Mindmapping Your Seminar

This morning, a fascinating google alert appeared in my email, a posting by Kevin Lim, University of Buffalo, describing a recent graduate seminar. The posting was accompanied by the mindmap above ..

[Recently, Kevin Lim] presented “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams at [his] graduate reading seminar. [He] created a simple mindmap as seen above, as a way of navigating the text and drawing out more thoughts during discussion.

As you will be able to tell, Wikinomics runs polar to Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” as well as Jaron Lanier’s “Digital Maoism“. While the latter folks speak about the hazards of the online collectivism, Wikinomics runs on a high with optimism about our new world of online collaboration and crowdsourcing.

If nothing else, a mindmap like this breaks out of the "powerpoint to death" trap - participants can't just easily "follow the bouncing" bullet from a though z. The two dimensional model immediately triggers a lot of questions that lead to thinking about the map: why is this pink and that yellow, why isn't it the reverse, why is this here and not there, etc ... Even this slight break from linearity encourages the reader to begin to develop her own authority over the subject.

We will have to experiment a bit more with this model in our plans for great leap forward ...

Resources:

[0] Kevin Lim, Mindmapping Wikinomics, flickr.com, November 9, 2007. http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/1925928543/

[1] Kevin Lim, Mindmapping Wikinomics…, theory.isthereason.com, November 9, 2007. http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=1950

Japan Moves Towards the Post PC Era

Hiroko Tabuchi, reporting for the Associated Press in Tokyo, observes that "a new PC or laptop computer may be the last thing a Japanese student will want to buy for college." Leaving aside the differences between the Japanese and American undergraduate curriculum, several important observations stand out:

the Japanese PC market is shrinking, rather than growing. PC sales have declined in each of the last 5 sales quarters.

Hitachi, like IBM in the United States, has announced that it will cease manufacturing home computers,

hand-held keitai devices are providing more and more of the computing power usually associated with PCs.

The last item points to an important component of the platform shift ... keitai devices and services in Japan are where the action is.

More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.

The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.

Story: Hiroko Tabuchi, PCs being pushed aside in Japan, Associated Press, November 4, 2007, 5:49 AM (ET). http://apnews.excite.com/article/20071104/D8SMQ8DG0.html

Image: Ken, Keitai = Cellphone = modern security blanket, http://artsyken.com/2004_07_01_archive.php

Cappuccino culture for teenagers

In some schools, classrooms are being redesigned to resemble cyber cafés. Virginia Matthews of the Independent [London] reports

"At Colne Community School in Brightlingsea, Essex, the ICT Learning Centre – despite its 60 or so matt black, flat-screen computers – is designed to look more like a coffee bar than a secondary school, according to Mark Thomson, assistant principal.

"Yet despite the significant increases in GCSE grades, the better coursework presentation and what he calls "rising engagement levels among less motivated pupils" that have followed a £3m investment in technology, Colne's cyber café is just the start of things. ..."

Article continues at Virginia Matthews, Secondary teaching: Cappuccino culture for teenagers, The Independent [London], 01 November 2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/education/schools/article3113582.ece

Image credit: University of Pennsylvania, Accenture Cyber Cafe, http://www.seas.upenn.edu/cybercafe/

Mashing up the Once and Future CMS edit / delete Mashing up the Once and Future CMS

Malcolm Brown, Dartmouth, wonders with all the buzz that surrounds the Web 2.0, students' immersion in it, and the current focus on emphasizing the learner, if it doesn't make sense to implement Web 2.0 features into the CMS?

Url: Malcolm Brown, Mashing up the Once and Future CMS, Educause Review, vol. 42, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 8–9 http://www.educause.edu/er/erm07/erm0725.asp?bhcp=1http://www.educause.edu/er/erm07/erm0725.asp?bhcp=1

Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations

Ubiquituous Media: Asian Transformations

From July 3 to 16, 2007, a major media studies conference, entitled Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations, will be held at Tokyo University. Prominent scholars such as

• Friedrich Kittler
• Shigehiko Hasumi
• Rem Koolhas
• Bernard Stiegler
• Asada Akira
• and others

will serve as plenary speakers and there are literally hundreds of papers being presented, including many on film, anime and TV. You can check out the program and download registration forms at: http://www.u-mat.org/

The conference languages are Japanese and English.

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The R Project for Statistical Computing is an Open Source application with binary installation routines for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is much much more than a simple statistical package. R provides an interpreted statistical programming language that looks a lot like S. The resemblance is so strong that I can use my old S language reference books to work with R.

R provides a graphing facility that goes far beyond what you might have used in spreadsheets like Excel.

R version 2.4.0 was just released last month (October 3).

Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies

Tracy Mitrano and Anita Rho, both of Cornell University, are leading an online workshop on November 8 to explore ways in which colleges and universities can use social networking tools: Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies. The announcement seems facebook (and marketing) oriented - If you’re starting a capital campaign at your institution, why not use social networking technologies for your alumni too, so they can create communities, post video and photos past and present, and "poke" old friends? - rather than academically oriented. Online studygroups, school clubs, political action, hobbies and recreation

Social Networking - Where the cool kids are

"The rapid growth of 'social networking' Web sites, such as http://www.myspace.com/ , continues to soar, according to the most recent numbers from Nielsen-NetRatings, released Thursday." Peer-to-Peer Networking For Podcasts and People

Royal Soc. attacked on open access

"A group of 46 senior scientists accused the Royal Society this week of putting its own considerations above those of science by adopting a negative stance on the issue of open access publishing, in which scientific literature is made freely available via the Internet. The letter-writers argue that the Royal Society is disparaging open access to protect the interests of for-profit publishers – including the Royal Society itself -- while the Society accuses petitioners of harbouring their own conflict of interest."

Stephen Pincock, Royal Soc. attacked on open access : Leading scientists criticize the UK's national academy of science for its negative stance, The Scientist, Daily News, Dec. 9, 2005 http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20051209/02

Towards the Visible Web

Gerry McKiernan, the blogging, theoretical, visual librarian sent this to the digital library list:

John Markoff, Your Internet Search Results, in the Round, The New York Times, May 9, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 - For decades, computer researchers have experimented with the idea of displaying textual information in visual maps, but the concept has been slow to find practical applications. Now, one of the pioneering companies in the field is hoping that by making its software available as part of a standard Web browser it will be able to wean surfers away from the simple ranked lists of search results offered by Google and Yahoo. Groxis, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001, has converted its desktop Grokker software program, which displays a Web search as a series of categories set in a circular map, to run as a Java plug-in for browsers. On Monday, the company will begin allowing computer users to view Yahoo search results with its visualization technology at http://www.groxis.com . [MORE at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/technology/09yahoo.html

Gerry McKiernan's post includes links to good historical papers: [1] Gerry McKiernan, New Age Navigation, Innovative Information for Electronic Journals, The Serials Librarian, Vol. 45(2) 2003. p. 87. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf [2] Gerry McKiernan, The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases, Cyberstacks, March 21, 1999. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm