Here's a story from The Chronicle of Higher Education on blogging in the academy.
Linda found this page chock full o' tasty KM research. Articles
Looks like a lot of fun beach reading...
Another class on campus working with blogs is also using Moveable Type. It's in the Technology, Literacy, and Culture Department, which some of us were discussing at Sholz's on Wednesday night.
Looks like there were both group and student blog components to the class, and they read a few texts we looked at (as well as David Hockney's recent work on the use of optics by the Old Masters).
Looks like a pretty interesting class; maybe the next section of KMS can somehow reach out to these students.
Lou Rosenfeld at Bloug has a post on Blogging K-logging.
I'm bumping into some great stuff on k-logs (knowledge weblogs used (mostly) inside organizations). K-logs promise to be inexpensive, lightweight, and valuable knowledge management tools, especially for teams. Any IAs (or others) have any experience with k-logs you'd like to share?
Here is a link to David's blog. I mentioned him in class the other day because his blog came up when I was doing research a few weeks back on a different area. Look around, he tends to keep up.
PS: If you'd like to mess with him, start commenting on some of his posts and be sure to mention that you heard he wears "cool shoes" but don't tell him where you heard it. ;-)
I was supposed to post this a while ago. This is the news aggregator I use when I want to check recent buzz on a particular topic. There is a premium service, but I just use the guest search feature. News Is Free: News Is Free
There is an article in TIME magazine that talks about war-related weblogs -- warblogs.
"War-related weblogs -- warblogs, for short-- have soared in popularity since the hostilities began. Their chief attracion is that they offer perspectives overlooked in most U.S. news reports -- from war photos too grisly to print to viewpoints too far outside the political mainstream. And because their diary-like formats are so informal, they tend to invite reader participation, discussion and fiery debate."
This article also mentioned that some blogs are from an Iraqi living in Baghdad, and soldiers stationed in the Middle East. It is very interesting to read opinions directly from people who actually were there using this technology.
Saw some good stuff today. I'll write up more detail this evening as I'm on a public computer right now (boo). Talks I intended today included:
Gesture + play (MIT AI Lab)
Privacy and networking (Colorado)
Measuring user frustration ((Johns Hopkins)
User recall of usability errors (Cornell)
Lab vs contextual usability testing (Indiana)
Affective structures of a txt document (MIT Media Lab)
How users assess credibility of web sites (Stanford)
Trust and Privacy - who wants to know what when (Berkeley)
Post Cognitivist HCI (a bunch of folks including Terry Winograd - Stanford)
Affective gaming - Glasgow Caledonian Univ - UK)
more later....
I just blogged a chat transcript on my personal blog because of an interesting tidbit of information it conveyed, then thought of our instructor's bewilderment at people who download, let alone blog, celebrity chat transcripts, so I thought I would post that here.
From the Newsweek article:
More press on weblogs as knowledge management tools for covering international press regarding the war, particularly the "collectives" mention.
An even more comprehensive view can be obtained by going to “warblog collectives” that gather the information and links from multiple sites. If you go to a site like The Command Post, you can find updates every five or six minutes, each one a different story. Within a few minutes on Friday, there were reports from AP, Reuters, Iraqi News, the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, The Washington Post and the Samizdata and Outside the Beltway blogs.
...The collectives “show the self-organizing, distributed nature of the Blogosphere,” says popular blogger Glenn Reynolds, whose own Instapundit uber-linking site has been pulling in 200,000 page views a day during the war.
I caught a notice about the "Blog Bar " over at Library Stuff today. The Blog Bar is "a neat little tool to add to your IE Taskbar. Click on the Blogger icon and a side bar comes up where you can blog, post, and publish your entries. Only works with Blogger." Steven also mentioned a new tool called FM Radiostation, which provides a different interface for Radio (it looks like it might be a bit easier to use). I downloaded it today and will try it out this weekend.
Fossil has developed a watch with a Palm OS, coming out this summer.
I know I'd lose the stylus, and four days of battery life seems like it could be a real hassle, but I bet it catches on....
The "next generation" watch seems to be a new focus. This one actually receives instant messages.
LISNews.com reports that the online OED has added New Oxford English Dictionary Words including "blog, v.; blogger, n.; blogging, n.; weblog, n.; weblogger, n.; weblogging, n." Their definition of blogging is:
The activity of writing or maintaining a weblog.
"A cultish techie activity"? Hmmm.
Blogger has a new feature that allows you to post an audio blog to your blogspot by telephone call. I tried the "free sample" using my home phone, but you could post from a cell phone also if you really want to stay mobile and blog! The cost is $3.00 for 12 2-minute audio posts per month. I'm going to try and find out how popular it is. Check out my "test" post on my blog.
Last Tuesday Mr. Turnbull suggested we go ahead and try using Infopop's UBB.x for discussions pertaining to the remaining week's topics. This is the afforementioned tool we spoke about briefly in class. For those who haven't registered, here is a quick link in case you missed it in email.
I decided to post this story here instead of my blog because I think it's really relevant to the class. InfoWorld has an article today on "Knowledge managing." The subtitle reads "The technology to make KM work is available -- now is the time to reconsider old implementation hurdles and reap the benefits of knowledge sharing." Some of the points in the article arewell worth reading. They also have an interview with Robert Buckman, whom they describe as "KM's father figure."
If you're setting up a blog for yourself, you might want to consider allowing people to signup for daily updates through e-mail. I signed up my blog (actually, my RSS feed, but you can do it even without RSS) with Bloglet. This would be an easy way for us to keep track of each other!
Well, I have managed to set up a personal blog. I used Radio UserLand and published the blog to my iSchool account: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~dcplumer/blog/.
So far, there are some features I like and others I don't. It's not free (I'm on the 30 day trial right now) and the prebuilt templates are, frankly, uninspired; I'm going to work on beautifying things tomorrow. On the plus side, the built-in news aggregator makes it VERY easy to post news stories, and it has RSS support if you like that kind of thing. It has built in e-mail posting, and I think I've enabled remote posting to my server, so it's not just a desktop solution, as the books would have you believe. There are, however, some CMS features to the desktop system that I hope to play with over time.
I realize this is not on this week's topic, and I apologize - but I'd like to know if others are feeling as down on this discussion format as I am? I've found it is not conducive to good discussions though really good for one-offs/blogs. That is not to say that the content isn't great. The posts that do have comments are quite buried, and the need to scroll forever to see what is new is pretty bad. It is overwhelming on the page and makes me actually NOT want to read. I am spoiled by good discussion boards that show me the latest post under a topic header that doesn't move, with number of views, and yes - a rating. No need to show me the whole message - just the subject line.
If everyone else is cool and I'm the Lone-Anal-Retentive-UI-Designer then so be it. ...and since I hate being part of the problem and not the solution, I will try to offer some ideas for better discussion formats. Of couse, I doubt the content will be exportable so that might kill any wishful thinking.
...and their competitor, vBulletin
and while these might be more $ than free, there are a bunch of less expensive boards out there that have similar functionality.
Thanks for listening ;-)
Amanda
Microsoft announced late last week that they are developing the Windows Rights Management Services, which will allow companies to protect the privacy of documents created through their Office software. While the outcry over the announcement has centered on how it will impact "whistle-blowing", I think there are some very useful applications. Doctors, CPAs, and others who keep personal records are definitely a market where I see the need for this type of security. As more and more documents become available online, it would be nice to know that some things have the potential to be kept private.
Soon you will be able to talk on the phone (in 5 continents), email, play mp3s, send images, keep to-do lists, AND play action packed games. Nokia and Sega (among others) teamed up to create the ultimate time management / time waster. For the kid in all of us (or at least some) we will finally be able to get in some gaming on the fly without having to toot about a Gameboy.
The device is called N-gage will be available in the fall for a mere (est) $200 - $300.
Check it out: www.n-gage.com
The link for one of our readings, "Taskmaster: recasting email as task management" seems to be broken. I've found another e-copy at the Toronto site: http://peach.mie.utoronto.ca/people/jacek/emailresearch/CSCW2002/submissions/PARC-Taskmaster%20position%20paper.pdf
Found an article that was pretty interesting about MS's SPOT technology
they're working on which reminded me about ubiqutous computing.
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=ces09&date=20030109
short blurb from the article:
SPOT technology may also power alarm clocks, refrigerator magnets and other
devices. It is designed to accomplish several goals for Microsoft:
. Allow users to access computer data in different locations and on
different devices.
. Provide opportunities for programmers using Microsoft software to build
new applications.
. Provide a new opportunity for Microsoft to sell subscriptions to data
services.
Take a quick look for a quantitative way to measure the marketplace of ideas:
Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
Another Call for Papers that I spotted in last month's DLib Magazine:
ACM CIKM 2003, 12th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2 - 8 November 2003, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Preliminary Call for Papers. The deadline for submission is 20 May 2003.
"Since 1992, CIKM has brought together leading researchers and developers from several areas of information and knowledge management, database management systems (DBMS) and information retrieval (IR). We continue this tradition of collaboration between information and knowledge management. Only the highest caliber papers submitted to CIKM 2003 will be accepted."
"We have a special interest in papers that bridge the areas of databases and information retrieval."
For details and additional information, please see http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~cikm2003/CIKM_CFP.html