October 10, 2005 This article surveys properties of social networks and the semantic web, suggests that social network analysis applies to semantic content, argues that semantic content is more searchable if social network metadata is merged with semantic web metadata. [Comment]

Good question, eh? And the answer is pretty simple - when they're imposed from the top (usually in a slap-dash duct-tape manner), they fail. And they poison any attempt that may follow. "That's the key. It has to belong to the teachers who are part of the community. If the community belongs to 'the administration' and teachers are merely invited to attend, things fall apart." Now the thing is - what is true for teachers, is also true for students. Oh - and dig the format of this blog post. What we have here is someone deftly summarizing an online conversation so well we don't even notice it. [Tags: Web Logs, Learning Communities] [Comment]

I was waiting for an update, but it never came so I'll run with what I have. It appears from this report that ADL is planning to set up a "stewardship" for SCORM. "It is clear in the discussion that it is NOT the intention of the US Department of Defence funded ADL Initiative to give up SCORM and its related technologies. Rather, it is a way forward to further advance the vision of creating a global interoperable infrastructure for advanced distributed learning." Interesting. [Tags: Metadata, Interoperability, SCORM] [Comment]

Lanny Arvan takes Merlot to task, arguing that its content review process doesn't serve downstream users. I like the way he sketches an alternative: "So go to Bloglines.com, do a search on your favorite topic (I chose edtech) and then for some of the blogs that come up, click on “Subscribers” and you should see the list of those subscribers who made their subscription public. Then click on a few of them and see what they have as their feeds in the topic you searched. Then a couple of more iterations on the same. I think you’ll find that its seems like there are a few core blogs that many people read and then a bund more out there. Those core blogs end up being the trusted sources I mentioned above." [Tags: Subscription Services, Web Logs, MERLOT, Bloglines] [Comment]

Seeing how ERIC has basically dropped off the radar, this update on the fate of the resource library is welcome. According to this article, "ERIC announced the release of citation management functionality. Searchers can now mark records for placement in a temporary work space called 'My Clipboard.'" Of course, what I'd much rather do is pluck them from my RSS feed and blog them. Oh well, one step at a time. This ITI NewsLink newsletter (first time I've seen it) looks like a good read, too - I'll subscribe by email, but really, again, I'd rather be reading it in RSS. [Tags: Newsletters, Web Logs] [Comment]

I haven't had the chance to listen to this yet, but it has been bookmarked in my Bloglines for the last week or so (so I'm going to). That said, it seems like it would be a good link in view of the next two (conference-based) items. Me, I'm pretty ruthless with conferences - it costs a lot of time and money, and so I focus on getting what I want out of it - which isn't always the formal papers (though if a paper looks innovative you can count on finding me lurking in the back row), and is more likely to involve engaging in a hallway conversation, spending a much-too-late evening in the pub, and haranguing vendors in the trade show. [Tags: Bloglines] [Comment]

The Open Education Conference proceedings are now available as a 181 page PDF document - the last 8 pages are blank, but that's small consolation as it's still something you have to print out rather than struggle through online. There's a lot of good content here and the usual players in open educational content - Wikipedia, Connexions, eduCommons, Merlot, Public Library of Science, OOPS and many more - are all represented with project updates. As Luc Chu said, "Confucius said that, 'They hate not to make use of their abilities, yet they do not necessarily work out of self-interest.'" [Tags: Project Based Learning, Wikipedia, MERLOT, Connexions, Public Library of Science] [Comment]

Mathemagenic pointed to this conference website featuring dozens of interesting papers - well, more accurately, abstracts, as I didn't find a single full paper despite searching through dozens. The papers look interesting, though I'm not sure how many would be worth reading in detail. The abstracts themselves constitute almsot the full fifteen minutes delegates were likely allocated. It makes me thing, isn't there a better way of presenting this content? The abstracts were a pain to click through, the pages badly design, the text too small and too grey - and having the full papers would be worse! As I was reading, I was thinking how much nice it would be were the conference presented more like a newspaper or magazine - you know, by people who understand design. And writing. [Tags: Web Logs] [Comment]

Yahoo! launched a new podcast search and subscribe service on Sunday, marking the most significant development in the field since ipodder (now known as indiepodder). Yahoo! does podcasting a bit differently - "When you subscribe... you will be asked to download a small file called a .pcast file that contains information about the podcast. This file tells jukebox software like Yahoo! Music Engine, iTunes 5.0, and others to keep tabs on this podcast and to go fetch new episodes for you whenever they are ready." The .pcast file looks almost exactly like an RSS file. Alex Williams comments on Corante, "A striking trend is emerging with the search players that you see in Yahoo! Podcast.. It's not that people are being directed away from the search engine but keeping you in the Yahoo! garden to find and subscribe to RSS feeds." [Tags: Podcasting, Assessment, Yahoo!] [Comment]

Google launched an RSS feed reader last week to wide - and generally negative - publicity in the blogging community. Not because people questioned whether the world needed another feed reader, much less one by Google (though there was that undercurrent), but more because people found the interface less user-friendly than most of Google's previous work. Some writers reported having trouble uploading their OPML (a format that lists their subscriptions) from Bloglines; mine mostly uploaded, but it wasn't problem-free. Others commented on the clicking you have to to - the 'next' button is really in the wrong place (upper left, and it says 'Down' - it's like web-surfing with crossed hands. As the article linked here shows, you can blog items you find interesting (if you can find the tiny drop-down in the upper right). It requires, of course, a Google account - which is why I linked to a story about it rather than straight in; unless you have an account it just punts you to a login. [Tags: OPML, Subscription Services, Google, Web Logs, Bloglines] [Comment]

Summary of a talk by Morgan-Stanley's Mary Meeker at the recent web 2.0 conference. The question on everyone's mind, it seems, is whether we are in another bubble. And while the tenor seems to be that we are not, there are still trends worth watching. Mobile computing in China, for example. The valuation of enterprises by the number of links they can garner. Voice over internet. It's still early days, and venture capitalists, once burned, will take some time before leaping in to be burned again. [Tags: China] [Comment]