Web 2.0

Open Web Awards - Your vote counts

daniel — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:23:26 -0500

From http://mashable.com/2008/11/19/openwebawards-voting-1/ :

Voting has begun in the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards, a unique opportunity for the most accomplished websites and services to receive international recognition for their achievements.

You can participate using the following widget:

Creative Commons - you can participate in the creation of a globally shared cultural heritage

daniel — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:14:29 -0400

This video released by Creative Commons explains how you can contribute to a global cultural heritage and at the same time exercise copyrights to have a say on how your contributions live on when taken up by others.

Web 2.0 tools for scientists

daniel — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:24:30 -0400

WAYS is a pretty interactive website (i.e. you can both consume and generate contents in various medias, a concept commonly referred to as Web 2.0) but if you are not sure what all these new tools can do for you as a scientist, you may wish to take a look at the Small Worlds project hosted at the University of Leicester.

Stimulating video documentary on Wikipedia, knowledge sharing, truth and the role of experts

daniel — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 20:47:04 -0400

The role of expert knowledge is central to a video documentary on Wikipedia's way of knowledge sharing. It features the opinions of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, as well as of some other major Web 2.0 players and critics, including the authors Tim O’Reilly and Andrew Keen as well as Charles Leadbeater (a former advisor to Tony Blair), Bob McHenry (former editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica) and Ndesanjo Macha, one of the first to blog in an African language and one of the major contributors to the Swahili Wikipedia (which, by the way, is about to reach the 7,000 article milestone within the next few days).

The views of these people, particularly on truth and its representation in encyclopedias, contrast quite significantly but their aggregation provides food for thought on how the future of knowledge sharing might look like. The explicitly scientific perspective was mainly missing but between the lines, it became clear that large interactively collaborative (ubuntu) projects like this might also play an increasingly important role in academic research and tertiary education.

One possible direction is a continuation and expansion of Wikipedia until saturation, other options include branching and the development of more academically inclined variants like Scholarpedia, the Encyclopedias of Earth and Cosmos as well as Citizendium (not mentioned in the documentary but in a previous post here), and there are certainly many other possible developments.

How to render your homework assignments useful for you and the world

daniel — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:16:11 -0500

Homework is a word that probably very few associate with something positive, and here, I will summarize four recent (independent but converging) twists on the topic:
(1) a study by researchers at the Technical University of Dresden (see press release, German only: http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news245011 ) has demonstrated that homework assignments do indeed fail, in most cases, to help the student in learning;

(2) Citizendium, a wiki-type free encyclopedia aimed at improving general credibility and article quality with respect to Wikipedia, has launched an initiative which encourages university instructors to assign Citizendium articles as homework for which students can get credits (see press release at
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Citizendium_Press_Releases/Jan... );

(3) OpenStudents.org, upon whose inauguration I have commented previously (http://www.ways.org/en/2008/jan/31/1915/daniel/open_students_pla...), now features an article on a very similar approach - to let students deposit their homework in freely accessible repositories, and to give them the option to comment on such contents (cf. http://www.openstudents.org/2008/02/13/student-publishing-as-an-... );

(4) As previously announced, a global initiative on Open education is gaining momentum (cf. http://www.ways.org/en/2008/jan/25/0618/daniel/cape_town_open_ed... ), and (2) and (3) are important steps in this direction.

Call for proposals for a WAYS userbox at Wikipedia

daniel — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:08:36 -0500

Hello everybody,

many of you have already edited Wikipedia articles, and some certainly do so on a regular basis. As it would be nice to showcase the contributions that WAYSers make to such a collaborative project, I thought it might be a good idea to think about a userbox for WAYSers in the English Wikipedia, for a start, and instead of just creating one myself, I would like to invite your feedback and suggestions on its design.

Wikipedia userboxes are described in detail at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Userbox , and the userboxes of members of IEEE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:User_IEEE) or similar organizations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Userboxes/Science#Scienti...) might serve as examples, whereas http://www.yerich.net/test3/userbox-gen.php , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Java7837/userboxcreator and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Userbox_Maker provide tools to experiment with userbox designs.

If you have suggestions on the topic (e.g. a nice image or catchy slogan), please post them here or contact me in private.

Cheers,

Daniel