EDUCAUSE | Semantic Web

ELI In Conversation: George Siemens and Michael Wesch Talk About Future Learning.

gbayne — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:48:53 -0600

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.

Bell Tolls for the Semantic Web

catherine — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:41:08 -0500

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:

"Yeah - we'll play games on Yahoo, create a not-too-serious blog with Google, post some tunes on MySpace (under an alias of course), and mess around with some photos on Flickr.

And we'll even go along with some unimportant things, like the university account and email, so we can access the course notes on Blackboard. The personal email address, that we got from our ISP, we will tell only to our closest friends - and we'll use the gmail account for logons and the Yahoo identity for spam.

We'll post to these Web 2.0 sites, but if the content means anything, we'll keep a copy on our computer as well (until Windows crashes and eats all your data, that is).

But trust them? Not a chance.

The future of the web will be based on personal computing."

An Interview about Zotero

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:53:48 -0600

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

An Interview with Christopher Blackall

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 09:37:56 -0600

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

An Interview with MacKenzie Smith

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:53:57 -0600

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

Event Photos

StuartYeates — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 03:37:22 -0600

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.

Now this was quite a bit of work. I had to: (a) write a form email; (b) track down everyone's email address; (c) match people to email address; (d) send off customised emails to everyone, (e) then track who respondedand (f) make public images that everyone had OK'd. But a bit more thought suggests that this could potentially be cut down hugely using an appropriate tool. In particular (a), (d) and (e) could be completely automated using a stateless tool and flickr. (b) and (c) would require a more sophisticated tool, with semantic web and/or image recognition capabilities, which put them in a different league.

How a tool might work:

The photographer uploads photos privately to a new set on flickr.
The photographer goes to the tool, which authenticates them with flickr, using the existing API.
The photographer selects a set of of photos to operate on.
The photographer selects a list of subjects. The easiest way to do this is probably have a text field into which the photographer can cut and paste an email header, since every event in the known universe is organised by email these days.
The tool presents the photographer with a table of photos (which the tool can access because it is authenticated) and people / email addresses, the photographer checks checkboxes as to which people are in which photos.
The tool adds tags to each photo to indicate who is in which photo and their email address. Ideally the tags would be encrypted, so as not to make the email addresses open to spam and to avoid tempting yahoo! to do something we'd prefer it didn't.
The tool presents the photographer with an email for customisation. The email contains a thumbnail of each photo the subject is in, and a URL to block or approve the particular photo, as well as URLs to blanket-block and blanket-approve all photos. The instructions in the email make it clear that the subject should reply to the email either approving or rejecting the photos, either as a block or individually. The instructions also make it clear what happens in the event that the subject does not respond.
The tool sends out each of the emails.
Subjects receive the emails, indicate their preferences, and return them.
When the photographer receives an email back from the subject, they click on the appropriate URLs, which access the tool, which amends the previously added metadata on the pictures. If any pictures have been cleared by all required subjects, it is automatically made public.
Optionally the tool might include a tiding-up feature which allows the photographer to visit after some fixed period of time and automatically deals with photos still public, by permanently deleting them, removing all metadata except that they were blocked, etc.

Such tool could also be used to add rich metadata in some appropriate metadata format (Dublin Core or FOAF anyone?). Such metadata could be approved (or rejected) by participants at the same time as photos.

cheers stuart

An Interview with MIT's Phil Long

mpasiewicz — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:44:39 -0500

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.

An Interview with Google's Vint Cerf

mpasiewicz — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:41:11 -0500

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.

Semantic Web and ePortfolios

mmorton8 — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:14:05 -0500

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.

From our childrens' schools to human resources at work, I think the semantic web will provide the framework for the application of these concepts. This data can be captured in a variety of ways but essentially it is this classification that will make it easier to evalute or assess the events or items in a users portfolio. Almost like the pure content driven portfolio can now be merged with the data driven desires of the those who need to assess the data they provide.

Assessment then combines together the data and the classfications to create the knowledge needed to evaluate a portfolio or a programs success. Its easy to put some of these concepts into a box and only look at them in relation to the higher education context but they do indeed have relevance in many fields. Thus the whole idea behind the semantic web, that of classifying knowledge and applying the results to other areas to create new knowledge, is being approached. Many of the technoloigies used in these systems are called "Web 2.0". Maybe the next wave in higher education will be Knowledge 2.0, with a different way of looking at teaching and learning.

This all ties in nicely with the upcoming ELI 2006 Fall Focus Session in Broomfield in September "Supporting Learning with Technology: Assessment's Role". There are several sessions that are going to focus on these issues. The UNO myMAPP team will be presenting as well.

Wow - This could really be fun. :)

RDF and walled gardens

StuartYeates — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 03:16:47 -0500

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.

How do you overcome a garden walls and fragmented RDF? Well ideally you create a semantic map from each of the gardens into a more widely used frame of reference, but creating and maintaining such mappings is a huge burden in terms of time and energy, particularly for those of us who have data in a dozens (or even hundreds) of walled gardens.

A lighter-weight approach might be to create a service which allows users to associate URIs for "landmark" real-world entities across different walled gardens. Such a service would not map all entities, only relatively small numbers that a user actually cares about, which actually turn out to be important starting seed points for mapping ontologies (an altogether larger and more complex task, but one which might usefully be aided by the presence of existing seeds).

Landmarks for me might be myself (obviously), key people I work with, communities I am involved with and passtimes that interest me.

Such a service would not have to make a big priority of security, because the walled gardens, by their nature, are secure. Simple user authentication might be required to avoid rampant spamming, but would have to be very lightweight, to avoid the service becoming a kind of walled garden itself, with the unauthenticated being able to look in, but not plant seeds of their own. Lightweight authentication would also solve the uniqueness problem (my idea of the key URIs for "open source" my differ from yours), by labelling associations by user.