Bazaar seminar: Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?

With Web 2.0, more and more people have their documents, products, personal details and photos stashed all over the internet – what issues does this raise for education?

- and, it’s in lovely Barcelona! (25 October, 2006)

Child of LKL SoSo, and Manchester Workshop Series

Child of LKL SoSo

Anjana (aka Natasha on-line), Steve and Mark had a longish meeting on the 31 August 06 to discuss arrangements for the spin-off workshop series that was mooted during the original series. As yet no name has been suggested for the series.

The series will be held at King’s College over a period of ten weeks, with five meetings once every two weeks. King’s is not a sponsor, but a handy place for the series. The first meeting will be a bit into semester 1, so academic attendees can settle into the new academic year.

We think that potential attendees will be PhD candidates, academic and research staff, and interested others.

We are hoping to up the level of discourse to reflect what was learned in the last series, but all sessions will have (perhaps three) graded readings so that neophytes can lever themselves into the general area for subsequent discussion.

The first three workshops will be set up in advance. After these, there will be a checkpoint for group discussion of what we should do for the final two sessions. No topics have been set for the first three workshops as yet, except that they will be in a very broad conception of the social software area. Suggestions please in an e-mail, perhaps to our Google Groups e-mail address.

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, we have adopted some roles:

• Anjana – general organiser
• Steve – room booking and arrangements czar
• Mark – wiki editor / tools meister

We expect to hand these roles off to others for a later third series…

Manchester Workshop Series
Also, there is to be a somewhat similar series hosted by the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science. This series will concentrate on the convergence of broadcast media, social software, community formation, and elearning.

Contact mark – a – t – cs.man.ac.uk to ask for more information when it appears.

Links, remote attendance

We are not sure about the possibilities of linking these workshop series, nor about remote attendance.

However, for the Child of LKL SoSo, we want to provide unrecorded real-time meeting facilities for members of the group who can not get to central London.

Mark is also blogging elsewhere

Inevitably I have gone off and started blogging elsewhere.

Aside: For such is the transformative power of LKL SoSo; bow down and be humbled in the presence of transformative group process… (whoops, I don’t know how that slipped in )

One blog is explicitly for interacting with a new community I have caught up with, the Connected learning Community (see Frapper map here). That blog is markz space, and it is explicitly an experiment in transforming a blog into as much of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) as the blog can become. I’m not entirely sure of future success, at least in blog-only form, but it will be interesting to see where it gets to. Some transformations are on hold for now while Blogger completes an important upgrade cycle.

My other blog is purely elearning related and a little scant at the moment, but has entries on the Wikipedia History of PLEs page, in response to Blackboard and its recent mis-founded patent of the VLE. See also the Wikipedia History of VLEs page.

Honey, where did you put the cat’s RSS?

Web-too-oh: Wondermark sums it up.

read more | digg story

Tagora

No, it’s not Totoro’s cousin.

Tagora is a recently launched EU research project (STREP) exporing the “Semiotic dynamics” of SoSo. They will be using Bibsonomy as their testbed, which makes sense – given that the makers of Bibsonomy are project partners:

This research project is located at the interface of several fields, such as computer science, complex systems science, cognitive science, psycholinguistics and information architecture, and is likely to feed back into the design of better applications. The project will contribute to Semiotic Dynamics, a new field that studies how semiotic relations can originate, spread, and evolve over time in populations, by combining recent advances in linguistics and cognitive science with methodological and theoretical tools from complex systems and computer science.

The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction in a variety of contexts. Such popularity, in fact, is making available large amounts of raw data from online semiotic systems (for example, collaborative tagging systems) and these data may become the foundantion of a true scientific investigation about the behavior of human agents on the Web and the dynamics of information in online communities.

The project ultimately aims at creating a virtuous cycle between data analysis, modeling and theoretical constructions, with the ultimate goal of understanding, predicting and controlling the Semiotic Dynamics of online social systems.

apropos Digg

Have a look at swarm.

Wikipedia adds new feature – Cite This Article

Interesting Wikipedia feature: Cite This Article. From anywhere inside wikipedia click on ‘Cite This Article’ to get the full citation in 9 different formats, MLA, APA, and Bibtex included!

No less interesting is the discussion on Digg about the viability of citing Wikipedia.

read more | digg story

Some stats on market share email, news, messaging, maps, social networking

From the New York Times. Interesting stats.

Web2.1 (II)

Tribler is a p2p file-sharing tool which uses social networking to enhance quality & performance. While I haven’t tried it yet, or even read the paper, the concept is definetly called for. Most so-so tools have a very limited perception of ’social’. It’s usualy ‘me Tarazan you world’ or ‘me Tarazan you firends’, with no intermidiate levels. In the real world, I call my mum for recipies and my dad for car advice, but wouldn’t bother sharing a video with niether (unless its a home video of their grandchildren, which I wouldn’t want to share with anyone else). Its about time systems started reflecting these basic principles of social life!

Oh, and the reason they get a ‘Web2.1′ tag is that they’re also working on tag navigation and mob ranking.

Anyway – if anyone gives them a spin, do leave a comment here!

Web 2.1?

MarkaBoo is far from ready for use. For example:

• It only shows you yout 50 most common tags, but has no link to 'all tags'.
• It has no search facilty. I kid you not. MarkaBoo: bookmarking without search is like camping without a sleeping bag.
• It doesn't show clouds etc.

Yet it marks a significant milestone in the emergence of combined social web services. Markaboo is a tagging / social bookmarking tool which also allows you to upload media files and create pages online. Now isn't that a 'how didn't they think of that before' moment?

Well, in a way – they did. Flickr was one of the first to do tags. But Flick (youtube, etc.) doesn't allow you to tag stuff that isn't Flickr. 

Create, store, share, tag – all in one shop. Briliant. Now they just need to get their act together. And add social networking.