e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Weblogs and Communities of Practice

    Here’s a thoughtful post comparing communities of practice to networks of weblogs, apparently distilled from a discussion group at the Blogwalk conference. The short summary:

    • Weblogs are more respectful of their authors and of their audience
    • Weblogs are better connecting tools
    • Communities are better social structures for problem-solving, knowledge stewarding and innovation
    • Communities of practice are better social structures for learning
    • Blogger networks generate communities of practice
    • Communities of Practice can use weblogs to communicate with the outside world

    The last two point hints at a basic weakness in this otherwise illuminating piece; namely, that weblogs and communities of practices are apples and oranges. A weblog (or really, a network of weblogs, which is what the author really means) is a technological platform for dialogue with certain specific affordances. A community of practice, as defined by the author, is a social structure that is independent of platform. A more apples-to-apples question might have been, “What kind of affordances for dialogue do weblog communities have in comparison with the affordances typically sought after by communities of practice?” Another interesting question might be, “How do weblogs compare to discussion boards or listservs as vehicles for communities of practice.” But because the author (and, presumably the group whose discussion he is summarizing) partially conflate the technology base with the social structure, they miss out on other interesting questions, e.g., “How well does a network of weblogs work as a facilitating platform within a community of practice?”

    Nevertheless, there’s a lot of good stuff in the post. Definitely worth reading.

  • Monkeymagic: Feeds & Faces

    Monkeymagic has a simple yet compelling suggestion for improving RSS feeds: Add a photo of the author. Why not put a picture pane in the RSS reader so that you can see who is talking? Beyond creating a sense of intimacy that may, over time, help foster more nad different sorts of conversation, it also will help readers (who increasingly have a bazillion feeds in their RSS list) to distinguish the voice of each author from the crowd.

    Ironically, the author of monkeymagic himself has neither a picture of himself nor any personal information (a name, even!) on his own site. That’s too bad, because I like his blog a lot and would like to know a bit more about him.

  • Link Prediction in Social Networks

    I’m afraid this is going to be something of an echo-blog, since I don’t have the paid subscription to the ACM library necessary to allow me to see the original article, but the About Kim weblog has an intriguing and encouraging quote from an academic article on link predictability within social networks:

    By running our predictors on some other datasets, we have discovered that performance swells dramatically as the topical focus of the dataset widens. In a narrow field, almost anyone can collaborate with anyone else, and new collaborations are largely random. It would be interesting to make precise a sense in which such new collaborations are simply not predictable from the training data.

    From this blurb it looks like there exist conditions within certain social networks in which past collaboration or references are not highly predictive of future collaboration or references. In other words, people make new connections with new people a lot.

    I’m going to have to get my hands on this article; it’s too tantalizing.

  • Furl Follow-up: Mike Giles Responds

    As a follow-up to my earlier post, I’m happy to report that I’ve had a satisfying email exchange with Furl’s Mike Giles. On the PDF front, Furl is planning to index both .pdf and .doc files in the “near future.” (No, he didn’t give me a timeline.)

    Even more interesting is the possibility regarding Creative Commons. Currently, Furl only makes cached copies available to the account holder for personal use; you can only share the original URLs. But Mike is open to the possibility of working with CreativeCommons.org to allow Furlers to share content that has the appropriate machine-readable CC metadata. (Of course, he couldn’t make me any promises at this point.)

    This is potentially a huge step forward. I believe that Furl could provide a major boost to CC license usage on the web (and vice versa). If this is a feature that would make you more likely to use Furl, then I encourage you to contact Mike with your use case.

  • Constructivism, Cognitivism, and Behaviorism in the Corporate World

    I had an interview with a PhD student today that got me to thinking about various instructional philosophies. Now, I must say that this is somewhat unusual for me, since I happen to think that all three philosophies mentioned in the title of this post (a) are weakly supported (at best) by what little we know about how people actually learn, (b) usually misapply what we do know in practice, and (c) generally net me little practical gain in my design for the effort.

    That said, they are not entirely without their uses, and this particular PhD student got me thinking by asking an interesting question: When do you employ each of these philosophies in your instructional designs? What I like about the question is its pragmatism. It suggests that constructivism, cognitivism, and behaviorism are all perspectives that you try on to achieve specific goals rather than fundamentally correct or incorrect positions about how human beings learn. (more…)

  • I Want MemeStreams as a Web Service

    I found this cool collaborative blogging site called MemeStreams. Here’s their description of what MemeStreams offers:

    A democratic view: On the main page you’ll find the most popular recent articles on the net according to our users. There are no editors. Everyone’s recommendations count equally. These recommendations are organized into different topics so that its easy to find the information you want.

    A reputation agent: There can be no tyranny of the majority. As you use this website, MemeStreams takes note of web logs that you find interesting and recommendations that you agree with. The agent uses this information to produce a custom news selection for you which is made up of the most relevant recent articles according to the people on the site who you most often agree with. You can also create specific communities of interest that you would like to follow using the agent.

    Threading: Web logs often consist of entries which reference and respond to other web logs, and so on. Unfortunately, these discussions are spread out on different sites and there is no index into them. MemeStreams can present a threaded view of all of the discussion that links back to a URL. This is particularly useful when surfing the web, as MemeStreams can offer you one-click access to all of the threaded discussion for any web based content that you happen to be reading.

    Search engine: Search engines are designed to provide the most relevant results, but everyone has different ideas about what is relevant. MemeStreams allows you to see what different communities of interest think are the most relevant results for your search. You can also search a particular weblog, including your own. This is quite helpful when you want to revisit an article you’re read in the past.

    An inbox for links: You can use MemeStreams to forward a link directly to a friend who might find it interesting. If they are a MemeStreams user, you can send the link to them in MemeStreams. This reduces email inbox clutter by moving web site recommendations into the web.

    I like everything about their offering except for the fact that it’s a closed system. I’d like to be able to incorporate the features they offer into my current blog. It would be nice to have each of these features available as a web service. Maybe they’ll develop an API.

  • Furl, PDF's, and Creative Commons

    I have started to use Furl to create an archive of articles (mostly PDFs) that I find on the web related to informational cascades for myself (and eventually for my blog readers as well). So far I’m finding two significant limitations.

    First, Furl apparently doesn’t do full text search for PDF’s yet. That’s too bad; there are OSS libraries available that would allow them to index these documents. Maybe they’ll get around to it.

    More worrisome, though, is the IP problem that can’t be fixed by simply adding a standard feature. If I Furl somebody’s PDF and then share the link to the archive (Furl copies and saves web content), am I violating copyright? I’m not sure when or if that happens. It would be great if Furl the ability to read Creative Commons metadata and guide users on any potential Furling-related IP issues.