personal or departmental activity. However, there is now a variety of institutional initiatives which may pull together data about expertise, experience, publications, grants, courses taught, and so on (see OSU Pro at OSU, or Vivo at Cornell, for example). Such initiatives may sit between between several organizational units on campus: Research Support, PR/Communications, IT, Library. They are also at the intersection of different systems: enterprise (Peoplesoft, for example), course lists, research/grants management, bibliographic. At the same time, researchers may have presences in emerging network level research social networks (Mendeley or Nature Network for example), in disciplinary resources (Repec, for example), and, of course, in general use services (Linkedin, for example). There are also commercial services which support such activity in different ways, Community of Science or Symplectic for example. [Reputation enhancement]The Scholars Hub is the institutional repository at Hong Kong University. It has recently been enhanced with author pages which pull data from several sources including:Name & Contact Details: HKU Communications DirectoryPicture & Biography: Departmental web pagesMedia Spokesmanship: HKU Communications & Public Affairs OfficeMetrics: Scopus & ISI ResearcherID Open access outputs: HKU Scholars' Hub.Each is harvested from its source silo and integrated to form an author profile. In a recent presentation [ppt] about the approach, University Librarian Tony Ferguson and David Palmer describe how researchers can control their own page, and emphasise the incentives for contribution in the context of an overall alignment with the university mission of 'knowledge exchange' (KE). KE is defined on the presentation splash page: "The HKU definition of KE includes the act of making HKU generated knowledge and skill sets accessible to business, government and the community." They suggest that the pages give authors a valuable service and point to success in search engine retrieval. For an example, see (click on the image to see the full page):The service also attempts to bring together different versions of author names. They assign a unique local identifier to each researcher, which is in the page URL (rp00026 in the above example). The bibliometrics section is in preparation for the HKU annual Performance Reviews, and the Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise.(Thanks to Tony Ferguson and David Palmer for a note on the work supporting this initiative.)Related entries:Research assessment and the libraryReputation enhancementReputation enhancement redux
Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:39:52 -0500 The Threats To Openness [New Window]
I’ve a folder called “Openness” in my RSS reader. And the most prolific blogger in this folder is Glyn Moody in his Open blog.As indicated by the blog’s sub-title “open source, open genomics, open content” Glyn comments on a broad range of issues related to openness.These are areas of interest to me too – indeed [...]
Sat, 02 Jan 2010 05:14:54 -0500 2009 The Year Of Twitter? [New Window]
To describe 2009 as the year Twitter came of age would be rather unremarkable and perhaps cliched – after all a month ago a headline in the Guardian announced “‘Twitter’ declared top word of 2009“.But if 2009 was the year of Twitter what was 2009 not? That might provide a more interesting way of [...]
Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:36:17 -0500 How to repost? [New Window]
I 're-posted' my entry on the 'two ways of Web 2.0' the other day. On the site, I now have a page for the original entry and for the 're-post'. I have just 're-posted' another entry, but this time I chose to do it a different way. I changed the publish date to today's date, and noted the original date in a note. I wondered which way was the better, and am not aware of any 'good practice' on this issue. It seems to me that newspapers sometimes adopt the latter practice. I notice that PersonaNonData, who occasionally reposts earlier entries, seems to follow the former. It is interesting to run into this versioning question in a modest way here. I can see pros and cons of each approach and I am sure there is a relevant literature. Something to think about in the new year ....
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:02:37 -0500 Extending Your Community Through Machine Translation [New Window]
Out Of Sight, Out of Mind?It was over ten years ago, when I was the project manager for the EU-funded Exploit Interactive ejournal that I first started to explore the potential of machine translation. Could we, I wondered, make use of Web-base language translation services to translate articles published in English into other languages?“Nonsense!” [...]
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:06:29 -0500 Being friends with the librarian in the Bibliothque National [New Window]
[I bring back this entry prompted by the selection of The Arcades Project in the series of canonical works in the Times Higher Education Supplement. It was originally published on July 13 2007.]There is a passage in a letter from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno where he suggests removing a reference to Georges Bataille from a document. Bataille, in addition to his other accomplishments, was a librarian at the Bibliothque Nationale de France. Benjamin writes:And in this way my own relationship with Georges Bataille will not be adversely affected either, something I would like to maintain, both because of his assistance at the Bibliothque Nationale, and because of my plans for naturalization. - The fragment would not escape his attention since the Institute journal is openly displayed in the reading room where he often works; and he is hardly the type of person to react serenely to its contents. [Theodor W Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The complete correspondence, 1928-1940. p. 276]I was reminded of this passage as I read Jeremy Harding's discussion in the current London Review of Books of Walter Benjamin's 'last day' before his death in 1940 while trying to flee to the US.Benjamin had left various papers, including the manuscript of his Arcades Project, with Bataille for safe-keeping. Bataille hid them in the library. The Arcades Project is a massive unfinished work, a weaving of quotations and Benjamin's own text.So the library comes in at three levels. At one, it is important for the scholar to keep in with the librarian ;-) At a second, the librarian receives a manuscript on the eve of flight and keeps it safely in the library from where it is retrieved and published. At a third, is it possible to imagine a book which rests so much on quotations without the libraries which preserve the scholarly and cultural record the quotations point to and make it available to readers?Related entries:Aura again: habent sua fata libelliQuotes about order and disorderCollecting booksAura and digitizationTwo buildings(Originally published July 13 2007. WC Identities URLs updated to current versions.)
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:06:51 -0500 Research assessment and the library ... [New Window]
I am pleased to note the appearance of a new report on research assessment and the role of libraries. This has been prepared as part of our Research Information Management stream of work in support of the RLG Partnership. The study is a comparative review of formal assessment regimes in five countries. Such assessment regimes exist to monitor public research spending in various ways, and are specific to national circumstances. Although such regimes are not universal, evaluation, ranking and assessment of various sorts are becoming more common and some of the library responses discussed (bibliometric assistance, reputation management, names and identifers, institutional management of research outputs) may be of quite general interest. This is from the introduction by the authors, the UK consultants Key Perspectives:This study was designed to review research assessment regimes and the role of research libraries within those assessment processes in five countries, each of which takes a different approach to assessment. At the beginning of the project it was postulated that libraries occupy an interesting position within the academy, both belonging to an institution yet to an extent separated from it. There is--arguably--a set of 'research library values' that remains independent of local, institutional values, enabling libraries to occupy a unique and constructive role in the development and support of research assessment processes. Libraries have an understanding of scholarly communication processes, and they are currently in a state of rapid transformation to keep pace with the way scholars work. They understand the broad range of outputs and the publishing behaviour of scholars across disciplines, and the methodological constraints, limitations and variances that pertain to assessment exercises. This report provides an insight into the extent to which research libraries have so far been able to leverage the particular skills and experience their staff possess to position the library at or near the operational and strategic centre of institutions' responses to the internal and national requirements of research assessment processes. [A Comparative Review of Research Assessment Regimes in Five Countries and the Role of Libraries in the Research Assessment Process PDF]My colleague John MacColl writes about the report at more length and offers these thoughts ...The Review provides a fascinating account of different cultural understandings of the purposes of assessment, and a glimpse of the trend of concentrating research excellence in a small number of top universities that is now taking shape in many countries, as the competition for research income, top faculty and students becomes one that occurs within a single international marketplace. We found countries that tied research assessment to large amounts of government funding, and others that did not (yet); countries that operated systems based on bibliometrics and others that mistrusted them; countries that devised league tables of journals and awarded points to researchers on those they published in - and others that assembled national panels of experts to determine the rankings.Libraries are involved in these assessment exercises in a range of ways, from the clerical (data entry) to the highly strategic, and from the specialist (bibliometric expertise) to a role as providers of general infrastructure (institutional repositories). Whatever differences there may be in the assessment systems adopted by different countries, they all share a focus upon the research outputs produced by their researchers and faculty. These outputs are managed by libraries - both indirectly (via publications) and, increasingly directly (via arrangements with the authors themselves at pre-publication stages). Does this suggest that libraries play a central role in research assessment within their institutions? Or that they should? At the very least, shouldn't libraries seek a shared view on this question?[National systems of research assessment and implications for libraries]
Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:45:54 -0500 And to sum up... [New Window]
Well - after a frantic couple of months (parents ill, I moved house, waiting for exam results - passed my MEd - woo hoo!, job changes at work, piles of marking, swine flu, sick children etc etc etc)... I just thought I'd pop onto my blog to say 'hello' and to reflect, briefly, on this year's bits and bobs.2009 HighlightsSo... my highlights from this year:1. Social networking makes your brain turn to mush2. But it's okay... because just about everything else gives you cancer anyway3. The VLE was dead4. Then it wasn't5. Twitter took over the world6. While Google Wave-d7. Microsoft Bing-ed... then got sued for binging and their Word was no longer law8. And Facebook kept managing to annoy people for messing with layouts and privacy settings9. But it still won the battle of the social networks10. And Apps were 'it'Reading stuffOh, and when time got tight and I was under pressure, I still found time to catch up with Steve Wheeler's excellent Learning with 'e's, John Connell and Martin Weller's ed tech goodness, Jane Knight's tool recommendations, Mashable's stream of social media goodness, educational goings on with The Guardian and ReadWriteWeb for their tech trend interpretations.Tech stuffI also still love Google Reader, Delicious , YouTube, Blogger, Google Docs, SlideShare and Twitter... while Slideboom, WordPress, Plurk, ScreenToaster and Diigo have also emerged as useful tools during the past 12 months.However, SecondLife I still don't get but nor do others, Google Notebook was quietly left to die,Etherpad sparkled with usefulness then disappeared and Google Wave is very, very alpha and I'm waiting for the lightbulb moment with it.And next year?But... next year will be another year of ed tech loveliness, I'm sure. Funding crisis in HE or no, there's always interesting stuff happening and with luck... we'll find ways of making learning more interesting, relevant and (dare I say it?) engaging for everyone concerned.
Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:12:00 -0500 Unlucky in Lucca? I Think Not! [New Window]
About This PostIn this rather long post I describe some personal stories of benefits I have gained from my social networking communities. And rather than the focus on the professional benefits of such services which I have described in previous posts in my final post before Christmas I suggest that the main benefits of the [...]
Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:49:31 -0500 Online learning in virtual environments with SLOODLE - final report [New Window]
The final report from the Online Learning In Virtual Environments with SLOODLE Links for 2009-12-17 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
Mag+, a concept video on the future of digital magazines – Blog – BERGImagine OU study guides delivered this way....Bridging Serious Games X eLearning Chasm | SERIOUS GAMES MARKETI'm not sure I agree with the generalistaions - the way I designed T151 puts me down as game rather than elearning designer, because believe it or not the course was designed as an elearning course - but I think there is something in the sentiment...[OMG, just struck me: these notes are in danger of turning my feedthru feed into a poor imitation of OLDaily...]YQL gets personal URLs and more cache control (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)Mint your own short-ish URIs that alias YQL queries (I think?!) Which means it's easy to mint URIs that can run bespoke parameterised Linked Data queries via YQL?
Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:00:00 -0500 Seeing how people really use online technology with the Tobii eye-tracker [New Window]
Liveblog notes from an IET Technology Coffee Morning, 16 December 2009.Presenters: Patrick McAndrew, Graham Healing, with input from Elpida Makriyannis and Anne AdamsWe have a Tobii eye-tracker in the labs, which isn’t used as heavily as it could be. Aim for today is to show how easy it is to use, and explore some of [...]
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:14:22 -0500 Links for 2009-12-15 [del.icio.us] [New Window]
How to Embed Interactive Maps in your Blog - GeoCommonsEasy peasy way of getting geo data onto an embeddable map...
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:00:00 -0500 Scaffolding and online synchronous communications [New Window]
Steve Wheeler has just posted something interesting about the ZPD and scaffolding in his 'always worth a read' (Sarah's Made-Up-Taxonomy of blog types, 2009) blog. Anyway, he posted it and it reminded me that I'd been interested in just this thing a few months ago when I was doing my research project to finish off my MEd. I was interested in the impact of a tutor when students were learning in an online synchronous (chat) environment. I wanted to know what happened to any conversation and associated learning... and whether or not the tutor's presence enriched the experience.Anyway, I ran my research project and got some interesting results. Although the activity itself was fairly carefully constructed so as to provide a light scaffolding for the main body of discussion and the environment was controlled so that I was able to compare both sessions - how each discussion evolved was up to the participants. Different types of reflection were evident in the session with the tutor present and that which took place when just the students were around. The flow of the conversation altered. The type of questions and responses changed. Students seemed to be more passive in the tutor-led session and although there was plenty of conversation, the expectation seemed to be that the tutor was in the driving seat and the ownership of that communication shifted noticably.If, having read the above blurb, you'd like to read the full report of the research I carried out, then feel free!
Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:09:00 -0500 Enabling Greater Accessibility [New Window]
Live notes from IET Technical Coffee Morning – Robin Stenham on accessibility.Accessibility is one of the things I particularly care about so it’s good to have this session.Robin is Manager – Curriculum Access in Disabled Student Services. Two main areas of responsibility: single enquiry point for students (or their intermediaries) about the interface between their [...]
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:32:14 -0500 Twitter lists as online identity [New Window]
In the last few weeks, Twitter lists have appeared on the scene. I've seen a few useful bits and bobs about the lists and how they might be used (Mashable has some good ideas) but the thing that surprised me most of all was that Twitter lists are an interesting tool to discover a little more about your own online identity. All you need to do is to see what lists you're on by clicking on the 'listed' link on your profile. Simple, huh?It's interesting to see other people's perceptions of you. Me, I seem to feature on a fair few elearning / ed tech lists (as well as my favourites so far 'fab education folk' and 'geek girls'!) as well as a few Open University ones. It's interesting to see where you're being placed and how much control (or not!) you have over your online identity. It reveals, also, your main purpose for using Twitter. I tend to use it to communicate with others in ed tech. There are other places where I might talk about other bits of my life / personality... but I've always been fairly purposeful where Twitter's concerned. Other people may find that they feature on a wider variety of lists... but either way... have a look... it's really interesting to see where you fit in to Twitter's strange patchwork of communication!PS Until someone puts you in a comedy list and you think 'Eh? How did that happen???!' :o)
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:28:00 -0500 Literacy in the Digital University [New Window]
Liveblog notes from a presentation by Robin Goodfellow. Part of an ESRC Seminar Series on Literacy in the Digital University, which has its own blog. Of course. Also has an ordinary dull website.(Robin’s notes and PowerPoint are available – to OU people – on the Knowledge Network)Update: Andreia Santos also liveblogged the session.LiteracyThere’s an idea [...]
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:02:57 -0500 101 Reasons why Google are taking over the world... [New Window]
Get Your Files Out of Google Docs With New Export Options: "... today, Google announced the Convert, Zip and Download feature in Google Docs to tackle this challenge. The new features make it a simple two step process to pull down any and all the Google (Google) documents of your choosing (up to 500 MB), convert them to your preferred file types, and zip them up in a concrete package you can download and save to your desktop."Gotta love 'em... Google sure are chomping away at the online / offline connected world.More and more I find I'm using Google docs for collaborative editing rather than entering into track changes hell with Microsoft Word. More and more I'm using Google sites as a wiki rather than faffing about with using other wiki tools (WetPaint withdrawing its ad-free education version forced me to see what Google were up to). More and more I'm using Google forms for surveys / quick an' easy booking systems. And now, I get to not just create stuff online with them, but I can quickly pull all that Googly goodness off the system. More and more I'm using Google to find ways around the red tape / processes which infest institutional systems and make it so painfully difficult to innovate.Actually, you don't need 101 reasons why they're taking over.There's really only one: Google get it.
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:47:00 -0400 Library learning [New Window]
An observation.The Educational Development Unit where I work is based in the main University library. Last week we had a few powercuts in the library building. As on any normal weekday, there were loads of students in the building. Hardly any spare desks available. Then, the power went off. Though there was no power, but it was still perfectly light enough to work - the only thing missing was the computing facilities and the artificial light. Still lots of books. Lots of desks. Lots of places to read. Lots of places to write.What happened?The library emptied. With no computing resources available, the students left. Virtually all of them. Gone.Just an observation.
Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:22:00 -0400 Reserving judgement [New Window]
Okay, so... like lots of people I got a Google Wave invite... which was jolly nice, especially if you're a bit of an 'ooooooh, what's that shiny thing over there' kinda girl, which I am. However, I've been struggling to contain my high levels of underwhelm at the moment. I've got a few contacts now, but no real purpose for using it... and the only uses I've seen so far are for what are essentially fancy, collaborative lists. Which is nice. But... not inspiring.However... two and a half years ago, I remember seeing the following on a blog..."I have to say if someone I knew thought they should be sending me texts, e-mails, IMs etc about the fact that they were just off to the loo and wouldn't be around for five minutes, I'd be seriously considering turning off my computer forever, bricking up the windows and becoming a hermit. Has the world honestly gone bonkers? My 'persistent presence' is that I'm here. I know I'm here. I don't really care if you are aware of that fact 24/7 and you know what? I'm betting you don't either. Where's the separation between public and private? Doesn't part of that separation exist because we simply don't have time to care about the meaningless minutiae of each other's lives. Isn't it okay not to care???? So... You had tuna in your sandwich... but you thought you might have cheese... it took you three bites and a sip of tea to consume it, lasted precisely 2 minutes of your day and another half a minute in which you wondered if there was a little too much mayo and not quite enough salad. I DON'T CARE! Please, if you're struggling to say something to me today, don't bother. Just take time out for yourself. I don't sweat the small stuff in my own life, and I sure don't want to sweat it in yours either!! Blogging - okay... now get it.Microblogging - NO! NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!! PS. NO!!!PPS. There. That feels betterPPPS. I'm about to have porridge for breakfast. With raisins. A dash of milk. A cup of tea. I may or may not yawn half way through doing so...PPPPS See - you don't care either. :o)"... and could tell that that person really didn't think much of Twitter at all. They were seriously dismissive of it as a technology and weren't going to give it a fair go. Microblogging - no, no and a bit more no!Thing is. That person was me.And once I got off my negative high horse and found a purpose for it other than the use suggested by the service, just fill in the answer to: 'what are you doing'... and instead built a network... and made connections... then. Then, it had real value.So. Rather than being the person who makes dreadful dismissive statements about Wave, I'm going to let the dust settle. Keep an eye out. Keep on having a go... and find my own way in. Or at least, give it a proper chance to be what it will be.
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:16:00 -0400 OLnet regular meetings [New Window]
As well as iSpot, one of my big current projects is OLnet, which aims to research Open Educational Resources (OER) and the OER community, and to support the OER community in developing its research capabilities.We want to model being open in what we’re doing, so we’ve decided to liveblog our regular team meetings – you [...]
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:34:54 -0400 iSpot helps six-year-old spot new-to-Britain moth [New Window]
Katie Robbins, a six-year-old living near Newbury, spotted an interesting moth on a windowsill. She and her Dad couldn’t identify what it was, so her Dad put a picture of it on iSpot, the nature identification website produced by the OU as part of the OPAL project, funded by the Big Lottery Fund. (I’m leading [...]
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:35:59 -0400 Poor neglected blog [New Window]
Nearly coming up on an anniversary of my last post to this blog has made me reflect on why I seem to have drifted away from the process of getting ideas out through my own blog. Certainly part of it is sheer lack of time (and possibly ideas!) but it also reflects the choice of [...]
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:38:17 -0400 Tangibles, tabletops or mobiles: which is best for collaborative learning? [New Window]
Liveblog notes from an IET Technology Coffee Morning by Yvonne Rogers, on Tangibles, tabletops or mobiles: which is best for collaborative learning?(Podcast version will be available at podcast.open.ac.uk)Review of her work over the last 10 years. Has been looking at new technologies – shareable technologies – and how they support different activities.15-20 years ago, students [...]
Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:13:00 -0400 The Public Domain [New Window]
Liveblog notes on a book discussion seminar on The Public Domain, by James Boyle, led by Ray Corrigan. It’s another in the series of senior seminars on the implications of technology for the world that I’ve liveblogged before (last was on The Future Of The Internet).The audience included notable OU blogger and genius John Naughton, [...]
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:04:24 -0400 Web Squared [New Window]
In the runup to the Web 2.0 Summit later this month, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have been outlining their vision of what comes after Web 2.0. Their answer: Web Squared. They’ve set this out in a white paper (also available as a 1.3Mb PDF), a webcast, and a Slideshare presentation:They say:Ever since we first [...]
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:47:00 -0400 On boring VLEs [New Window]
Federal UpsetOriginally uploaded by ShermeeeI did a staff development session today on some new tools in the University's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and on the way in to the session (no-one knew it was me delivering the session which put me in a great position for eavesdropping pre-match conversation!) I heard several people chatting about 'another dull VLE session', 'the VLE is so boring' etc and although I get where they're coming from, I do wonder why people get so hung up on the tool itself. I know I probably veer towards the more personalized learning environment camp, but even then, they're all just tools and it's what you do with them that's interesting.Anyway, I got into the session and made a start and asked them who thought that the VLE was dull... best to tackle this stuff head on, I reckon! So, a few hands went up. 'How many of you... honestly?' - a few more hands went up. Y'know. I agree. It's just a 'thing' after all, isn't it? A shell with some bits and bobs you may or may not use.So, I moved on. I asked, 'How many of you put your lecture PowerPoints in the VLE?'. Lots of hands. 'How many of you provide anything more than your lecture notes? Anyone put any additional activities in there?'... no hands. I asked them what that might feel like for their students. Was that an interesting or helpful place to be once you'd downloaded those PowerPoints? Were those PowerPoints really that helpful without anything else? Were they engaging? Have to say, there wasn't a great deal of nodding at this point!I then got them to imagine a really great learning experience that they'd had while they were at school or university and what made it great. I then asked the group 'did anyone's great experience involve a great teacher?' Hands. 'A really great subject area?' A few more. 'A really great activity or experience?'. Lots of hands and nodding. 'Did anyone's great experience involve how brilliant the room was where the learning happened? How great the chair was they were sitting on? How great the desk was they were using? The pen? Anyone particularly excited by the pen they were using?'. No-one.Y'know. I think I actually heard the penny drop as they realised that it's what you do with something that makes it good and not the places or tools which make it extra special. It's funny how quick we are to blame an environment and forget that inspiring teaching and learning is about the people and the players. As adults we look at an empty cardboard box and see it as a storage device. Somewhere to put 'stuff'. As children we looked at that same cardboard box and saw a plane. A car. A train. An adventure waiting to happen. What happened to our own creativity? It seems like we get confronted by a 'virtual learning environment' and think that's enough. The learning will happen regardless of the effort we put into it. Wrong! So, so wrong! When eLearning works, it's an amazing, interesting, vibrant, evolving, engaging, rich space. When it's just a shell. A place to download PowerPoints... boy oh boy is it a sad bag.I admit it. VLEs are dull. But what goes on inside them doesn't need to be dull. Here's to opening up the box and seeing what you can really do with it and putting an end to using VLEs as document dumping grounds. Days where you get to see people imagining bucketloads of learning potential and want to hold onto it themselves. Coming up with ideas as you're talking and scribbling them down as quick as they can. Now, those are the really great eLearning days. :o))
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:39:00 -0400 Windows 7 for 30 [New Window]
Just to alert students that you'll be able to get Windows for £30 for a limited time from 30th September if you sign up for the offer using your University email address. There are more details here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/studentoffer/default.aspx. I used Windows 7 for a few months, and I have to say that it was a lot easier on the eye than Windows Vista (there's a thorough technical evaluation for you!), and, apart from a couple of specific driver problems, very stable, so if you've a fairly modern PC this will be well worth it.
Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:14:00 -0400 The 10 PowerPoint Commandments [New Window]
For the past week or two I've been involved in various staff development / conference bits an' bobs and my head is jam-full of PowerPoint loathing. It is such an uninspiring tool... or rather, it is used in such an uninspiring way, so much of the time.So, wanting not to fall into that trap myself (though I'm sure I've done some of these - I have vague memories of thinking the typewriter entrance effect was cool at one point!), I'm going to set myself 10 PowerPoint Commandments:1. Thou shalt have other tricks up your sleeve as well as PowerPoint2. Thou shalt not use rubbish quality images or diagrams3. Thou shalt not use stupid effects4. Thou shalt restrict bullet points5. Honour thy audience's eyesight6. Thou shalt not bore7. Thou shalt not use the slides as speaker notes8. Thou shalt master the slide controls before the presentation9. Thou shalt be concise10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's Prezi... learn to present well without any props firstIf I don't have to use PowerPoint, I'm not going to. When I do, it should be in a purposeful manner. If I ever catch myself simply reading the slide contents out to the audience, I'm going to take myself straight home and read to my kids instead. They like me reading to them... I'm sure the rest of the world doesn't. :o)So there!
Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:25:00 -0400 Incoming SMS number [New Window]
We've just added an incoming SMS number to our text messaging service. We're going to build a few proof of concept applications showing various ways it could be used, for example as an voting system, and as a way of gathering feedback either in real time or not.If you've got any ideas or example of similar use then get in touch.
Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:38:00 -0400 ALT-C '09 [New Window]
For the past three days I've been tootling to and fro going up to Manchester for ALT-C 2009 and although I'm a bit shattered (understatement of the year) it was a really useful experience. While it is still fresh in my head, and before I crash out, here are my five highlights from ALT-C:1. The VLE is Dead debate. Okay, not so much debating as a good ol' e-learning ding dong with no winner declared... but the best thing about that? Hearing people getting really engaged and passionate about e-learning! So often we get stuck in the mire of everyday institutional / academic battles and forget that e-learning has the capacity to really grip you and get you thinking. About its complexity. Its potential. Its issues. Its benefits. Drawback. The whole good, bad and ugly shebang.2. Jonathan Drori's talk on making successful pilots and 'being mighty'. A super talk and he came up with 10 great pieces of advice about projects, so, in reverse order, here's his top 10:10. Understand the barriers - cost, relevance, ease of use, experience, talent, resources, coherence. Be honest about the talent! This one is hard to do!9. Think about who are you trying to impress!8. Sort out project management from editorial leadershipThere is a confusion between what is project management and what is editorial leadership and you need to know the difference between the two. In other words, you need someone to say 'that's a bit crap' and take that role in the project - it can make or break a project!7. Ensure everyone understands the pilot! Seems obvious but so often we skip straight into what the project is now doing rather than giving it a background and contextual description6. Understand where your pilot fits inWhereabouts on this chain...stimulate interest > engage > guide > communicate > create or 'do' something... does your project sit?Try to create virtuous circles5. Choose good measures of success - make the measures make sense!4. Partnerships - on this... when encountering new partnerships ask this question...- what does each partner say they want?then work out this one...- what do they actually want?No matter what they say, they may well also want a mix of the following: political influence / power / limelight / money / creditUniversities want some combination of the above - but contextualizedPersonal agrandizement is also important!3. Know everything you can about your audiences - don't just look at the known2. A word on new formats and services - sketch it out using a storyboard. It's cheap, efficient and can open dialogues with people who should then be able to understand what your project is about1. Is something missing? Ask yourself this question! Are you testing the wrong thing?A useful and interesting talk and grounded in lots and lots of experience of projects, which was excellent. I loved his closing thought:"Meet your audiences. Fiddle. Be curious!"It should be every e-learning bod's mantra.3. Excellent opportunity for putting faces to names - even though I did get the carbon footprint conference guilts from Terry Anderson's keynote you can't beat a bit of face to face stuff and I wish that the packed timetable and stupid amount of commuting I was doing had allowed for more chatting. :o)4. Some great keynotes from Terry Anderson, Michael Wesch and Martin Bean and following the #altc2009 hash tag throughout their presentations gave a good sense of what was relevant to the audience too. Nice way to capture the 'relevance flavour of the month'.5. The CrowdVine site - worked well and was a useful way to network pre-conference. Liked it and good to see that it was used by most people attending ALT-C.Okay, so those are my five main highlights. What made the not so good list?1. The catering!!! Absolute rubbish! Well, unless you like a queue, cheap biscuits, limited drinks and soggy pasta o'course.2. The lack of quiet spaces to chill out. A seriously noisy venue and for little ol' me who has a bit of a struggle with tinnitus at the best of times, it made networking tricky.3. PowerPoint overload. I came across presentations with too many slides. Too many notes per slide. Too quick transitions. Presenters simply reading out the contents of their slides. And a generally uninspiring PowerPoint-fest. There has to be a better way than PowerPointing everything. And I can feel a PowerPoint boycott coming on while I work out what that might be.4. Hashtag spam on the Twitter feed for the conference. Must try to find ways of filtering spam when using hashtag aggregation for events... it's not good on any level.Okay, am slinking off to collapse. Hopefully will get my 'thinking about it all' head back on soon once I've got a tad of energy back! I'll leave you with my twice-daily view of the Peak District which I had the pleasure of seeing on my gargantuan commute!
Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:07:00 -0400 Lock Down Learning [New Window]
I have a question which goes round and round in my head and it concerns trust. In fact, it concerns trust of adult students / employees and the conflict with a web 2.0 / user-generated world. Why don't we trust people? In fact, I can tie it down a little further.... why do we only trust people when we feel that it doesn't really matter?Here's an example. An institution has a stance whereby constructivist learning is promoted. Students should 'own' their learning. They should construct their own knowledge. Be critical. Thinking. Reflecting students. We want them to engage and be interested in what they study. But... we put those flowing, interesting, fluid notions of ownership and contextualisation and shove them into a VLE. We encourage people in with the idea that these tools have potential and the capacity to offer them a useful learning environment... then, it seems, we slam the door shut behind them and tie down all the tools until our systemic desire for control is satisfied - "what if someone's offended?", "what if they sue us?", "what about quality control?", "what about... what about... what about...?". "Oh, just turn it off, that'll be easier".Nominally, we want them to learn it 'their' way, but the reality is that we don't feel comfortable if we're not learning 'our' way. Why don't we trust people? As soon as something becomes institutionally hosted then issues of liability, reputation and administrative control rear their heads and lock down ensues.Is it any wonder why systems get only a token use? Is it any wonder why students are out there every day using their own tools and systems - making choices, being supported by their peers, when we're too scared to let go just a little. Unless, of course, it's behind closed doors and it doesn't really matter anyway. Are VLEs symptomatic of 'lock down learning'? Where's the trust? What would the educational landscape really be like if we put some real control in the hands of users?I've just read 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky (yeah, late to the party, I know!) - and it occurs to me that what if our VLEs aren't a case of 'here comes everybody', but instead result in 'there goes everybody' as the PLE offers the flexibility and personalisation which makes learning really meaningful?PS Thanks to AJ Cann and Steve Wheeler for feeding my inner rant. :o)
Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:28:00 -0400 Web2practice from NetSkills [New Window]
Guides to emergent technologies and innovative practiceAre you thinking about using web2tools for research, administration or teaching? If so, make a quick start with the web2practice user guides.The web2practice guides explain how emergent web technologies like RSS, microblogging, podcasting and social media can enhance your working practice. Each guide consists of a short animated video explaining the key concepts (such as microblogging in the example below), supported by a more in-depth guide covering potential uses, risks and how to get started.Netskills: Web2practiceUseful guides from JISC - giving a bit of heavyweight legitimacy to things regularly dismissed as superfluous / superficial / damaging. Good to see and handy to bookmark!Blogged with the Flock Browser
Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:51:00 -0400 Three cool tools [New Window]
I'm always trying out new tools. Some of them make me go 'hmmm'. Some of them make me go 'nice idea'. Some of them make me go 'ooooooh, that could work in x scenario'. Others... I really get using and they become part of my online toolkit.So, here are three which have taken pride of place on my virtual mantelpiece in the last few months:Doodle.com - unbelievably simple to use tool to schedule meetings. You just create a free account, give your event a name... put in some suggested days / times... and send out the URL to others who simply enter their names and select their preferred times. The beauty of it is that you get to see at a glance what times work... what time the majority can make and it doesn't matter what diary system / calendar people use, this is just a click, click, click and you're done kinda thing:Another great tool is Dropbox - if you work on more than one computer and want to move files from machine to machine, keeping them all in sync is a pain. With dropbox, you set up a free account (which gives you up to 2GB of free space) and your files are synced via the secure online Dropbox. Doesn't matter what operating system you're using - it just works. I have a PC at work, PC, MacBook Pro and Linux netbook at home... if I want to work on a file and I know I'm going to need access on a number of different machines, I just put it into my dropbox. On Windows it installs as a folder in your My Documents area / as an icon in the status bar. On a Mac it appears in the Finder and the top menu. No more copying stuff onto a USB stick / e-mailing it to yourself - if you have an internet connection, you file will be updated. But... if you want to roll it back to a previous version, then you've got 30 days to sort that out. Oh, and you can also share your Dropbox folders with others. Love it!My final new tool is Mindomo - it's a terrific, free online mind-mapping tool and it's even won me away from MindMeister which I liked for years. The advantages of this? Well, once you ignore the Google ads down the right hand side, is that it's seriously feature rich, collaborative and really flexible to use. Work on your maps online, import from Freemind or export as a pdf / rtf / xml file / an image file. It's a bit Microsoft Office 2007 / 2008-ish in appearance and it doesn't feel like 'free'. :o)So... there ya go. Three free, simple, online tools which have 'stuck' in the past three months: Doodle, Dropbox and Mindomo.Anyone else got any recent favourites?
Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:56:00 -0400 10 Pleasing MacBook Pro keyboard shortcuts [New Window]
Being a total Mac newbie (well, I last had a Mac five or six years ago, so it's pretty much all new), I'm finding out some handy things which I thought might be useful for other people too. So... here goes my 10 handy keyboard shortcuts:1. There's no hashtag key on my MacBook Pro keyboard - to enter a hashtag you need to press alt and 3 together2. You can get a whole load more symbols by pressing the alt key and another key... here are some useful ones:alt + 2 = alt + 0 = alt + 8 = alt + r = alt + w = alt + p = alt + s = alt + g = alt + ; = alt + x = alt + c = alt + / = 3. There's no delete key, only backspace. To forward delete just press fn and backspace4. If you want to delete one word at a time, press alt and backspace5. Pressing F12 brings up the Dashboard gadgets. Press it again and the Dashboard disappears again6. Pressing F11 moves everything so you can see the desktop. Pressing it again brings everything back.7. When you're in your web browser, press F6 and you select everything in the address bar8. Press F9 and you can toggle through all open windows9. To select words one word at a time, hold down alt, shift and press the left cursor key10. To quit any application, press cmd and qThat'll do for now! My closet nerdness loves finding keyboard shortcuts! :o)
Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:30:00 -0400 The joy of the Fail Whale [New Window]
Nice little piece in the New Scientist about Twitter and its delicate disposition...Innovation: Why don't users mind when Twitter breaks? - tech - 10 August 2009 - New Scientist:"The strong roller-coaster-riding community of Twitter, by contrast, have tied their personas to the service. They simply embraced the fail, enjoyed taking a break from maintaining their 140-character selves, and prepared to celebrate when the service came back."Yup, people hate Facebook, Google, Amazon etc going down... but there's a certain humour in the fail whale-ness of Twitter going down the loo yet again. A sign of an immature service or one that's got its users on-side from the start in terms of allowing itself to have a wry sense of humour?Maybe it's just because it's not seen as corporate as the others on the failure hit-list? Maybe it's not seen as essential as the failure hit-list? Maybe it's a bit more opt in... which means temporary 'opt-out' isn't as painful? Who knows? Fail Whaling (spotting and celebrating the appearance of a Twitter Fail Whale) seems to have an opposite reaction to most systems failures. Bet you any money IS departments all over would kill for that kind of sympathetic, forgiving band of users! :o)
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:51:00 -0400 Changing online demographics... [New Window]
It's SO over: cool cyberkids abandon social networking sites | Media | The Guardian: "From uncles wearing skinny jeans to mothers investing in ra-ra skirts and fathers nodding awkwardly along to the latest grime record, the older generation has long known that the surest way to kill a youth trend is to adopt it as its own. The cyberworld, it seems, is no exception.The proliferation of parents and teachers trawling the pages of Facebook trying to poke old schoolfriends and lovers, and traversing the outer reaches of MySpace is causing an adolescent exodus from the social networking sites, according to research from the media regulator Ofcom.The sites, once the virtual streetcorners, pubs and clubs for millions of 15- to 24-year-olds, have now been over-run by 25- to 34-year-olds whose presence is driving their younger peers away."Where are they going then? Interesting!
Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:38:00 -0400 Social Swine flu fever [New Window]
This week I have mostly been ignoring swine flu...Universities prepare for swine flu worst as nurseries take away soft toys | Education | guardian.co.uk: "The guide for childminders tells them: 'Try to avoid children sharing soft toys as these are hard to clean adequately; you may find it easier to avoid using soft toys altogether. Clean hard toys after use as the virus can survive on hard surfaces.'The guidance for schools and nurseries says: 'Discourage the sharing of pencils, crayons and pens during a pandemic. Encourage the wiping and cleaning of hands and objects when passing round objects like musical instruments or toys. Do not allow children to share musical instruments.'A spokesman from the DCSF said: 'We are not suggesting taking all toys out of play settings, just to take care with the use of shared toys, which can be a way of spreading infection. This is about striking a sensible balance between continuing life as normal but also taking simple, common sense steps to protect children.'"... and watching the world going mad. "Kids. Don't share your teddies. No! Don't!!! Those soft toys are evil. Burn them! Burn them all!!!!" *sigh*Okay, so my 3 and 6 yr olds have had it... but it was JUST FLU... okay. Honestly. They didn't turn into piglets (they may eat like them, but appearances can be deceptive)... they didn't turn violet... they didn't... well... they didn't do much really. They had flu. Paranoia about Swine Flu and the Gartner Hype cycle... I bet there's a relationship which is pretty much identical. I also wonder if our increasingly virtually connected world is heightening that sense of paranoia. Before we may or may not have known someone who was poorly. Now, through status updates and Tweets etc... everyone is now a 'friend' and it seems closer and more dangerous than it is.PS I've also got a bit of a chest infection. A bit of a chest infection. And. It's. Not. Swine. Flu. Honestly!
Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:39:00 -0400 Return of the Mac... [New Window]
I just bought myself a MacBook Pro and while I'm waiting for it to arrive, I thought I'd just share the various links others have kindly shared with a PC-based ignoramus like me for making the switch to (or back to, in my case!) a Mac:General Mac basicsFor free and useful, take a look at Apple's site. Their support pages are good.Also, Mac 101 and Switch 101 (which is great if you're moving from PC to Mac)These might answer many of the questions that crop up in the first few days/ weeks.Also, Mac Help, Finder> Help> Search usually works well.Open University-related:For Open University-related questions, try the Mac General website (although this is jam-packed with stuff anyone using a Mac in education would find helpful)The best news is that Virtual PC is no longer needed. If you need to use a PC, you can install Windows OS onto your Mac- see Mac General for details.Other recommended sites:Mac Rumors and Mac OS X Hints - both sites have forums too; you can pick up tips and tricks in those sometimes as well.Books and Magazines:Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual, David PogueMacUser magazine and website.Oh, and if you're a student or work in Education... take a look at the deals available via the Apple Education Store. Well worth the saving!
Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:00:00 -0400 Learning Outcomes... again... [New Window]
Would love to know what people think about the following... yes... no... anything else?Do learning outcomes really improve student learning?Am having a mull about this and would like to know what other people think!
Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:03:00 -0400 More Tricks to using the iPod Touch in education [New Window]
Really useful list from David Hopkin's eLearning Blog on how to uses the iPod Touch in education.mLearning; Tricks to using the iPod Touch in class eLearning Blog // Dont Waste Your Time included the following:Screen-grabSave images while browsingEmailsApple App StoreInternet & SurfingNote-takingPodcastsDocuments"I commented on it, but thought I'd expand his list a little further to include the following:Get a headset with an in-built mic and you can record voice memosSync the calendar with Google Calendar to keep track of appointments / assignments etc (also good for accessing your Gmail too)Use the Contacts organiser to keep track of numbers / e-mail addresses you're given when out an' aboutCreate shortcuts to web-based e-mail by adding that page to your home screen - just open up Safari > go to your webmail > Click on the "+" (plus sign) button and then touch the "Add to Home Screen" option (see screenshot, left).Get hold of the free TED Talks app to view some inspiring talks without needing to download the podcastsInstall the Skype app (also free) to use with that ipod headset with mic mentioned above... and free Skype-to-Skype calls / the ability to make phone calls becomes available wherever theres wifi availableAccess presentations from SlideShare by using mobile slideshareWriting a timed essay or trying to motivate your way through a batch of marking? Click on Clock and Timer and speed yourself up!The calculator is useful... but a quick rotate to landscape and you get yourself a free scientific calculator.Me, I love my iPod Touch. It's got just enough stuff to fill in most of the gaps when you haven't got access to your main computer. It's lighter and quicker to turn on and get online than a netbook. It has oodles of apps available (though you end up using just a few select ones). It's 'shove in your pocket-able'. The battery life is excellent (can be left in sleep mode for days) and it charges quickly. What's not to like? Oh, and although you don't get the phone bits you do with an iPhone, for on-campus use, you'll most likely have a wireless connection available... so who needs the additional monthly contract cost / extra initial cost of the iPhone? :o)
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:14:00 -0400 "Free" by Chris Anderson - available... free! [New Window]
Living by what he's writing, Chris Anderson (of The Long Tail fame) has written a new book, "Free" and made it available via Scribd for nowt:FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson Like the price... may like the content enough to pay the 'real' price too! Like this model of distribution!! Here's to 'free'!
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:25:00 -0400 Things I love about tagging [New Window]
I'm a bit of an online hoarder. I love collecting snippets of information, articles, news items, hints, tips... you name it... I want to put it in a little bag and save it. However, 'favorites' and 'bookmarks' and me don't really get along terribly well. I'm also a bit of a computer-floozy. I'll swap computer at will. As long as I have an internet connection and a keyboard I don't care so very much about the hardware that I'm using... so managing multiple instances of bookmarks is a pain in the backside. Yes, something like xmarks can be a useful add-on, but I still have to sort out installing that... and y'know what... I'm lazy. Something I can use on-the-fly really works for me... which is why tagging is such a handy dandy thing to do.So, what're the plus points of tagging? Categorise resources in the way you want to categorise resources No favorites folders! The same bit of information can have lots of different 'tags', no need to try to shoehorn it into one folder. They help you search and retrieve resources easily Those tags are shareable and subscribable... which means you can share what you find and keep track of what others find too Agree on a unique tag for a project / subject area and you can track all materials for that projectOf the above, number 5 is one of the most useful, I find because it lets you do things like this:Using something like Friendfeed or NetVibes you can quickly add in the various RSS feeds for your tag of choice and... bingo... all resources in one place, no matter where they came from or who originated them. If you're using Twitter, just use a unique hashtag and you're away. Unique tags are also great for following what happens at conferences and can help create a vibrant backchannel for live comment and discussion. Have a look at the CommonCraft intro to Twitter Search for more detail... it's sure to fire off some ideas on how to use this stuff!I also thought it would be handy to quickly jot down some of the main ways of I use tags:Aggregating resources for my own useAggregating resources (from a variety of sources) for projectsPooling resources for a team (for example in the Educational Development Unit at NTU, we use the tag NTUEDU on Delicious to pool any elearning-related links we find)Creating a backchannel for an event using a unique tagSubscribing to specific tags to follow what's happening in that fieldWill try to add more to the above as they come to me.PS Am I very sad for my tag-love?! :o)
Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:56:00 -0400 Communities of reciprocity and Twitter [New Window]
Just seen the following on the BBC website...BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter followers 'can be bought': "Twitter users who lack an audience for their messages can now buy followers.Australian social media marketing company uSocial is offering a paid service that finds followers for users of the micro-blogging service."Oh, good grief... buying followers? Hmmmm...Actually, this has got me thinking. There seem to be three main ways in which Twitter is used:1. Those who see it as a consumption-only medium: happy to follow but rarely contribute directly... primarily following celebs etc2. Those who see it as a community of reciprocity: sharing, retweeting and commenting3. Those who see it as a broadcast-only medium: collecting followers, but rarely interacting with them... primarily using it as a means to transmit their messageThere are people who seem to flit between the three main groups above but I think that people / organisations tend to broadly fit into one of the above. I suppose there's a fourth way in which it's used - as a 'because others are using it' choice. However, these people rarely if ever post updates or add followers and eventually the account lies dormant and the service is declared 'pointless'. For me, however, the way it works most effectively is in the middle - the community of reciprocity. You build up an idea of the person behind the account through the way they behave. The way they interact. The way they involve and share. For those people, a network can't be bought... it's sought out and / or earned.I was thinking that this idea of online communities of reciprocity relates to why online communities do or don't work as well. It's not enough to say that an online community is automatically a 'community of practice' just because someone has set it up to be so (I've attended several conferences / talks where the talk was of communities of practice and all they actually meant was that they'd set up some online forums). Without the recipricous element, it is a sterile place to be and the potential for longevity isn't (I would guess) as powerful.You can buy your Twitter followers if you want... it won't necessarily buy an engaged set of followers. I wonder how effective services such as uSocial will be and what the quality will be like for those who pay for it??
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:30:00 -0400 So what do you do in the Summer? [New Window]
"So what do you do in the Summer?" - a question I've been asked quite a few times over the years, as friends assume we just relax while the students are away. This summer is going to be particularly busy, with quite a few major projects. Here's a quick rundown on a few of them.Storage and Server Replacement.This is probably the biggest one - we've just completed the procurement of our new Dell/EMC Storage Area Network (SAN), server and backup infrastructure. The first parts have just started arriving. This means we'll have much more storage (so bigger mailboxes, more shared storage), and a new virtual server infrastructure to help us cope with the ever increasing demand for new applications. For the techie amongst you we are going to be using Microsoft's Hyper-V for the virtualisaion rather than the more usual VMWare. More on this another time.Timetabling Phase 2Last year we installed a new Timetabling system (Syllabus Plus). This year the timetabling processes has been re-engineered, allowing us to really take advantage of the software. Work over the the summer will include better ensuring better web timetables and integrating data with other systems, for example the student record system.Network Connection RelocationAs part of the process for the move to our new City Centre Campus we'll be moving our primary network connection to the Caerleon Campus, as the current connection goes to Allt-yr-yn - due for closure 2011.ID CardsWe'll be reviewing our ID card process (and replacing/upgrading the software), with the aim of integrating our new(ish) Salto lock system in the process, as well as various other systems, such as the new Gladstone system in the sport centre, new printing software, and potentially, cashless payments.Exchange 2007We'll start the process to upgrade to Exchange 2007 (from Exchange 2003). The immediate user benefits aren't that great, although Outlook Web Access in Firefox/Mac is a bit better. The real benefits will be better integration with voice mail etc when we move to a new Voice over IP (VOIP) phone systemMyLearning Essentials/MoodleWe've integrated Moodle into our Learning Environment (myLearning Essentials), so we'll undertaking staff development, and working on elements such as the processes behind online course work submission.That's probably enough for now - other projects include completing our Office 2007 roll-out, supporting our new online enrolment process, reviewing and upgrading our Goldmine CRM software, replacing a lot of computers as part of our rolling replacement programme, and refining the plan for the IT services in our new city centre campus.Let me know if you want more information on any of these projects.
Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:38:00 -0400 New Macs and Price Rises [New Window]
Apple announced a range of new Macs yesterday - usually a cause for excitement among Apple fans (and sadly I'd have to include myself in that group). I was particularly pleased to see a new Mac Mini - it looked like these may been abandoned. But...Wow! Look at the prices! 649 for a decent Mac Mini - no keyboard, monitor etc! 949 for an entry level iMac! They are really high, a big increase over previous models. OK, the specs are increased, but still, we've all grown used to better specs for more money. I believe Apple are blaming the (lack of) value of the pound, and, to be fair, this is probably correct - we are seeing big price increases on other manufactures products as well.Still, this does make me question the viability of the iMac as a basic desktop computer for those that just need access to email/Internet/office. Before these price rises there was only a small premium for our Macs over our standard PCs, but not now.It's also worth reminding all staff and students who are thinking of making a purchase that you can get a good educational discount that make the prices a little more palatable:http://promo.euro.apple.com/edu/hed/routing/uk/index.phpLet's hope this is only a temporary problem!
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:45:00 -0500 Snow... [New Window]
The snow didn't last long in Caerleon in the end in, so here's a short video clip in case you've forgotten what it looked like already![YouTube:5OYC1BLrCR8]
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:37:00 -0500 A Tale of Three Word Processors (or how I came to use MS Office instead of Google Docs) [New Window]
I'm currently taking an MBA at the University, so I'm in the interesting position of being both a staff member and a student. Obviously the course itself is great, but it's also really useful to see things from a student perspective. I'll post some other observations at some point, but here's the story of software for my first assignment. I though this worth sharing because things didn't end of as I'd expected.Our first assessed assignment is a 3,500 report on leadership styles. This followed on from a group presentation where we'd used Google Docs to create the presentation. This worked really well, as we could collaborate seamlessly. Everyone got to grips with the software, it did everything we needed, and it coped with all four of us editing the presentations at the same time the night before it was due! My first plan, therefore, was to use Google Docs to write the assignment . It's free, and I could work on my it from whatever Mac or PC I was using. Plus it would be backed up.It all started well, but then I needed to draw a diagram, and I just couldn't get it right in Google Docs. I'm sure it would have been possible, I just didn't have the time, so I saved it in Word format, and decided to try and finish it in OpenOffice. For general home use Open Office is great - it's my home Office application of choice, largely because it's free, but it also does everything I need, and has a drawing package. I created the diagram with no problem, and carried on with my essay, backing it up to memory stick.I'm sure I could have completed it in OpenOffice, but I really started to miss Microsoft Office's layout features, for example its handling of styles and auto-table layouts. So I gave in and moved to Microsoft Office. Given that I'd ended up with a Microsoft solution I decided to go the whole hog (after all, USB memory sticks are evil!) and used Microsoft Skydrive to backup it up, and give me access to the document from any PC in the same way I had with Google Docs.So what's the point of this? I was reflecting on this because I think we need to be able to guide our students through the sea of technical options available to them. I'm, sure, for example, most students aren't aware of Skydrive (25Gb of storage for free!) . And without actually trying it, I would, I think be selling Google Docs as a great solution. I think it still has a place, particularly for collaborative works, but I really surprised myself ending up using a wholly Microsoft based solution.
Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:01:00 -0500 Twitter vs Blogs or Where have all the posts gone [New Window]
I've just realised that I haven't posted anything since September. This is by far the longest gaps between blog postings, and I blame (or you can thank!) Twitter. In that time I've made made about 70 Twitter updates, which may seem a lot, but I'm hardly a prolific Twitterer compared to some of the people I follow.This seems to be part of a trend - here are a few other people who've made the same observation:http://www.thewavingcat.com/2007/11/08/twitter-vs-blogs-revisited/http://www.wadehodges.com/2008/12/01/catching-up-and-twitter-vs-blogs/http://blog.andrewparker.net/2007/09/05/twitters-ruining-my-blogging/http://graemethickins.typepad.com/graeme_blogs_here/2008/04/blogging-less-t.htmland many, many more...So what's happening? Is this a good thing? I'm not sure, but I've a sneaky feeling that this post would make sense more as tweet "Twittering more - blogging less. Is this part of trend?".
Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:44:00 -0500 Future of homework with Xtranormal [New Window]
My colleague Martin Weller put a little movie that he made over lunch with Xtranormal on his blog. Martin always picks up on the latest tools and applies them to his work in really interesting an insightful ways. Whereas I delegate! So last night when my daughter for her Year 4 homework had to write [...]
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:02:01 -0500 Newspace update [New Window]
I was asked by a few people outside the University to give an update about Newspace. Newspace is the University's social networking site for new students, based on Ning. I'll give a short update on how it's been used, what next and go over a couple of interesting issues. The bit at the end may give the 'Web 2.0 for free' naysayers some ammunition!So first, a quick summary on how its been used. Sorry if this is a bit dry and quantitative! At some point we hope do a bit more of a detailed statistical analysis, but here's a summary. We've had 961 students join Newspace, which is a sizeable portion of our intake. We advertised in three ways - an email to students before they joined, a postcard flyer in their joining packs, and a link from the front page of the website. There have been about 280 conversation topics in the main forum - favourite topics have been finding people in the same accommodation and course, and nearly all topics have a good number of responses (probably a few thousand messages in total). On top of this there were 44 groups created, all with their own forums, and a huge amount of use of 'person to person' comments - I can't find an easy way of getting stats on this at the moment. Finally, one of the strengths of Ning is that users can customise their own profile page, and a lot have done this. Ok, so it's had a lot of use. What next then? In some ways we have a bit of dilemma.We created Newspace for new students, and my expectation was that use would slowly decline as students came onto campus - after all, they can now meet face-to-face, and now they know one another can easily become Facebook/MySpace friends.We'd then create a new NewSpace for next year. The fun about trying something new is you don't quite know whats going to happen - and at the moment it's still being used, perhaps not quite as much as the flurry of activity when, say, rooms were allocated in halls, but it's still quite steady (and more nocturnal)We were tempted to open it up to all students and see what happened, but on the other hand, we think maybe it only worked as a 'NewSpace' because all the students were new and in the same sort of position.So we've decided to stick with our orginal plan for the time being, and keep Newspace as a place for new students. There's nothing to stop other students from joining, but once you are a member of the University you've got full access to MyLearning Essentials (our VLE) myCommunity (although it's fair to say we've seen more activity on NewSpace than MyCommunity and Newport Facebook groups combined...)If NewSpace does carry on being used and looks like turning into a more permanent fixture we'll obviously rethink.Finally, what other issues did we face?We had two main problems to deal with - Google Ads, and a disagreement between Ning and a third party Widget provider. I'm being quite open about these in the hope that it's helpful to other people looking at doing a similar thing.Let's start with Google Ads. The Ning service is free, if you take Google Ads. Not a problem to start with, they were all for education type things like accomodation services...until I logged in an one day, and got confronted with ads for a couple of other Universities.... NOT GOOD!. The problem with Google Ads is they are personal (I think), so I don't think other people got these, but I can't be sure. So, we decided we needed to remove them ASAP. It only cost 11 a month to get rid of them - but it wasn't that straight forward to arrange payment, just because our Finance people weren't really geared up to paying for this sort of web service (credit card only, monthly debit, in dollars). Still they were very helpful, and we got it sorted quickly.The next issue is perhaps the most important, as it shows the sort of risks you take when using a free service like this. We used a third party plug in from Widget Laboratory to provide an instant messaging service on Newspace, and this was really popular with some students. Then there was a dispute between Widget Labs and Ning, and the widget was terminated with no notice due to Widget Labs allegedly breaking T&C. There's more about this here:http://developer.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1185512%3ATopic%3A63551The Widget was reinstated after while, but then withdrawn by Widget Labs, who, we believe are now developing for Social Go. I've no idea of the rights and wrongs of the case, but it shows (as with the Twitter text messaging) how you can't rely on these sort of services for critical applications. In this instance it was just a minor inconvenience, but it was an interesting experience. It hasn't put us off, but we'll be hedging our bets, and registering with Social Go as well to keep our options open for next year.
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 08:33:00 -0400 Vista and Office 2007 plans [New Window]
I presented our plans for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007/8 at our Information Strategy Panel today. A quick summary of the plan is as follows:VistaWe are going to switch to Vista for new PC deployments later this year (unless the user/area has a reason to stick with XP), and we'll switch the student labs to Vista next summer. We aren't going to roll it out to any other PCs apart from to academic staff who need it for teaching/research reasons.Microsoft Office 2007/08We'll start rolling out Office 2007/08 out later this year, to academic schools first and then corporate departments. Lots of training and support will be available, as the interface is completely different.Why do it this way?Vista is a tricky one. Obviously it's had a huge amount of bad press, and it doesn't have any 'must have features' that make it worth deploying to existing staff PCs. However, it does have some useful features, particular for us on the IT side (easier imaging, better security model) and it seems quite clear that the next version of Windows is going to be Vista part 2, so there isn't much point waiting to see if something different comes along next time. So just using it for new deployment seems to make sense, and XP will be gradually phased out.Office 2007/08 is more straightforward. Most people seem to prefer it, its starting to be the version that most people (especially students with new PCs) will be using at home, so know is the time to start upgrading so we're in line with user's expectations.Now the proposal has been approved we'll start putting together a more detailed project plan.
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:10:00 -0400 Google Chrome [New Window]
I guess most people with even a passing interest in technology will have picked up on the news that Google have just released its own web browser, Google Chrome. Three questions really - 'why?', 'is it any good?' and 'will anyone use it?' Lets start with a picture first though...What you see there is the default home page, with thumbnail links to your most commonly accessed pages, the ability to search your history, and your recent bookmarks and tabs. All very nice - I like it. The thumbnail links seem to be 'inspired' by Opera, but sadly hardly anyone uses that, so that will be new for most people.So why have Google done this? Well, they've put their version of the answer as a comic strip!http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/The long and the short of it is that they are saying that current browsers are intrinsically flaky and dated.OK, but what does this really mean? I'm speculating here, but all the innovation in the browser market recently has been around FireFox. I know of virtually nobody who knows enough about IT to be able to choose a browser who uses IE. Obviously Google has invested heavily in application development, so does it no longer trust the open source FireFox community to deliver a good enough browser to deliver the cloud computing experience is obviously believes is the future?There's been a lot of talk about a Google OS, but I wonder whether actually this browser is kind of a future OS? Without wanting to get too technical, Chrome has OS-like features, in particular separate processes for each tab (or application) and a task manager to manager the processes. Are they trying to render the host OS irrelevant?So is it any good?From a user interface point of view, so far, (and I've only used it for a couple of hours) I love it. I rarely bother with bookmarks (other than del.icio.us) so the default front page (as described above) is great, and the interface is fast and clean.Google clearly know who they've got to impress first - there's a menu link called 'Stats for nerds' that's clearly hit the mark - have a look at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=stats+for+nerdsAnd it has some really odd features. You can resize text boxes - a nightmare for web developers.So the big question. Will anyone use it?The fact is, most people just want to browse the web, and just use whatever browser they are given. If they haven't got any need to change they won't. FireFox probably has around a 20% market share at the moment (web stats are notoriously unreliable), but it's difficult to see how they could push their market share any further. Google, though, have an advantage. They also control sites that people actually want to use - search. YouTube, Gmail etc. If they can make using those with Chrome significantly better than with IE then maybe, just maybe, they might succeed.
Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:05:00 -0400 Twitter [New Window]
We've just set up a couple of Twitter accounts for the University, one for news, and the other for internal announcements from myLearning Essentials and the intranet:University News - http://twitter.com/newportuniInternal News and Announcements - http://twitter.com/newport_mlenews Both these take news from existing sources, the first from the front page of the University web site, and the other from the Intranet news, so it's not a new place you need to look, just a convenient way of getting noticed when news is updated if you happen to be a Twitter user.No idea what Twitter is? It's a service that lets people communicate via short messages (or Tweets). It's sometimes known as Microblogging. The great thing about it is that there a whole range of ways to make and receive Tweets, including from the web, mobile phone, SMS, and desktop application (my preference). The way it works it that Twitter users 'follow' people or accounts (sounds a bit dodgy!), which means they receive that person or accounts Tweets. This article from the Guardian is worth reading if you want to find out more: Making the most of Twitter .I'm not expecting this to be a particular mainstream service, but it took very little effort to set up, and will hopefully be useful to a few people.Here are some more University Twitter sites:http://twitter.com/ManMetUnihttp://twitter.com/KeeleUniversityhttp://twitter.com/AstonUniversityhttp://twitter.com/OpenUniversityhttp://twitter.com/CoventryUnihttp://twitter.com/CardiffUni
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:35:00 -0400 So I finally bought an iPhone... [New Window]
Not sure why it took me so long, but I've finally bought an iPhone!In a previous post I noted how difficult I was finding it have work and fun mixed on one device (that was an iPod touch). I was very grateful for a comment from Kevin from Glamorgan who told me had the same issue, and had bought an iPhone for home and Blackberry for work. Suitably reassured I've gone down the same route, iPhone for non-work things, and I'll stick with my Windows Mobile HTC for work.So initial thoughts? There are two aspects of the iPhone that I think are absolutely fantastic - the App Store, and the GPS/App/Flickr integration.The App Store works like this. Anyone can buy the SDK for about 100 and start writing apps for it. The author submits it to Apple, who check it, and then add it to the store. Apple keep some of the money, and the author/developers get some. Applications are typically sold for small amounts of money (eg 59p for 'Shopping List', 5.99 for Super Monkey Ball). The great thing is, small developers can now compete on a completely level playing field with big companies, and actually have some chance of a revenue stream. It almost reminds me of the first days of computing, with the ZX Spectrum cottage industry. The big criticism is that Apple are acting as gatekeepers, but it really doesn't bother me. As a consumer I'm more than happy to have some quality control, and as a potential developer I've no issue with some sort of third party verification. I'm sure it won't be long before I buy the SDK.Second thing, GPS/App/Flickr etc. This is just fun really, but it feels like something completely new. The iPhone has GPS, so it knows where you are. So, for example, you can then search Flickr (via a third party apps, some free, some 1.59!) and find pictures taken near you. Great for exploring new areas (you could then use Google Maps to find them). And obviously in true Web 2.0 style, you can take photos with the phone, Geotag them (ie add their location, again via GPS) and upload them to Flickr for other people to find. I know other phones have GPS as well, but it's all so elegant on the iPhone. I'm sure we are going to get more an more Apps that make use of GPS and user generated content.
Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:17:00 -0400 More about Newspace [New Window]
News of our Newspace, our Ning sites for news students, has been picked up on a number of blogs around the community, so I thought it worth summarising the reaction, and giving a quick update.First one is from Tony Hirst from the OUsefulInfo on OUwith a posting 'Institutional Social Networks' , which starts saying "Reading the feed from Michael Webb's Blog yesterday, I was.... stunned is probably the best word, to read his post "Newspace - a social networking site for new students"I'm not sure if that's good thing or not! Read Tony's post and decide for yourself.Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus from UKOLN, picks it up on "Institutional Use of Ning", and says "I welcome this development - and I am particularly pleased that Michael is being so open in describing the reasons for this decision, the possible risks and how the institution has responded to the risks."Thanks for the positive feedback!I also found posting about it on Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog and the tfpl blog , so I'm glad we are doing something of wider interested.So a quick update. Firstly, a quick thanks to a couple of my colleagues that did the hard work in getting it going - Allan Theophanides did all the hard work getting the site content together, including the Google maps and events, and, more importantly, getting the staff and mentors on board, and then organising the invitations to the students. If you want a site like this, it's crucial that someone takes this role, after all, a technically great site with no content and members is not much use! Secondly, to Jon Ingram, who sorted out the look of the site (it's based on an existing template, but Jon sorted out the logo, picture and CSS).So how's it going? So far, really, really well - in a lot of ways it's turning out to be one of the most exciting projects I've been involved in. Feedback on the site is terrific, so far we've over 300 members (we're only a small institution, and have only invited two schools so far), and the quality and quantity of the communication is amazing! It's really working - students are using the site to make friends, share their excitement, create their own home pages, reassure one another and ask questions.Obviously we won't know it's true value until the start of term, and maybe it's just initial enthusiasm, but, wow!I'm also really glad we decided to make it a closed community. I'm sorry, that means that a lot of you won't see it, but I really don't think it would work if it was a more public space.
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:34:00 -0400 iPod Touch/iPhone and Work/Life Balance [New Window]
This post is really triggered by my iPod Touch, but really applies to most handhelds/smartphones etc I guess, especially the iPhone.. As I said in a previous post, I've put the new 2.0 software on, which does a couple of things. Firstly, you can get 'Push Email' from Microsoft Exchange, which means as soon as you receive an email it's pushed to your iPod which beeps, and secondly you can install lots of other applications. Most of these aren't really work type things (eg Last.FM), but some blur the boundary (Facebook is mix of work colleagues and friend-friends, Twitter is mostly works stuff). Before I go on, it's worth saying I'm a bit of a music obsessive. I've heard a lot of people say they never go anywhere without their phone. I never go anywhere without my iPod (I've got a 30Gb Classic as well). Maybe if you don't listen to music as much as I do none of this matters.I've ended up with a really odd mixture - as an iPod, something I'd listen to to relax, and now, perhaps with the Touch, get in touch with a few friends, but there, in the corner is an icon telling me I've 27 unread emails, nagging away. And then it beeps to tell me I've got another message. Now, I like my job, but sometimes I need a break from it, I need to recharge. And am I the only one that sometimes reads a work-related email over the weekend and then wishes I hadn't because you can't do anything about it until Monday, but it still gnaws away at you over the weekend. With web mail its fine, as I actively need to go and check it, but with the iPod, it's there, sat in the corner of the screen, hard to ignore.How do Blackberry users cope? Is it less of an issue, because the Blackberry is really just for messaging? I've got an HTC Windows Mobile Smartphone, but I never switch Push email on - I just fetch it if I need to when I'm off site.I ended up switching Push email off for the weekend.I'll probably finish up using two iPods, my 'classic' for music, and the Touch as a work email device.
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:45:00 -0400 iPod Touch 2.0 [New Window]
You can't have missed the new iPod launch, but the upgrade to the iPod Touch has received a lot less publicity. Basically, for 5.99 you can update your iPod so you get the full Microsoft Exchange email client, and the ability run iPhone applications. This turns your iPod into a fully fledged PDA - far more elegant than any of the Windows Mobile equivalents.The upgrade is painless, and to set up Exchange mail you just need to tell it you mail server address (my.newport.ac.uk for Newport users), your user name and password and you are away - you get Push email, and contacts and calendar synch over WiFI as well (this wasn't possible over WiFi on the old iPod Touch).So far I've installed Twitterific (Twitter Client), Last.FM, NetNewsWire, Facebook and AIM. LastFM is my favourite, it creates personalised radio stations based on music you listen to, and you can then listen to other people's stations to discover new new music - a perfect application for the iPod. Sound quality is bit rough though... (it's streamed)
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:44:00 -0400 Trying out alternatives [New Window]
This started as a comment on Martin’s post about problems with Vista but grew a bit too long so I have put it here.I have too many machines (can you have too many ) the one I use most is the MacBook (especially now I have discovered it is Unix really), then the little [...]
Sat, 10 May 2008 09:41:30 -0400 Drupal on a Mac not quite as easy as I hoped [New Window]
For a couple of reasons I decided to install Drupal on my Macbook: it seems to have become the prototyping tool of choice in the OU; I am thinking about using the ejournal module for the journal I edit JIME; and, I had too much real work to do so a distraction was in order. [...]
Fri, 02 May 2008 19:22:47 -0400 Conference blogging [New Window]
I have spent a couple of days in the OU internal conference Making Connections blogging the sessions that I am in over on my OCHRE blog. My colleague Doug Clow also blogged the same conference and there were several of us also twittering away during the conference. Liam Green-Hughes created an OU aggregator twitter to [...]
Thu, 01 May 2008 19:49:55 -0400 Watch the birdie! [New Window]
This year we again have a pair of blue tits in a nest box by our house. The nest box has a camera in it hooked up to our TV via a DVD recorder. Blue Tit TV is definitely the best channel we have and the female has just settled down to brood her 10 [...]
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:32:18 -0400 Watch with RescueTime [New Window]
Follow TonyH’s advice received through the wonders of twitter I installed RescueTime as part of my move towards managing time. The result over the first couple of days is shown below.I think the plot is interesting but I am not sure how useful. Over these two days my main work tasks were involved in meetings [...]
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:12:03 -0400 Restructuring 2.0 [New Window]
Martin Weller across on his blog has written about how we have just been reviewed where we work at IET. The review has plenty of reasonable anlaysis but ends with a suggestion that IET splits in two and bifurcates – which if it is not handled carefully might lead to chaos, or at least some [...]
Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:21:18 -0400 Remember the milk v ThinkingRock [New Window]
I think that life needs a decent swap algorithm but first we need a way to know what we are doing. In Unix terms I want to do “ps x” to find the processes that are The GTD approach is to dump a whole list of everything that you need to do and that makes [...]
Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:42:04 -0400 OS Life [New Window]
Following up on my previous post about Life Thrash I have carried on thinking about the parallels between operating systems and life. The two suggestions so far “switch off and on again” and “upgrade to a newer model” are a bit tricky to implement – however a software upgrade does not seem out of the [...]
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:47:12 -0400
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