Category — General

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….

Lesbian Park Rangers. There's a new elite force protecting the wilderness in Canada; a duo whose love of the bush has become more than a vocation, it has become a calling. This is the story of some rangers who, unlike Mounties, aren't interested in getting their man. Meet the Lesbian Park Rangers. [MetaFilter]

this is an intereting art project…. the whole identity vs institution thing is usually underplayed

on-line lectures. On-line recordings of lectures delivered at Columbia University's architecture school. Speakers included Alvaro Siza, Bernard Tschumi, Marshall Berman, and a number of other important architects and urbanists. [A bit more inside.] [MetaFilter]

i've always liked reading about architecture, so here this is.

RSS Kerfluffle. Dave Winer says that MoveableType's RSS support is “funky”. Aaron Swartz offers an extensive and sensible survey of the question. [Mark Bernstein]
mark asks later, 'can we please just talk about the tech' and the answer is 'no' because if it was about the tech, it would have been solved, now you are in the realm of egos and politics, best of luck.

Mac on an iPAQ.

This almost looks like an elaborate hoax, but apparently someone has figured out to get the Mac operating system to run on an iPAQ Pocket PC. Not that there's a whole lot you would actually accomplish by doing so, except to prove it could be done.
Read [Via PocketPCThoughts]

[Gizmodo]

i think this is a fake, a fake, a fake, but I'm happy to be proved wrong.

Dylan Thomas – 50th Anniversary of the Poet's Death. And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Fifty years ago, Dylan Thomas – one of the greatest poets of our time – drank himself to death in New York's Hotel Chelsea at the age of 39. Swansea, his Welsh hometown, will be commemorating his life all year, culminating in a festival in the fall. [more] [MetaFilter]

Dylan Thomas is one of those quintessential poets that will be long celebrated.

On Search: The Users. Herewith Chapter Two of the search travelogue. Between late 1994 and early 1996 I was occupied full-time and then some building and running one of the first Web search engines, the long-departed Open Text Index. There weren‰??t many million-hits-a-day sites back then. When you‰??re running that kind of thing, you spend a lot of time watching your logs to figure out what your users are doing and what makes them happy. There are two lessons that loom larger than all the others put together…. [ongoing]

this is somewhat insightful, i wonder if anyone has similar insights on blogs. I know that when i analyze my logs from my blog it tends to show that most people view only the current page, unless the other pages show up on a search, and then they view a specific page.

Review of QuickTopic and Quick Doc.

Great post by Alan at cogdogblog about two useful applications (one for single-topic discussions, the other for gathering comments on documents) with very low barriers to use. I love applications like this (which the folks at the TLT Group call 'Low Threshold Applications') which have a quick pay-off for instructors and students and little or no cost to uptake. – SWL

Afterword: Looks like Alan has previously submitted an LTA to the TLT group – cf. http://tc.unl.edu/cansorge/lta/lta25.html. Any suggestions on how to get them to produce their list as an RSS feed?

[EdTechPost]

yup, yup, these are handly little tools, but they also are not the easiest to manage becuase in part, they are 'out of the package' that students used to webct or blackboard, etc. are used to using…