Group items tagged

A small, digital book startup thinks it has a solution to the age-old student lament: overpriced textbooks that have little value when the course is over. The answer? Make them open source -- and give them away.

Open Context features an innovative folksonomy system that will encourage individual users to add value to the information in Open Context. This powerful social software allows users to add meaningful tags (keywords) to data they discover in their searches.

The Semantic Web is necessary, but not sufficient to provide better technological support for online communities. Web services cannot be described independently of how they are used, because communities of practice use services in novel, unexpected ways. Although semantics are very important to create more 'intelligent' web services, what has been lacking so far is some formal notion of context of use. As Piers Young summarizes it, "that's where the problem of effectiveness starts getting addressed." Contextual elements like the community of use, its objectives and communicative interactions are thus important starting points for conceptualizing the pragmatic layer.

Personal knowledge management is becoming one of the most critical skills that information workers like journalists, marketers and PR pros need to succeed today. Specifically, I am talking about the efficient collecting, processing and weeding of massive amounts of data. In this post I want to offer tips on how to take full advantage of tagging information in Gmail.

Invariant study is fundamental to any scientific research, especially when the research domain is as complex as World Wide Web. Invariants are supposed to be constant within the specified research scope. By well understanding the invariants we may effectively improve the knowledge over many complicated issues. Therefore, it is unsurprisingly for us to see the discussion of invariant study in the new Web Science Research Initiative.

Supports metadata interoperability: NSDL Registry

Zemanta is a service that's focused on helping the blogger/content creator make the process of creating their content simpler and easier. As you write, Zemanta processes all of your text (like a spell checker in a word processing program does) and suggests things to you. Currently, Zemanta suggests stories/posts/research you might want to read as you compose your post, images you might want to include in the post, words you might want to hyperlink out with, and tags for search engines and other services to use to discover your content.

New Video: Leading Minds from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft talk about their Visions for Future of The Web

Here's an important question for all of us: How do you make sense of something that's big and complicated? Say… something like why your users aren't passionate about your product?

The purpose of this chapter is to delineate the key aspects comprising the epistemology that informs my research. It is written as a conversation between myself and three scholars, Ken Wilber, Max van Manen, and Humberto Maturana, each of whom has greatly influenced my thinking regarding the nature of knowing, knowledge, and reality in relation to human science research.

This paper is based on a study of personal experience narratives told by witnesses of the September 11th attacks in calls to C-SPAN. Drawing on research on narratives of ordinary and extraordinary experiences and witnessing, the author offers a framework for analyzing the structure and function of eyewitness accounts. Analysis focuses on methods callers use to show and tell the audience where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking at the time of the attacks. Verbal, visual, and structural features of these narratives are highlighted, with particular attention given to orientation and ideation components of the narratives. The design of these components and their location within the callers' stories are shown to construct the narratives as eyewitness accounts, position the callers and audience members as witnesses, and engage all in a therapeutic sensemaking process.

The Mike Wallace Interview Aldous Huxley 5/18/58 Aldous Huxley, social critic and author of Brave New World, talks to Wallace about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.

Control information overload. Emails, links, attachments, blog posts, news-all relevant data is organized and prioritized by contact.

Once students have gathered information on a topic, it is important that they reflect on whether the information they have gathered is sufficient to answer the research question. This requires students to make sense of the information they have gathered-to synthesize the information into new knowledge. In order to address the different leaning modalities that students possess, teachers should have students use a variety of forms of representation for this sensemaking stage (see Forms of Representation matrix).

Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see patterns that were once hidden to them and develop a common understanding of what is required to address an issue. While the sensemaking (and subsequent intervention design) process will result in the production of artefacts (reports, lists of action items, descriptions of the current situation etc) much of the value is derived through participation in the process. It is not a process where you say 'make sense of this and tell me the answer'. Much of the benefit comes from determining 'what it means' for yourself. Sensemaking is beneficial at an individual level as our values and assumptions are tested and either confirmed or found wanting.

Instead of constructing theories like their researcher colleagues, researching clinicians must face their previous constructions (i.e., sensemaking from experience), create methods which allow for deconstruction (i.e., sensemaking challenged), and then work towards building reconstructions (i.e., sensemaking remade) (Dervin, 1992; Duffy, 1995; Shields & Dervin, 1993; Weick, 1995)

understanding this content and making decisions based on it (especially in mission-critical situations) is not just a simple matter of consuming information. To effectively "make sense" of large, heterogeneous, and often unstructured content collections requires: - efficient, accurate, and context-based ways of extracting, filtering, and summarizing information; - better and more meaningful ways of organizing, visualizing, and interacting with the information; - faster, more objective methods for investigating hypotheses, detecting trends or patterns across multiple sources, and otherwise analyzing or interpreting information.

Sensemaking systems don't only help people find stuff faster. That's just the information retrieval part. The bigger story is about augmenting and amplifying our abilities to make sense. Sensemaking adds things like skimming, power reading, organizing, spotting patterns, tracing social networks, taking notes, summarizing, drilling for details, and flagging biases. Reading an article is different from reading a book, and that's different from reading from a collection or stream. Radically new forms of human-information interaction are being enabled by these new technologies. Sensemaking systems not only have front ends (visualization), but also back ends (content analytics and reasoning).