Semantic Web

In this podcast we feature a conversation between George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. and Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University It was recorded at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

Michael Wesch presented a session entitled, "Human Futures for Technology and Education" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. He also produced a video, which is referenced in this conversation, entitled "The Machine is Us/ing Us".

George Siemens presented a session entitled, "Connectivism" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

Stephen Downes' post over at Half an Hour on the likely future of the Semantic Web has sparked a rich and fascinating discussion. Stephen's post started with web standards, but his wider message touches on issues of business practice, corporate vs OSS development models, identity and data management, and plain old user preferences, among many other issues.

I recently submitted a proposal to the ALT-C 2007 conference about personal archiving practices - investigating some of the ways that we take care of our personal data (or don't) in an era of fast-multiplying accounts (commercial and non-commercial) and ever-more-widely distributed personal data. Issues of trust are becoming critical - who can I trust to take care of my data? (See also the wiki notes for the seminar organised by Graham Attwell and the Bazaar team, "Hey Dude, Where's My Data?").

For me, it all starts and ends with the individual. So this is the section of Stephen's post that really spoke to me:

In this 15 minute recording, we'll hear from GMU's Roy Rosenzweig and Josh Greenberg.  Listen in has they cover a range of topics including the very interesting Zotero Firefox Extension.

Also of interest:
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this 19 minute recording, we'll hear from the National Portfolio Coordinator of the Australian National University, Christopher Blackall.  Listen in as he shares thoughts on institutional repositories, standards, and more.


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

In this 19 minute recording, we'll hear from MIT's MacKenzie Smith about a range of interesting work evolving out of SIMILE, D-Space and more..


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Most of us have been to events where participants take photos, but what happens to them at the end of the event?

Recently while taking photos at an event I was good-naturedly hassled about pictures I'd taken at a previous event with the same attendees. I'd put the photos, taken in a semi-private space, up on flickr.

I love taking pictures at events, because it means I have a permanent visual record of the people and the places. It means that in 12 months when a participant emails me I can reacquaint myself with the face that matches the name and email address. It also gives me something to illustrate my blog with.

On reflection, I believed I could do better than just blatting all the images up publicly on flickr. After a little editorial work (i.e. throwing out the really bad ones), I uploaded them to flickr privately and emailed the participants of the event the URLs of the images they're in, to give them the option of veto. This works because flickr uses authorisation only for HTML pages, images' privacy is protected due to the obscurity of the URL. All but one participant got back to me and approved the images. I have no idea whether the remaining participant objected to their photos, didn't receive the email or just never got around to responding. Once I'd had the bulk of the responses I started to make the images public.

The attached MP3 provides continuing coverage of a series of interviews conducted at the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Listen as Marilu Goodyear hosts a 30 minute interview with Phil Long, Senior Strategist for the Academic Computing Enterprise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among other things, they take on the issue of patents, discuss Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, and tackle the prospects for continued research on learning space design.

This 25 minute recording provides coverage of an interview with Google's Vint Cerf. In a couple of weeks, Dr. Cerf will be speaking at our Annual Conference, and we hope to see you then. For now, let's listen in as we cover a range of topics including Google Video, digital preservation, intellectual property, net neutrality and high performance computing.

After working on a comprehensive faculty eportfolio for several years now (myMAPP) I have begun to realize that the classification of the entries is extremly important.  Currently the entries are put into the system each having their own ontology.  It is this ontology that provides the description that is used by the system to automatically map them to quality standards.  It is this ability to describe the content provided by the semantics that will drive the use of ePortfolios at all levels of our lives. 

It seems to me a natural consequence of the increasing bridging of traditional data sources into RDF is that the number of "walled gardens" of RDF is increasing. Walled gardens are areas from which there is no escape, and while they certainly have their uses (in particular controlling who can access what), they erode the overall usefulness of the system as a whole, by meaning that you literally can't get to there from here.

Examples of RDF walled gardens include the FOAF generated by such systems as tribe.net and livejournal. While it is useful that these sites are exposing data in a machine readable web 2.0 format such as RDF/FOAF, the inability to link to people, resources and interests outside the walled garden represent a significant barrier to interoperability. I am the same person in my blog RSS feed, my flickr photo feed, my del.icio.us feed , my tribe FOAF and my hand-edited FOAF, but only the last can I link to the others, despite the fact that they are all in the same format.