GVU – Global Virtual University. Quote: “The Global Virtual University (GVU) is an online university for sustainable development, and has a particular objective to meet the educational needs of the developing world. The agreement to start the university was officially signed in September 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where the Norwegian Government, the United Nations University (UNU) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) pledged their support and partnership.” [Serious Instructional Technology]

well, this is good news, there have been groups interested in this for some time, now that we have it, the question is, what will it really do?

Lisbeth is a Ph.D!. My long-time cool colleague, Lisbeth Klastrup has succesfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on virtual worlds today in Copenhagen!
Congratulations, Doctor Klastrup!!!

(My own dissertation is due October 1st, btw.) [The Ludologist]

Congrat's to Lisbeth, Wooo Hooo! the newest Dr. Klastrup has a position at itu.dk which is awesome!

Communication & Collaboration Convergence.

Uh oh, there's that word again.  Convergence.  The solution to all our problems.

Siemens has released OpenScape, which integrates phone, voice mail, e-mail, text messaging, calendaring, instant messaging, and conferencing services. Its all centered on IM to synchronize use of different modes of communication, with a SIP server (Session Initiation Protocol) for telephony integration.  OpenScape 1.0, however, requires Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2003 and Greenwich collaboration server. Its the latest in a long line of communication and collaboration solutions to leverage Outlook as a platform.  And its estimated to cost as much as $400 per seat.

This may just be unified messaging redux, but Mike from Techdirt is right that it has potential as a productivity tool if its simple enough for people to use.  People use many modes of communication.  Optimize only a one or two and you may make communication in its entirety even more sub-optimal. 

[Corante: Social Software]

Wow, 400 per seat is a bit outrageous for something you could probably put together out of a set of linux hacks. It was just the other day when i was helping a colleague using freebsd set up an audio system on a standard serial port to answer phone and the like. in short, with a little innovation and some language recognition, you shoudl be able to 'hack' a product like this together from free software.

Blog -> BBS: WebDawn reverses the pattern. Another fusion of the patterns of weblogs and BBSes, this time in reverse. Mark Carey has created a new view of his Web Dawn weblog, reconfigured in BBS format:

Forum View provides an alternative view to the blog, giving a more accurate view of the conversations taking place. With the more recently active conversations listed on top, you can quickly get a sense of which entries have generated discussion – without scrolling to the bottom of each entry to see the number of comments.

Here's the forum view itself. [Corante: Social Software]
interesting hmmm, might be something to this….