A little while ago, the semi-ubiquitous learning management system Blackboard announced it was going 2.0 – in its own proprietary fashion. Lumped under the name BeyondInitiative are a series of properties that are designed to connect users worldwide, across education segments and disciplines, and thus leverage the wisdom of the … Continue reading
If you agree that Wikipedia presents more thorns than roses to academic experts, you have good company: one of Wikipedia’s two founders. The split between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger has a certain Old Testament character: Wales (the Web 2.0 brother) reigns over the miraculous worldwide flourishing of the anonymously … Continue reading
Reading Roy Rosenzweig’s thoughtful appraisal of Wikipedia in the current Journal of American History (“Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”), I was particularly struck by this passage: If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation … Continue reading
Oh to have been a fly on the wall at the just-wrapped Mashup Camp – a fly safely high up on the wall, because a) I’m no programmer and would likely be in the way, and b) its ‘geek dating’ program – a frenetic dance of speed demos and the … Continue reading
Inevitable? Sure. Useful? We’ll see. Wikilaw, an open-content legal resource, is up and running — soliciting off-the-clock, copyleft work from the million lawyers running around the U.S. At least one or two of them must be frustrated graphic artists – imagine if tort reform could be similarly explained: Wikipedia is … Continue reading
Fresh outta Norway, here’s an intriguing marriage of wikis, folksonomy, and metadata harvesting: meet Collib, an experiment launched by a student at the University of Tromsø. The idea here: records are harvested from OAI-PMH-compliant repositories and brought into the wiki. Users – now end-users of these records – then ‘tag’ … Continue reading
While Wikipedia is the standard reference for what wikis can do, its newer cousin Wikibooks is, in many respects, a more daring venture. This is a collection of open-content textbooks – that is, modules freely available to and updatable by anyone, covering a wide range of subjects. (General FAQs here) … Continue reading
As New Orleans was flooding, and burning, and suffering, two young computer programmers quickly launched Scipionus – a visual wiki of the calamity, charted onto Google Maps. On this site, users mark a location and report on it. The markers are color-coded – indicating new (green) and updated (purple) posts. … Continue reading
An essay by Clay Shirky, called “A Group Is Its Worst Enemy”, has been floating around for a couple of years – but I just ran across it. It’s an interesting meditation on group dynamics and social software, shaped by crushed hopes for Usenet as well as a book about … Continue reading
It’s all in the visualization. When I describe wikis to someone still grappling with the oddness of the word ‘wiki’, my description inevitably kicks into abstractions about joint authoring, organic development, networked interactivity. What is likely to lodge, in an innocent auditor’s mind, is an amorphous sense of wide-open vulnerability: … Continue reading