One context [in which I collect and write]: explaining the world of blogs to those who aren't participants --why would anybody want to...I want students to explore the development of a Voice. The medium [blog, Web page, etc.] is a present-time convenience. I want them to practise expression for an audience, a public; and I want it to be unbound from a technology as specific as PowerPoint. THe blog, like the Web page, has its Moment, and likewise has an ambit of eloquence [but doesn't do everything]. I want them to find what they have to say --and that may require specific assignments
record, 'expose' and distribute the process of thought and information gathering
challenge conventional notions of Reality. Sliding from 'objective' to 'subjective' without hand signals. To be appreciated as a KIND of narrative
search blogworld for 'chushingura' and 'rashomon': what conversations already?
from rashomon.blogspot.com: "Rashomon: Truth is like water: Just enough quenches the thirst and keeps you clean - but too much and you drown."So are blogs really a stepchild of Knowledge Management? Christine Boese has an aside that may apply:from www.dijest.com/aka/categories/ technology/2003/01/24.html on ?What makes moblogging novel?: "The ability to swarm on an important or interesting event lets you form a rashomon and blind men with elephant composite view."
(link someplace to Marty's Notes On "Roshomon" (Summary of, and comments on the 1951 film by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa about the subjectivity of truth. by MARTIN SPELLERBERG)
Let’s step back and look at blogs and klogs in terms of this interesting dance with corporate entities, some of which see knowledge management as asset management for the Information Age. Ostensibly, blogs and klogs would seem to help corporate entities to “manage” the “intellectual assets” of a company in an information-based economy, particularly in the context of knowledge workers, but who is managing whom? It has been said that companies are increasingly concerned that the greatest assets of the firm are walking out the door every night at the end of their shifts. The wolf in sheep’s clothing in the dance could be the knowledge-logs that seek to create artifacts based on those information assets. The contingent knowledge disseminated through both intranet company klogs and more public, journalistic or topical extracurricular blogs of journalists or other experts, writers, and communicators create a kind of knowledge commodity that exists outside conventional economic systems of value.
8 July
Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs (Kevin Brooks, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe) is extremely helpful in articulating three Weblog genres: journal, notebook, and filter. I've mostly employed the latter two, but hadn't thought of systematizing the terminology. See Brooks' page for English 110: Technology and 21st Century Literacy (Fall 2002)
One of the useful Intros I've found is What is a weblog? from itchyhands.com, which also typologizes --and offers the pair "knowledge weblog and project based weblog" as more or less analogous to what Brooks et al. identify as the 'notebook' genre.
Seb's Open Research has this epigram today:
"In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth,21 July
while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped
to deal with a world that no longer exists."
- Al Rogers (founder of Global SchoolNet)
(also attributed to Eric Hoffer [1902-1983])
How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think Lion Kimbro 2003
And consider this webnote app, which seems to be pretty remarkable. The home site is http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/
I am perpetually on the lookout for such management tools, and thinking about their implications... and interrelations.
22 July
What I want at the moment is an easy link between Onfolio and del.icio.us --the former is a wonderful means to manage the flux of resources, and the latter is a great display and distribution interface to the collection as it emerges, and to share found things with others. Maybe there's already a pathway? Certainly they can be added one by one. See oook's extispicious and http://del.icio.us/oook for starters.
23 July
A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator
K. Andrew Edmonds, James Blustein* and Don Turnbull, Journal of Digital Information, Volume 5 Issue 1 Article No. 243, 2004-05-12 --another clarion call, worth quoting extensively.
I've been following the implications of technologies for a very long time --that's what got me into library school, and what has driven a lot of my activities as a librarian, and what motivates my choices among things I might be attending to. So here are some extracts from Edmonds et al.:
[some terms for further exploration: common-use hypertext, transclusive, personal iterative publishing, intertwingled]The Web is an incubator for a continuously evolving system of content, user interests and supporting technologies... The growth in the amount of digitally captured and hypertextualized information in the coming years will be even more astounding than the growth of the Web over the past ten years. (conclusion)
...a new generation of software applications, protocols and dedicated users who are putting a more individual, granular spin on creating and accessing information through the use of Weblogs ...This blogging system has developed organically through mostly open standards and is fueled by what are essentially citation tracking systems. ...an evolving personal information hub augmented in value by its relationships to other hubs on the Web. This infrastructure and its trajectory can be seen as a supplementary system, a meta-level above the static and major media areas of the Web.
...the network effect of being able to link in and leverage the power of links created by others to help with identifying and contextual understanding of the storehouses of information...
As people become more accustomed to blog-like functionality, their natural proclivity for collecting and commenting on information (either explicitly or implicitly) can prove altogether new methods for both finding and interpreting inter-linked information on the Web.
Weblogging extends this trend of self-expression to dynamic, almost continually prolific linking and commentary about life and any kind of information on the Web. The proliferation of alternative linking and distribution methods allows users to both stream information to one another for reading, but also to weave a dense network of links throughout the Web with their own personal perspective and preferences as one hub.
Monitoring of engagement with new content is a key step in supporting the recording of useful trails (Claypool et al. 2001).
Nelson (1990) describes a property called transclusion as a process in which part of a document may be in several places. The most transclusive of the aggregator designs is the reverse chronological ordering that merges information from multiple sources into a newspaper-like listing. Frequent polling by search engines and aggregators keeps the fragments up-to-date with edits.
Having finally achieved separation of content from presentation on the Web, RSS enables content to be flexibly distributed and recombined. Services such as Feedster offer keyword-based search over RSS items creating topical composites of content. Other services focus on link tracking, enabling a mapping of content across blogs. Readers find new Weblogs through links from other blogs, called blogrolls, and topical directories...
Opening an organization's hierarchy to one of information sharing would encourage users to comment and improve any information item via their own networked information space, to be shared with others interested in the same topics or working on similar work projects. More blogging and linking will create a social capital in the organization, akin to Gatekeepers (Allen 1977) where those who are sources of information often continue to acquire more information through networking (both physical and informational) gradually enhancing both their value to the organization and amongst their peers. These new technologies can network both the organization and improve the physical and virtual links between employees, businesses and their customers.
An enriched personal history of interaction with any networked information, organized by time, location or activity will add much-needed context to ubiquitous computing and its potential for always-on history collection.
The critical need for personal information management and publishing is to bring the fluency that Weblogging software has created for publishing to the process of connecting and integrating information, leading to a storehouse of personal knowledge.
The suite of tools that anybody uses at a given time is driven by what that anybody has encountered, and directed by perceived applicability, and flavored by perceived steepness of the learning curve. There are other determinants, but all are highly susceptible to available personal support and trusted demonstration: an anybody will experiment with a tool if it seems that it might solve a recognized problem, and/or if a respected other shows its utility in a relevant context. In late July 2004 I am using There is interesting resonance with material on Knowledge Webs (pp 20-22 of New Media Consortium's 2004 Horizon Report, thanks to John Blackburn for the pointer): ...increasingly seen as a strategy to bring this sort of vision to everyday reality, and include processes and tools for gathering, validating, organizing, representing, navigating, and sharing knowledge... Knowledge representations are visual depictions unique to specific knowledge domains that are meant to show structure and relationships within the domain... RSS provides a compelling simple way to share knowledge, especially new knowledge. ...The vision of a space where knowledge sharing tools, knowledge generation tools, dialog and discussion tools, and quality assurance approaches come together is a compelling one for educators of all levels, but especially for higher academe... Knowledge webs are increasingly seen as a natural way for scientific and other disciplines to evolve the ways they apply technology to their traditional roles, and to help them manage the flow of emerging knowledge, and make new findings easily and intuitively available to faculty and students...
What strikes me about the above is that several are quite recently discovered, and all but a few are "new" in my personal information management universe in the last 6 months or so, and reflect my exploration of the blogosphere.Knowledge Web... is beginning to be applied to a group of convergent technologies and ideas based on a dynamic concept of individual and group knowledge generation and sharing, with technology used to make connections between knowledge elements clear, to distribute knowledge over multiple pathways, and to represent knowledge in ways that facilitate its use... the convergence of work being done in digital libraries, mind mapping, communities of practice, and emerging technologies such as RDF, RSS, and data mining...
There are some examples cited at the end of the article: World Music in Contemporary Life from SDSU, James Burke's Knowledgeweb Project ("the home page of the Burke Institute for Innovation in Education and its flagship project, the Knowledge Web"), Stephen Downes' RSS feeds on educational technology, and Science Blog [the lattermost has all sorts of popups...]
...and some "further reading":
The Educational Promise of Knowledge Webs and Virtual Communities and Seven principles for cultivating communities of practice (Etienne Wenger and Associates)A Google search for "knowledge webs" gets more than 1300 hits...
Some of the above is lame/obvious... but there's a germ there of significance.
A link to Ted Nelson 1990 World Tour by Ian Feldman, which includes this fragment on 'transclusion':
And what are those mysterious 'transclusive fragments?' Ted Nelson has a definition ready for the term he coined two years ago; finally giving The Vision the right generic name. Transclusion is a way to include, to quote, parts of a document without losing its current (or any subsequent) contexts, and without it becoming a physical part of the new text (which could be a movie, hyperfiction document, you name it)....and see Jon Udell's 2002 posting, and a wiki take and another from Meatball
24 July
Skip sent me a link to iMarkup:
The Internet now becomes your own virtual notebook. Once an annotation or markup is placed on a web page it is automatically displayed the next time you navigate back to that page. You can supplement your Bookmarks with the fully integrated iMarkup Organizer. Use the Organizer to search for any notes or markups you have made and jump directly to the appropriate web page. Your notes and markups can even be shared with a friend or co-worker using email or ICQ. The recipient of your markups can read and modify them using a free plug-in.So I'm adding that to the suite of tools, having purchased a license for the home machine. Initially I'll try using the freebie plugin on the office machine, but that may also need its own license...
25 July
Considering how iMarkup might actually be used, it occurs that markup of pdfs is one of the possibilities... and that it may be practical to distribute marked-up pdf files to a class. Needs to be explored, anyhow. I keep getting error messages about multiple versions of Acrobat, so I'm not able to assess functionality.
26 July
Jon Udell has a piece on Bloglines that conveys his enthusiasm for both the product and the medium
28 July
Blogdigger is another search utility ...and Furl is another KFTF utility cum bookmarks manager
29 July
I guess I need to summarize the state of the establishment of Movable Type at W&L, so that I can pick up where we left off in a month or so. MT is running on a Linux box in Pat's office, and I (a) can post to it from the management pages, (b) get a "You don't have permission to access..." message when I try to view the posting, and (c) can see the posting if I'm on that Linux machine. That sounds like permissions, nothing but.