randomosity

Browsing about through one of my Blue Dot friend’s additions, I read through an interesting article listing some education 2.0 sites. One of them is called stud.icio.us a site tied in with Facebook that provides a place to share notes with fellow students. The site makes good use of AJAX and is in the process of transitioning to its own v2. I played a round with the beta site and found it intriguing. It automatically matches you with classmates and provides a means to manage your assignment dates and other such deadlines. It offers places to share material beyond notes and obviously will set off some alarm bells for educators as to room for abuse.

1. Will students stop attending class and rely on notetakers to carry them through?
2. Will material beyond notes such as essay outlines and potentially full essays be available for use?
3. Are these all bad things?
4. Would they happen through other means anyway?
5. Does simply making sharing in an electronic format make abuse happen?
6. How does this make things any different from professors making lecture notes available?
7. What about Podcasts?

I have to admit I find the collaborative possibilities rife with potential and equally prone to abuse by those looking for the easy way out. Perhaps one of the better aspects of this rather public approach is just that…it is public.

A few weeks ago I blogged about Swivel, a cool place for kids to play with data and comment on others datasets and visualisations. Today Geoffrey blogged about an IBM Alphaworks site that takes this concept in a different direction.

Read the complete article… »

This constellation of researchers working in overlapping fields of knowledge, information, software and data visualization is a great jumping off spot. Visual-Literacy.org is a collective course spanning several institutions and involving a number of leaders in the field of visualisation. Sounds rather cool. As part of their prospectus they have constructed ‘maps’ of the visualisation constellation as geo-spatial map, periodic table, and a syllogism. This is a real practise/preach exercise and a wonderful overview of the wide range of activities in this field and their inter-relations. The periodic table is particularly impressive. Hover will popup a graphical representation of the technique noted. The syllogism makes a lot of sense. The periodic table must be complimented for the breadth of information conveyed and the attempt to systematize the volume. The table itself is a bit of a challenge to use and the metaphor of periodic table questionable, but a pointer in an interesting direction.

It’s that time of the year when we are bombarded with these, and like all of us I am trying to develop the appropriate strategies for winnowing out the chaff. The list of Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without is one that kept my interest. Michael Arrington has compiled an intriguing list of service-based companies that you may or may not have tried before. Some such as blue dot are providing a new spin on existing services, in this case the social bookmarking model of del.icio.us.
Read the complete article… »

Is this an up and coming phenom? Zopa and Prosper are two two startups offering to bring together borrowers and lenders and offer . The sense of ‘Simness’ (as in simcity/sim this sim that) is an interesting note. … As the author of this survey on these two services note, they even add fun to the act of borrowing and lending…quite an accomplishment.

Everyone knows that the value is in the network. SNA is a wonderful tool for academic and I am using it to map my local webs of commerce. The folks at Spoke however are doing this one step better. They have the typically enormous and touted list of key decision makers and influencers at companies around the world. Nothing short of a big Spam list there. However, on joining the network, you contribute your own contact list. Again nothing revolutionary in that…but here’s where it gets interesting. The little client that harvests your contacts for Spoke also measures how connected (inbetweeness in SNA-speak) you are based on frequency and nature of contact based on your email history. Sure its not flawless, but when you overlay this with all the other participants they are building one mega web and are creating a potentially rich map of influence flows. It raises some serious privacy and trust issues, but it is clearly pushing the envelope one step beyond. Many CRM apps are out there trying to build similar webs in an automated fashion, but generally require huge rejigging and manual creation of hierarchical relationship by thew user. Few actually automate the process, let alone start to weight the results through contactedness (not connectedness) mining. Intriguing.