Web 2.0 in higher education

May 7, 2009 at 1:45 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, social media, software, web2.0

There is a belief in some circles that Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Joomla and Drupal are labour saving devices and that their very presence online will spontaneously invoke a community of highly-skilled individuals that will submit content and build the system in a coherent and meaningful way. This idea is a myth as virtual communities require a great deal of maintenance, promotion, and strategy to work in a meaningful way for all. It is almost impossible to make a virtual community work if the main concern is the technology alone. It is an inherently socio-technical exercise with the former being extraordinarily difficult in an institutional environment.

JISC will launch a report on Web 2 in Higher Education next Tuesday 12 May (that I will attend). I also draw attention to a case-study report published on the JISC web site last year that claims ‘The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource’ (link). In other words, building a virtual community is a very labour intensive and difficult task in HE and almost impossible if there is not at least some attempt at a community building strategy. A virtual community needs a strong sense of community through a coherent and interesting concept, a belief that the labour that the user is contributing to the site is meaningful and consequential, and some sort of reward system. There is no rigid method for making a community site work, but it does take a strategy to grow and foster the community but the one that develops may not always be the one that was imagined in the first instance.

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Therac-25: the killer of all case studies

April 22, 2009 at 1:26 pm · Filed under software

Those involved in writing case studies or teaching ethics to ICT  students may find the Therac-25 case of great interest. Basically it is about a medical machine that delivered a lethal dosage of radiation. But rather than being the fault of an individual; it was an entire systems fault. In other words if you have ever doubted the importance of a socio-technical perspective you practical beast you, think again! Well worth a read (link).

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Reclaiming the local…

April 13, 2009 at 7:14 pm · Filed under media, social media, software, web2.0

(thanks to the NY Times)

If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.  

Minh Uong/The New York Times

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants (link NY Times)

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Report: Tools for Data-Driven Scholarship (or tools for value driven scholarship?)

April 10, 2009 at 9:26 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, software, tools

(Google’s data centre)

Another excellent report from some excellent US scholars. But I wish that I had more time to properly interrogate the ideas and claims I often read in these Digital Humanities documents ( but if I may be a bold and superficial blogger, there are some recurring themes in numerous of these documents). ‘Data driven’ scholarship is closely linked to science, meaning that it is the imposition of the scientific method upon the humanities. This means that the intellectual paradigm of ‘data-driven’ scholarship is empirical, positivist, and rational. From a progressive humanistic perspective, these are very old-fashioned ideas perpetuated by elite schools in elite Universities (repeat after me 27 times young man!). In some ways the tools don’t matter; it is the intellectual underpinnings of the so-called claim of ’scholarly transformations’ that do. The ‘humanities’ have numerous so-called ‘intellectual transformations’ but few if any of them has anything to do with empirical and positivist thought. Sorry, the humanities is not ‘big science’. The human condition is not all together rational. There is a massive tension here; we must never be driven by scientific nor engineering dreams; we must be driven by the values we place in our own intellectual traditions. These tools matter, but only in the context of the latter.

As documented in Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, we are witnessing an extraordinary moment in cultural history when the humanities and social sciences are undergoing a foundational transformation. Tools are one essential element of this transformation, along with access to cultural data in digital form. The need to “develop and maintain open standards and robust tools” was one of eight key recommendations in the ACLS report, inspired by the NSF’s 2003 Atkins report on cyberinfrastructure.[Unsworth et al., Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, American Council of Learned Societies, 2006] (link).

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Online Democratic Deliberation in a Time of Information Abundance

September 14, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, governance, humanities computing, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This article of mine recently appeared in the journal, Fast Capitalism.

The intensified use of the Internet by civil society groups and governments for political purposes has left many questions unexplained�especially in terms of the Internet’s effects upon deliberative democratic processes. The Internet was first imagined as a means to revitalize deliberative processes. However, poor design and lack of usability research meant that many ambitions went largely unrealized. With a new wave of Internet technologies, ‘deliberative design’ has become even more important to stem what many claim is a trend towards political fragmentation and disaggregation. In a time of ‘information abundance’ mounting political communication online may also undermine collectivist, deliberative democratic processes, distinct from the ambition to renew these processes. There is therefore a pressing need to design Internet technologies that serve deliberative democracy, rather than unwittingly undermine it (link)

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The (Opensource) Economy of Regard

August 3, 2007 at 2:09 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, open source, software, technology, web2.0

An excellent article about why the open source software movement works by Dalle, David, Ghosh, and Wolak and presented 2 years ago at the Oxford Internet Institute.

http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/Economy-of-Regard_8+_OWLS.pdf

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Australian Conservatives give MySpace a wide berth

July 18, 2007 at 9:56 am · Filed under media, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age. And Ironic considering that MySpace is owned by the biggest Australian Conservative of them all.

The Federal Liberal Party appears to be snubbing MySpace, after the social network publicly criticised the Liberals’ response to its new Impact political channel.

The channel – which MySpace says facilitates direct communication between politicians, non-profit organisations and voters – officially launched last Thursday, with profiles for 20 individual politicians.

It is understood the Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to create his own profile page because he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation. (link)

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Towards an institutional typology of digital humanities centres

May 11, 2007 at 1:07 am · Filed under communuity informatics, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, software

Thanks to John Unsworth for the link…

This Wiki presents a structured list of departments, centres, institutes and other institutional forms that variously instantiate humanities computing. For each entry a link is provided to the relevant site on the WWW and a brief description given. This list represents an ongoing attempt to derive a basic typology from a complex variety of activities and so to provide institutional models for the field. Despite the fact that national academic conventions vary quite widely and cultural differences make comparisons difficult if not hazardous, no attempt has been made here to account for them. The intention is not to define what is happening in the field world-wide, rather it is to provoke discussion leading either to consensus or at least to an improved understanding of the conditions under which computing humanists work. Constructive criticisms and clarifications are not merely welcome, they are to the point.

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Democratisation and the Networked Public Sphere

April 12, 2007 at 8:32 pm · Filed under events, political communication, social media, software, web2.0

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What is Annodex (hypertextual video)?

February 27, 2007 at 2:28 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, media, social media, software, video, web2.0

This fantastic film annotation (ie. hypertextual video) project is being developed by the CSRIO in Australia and other institutions.

When http, html and URIs were invented, the World Wide Web took its shape. With the technology provided here, we extend the Web to audio-visual data: Annodex, cmml and temporal URIs allow the creation of Webs of Videos. They also enable Web search engines to crawl and index audio-visual content. Just apply anything you know from the Web to audio-visual content – that’s Annodex (link).

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UK Government Restrictions on Street Photography

February 27, 2007 at 1:51 am · Filed under governance, political communication, politics, social media, software, technology, web2.0

(the software for No 10 was developed by MySociety.org)

Signing up to ask the Prime Minister to Stop proposed restrictions
regarding photography in public places

The UK Govt are about to propose restrictions on photography in
public places which could make street photography and documentary
photography against the law. There's a petition on the Downing St
website against the Government's proposals to restrict the use of
photography in public areas. Sign up to the petition now. (thanks to Nettime for the link)

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Photography/

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Vidipedia

February 21, 2007 at 11:37 pm · Filed under media, social media, software, technology, video, web2.0

After 640-802, many professionals think that it is of no use to write 70-290 as well. This is why they skip it and go for 646-204 directly. Although this makes them eligible for 642-901 , but majority flunks the real exam.

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A wiki for video…check out this research at the the University of Newcastle (UK) in the field of ‘media computing’ within computer science (thanks to Tobias for the Link)

Releasing the hidden value contained in the tens of millions of hours of the world�s media archives is dependent on the widespread of these collections in order to facilitate access. However, archive owners are reluctant to commit to the costs of digitization until two key enablers occur: (a) A cost effective mechanism to annotate the collection such that potential users can search audio/video content to identify items that will satisfy their information need; and (b) A working business model that supports the costs of digitization by demonstrating new revenue streams as a result of making the collection available. The Vidipedia project seeks to address these needs by examining the potential for community based annotation and identifying a business model that supports it. The project will create a tool that will address the challenges of archiving, search and discovery for producers and consumers of multimedia content. Vidipedia will also enable interoperability at the semantic level between services and systems that support inter-enterprise.

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timeXchange Project

February 20, 2007 at 7:45 pm · Filed under software, web2.0

Another interesting application from the Web 2.0 world is timeXchange.net based in Chicago. For the increasing number of us whose work is project oriented, this system offers a easy way to manage and track expenses. Thanks to Joe PieKarz for the (Link).

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What is the Haystack Project?

February 20, 2007 at 4:00 am · Filed under social media, software, web2.0

The Haystack Project is investigating approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them. By removing arbitrary application-created barriers, which handle only certain information �types� and relationships as defined by the developer, we aim to let users define their most effective arrangements and connections between views of information. Such personalization of information management will dramatically improve everyone�s ability to find what they need when they need it. We are currently exploring these ideas…(link)

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Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities

February 16, 2007 at 11:35 pm · Filed under design, e-science, education, events, humanities computing, software, technology, web2.0

This site from IATH (the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) at the University of Virginia contains the findings of a summit held in 2006 about digital tools in the humanities. The report is excellent reading; and points to the need for innovations in the humanities such as ICT Guides (link)

Digital tools are enabling and enriching scholarship in the humanities to a great extent. Within the past few years, humanities scholars have begun to design, develop, and apply digital tools for their own scholarship. Both the tool-building and tool-using communities are growing, and there is a need for a summit that can assess the state of development of digital tools for humanities research, as well as the effectiveness of the supporting and integrating cyberinfrastructure.

What defines a digital tool? How are they used by the humanities community? What are the best tools? What tools are missing? How can we develop a common vocabulary so that we can develop and share tools across various communities? What does the community need to do so that these tools are more interoperable? What are the grand challenges for building digital tools for humanities research?

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