David Warlick’s new web service is HitchHikr – an aggregator for participant generated summaries of conference experiences and related resources (flikr images). I suppose HitchHikr implies you get to go along without paying for the plane ticket (I tried HitchHiker and someone else evidently got that address first).
This is an interesting idea and I wonder how frequently and how the site will eventually be used. My first reaction was – I would rather be there than read about someone else’s experiences. Then I decided I would likely use the service even while attending. This is sort of a “smart mob” type of thinking – connecting with others linked to a location while in that location. I took some time to review the NECC information – it was a way to process my own NECC experiences in a little different way and to note some things I missed.
I am beginning to think I need an aggregator for the aggregators. Seriously, I don’t see myself combing this site to locate interesting tidbits within the large number of conferences I cannot possibly attend. However, perhaps some of the bloggers I follow will note interesting posts from unique conferences and I will make an attempt to explore.
C|NET News offers an interview (print and short video) with Michael Copps – FCC commissioner. The commissioner supports retaining the openness of the Internet and he urges content providers to become involved in the political process to prevent carriers from using the delivery system to manipulate user choice.
By the way, C|Net is experimenting with a type of concept map that shows how stories and concepts are linked (see the second page of the interview article for an example related to this issue).
You may have heard about the competing political agendas behind the net neutrality issue. A powerful voice in this debate is committee chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska. The following is a widely distributed statement by Senator Stevens most claim illustrates the pro provider (not information, but service) position on this issue.
I was listening to podcasts this afternoon while I drove to the lake for a little R&R. The podcasts orignated at NECC. One speaker expressed a familiar concern regarding the development of student “information literacy skills’, related these concerns to the variability in quality of what students encounter on the Internet, used the bogus Martin Luther King site as an example, and offered some familiar solutions. For some reason, perhaps because the words were coming from someone else, I thought about what was being described and decided I was not impressed. This is a personal insight because I have written things that were very similar to what was said. I am not impressed because the concerns are typically described in terms of issues I am not certain are serious problems and because the solutions provided deal with superficial techniques.
The description of the problem:
Perhaps you have seen the Martin Luther King site that was used as an example. It looks good, but further analysis reveals it originates from a white hate group and has a tainted message.
The solution:
Check the URL to determine where the site orignates.
My concern:
I am trying to imagine the reaction of a typical middle school student when encountering this site in order to complete a class assignment. I cannot seriously reach the conclusion that the student would select this site as the source for his report and ignore other sites that had been encountered. It occurs to me that the student may be infuenced by the site and identify some of the stereotypic themes promoted. If disposed by personal history, the student may agree with the comments unlikely to be discussed in the classroom. If more mainstream, the site may raise a certain curiousity because it demonstrates to the reader that there really are people out there who believe such things. I do not think recognizing the perspective/bias of the authors would be the problem.
Consider the type of things we ask students to do when selecting web information for careful consideration and use. What organization does the author work for? Was the author paid in one way or another for producting the site? Are the links out of date? Are there spelling and grammatical errors in the resource (supposedly as a sign of uneducated thinking, lack of review)?
I think my concern is that this checklist addresses the obvious and the issues of real concern are more about subtle bias. Maybe bias is not even the correct way to think about the real issues. We all are biased by what we already know and believe. This is a fundamental principle of constructivism or cognitive psychology. We understand in terms of what we already know. Simply put – how do you tell someone to think carefully about what you encounter in the world and about what you already believe?
A first step may be the use of some new examples. The bogus Martin Luther King web site is not what we should worry about. I am much more worried that a student might sit down beside his father who happens to be watching Bill O’Reilly and accept this as a model of how adults educate themselves about the world. Perhaps we should develop a checklist for the “No Spin Zone” or whatever a comparable CNN program might be (I don’t want to offend Bill). Perhaps instead of assuming learners should avoid slanted sites or television programs we should send students to several of these locations with different perspectives, ask them to identify key ideas in the information, and identify inconsistencies in what they encounter.
Remember, if you should find yourself in the no spin zone, think carefully and keep one foot on the floor.
I decided to set for myself the task of recommending a bookmarking service. After exploring a bit, I alterd my goal. Promoting a specific application would be presumptious on my part. I do not have enough experience with the options and the decision really comes down to personal preferences. A few comments and several links may be more valuable.
As I struggled with my initial goal, some of the comments made by Nicholas Negroponte (at NECC) came back to me (BTW – his comments are available as a podcast from the Apple Music Store). His comment on the commercial software/hardware scene pretty much claimed that vendors must create more powerful software and hardware to continue to attract business. The goal is to assure income by creating more powerful stuff rather than creating less expensive stuff capable of doing a fixed set of things. An unintended consequence may be that the powerful stuff is less friendly to use and perhaps more cumbersome than most users would require.
The connection? Consider ease of use relative to power/features when commiting to a bookmarking service. Perhaps some of the more sophisticated and full-featured programs may exceed your needs.
Some other bloggers attempting to provide product comparisons:
Scuttle might be useful if you have access to a server and enjoy having control of a bookmarking site. Control might involve defining the general purpose for the bookmarking site and limiting those who are allowed to contribute.
My personal favorite among these options is FURL. This site not only allows storage of the URL, tags, and personal annotations, but also saves a copy of the site on a specific day (which may differ from what the site displays on a different day and clearly different if the actual site goes away).
I am guessing that del.icio.us is the most popular bookmarking site. It is easy to use. Popularity may be an issue because the “social” part of social bookmarking depends on others and theoretically the more “others” with interests that match your own the better. I think popularity may play one other role. I wonder how all of these sites are going to survive. I would think popularity would have something to do with the business model sustaining a site. A popular site would seem more attractive if it uses ads because it would expose more users to the ads. A popular site would also seem more attractive as a service provided by a funding source (e.g., Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) – the business model in this case concerns the potential to attract users to a location associated with other “paying” services.
Diigo is my most recent “experiment.” Diigo uses an interesting approach to annotation (I think I remember the site describing what they offer as social annotation). Imagine a clear layer over the web page you are viewing. This layer may contain your personal highlighting and postit-like notes. Your private and other’s public additions become visible when the site is viewed. The value of this approach to you may depend on how much importance you place on the comments provided by others. Diigo also allows sites it bookmarks to be automatically added to several other bookmarking services (although I could not figure out how to add the annotations to a second service). I want to see if this service is around 6 months from now before I get too excited. I do think some of the features are interesting.
In general, I prefer to see several competitors working to create comparable products. Such competition drives innovation. Having said this and aside from the issue of survival, the nature of social software sometimes means that value increases with participants. Mechanisms for easily exporting personal resources to multiple services would be one way for any individual to create a situation in which it would make sense to pick from a number of services depending on which seemed most appropriate to an immediate need.
This issue was raised on the evening news so I had to find the online source. Hitwise has just published some stats attempting to document the most popular Internet sites. These data indicate that MySpace.com is the most popular U.S. destination accounting for an astounding 4.5% of web visits. Last year at this time myspace was in 12th position. This shows you what a little bad publicity will do.
Other popular destinations (Google, Yahoo) have been quick to indicate that they are really a collection of services and not a single destination. Probably so. While these data have generated some skepticism and there may be some issues regarding the methodology that was employed to generate these rankings, the fact that nearly any procedure would position MySpace at this rank should be some type of wake up. Either many of us are really rotten people or MySpace has found a way to tap a need in a large number of people.
Time for me and many of you to get a MySpace account. By the way, I find MySpace clunky, messy and very slow. Such complaints obviously are not concerns to those who spend a great deal of time within this environment.
The drive in one of my Macs crashed. These things happen. I thought I had backed things up, but you always find something you missed. One of the first things I have discovered is that I did not understand how iWeb stores the web content a user creates. I know where the pages are in my .Mac account and where they are on my personal server. I did not consider where the pages might be on my desktop machine.
It turns out the files are stored in what seems a really obscure place – the “Application Support” folder within the Library. This is my first experience with the Application Support folder. The logic of this approach escapes me – other products one creates seem destined for an appropriately named folder (documents, music, movies, sites) and the content is not hidden within a subfolder of the Library.
Anyway, here is why it matters. iWeb uses something called a “domain” file to organize the pieces of your web site (the pages, objects, etc.). You have access to all of the pieces with the exception of the domain file on the server. The problem is that without this domain file, iWeb cannot open individual web pages. The organizational file is not unique to iWeb. GoLive (my favorite web authoring tool – my reaction to Adobe giving up on GoLive instead of Dreamweaver is another issue) uses a .site file. What GoLive does that iWeb does not is to allow web site “pieces” to be imported into a newly defined site. One can build a new site from parts of an old site. This appears to not be possible with iWeb. In my situation, I will probably have to create a new site and then cut and paste pieces (images, segments of text) in an attempt to recreate the old version of the site.
Unless you happen to be an iWeb/iLife user this will not make much sense. However, if you work with iWeb my misfortunate may be useful to you. Add the iWeb folder within Application Support to the list of folders you back up on a regular basis.
The “issue” I encountered with iWeb made me realize some related limitations. iWeb is not a tool for collaboration. iWeb becomes cumbersome if one is accustomed to working from multiple machines. While the design of iWeb may explain such limitations, some method for importing web resources would be very useful.
The topic of whether or not wikipedia content should be referenced in papers will come up more and more. Alan Liu provides some thoughtful comments on the topic.
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