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Calais is an initiative by Thomson Reuters to connect the world's content by providing automated metadata (let's just call it tagging) services. The Calais service takes your text and uses sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to extract the people, organizations, companies, geographies and events hidden within it.

Prof. Stanley Fish ponders the book " "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," by Frank Donoghue. Donoghue argues that utilitarianism is all but triumphant in the American university, and that the non-instrumental studies like the Humanities are doomed.

good podcast about roles of internet and other personal technologies. just about mid-way talks about information scarcity (1.0) vs information abundance (2.0). near the end it talks about the tech proclivities of various ethnic groups

The expression "you can't fatten your lambs by weighing them" may be an expression in southern illinois but it was also used by Jonathan Kozol in his keynote speech to the Children's Defense Fund in the early 90's. I know. I have the tape of the speech. Obama likes to take the words of others and use as his own. Comment by catherine - September 10, 2008 at 6:32 am

The following paper gives an overview of the approach taken by the SocialLearn project at Open University UK. It provides a description and rationale for a hub-and-spoke model similar to the one we have been discussing. Social:Learn - Widening Participation and Sustainability of Higher Education Walton, A, Weller, M. and Conole, G. (2008). Proc. EDEN 2008: Annual Conference of the European Distance and E-Learning Network. 11-14 June 2008, Lisbon, Portugal [PDF]

Information from the Personal Democracty forum on next steps for networked governance.

The progress and the thinkings of SocialLearn project by Open University.

But the essential, core meaning [of Enterprise 2.0] has largely stayed the same: Social applications that are optional to use, free of unnecessary structure, highly egalitarian, and support many forms of data.

This article compares the Google index rating of canditates who allowed the posting of voter generated content on their site with those that didn't. In other words: Web 2.0 vs. Web 1 approach relative to the number of pages google had indexed from the site.

good analysis of some of the opportunities of light-weight (craigs-list style) comunity volunteer organizing

"You can learn a great deal about customers by studying the broader context in which they use your product or service. To do this, ask what your customer is doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after he uses your product or service."

"But knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge - especially "actionable" knowledge - by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles."

An interresting take on assumptions about knowledge.

Really interesting quote, Theron. I wonder if it's a chunk that could be used as a prompt for a faculty discussion, to open up the dialogue about what is learning. And then how does a program design a curriculum and syllabi / assignments to teach and assess, towards a much broader understanding of knowledge (and skills)?

Even though twitter is on the headline once again, the important message from the article is not about twitter... but rather, the way in which feedback is being solicited, or collected. Feedback is best when provided as close to the moment of performance as possible, as shown in studies involving everyone from medical students to athletes. But lengthy feedback forms discourage frequent and immediate responses. Enabling employees to solicit feedback in short, immediate bursts may actually be more effective than performance reviews or lengthy feedback systems, since excessive feedback can be overwhelming and hinder performance.

Abstract: This study explores the effect on discussion quality of adding a feedback mechanism that presents users with an aggregate peer rating of the usefulness of the participant's contributions in online, asynchronous discussion. Participants in the study groups were able to specify the degree to which they thought any posted comment was useful to the discussion. Individuals were regularly presented with feedback (aggregated and anonymous) summarizing peers' assessment of the usefulness of their contribution, along with a summary of how the individuals rated their peers. Results indicate that continuous, anonymous, aggregated feedback had no effect on either the students' or the instructors' perception of discussion quality. This is kind of a show-stopper. It's just one study but when you look at the results there appears to be no effect whatsoever from peers giving feedback about the usefulness of discussion posts, nor any perceived improvement in the quality of the discussions as evaluated by faculty. It looks like we'll need to begin looking carefully at just what kinds of feedback will really make a difference. Following up on Corinna's earlier post http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/twitters_potential_as_microfee.html about the effectiveness of short immediate feedback being more effective than lengthier feedback that actually hinders performance. The trick will be to figure out just what kinds of feedback will actually work in embedded situations. It's interesting that an assessment of utility wasn't useful...?