Del.icio.us Brainfood - Educational tagging service

John Palfrey (director of Harvard's Berkmann Center for Internet & Society) just spoke at a session of UOC 's UNESCO e-learning chair about the practices and conditions of digital natives and what this means for education. At one point the discussion turned towards entrepreneurship as a suitable paradigm to describe the creative destruction of educational practices, and this is when the following education 2.0 idea struck me:

As i am elaborating in my thesis, education institutions are not exploiting the potentials to aggregate relevance the same way financial institutions are doing[1]. So here is one idea that identifies an opportunity to aggregate relevance of professors:

Build a tagging service like del.icio.us (or collabroate with them) that allows for filtering and synergizing relevance in respect to the source of the tag's author. By building exclusive academic tagging networks the quality of the information refferred to is to a certain degree 'guaranteed' and if the network

This idea would be one way "to share the knowledge of the university" as Julia Minguillon pointed out is the key mandate (formulated in the web 2.0 fashion) of educational institutions.

This idea might also entangle very well with the 'social search engine' e.g. wikia "the search engine that changes everything" concept, pursued by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. An entrepreneurial university could reap first mover advantages and publicity by partnering up and pioneering 'professors recommended' search results.

UPDATE: I just found an interesting service that aims pretty much at what i am thinking about: http://edtags.org/ (is a Harvard related initiative)

------------------------
[1] This is a theme i have found in Sasskia Sassen's work - she compares the exploitation of digitization by financial organisation with civil society organisations.

Die SPD faellt durch sinnvolle nutzung des netzes auf

Ein freund hat mir gerade die plattform www.programmwerkstatt.spd.de vorgestellt. Sieht echt ganz brauchbar aus was da passiert. Die SPD will sich im herbst wohl ein neues grundsatz programm geben und dazu wurden viele thesen erarbeitet. Diese thesen kann man nun auf der plattform web 2.0 maessisch kommentieren und bewerten. Wenn die ergebnisse dann auch in die debatte mit eingehen dann waer dass doch mal was, wa?

Exchange of arguments & reaching decisions online

I guess most of us agree that the online tool (mailing list) and practices we have to have a share information and opinion are rather good but they are producing information overload. However compared to traditional discourse's location and time constrains there is an improvement in inclusiveness.

Partially as a result of the information overload however, our tool is rather poor for the important practice to collectively take a decision and to have a controvesial exchange of arguments.

Allow me to point your attention to http://grass-arena.net = Group Report Authoring Support System

"The purpose of the GRASS project is to develop an arena for credible societal discourse. Its aim is to produce concise group reports that give their readers an uptodate and credible overview of the positions of various stakeholders on a particular issue. As such, these reports can play an important role in consensus assessment and catalyzing societal conflict resolution."

The system
- gives an index (overview) page including the current state of the decision in question via pro/contra/neutral positions
- structures the exchange of arguments which significantly improves clarity and density
- transparently shows the activities of users

I dont think this system is the short-term solution but it is an indication as to what we will hopefully have sometime down the road.


PS: GRASS seems to be discontinued - If anybody knows a similar system i would be very interested to learn about it!

SecondLife architecture interface prove of concept

Thomas a.k.a. www.stylewalker.net
just found a really cool demonstration of how to 'work around' the in-convinient and un-productive internal SL building tools.

"To make this, I used PDFs from our architects as a base to trace all the walls on 11 layers in an Adobe Illustrator file, then exported each floor as an XML-based Scalable Vector Graphics file, each of which I ran through a PHP script to extract the object info and convert it to something I could paste in a notecard. Then I made 11 objects (the little cubes in front of me in the video) that scoot themselves off to a predetermined location, spew out prims based on the notecards, and send them to their appropriate positions. The next step, is to rez this on the ground, terraform, and then texture-bake every single prim..."
Click on the image to see the really impresive video!

Knowledge map of online communities

Makezine is just a great nerd-hub. This morning i found the visualization of cyberspaces' community landscape. A great example of knowledge visualisation if you ask me.

Ps: i haven't seen any copy-right or -left statements, but - it coming from makezine - i expect that it is ok. to show the pic - i have not even touched it - it comes from the original server.

Die kanzlerin besser als erwartet

Angela Merkel war nicht meine kandidatin der letzten wahl. Ja ich muss gestehen dass ich ihrgegenueber zunaechst recht negativ eingestellt war. Aber man muss sagen, sie ist bis jetzt noch fuer nichts was ich als eine skandaloese fehlentwicklung nennen wuerde verantwortlich. Im gegenteil ich stimme dem autor des spiegel artikels "Staunen dreimal" ,den ich hiermit empfehlen moechte, in grossen zuegen zu. Speziell aussenpolitisch bewegt sie sich geschickt und was er ueber die intelligente gestalltung der transatlantischen politik schreibt macht hoffnung.