Monthly Archive for August, 2003

Via Mark Oehlert’s mailing list e-clippings (there must be some reason he has for keeping that list and his blog separate?) comes reference of this immensely cool Flash demo of a ‘visual search engine’ (I’m not sure what else to call it). Once you get through the flash intro, click on the ‘Camera Finder Demo’ on the bottom of the left-hand nav. It doesn’t seem like much until you start changing the parameters in the search menu to the right.

These guys are building apps fro visualizing financial data as well as product catalogues like this. They seem to be working at the nexus of XML and Flash. - SWL 

o.k., last one from this site, I promise, but this really tickled my fancy - at the top of their monthly newsletter the folks at Web Lab highlight “This month’s weirdest Googling that brought people to the Web Lab site.” Not only is this a funny use for this underused data that most of us get from our web usage analysis programs, but by citing the exact words again on their site they basically increase the likelihood of being found again with this bizarre terms (though David Lynch seems to rank supreme as the ‘czar of bizarre’) - SWL

Buried within the last article on virtual communities in news sites was reference to this ‘technique’ for Small Group Dialogues (they call it a ‘tool’ at the top of the page but I don’t get the sense they are talking about actual software). I found this really interesting - many of the issues they try to address with their technique (too much anonymity; not enough personal responsibility; too large a group to get a sense of identity of belonging) seem to resonate with criticisms I hear of some formulations of online discussions or communities, and also seem a lot closer to a notion of what constitutes a community in our regular f2f lives. - SWL

(On a further look, they do also refer to some actual software they implemented with Web Crossing, which would be interesting to see.)

You’d think all this talk about businesses focusing on community would be uplifting, but I ended up feeling kind of depressed by the end of this article at the commodification of human socialization. - SWL

- via [Online Community Report]

Based on a reminder from Alan’s latest post, I updated this page of known examples of RSS feeds from learning object repositories. I hadn’t necessarily planned on maintaining this, but what the heck, the original title of that page was pretentious enough to justify it - SWL

I’m sorry to say this, and it is not just generational envy, but I just can’t believe this. You would have to try very hard to convince me that these results aren’t due to the ‘dumbing down’ of the SATs. - SWL

I inherited a lot of books two years ago when my Dad passed away, and I’ve slowly been making my way through them. One that’s been staring at me for a while, and for who knows what reason I had resisted picking up so far, was Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle.

Well a recent summer cold gave me an excuse to lie and bed and read for a few hours, a rare luxury, and not having anything else to read at the time I dug into this. And boy am I glad I did. I don’t think I have ever found a more clearly written statement of the issues our society faces in relationship to technology and the commodification of the earth. Berry is no luddite, he is just urging us to resist the easy lure of reductionism and mechanistic thought. As he puts it:

What I am against - and without a minute’s hesitation or apology - is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves.

This book is extremely pertinent for educators and technologists alike. He levies a big charge at the higher education industry, one that you may not like to hear but which needs to be engaged. Highly recommended. - SWL

I found this thread fascinating for a number of reasons. First off I hadn’t known there was any such issue of CD-Rs becoming unreadable and unstable over time, so it was just a good cautionary tale. Secondly in explaning the phenomenom, the posters give a great lesson on how some of the technologies involved with CD-Rs work. Finally, it’s just another great example of slashdot as an informal learning community. - SWL

- via [Bruce Landon's Weblog for Students]

“an algorithm intended to predict the gender of an author by analyzing writing style. Simply enter a few lines of text and click submit.”

I’ve read a few articles on this topic before which seemed to indicate this wasn’t possible, and so I had to try it out. First attempt it asserted that my submission was by a female, second one by a male. And it seems this is pretty much par for the course; of the 42287 total responses since August 15, 2003, it appears to have been right 49.87% of the time. Wow. Almost 50%.

-via [elearnspace blog] and [Kairosnews]

I had heard talk recently of Blackboard entering the ‘content management’ marketplace, and the speaker was puzzled why they would want to do this. From the looks of there announcement, they are not necessarily trying to compete with your standard web content management system that serves your public web presence (thought it’s not clear that it couldn’t do that too) but instead taking the step to add learning content management in behind the course management and portal systems. Interesting to me, they seem to have made the move to consider students as just another potential set of content authors, and so the proposed technology to manage learning content also serves your e-portfolio and virtual hard drives for learners. Interesting strategy. - SWL

(As an aside, their attempts to ‘eat their own cooking’ are perhaps leaving them with indigestion - clicking on the ‘standards‘ link on the  right-hand side of the page reveals perhaps more than they wanted to of the content management structure. At least at 9:40 am PST)