Edupunk: DIY for educational technology

Thanks to Don I discovered an interesting idea being worked out across the web: Edupunk or DIY instructional technology that avoids corporate tools like PowerPoint and Blackboard. The Chronicle has two stories on this, Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go ‘Edupunk’ and Technologist Who Coined ‘Edupunk’ Defends the Term in a Video Debate.

The Wikipedia article on Edupunk links to a great example from UBC where a course on Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation took a bunch of Wikipedia articles on Latin American literature to Featured Article and Good Article status. They wrote some and edited others using the Wikipedia as their DIY course environment. Neat idea that strikes me as scalable, especially in the case of grad courses. It is a way of using what is at hand, in this case the Wikipedia, and using it for an authentic instructional purpose. It has the advantage that it contributes something to the larger community and can benefit from the community.

A Collaborative Research Commons

Computing With The Infrastructure At Hand is an essay I wrote last weekend and have been editing that tries to think about how to do humanities computing if you don’t have grants and don’t have lots of support. I ended up trying to imagine a Collaborative Research Commons that imagines crowdsourcing digital humanities work.

While research as a gift economy may seem idealistic, I’ve been surprised by the extraordinary collaboration you get when you set up a structured way for people to contribute to a project. The Suda On Line project first showed (me at least) the potential for social and volunteer research. I’ve had luck with the Dictionary of Words in the Wild and the upcoming Day of Digital Humanities. This last project has yet to happen, but we have close to 100 participants signed up. My point is that we can imagine ways to research that don’t start with how to get a grant before we can talk.

Webilus.com: the best of the images of the web

Diagram of email and wiki work

Webilus.com :: le meilleur des images du web is a French web site that gathers images and visualizations of the web and computing culture. The image above, for example, compares e-mail collaboration to wiki collaboration showing how much more work it is to use e-mail.

The site is a blog curated by Frédéric COZIC and it has a widget you can install to see the most recent images on your blog.

Debategraph: social mapping debates

Screen Shot On the Independent I came across the interactive visualization above onMapping the crisis in Gaza. The visualization environment looks like your standard bubblegraph, but has lots of other features as you can see from the toolbar at the bottom. Here is another view:

Screen Shot

The maps can be edited by users – they have wiki features for those who register accounts. In some ways they are communal mind maps. The software comes from Debategraph.org.

Globe and Mail: The big ideas of 2009

Saturday’s Globe and Mail had a full page on The Big Ideas of 2009. The listed five, three of which have to do with information technology and two with biology.

  1. Do-It-Yourself DNA
  2. The 3-D Revolution (as in 3-D movies and screens)
  3. The Age of Avatars (as in your avatars will become transportable across virtual worlds)
  4. Grow Your Own Tissue
  5. Reality Check for Social Networks (as in Social Networks aren’t getting the advertising and will lose momentum)

These ideas seem to be about the body and space with the possible exception of the 5th which is not really a big idea so much as a correction. I would like to suggest a different list around time:

  1. 3-D Social Year It’s Facebook
  2. Genome Online Networks Technology
  3. DNA Cells Web Tissue Users
  4. 000 Second Time World Human User Sites
  5. Life Canada said Ko using virtual advertising avatars

This list was generated scientifically. I took the text of the Globe story (edited it down to just the titles, text and authors), ran it through the TAPoRware List Words (with a stop word list), and then took the sequence of high frequency words in the order they appeared and broke it into phrases (without deleting any). This is a technique I learned from David Hoover who performed it at the Face of Text conference. It is surprising how often you can find suggestive phrases in a frequency sorted word list. I will let you interpret this oracle, but remember that you read “Second Time” here first. This list is what the Globe author’s really meant for 2009.

As an aside, I should say that the reason I am blogging this today (January 9th) is because Saturday’s paper (January 3rd) was delivered to our house today. I didn’t confuse things as we were travelling Saturday and the paper was cancelled until Monday. When we called the circulation desk they told us other people in Edmonton had had the wrong papers delivered. Here is the note I sent the editors this morning:

 I would like to thank the Globe and Mail for delivering Saturday’s (Jan. 3rd) paper to my house today (Jan. 9th.) As the Globe knows, we are behind in Edmonton and need the chance to catch up with all the timeless opinions gathered. It was particularly kind of the Globe since I hadn’t read Saturday’s edition as I was traveling. I managed to get half way through the paper before realizing that I was reading old news.

I do want to take issue with your list of 5 burgeoning ideas (A 10). Two of “the big ideas” have to do with the compression of space (“The 3-D Revolution” and “The Age of Avatars”) but you neglected the big ideas in the compression of time. I would suggest that the really big idea is the “New News” otherwise known as nNews or iNews. What matters in this day of personalization is what news is new to the individual avatar, and what time they are in (like the burgeoning age of avatars.) In Second Life my avatar wants second news, and today you delivered.

What I don’t understand is why we got Saturday’s paper while others apparently got Monday’s. (This is according to the kind and real human at the circulation desk who told us others got their New News too, but a different edition.) How did you know I was exactly 6 days behind?

Social Computing in 2020: Bluesky Innovation Competition – UC Transliteracies Project

From Susan a link to Social Computing in 2020: Bluesky Innovation Competition – UC Transliteracies Project. This competition is hosted by the University of California Transliteracies Project and UC Santa Barbara
Social Computing Group and is open to any student from any discipline. I think competitions like this and T-REX are going to become a more common way of fostering innovation and rewarding ideas.

Night Danger: Dictionary of Words in the Wild over 3500

Moose Danger Sign

The Dictionary of Words in the Wild has now over 3,500 images and over 4,500 words. Willard McCarty delivered a paper at the University of Western Sydney reflecting on the Dictionary, “Stepping off the edge of the world or into it: The Dictionary of Words in the Wild as research?” Willard is the star contributor, but I’m catching up with pictures taken on the move across Canada including the moose danger sign above which is seen frequently on the Trans-Canada in parts of Ontario and Manitoba.

Urban Dictionary

I just came across this Urban Dictionary where people provide definitions for new urban words and then vote the definitions up or down (with commentary). The social site allows people to upload images that capture the word; for example, the first definition of “scene” has 332 images. These are not images of the word but images evocative of the word. What is interesting is that further down on each page is an embedded visual Google ad (as in a small image rather than text ad.) The ad is pulled based on the word so you get a different type of image of the word. For “scene” there was this linked animated GIF for a dating service where you can “Find out who is waiting for you at the Goth Scene”:

Image of Ad

Of course the book is being mined by the editor for a Urban Dictionary book compiled by Aaron Peckham. When you read the Terms of Service you will find the following:

When you post Content on the Website, you agree to grant the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, fully sublicenseable, non-exclusive license to copy, distribute, sell, publicly display, publicly perform and make derivative works of your Content on the Website, on services affiliated with the Website and elsewhere (including but not limited to print, video, audio or computer media), regardless of the form of media used or of whether such media or services now exist or are developed in the future. By posting Content to the Website, you hereby represent and warrant that you have the right to post that Content and to grant the foregoing rights to the Company.

ThoughtMesh: Tag your writing. Join the conversation.

Screen shot of ThoughtMeshMatt sent around a link to ThoughtMesh, an original idea about how tag-rich online publishing might work. You can get an account and upload an essay (it encourages you to divide into chunks) or self-publish so your essay is meshed. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but it gives you contextual tag clouds to use to see related stuff.
Here is what Jon Ippolito says in his essay, ThoughtMesh Author’s Statement,

When Craig Dietrich and I set out to build ThoughtMesh, we asked ourselves how an ideal publishing tool for scholars would behave. We decided that we wanted a system that was distributed–not siloed away in a single database, but able to be published on any Web site anywhere. We also wanted all the essays to be connected to each other, by something less random than search returns, but more serendipitous than intentional hyperlinks.

Adonomics: Facebook Analytics

Adonomics offers statistics for Facebook plugins so you can see which developers have the most installs. They give you emebedable code so you can track, for example, daily active users of an individual plugin like FunWall:

Adonomics also provides a valuation for plugins and a space for developers to try to sell plugins. To developers they offer services like:

Adonomics helps Facebook developers and owners take their applications through the three key phases of Growth, Engagement, and Monetization (GEM). Whether you’re interested in

1. Growing your app by designing it to spread virally
2. Engaging your app’s user base activating key users
3. Monetizing your app by running third-party ads, signing up sponsors, or selling it outright

Adonomics is your best source for information on what works (and what doesn’t). We’re dedicated to sharing the best practices and helping you get the most out of the Facebook platform.

Thanks to Shawn for this.