notes & links

Finding common ground on the read/write web: Developing Your Expertise to Make Friends and Influence Learning on Your Campus

Keeping Up — Add these to your feeds

Finding new tools and applications

AcademHack: tech tools for academics

The Museum of Modern Betas

Solution Watch

weblogg-ed: the read-write web in the classroom

Finding Visualizations

Information aesthetics: form follows data

Finding mashups

Google Maps Mania

Programmable Web Mashups Dashboard

Applications and tools to try out

Google Documents and Spreadsheets

Flickr

Picnik

MyNoteIT

stu.dicio.us

Many Eyes

Swivel

del.icio.us

Blackboard Scholar (public page)

U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

LivesConnected

TagCrowd

Soweto uprisings.com

American Image Project

Issues and Commentary

Infotangle (Ellyssa Kroski).
See the post on microcontent: Sayonara Super-Size - It’s Bite-Sized on the Web

Digital Digs (Alex Reid).
See the post on Ferpa, blogging and public pedagogy: Public and private course blogs

if:book (Institute for the Future of the Book).

apophenia (danah boyd).
See the post on openness & context: about those walled gardens (don’t skip the comment thread).

Terry’s Worklog (Terry Reese).
See the post on innovation, openness and open source: Can the open source community help the ILS matter?

educate/innovate (Blackboard).

David Binkley Emerging Technology Award Presentation: Experimental Interfaces for the Dynamic Visual Grouping of Data During Browsing (link to podcast)
Dr. Stan Ruecker (U Alberta)

This was my favorite talk of the day. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to say about it. It was very research-based and academic, which is probably why I liked it - I’m odd that way.

He also demonstrated a lot of different ways of visualizing information that again got back to the importance of browsing and serendipity in the information seeking process. We spend a lot of time thinking about search, and that’s valid and important. But I did find it interesting how many people were talking about ways to make the browsing experience more robust or meaningful. Pedagogically I think this is a really interesting and really important development. All of us who teach undergrads know that they are really not very good at choosing keywords. And in the decontextualized world of the keyword search, they are often at a loss - they don’t have the experience with a topic to understand how the concepts they’re interested in might fit together within the discourse so they have trouble with everything from searching to finding to reading to taking notes to writing.

Browsing addresses some of these issues. Ruecker’s talk really showed how the browsing experience depends on connections between ideas - visual, thematic, metaphoric, etc. It was interesting to think about how a dynamic browsing experience might help students explore a topic or concept in a way that also lets them experience the context and the discourse that produced the idea.

I’ve already showed some of the projects he demonstrated to students who were just brought to the library to “see what academic libraries are like” — it has been fun.