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Experimenting with Apture Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
796 days ago

While ferriting around in the wilds of the Web this weekend, I came across Apture. It takes weblinks and turns them into multimedia experiences. According to the Apture site,

This is my first experiment with it. I added the Apture code to my dkeats.com Chisimba skin, uploaded it to the site, and created this post.

With the speed of the Internet in South Africa, and my DSL performing at the speed of a jam melon falling up a hill, doing interesting things can be quite a pain.  Nevertheless, you can check out what it does by clicking on the Chisimba or South Africa link in this page.

I will explore the opportunities to use this capability in some of the other posts. The tool is currently in Beta, and they do not say what their business model is or if it will remain free after the beta. But it is a pretty cool use of distributed computing.

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Web 2.0 commenting with Disqus Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
773 days ago

Disqus is a Web 2.0 commenting system. I am just experimenting with it to see how it works. Disqus claims that it makes your comments more interactive for readers and easier to manage for you — all while connecting your community with other blogs. Well, lets see how it works.

If it works well, perhaps I will make a Chisimba filter for it so that it can replace the Chisimba commenting system if the user wishes to be more Web 2.0 in their approach to comments on Chisimba pages. From what I have seen so far, it works pretty well.

 

 

 

 

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Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change higher education Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
724 days ago

This presentation on Education 3.0: How the coevolution of technology and society will change higher education over the next decade is from a talk I gave at Wits on Aug 4th, 2008.

It was a talk about how the technology-society evolution is affecting education, it was NOT about eLearning.

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Disqus is disappointing - some web 2.0 is web 1.5 Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
724 days ago

I was excited recently when I came across a product called Disqus, which sells itself as follows:

This would be so cool, or so I thought, so I went about implementing a filter for it in Chisimba. At first it looked great. But then I realised something was not right. Replies to comments were not visible in the page on which the reply was posted.

Everything worked exactly as expected and as advertised, except  for this problem that replies made in the page did not work. The replies were stored correctly, but could only be viewed if the blog post is opened via the permalink for it. This can never be senisble behviour.

I reported this to the disqus support, and got mail after mail from them with 1-2 sentences which clearly showed that they had not read my email. Over a number of weeks, I got several of those kinds of responses, but nothing that indicated any intelligent consideration of my problem. Without any explanation of why their very instructions did not work, I got a final email from one of them last week saying

Duh! Replies are not supposed to work correctly!!! I cannot be the only one who thinks it is just strange to require the first comment to be opened in a separate window, something nobody would know about, in order to post or view a reply. That means that there is a gap in the market for a discussion engine that actually works. Any takers? Sounds like a good project against which to raise venture capital.

Meanwhile, I have disabled the Disqus plugin (or will have tonight when I FTP up the code with it disabled), and do not recommend anyone to waste their time on trying to implement something that is designed not to work.

 

 

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Education 3.0: why should Africa care? Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
706 days ago

This presentation uses some stats about Africa and the world to suggest that collaboration is the only way for Africa to build critical mass to address some of the challenges that we face. Once vehicle for collaboration is the set of conditions we describe as Education 3.0.

Note that the license for the images used in this presentation may vary from the license for my own part of it.

You can download this presentation from our Chameleon server.

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Institutional repositories: closing the chasm of apathy Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
567 days ago

Institutional repositories are interesting concepts. They are founded on the very principles that drive science, yet institutions struggle to implement them, and struggle to get researchers to contribute to them. Furthermore, most of the technology used for them is, like scientific publication itself, stuck in an antiquated 20th Century mode. This year should be the year that institutional repositories really take off in South African higher education institutions. But it probably will not, not for technical reasons, but for the same reasons that technology projects often fail: people and process reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_Repository.

One of the things about Web 2.0 is the evolution of the notion of 'content through process' rather than 'content after process'. Institutional repositories are stuck in the 'content after process' mode, and unless this changes, institutional repositories will generally remain a nice ideal that very few people live up to in reality.

Here are some suggestions for getting institutional repositories to actually work and function in an institutional context. They may not be popular suggestions with all researchers, who resist anything that might be considered 'managerialist' in approach, but there is no viable alternative other than to abandon repositories altogether and return to the delicious independent obscurity of the previous century.

So here are the interventions that I sugggest under the 'content through process' umbrella.

1. Research administration processes need to include an automated submission of research articles to the repository at the preprint stage. One way to accomplish this would be to request that preprints be included with funding applications for local research grants, conference travel fund or promotion applications. Software could easily be written (a couple of days work) to automatically add the document to the repository. Of course, hidden in this is the complexity of such a request, and the carrot against which compliance is effected.

2. Parse annual research reports and extract lists of articles that are not in the repository, and the author is emailed a request for a copy of the article for adding to the repository. The article can be added by attaching it to a return email, obviating the need for the researcher to do anything beyond a normal email procedure.

3. Search RSS feeds of published articles involving staff at a given instution are used to automatically add an article to a local database,  and follow the above procedure.

4. The DropBox method. Ask academics to install a dropbox tool so that they can copy files into a directory on their local computer and have them automatically assembled into a preprint and loaded into the repository.

5. More radical and managerialist, just like promotion would not happen without a list of publications, ensure that promotions processes also include review of contributions to institutional repositories.

6. Social marketing is one method of changing a culture. Institutions need to engage in activities that change the dominant institutional culture from the currently rampant 20th Century version to a more 21st Centure, open, collaborative one where these activities are done because they add value.

Unfortunately, instutional repositories only become valuable when large numbers of people are using them. Then their value is obvious, as physicists for example have discovered. The trick has to be to engineer a tipping point within individual institutions, and that is going to require a variety of tricks, only one of which is the provision of software tools. I will make another post in a day or two in which I will talk about some of the technology innovations that are still necessary for Repository 2.0, and a further post on the humble presentation and makinng a repository for it. Meanwhile, here is an interesting presentation to look at:

 

I called this post 'closing the chasm of apathy' becuase apathy arises out of not seeing the potential of engagement, or because the effort of engagement is higher than the perceived benefit, or out of general ignorance of the object of unconcern. We must use better technology, smarter processes,  a little bit of managerialsm and social marketing to close that gap. At least in South Africa.

For the oh duh! people, there are many things that I have not said in this article. That does not mean that I do not think they are important. For example, it is obvious that the 21st Century repository must have semantic elements -- thats why I included the presentation above. I will talk more about that later.

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Phycology 2.0: Can we foster a new interest in phycology using the technologies of Web2.0? Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
554 days ago

Since the emergence of the concept of Web 2.0, it has become fashionable to add 2.0 after concepts to indicate that social-collaborative processes and technologies have been brought to bear on them. Licenses that permit the sharing of the expression of knowledge in digital and other formats have evolved and become a popular element of Web 2.0 and the digital culture of the 21st Century. The technology-society coevolution that is happening at present may have some potential to rekindle an interest in phycology. As a recognized science, Phycology is in decline, having become almost a subculture or other disciplines during the past 1-2 decades. A scan of current social networking and social media applications show that there is almost no discussion of algae or media about algae available. Popular websites focusing on algae contain no social, collaborative features. Popular microblogging applications, such as Twitter contain no mention of algae by any professional phycologist. Photographs of algae on Flickr are almost all by amateurs, and generally of poor quality. Most online artifacts produced by Phycologists are fully copyrighted, and most phcological research is published in closed access journals that retain full copyright. Relatively few phycologists exploit new scholarly forms of communication, such as blogging, podcasting and presentation sharing.  In this talk I explore these trends, and suggest how organizations such as PSSA might help to use social technologies to help make our science better known.

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