EDUCAUSE | AJAX

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

An Interview with OCLC's Thomas Hickey

mpasiewicz — Fri, 19 May 2006 17:02:00 -0500

In this 23 minute recording, OCLC's Thomas Hickey was kind enough to join me via Skype to talk about open source software, grid computing, AJAX and a range other topics related to the work of OCLC Research.

Conference Report: O'Reilly ETECH

mpasiewicz — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 14:11:45 -0600

I'm in day two of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. So far, so good. Day one was spent in a couple of half day sessions. One on AJAX and the other on Creating Passionate Users. The Passionate Users session was interesting, but would have been better if I'd not had a little background in both psychology and marketing. I'll try to dig back through my notes to see if anything really caught my eye. At a minimum, I'd recommend checking out Kathy Sierra's blog. The AJAX one was fairly good. It covered some basic do's and don't's and highlighted a few AJAX frameworks that could be used. The slides and code are available here.

Last evening, the highlight for me was Bruce Steerling. Very entertaining. I'm hoping to read more from him. The really interesting Cory Doctorow provided an entertaining intro for Bruce. I'd love to see either of them speak at an EDUCAUSE event. My battery was dead, so once, again, I'll have to try to track down my notes. Hopefully a podcast of his speech will show up on ITConversations.com before too long.

One of other really interesting sessions was Jeff Han's live demo of a multi-touch display. WOW, really, really fun/cool! I'll refer you to Catherine Howell's blog coverage of the topic for more information.

I remember a lot of talk about trust, attention and identity management at the Corante's Symposium on Social Architecture (see my coverage here). Attention Economics is at the forefront of O'Reilly's 2006 Emerging Technology Conference. I have to admit, it still scares me to no end; there is just not enough talk of the potential for unintended consequences. Can you really trust your privacy with some of these new trust networks? Maybe if they were backed by a Ralph Nader, a library or maybe endorsed by an organization like the EFF. The one thing not so new thing that really drifted back on my radar is the really high value that corporations place on the ripples of data that people create. I can't help but wonder what would happen if public-good, cultural records organizations might place a higher value here and what the trade-offs would be.

I also listened to another demo of Second Life today. I believe it has been covered fairly well at EDUCAUSE events, so I won't spend much time on it here. On note of interest that I didn't recal coverage of in the past ... apparently, UC Davis used the system for some hallucination research.

Technorati's Dave Sifry had a brief, but interesting presentation about attention/socially assisted information discovery. He called for a need to incorporate an understanding of time and people deeply into your design. Despite some advances in search supported by technologies touted by many, IMHO there still isn't a good way to create multiple trusted filters for searches and affinity groups. Someone is going to figure this out ... hopefully a group representing a consortium of cultural record organizations. ;)

Another score from 37signals

joeclark — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 21:05:47 -0600

Basecamp is a nice lightweight project-management tool from the same folks who brought you Backpack and, more recently, the group chat tool Campfire. Smart interfaces, thoughtful features, applicable functionality.

Portable Portals

joeclark — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 18:40:15 -0600

One wonders how much mindshare will be available for university e-portals, such as Blackboard's. In addition to old standards like My Yahoo, a couple of Ajax-based personal portal tools are really sharp and intuitive, especially for the blog-savvy feedster:

The latter appeals to me more, though the former has a tabbed interface like Blackboard's.

And of course, both easily allow you to show del.icio.us bookmarks and tag clouds, as well as your latest Flickr pix.

An Interview with the National Research Council of Canada's Glen Newton

mpasiewicz — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 13:27:00 -0600

In this 16 minute recording, we'll hear from acting group leader of the National Research Council of Canada's CISTI Research. Let's listen in as Glen Newton compares and contrasts the superstructures supporting research in the US and Canada, shares thoughts about Canada's National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data, and offers some commentary on the open source, open content and open access.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 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 Northwestern's Jerry Goldman

mpasiewicz — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:49:00 -0600

In this 25 minute recording, I sit down with Jerry Goldman, Director of the Oyez Project and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. We'll hear about the Spoken Word project, the Project Pad audio annotation tool, and Oyez -- and Oyez Baseball.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 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

A conversation with Lanny Arvan

mpasiewicz — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 17:59:00 -0600

In this 17 minute recording, Lanny Arvan joins me for a discussion about mobile computing, rich media publishing, blogging, vendor consolidation, intellectual property and more. Lanny's blog is available at:
http://guava.cites.uiuc.edu/l-arvan/blog/lannyexport.html

new tools

ghbrett — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 06:36:37 -0500

Just received invites to work with two new tools: Wink and Ning. I'm trying quickly to figure out ways to use them during the annual meeting. Perhaps I'll come up with a social app with Ning other than another bookmark too.