Monthly Archive for February, 2005

There was no way I could pass up attending the Northern Voices blogging conference given that it was only a ferry ride away, and for the most part I came away glad to have made the effort. Here are some reflections, in no particular order.

The High Points

- Dinner with Brian, D’Arcy and other friends the night before. In truth, the whole trip was worth it for me for a few hours of good food and conversation with some old and new friends.

- Stephen’s presentation, nominally titled ‘Community Blogging‘ (in essence the notion that communities are defined by semantic affinity, not network proximity, and that we need to develop systems which help us derive meaning that emerges out of collective/aggregated contexts) was for me the highlight of the conference from the perspective of presentations given. It deserves a post of its own and for me was the most concise synthesis of what Stephen’s been driving at for the last few years I’ve seen.

- UPDATED: I forgot to mention the other highpoint of the conference, a 2 minute description on the use of RSS feeds and wikis for sharing and collaborating on the research at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The fellow making the point sat patiently with his hand up throughout almost all of the question and answers in the ‘Blogging in Academia’ session, and then in the space of about 2 minutes simply blew most of our minds away with the description of the collaborative knowledge sharing ecosystem they had assembled using syndication technologies and wikis. Worth far more than the price of admission itsself.

- Realizing one’s blogosphere ‘bozo filters’ are incredibly accurate when you finally hear the bozos f2f. The downside - not having f2f bozo filters.

The Low Points

- It’s probably an unfair criticism, but the format of the presentations/conference (sages on the stage, plebes in the audience gazing longingly) basically replicates a lot of hierarchical structure that seems antithetical to what’s interesting about the blogosphere. Undoubtedly there exist power laws, ‘a-list bloggers’ and the like, but for the vast majority of us, what’s interesting is not a quest to be listened to by everyone else, but to participate in ‘elocutions’ with as few as 2 people (even 1 in ‘blogs as soliloquy’ mode) and can grow as large as the net. So, suggestions for improvement: more coffee breaks/networking time (there are never enough), and less formal presentations. Instead, look to ‘workshops’ or other participatory models as a way to engage everyone and create useful outputs, not just speeches. (To be fair, Tim Bray’s did make some fun efforts at including the audience and seemed quite well received). And sheesh, with that much technology in the room, formally engage with it, not just accidentally through flickr tags and the like.

- Nametags: I guess I must be getting old, but my eyesight can’t handle 8 point type from more than a few feet now. Any really, a blogging conference without the name (not just the URL) of people’s blogs in bold print on their name tags?

Still, much fun was had by this attendee, and the organizers are to be thoroughly lauded for their efforts. Bravo. For any shortcomings, it was still one of the more fun gatherings I’ve been to of late. - SWL

http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=697

It’s been two months now since I started subscribing to an aggregated feed of FURL and del.icio.us feeds from various EdTech bloggers. It’s been a very fruitful experiment, and according to Bloglines at least 9 other subscribers seem to think so as well. For me it is providing a second channel of good resources with just enough context (e.g. the fact that they are all edtech bloggers I respect) to know they are worth considering but without the reading committment that blogs require.

This post is simply another shout out to any EdTech bloggers out there who also maintain a FURL, del.icio.us or other bookmarking site that offers RSS feeds to add their’s to this site - it’s open to anyone to add to. Currently the really active source feeds are from the cogdog, Brian, D’Arcy, Will Richardson, Trey Martindale and Greg Ritter, but there are tons of other folks whose interesting URLs I’d love to see. - SWL

http://www.incommonfederation.org/

I’ve known about Shibboleth for a few years now, but to be honest haven’t followed it that closely, in part because, as important as issues of authentication and authorization are, they typically bore the *!#$ out of me. So I had Shibboleth filed in the back of my mind as ‘hey neat idea, I’ll wait a few years and maybe this will move from idea to testbed implementation.’

Wow, time flies, and folks involved with Shibboleth have clearly not been fooling around - not only is there already this very real production level federation called InCommon, but they have a nifty ’starter’ program called InQueue which allows organizations just starting with Shibboleth and federated trust to try it out.

For those who are wondering ‘what the heck is he talking about?’, check out the Shibboleth ‘About’ page which has about as short an explanation as you can give, or else this recent Educause presentation by Michael Gettes which also does a nice job of explaning it. Long story short - as more organizations join federations, you’ll likely be able to get access to protected materials you couldn’t before without individually having to arrange that access.- SWL

(Clearly of only limited interest to anyone not on Vancouver Island, but hey, it’s my blog!)

The Northern Voices blogging conference is fast approaching - I am driving over from Victoria the night before, catching the 3pm ferry and have room for 2-3 others. I am returning the next day likely on the 7 or 9pm ferry. Love to have company and hate to drive to the mainland with empty seats in my car, so let me know if you could use a ride. - SWL

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/
2005/top10.html

This isn’t an educational technology post, but if it has any relevance in that regard it is to keep things in perspective. Click on the past years’ reports only makes it worse to realize how ongoing some of these issues have been. And count the number in Africa. - SWL

http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/
DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile

Possibly of interest to some of you metadata mavens out there is this wiki where you can find ongoing work of the Dublin Core Education Working Group, including this early draft of an application profile of Dublin Core to apply to educational materials. It’s not exactly ‘knock your socks off’ kind of stuff but then let’s hope metadata never is considered such.

Clearly an improvement over straight ahead Dublin Core in adding things like ‘Education Level,’ but as some folks from the library community recently reminded us, it’s not like anyone’s actually using much more than the equivalent of Dublin Core anyways when they use the LOM. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, automatic metadata generation/harvesting is going to save our souls and use all the LOM elements to then rapdily (magically, automatically…) re-assemble personalized learning. LOM mani padme LOM. Boy, am I having a rough Saturday! - SWL

http://www.computer.org/multimedia/mu2004/promo1.pdf

Raymond Yee helpfully points out this great article by Dick Bulterman titled “Is it Time for a Metadata Moratorium” from which Raymond extracts this true nugget:

“For nontext data - such as video, images, audio, and so on - direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation.”

Seems obvious, right? And yet, hyperbolic testimonials to the wonders of flickr and del.icio.us aside, this seems exactly the problem (one of many) that countless repository initiatives seem destined to replicate in positing a repository ‘container’ that isn’t even loosely coupled with either the content creation or content use/re-use environments or workflows. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa. - SWL

Looks like my earlier post may have been an overreaction (won’t be the first time), but not without productive results. The reason I posted my email to bloglines publicy was because I had heard from a few folks I asked that they had experienced similar problems, and also that they felt they were getting stock ‘we’re looking into it’ responses.

But luckily it also drew the attention of one-time fellow blogger Greg Ritter (Greg, come back, we miss you who cannily diagnosed the problem as likely being caused by extensions to Firefox that were messing with how Javascript was behaving. A quick google indicated this was entirely likely, and sure enough, disabling most of the extensions and upgrading a few others seems to have fixed the problem. I now have to go back and figure out systematically *which* extension caused the problem, but this test (along with checking Bloglines in a few other browsers) confirmed Greg’s hunch. My bad. So a tentative hurray that Bloglines seems to be working o.k. Note this is a different problem then the one that Michale Feldstein’s feed has been suffering, and I continue to be concerned that other feeds are similarly affected. - SWL