RSS: Two Interesting Articles

Just came across these two articles, one from Summer 2003 (RSS: The Next Killer App for Education) and the other from Summer 2004 (RSS: The Web's Next Big Thing?).

2003. The implications of RSS file syndication for the academy—in particular, its potential to expand the scope and prominence of self-published Web content—are significant, especially when files are produced from the content of a professional's weblog. In essence, RSS syndication technology provides a bridge between isolated Web content and interested information consumers in multiple institutions, groups, and arenas of practice. By reaching out to a global audience, syndication transforms the "lonely voice" of the Web page into an international dialogue of ongoing professional discourse.

2004. The implications of RSS file syndication for the academy—in particular, its potential to expand the scope and prominence of self-published Web content—are significant, especially when files are produced from the content of a professional's weblog. In essence, RSS syndication technology provides a bridge between isolated Web content and interested information consumers in multiple institutions, groups, and arenas of practice. By reaching out to a global audience, syndication transforms the "lonely voice" of the Web page into an international dialogue of ongoing professional discourse.

5 Challenges for Open Source

From the September 24 Chronicle of Higher Education. And they are:

• Building a Community
• Agreeing on What Open Source Means
• Securing Budgets for 'Free' Software
• Getting Colleges to Switch
• Working With Companies, Not Against Them

Emerging Face of Information Search

New from K-Praxis: Emerging Face of Information Search: Initial focus on two key issues: (1) How well does a search engine understand the users’ intention? and (2) What are the challenges and questions that arise while interpreting the users’ intent?

The KDE Accessibility Project

The KDE Accessibility Project (also by way of slashdot):

"Our goal is to make the entirety of the K Desktop Environment and (by necessity) its underlying technologies usable by and as efficient as possible for disabled users of all types. We like to make a complete accessible desktop as a free alternative to the expensiveness of commercial assistive technologies. By cooperating with other free solutions, interoperability with other accessibility software programs (e.g. GNOME applications) can be ensured. Making all of KDE fully accessible is a huge task, but it also involves very small things. A missing keyboard shortcut might be just a bit annoying for most people, but it makes the programs unusable for others. This is why the KDE Accessibility Projects aims to raise the awareness of accessibility issues among all people involved in KDE."

Sphinx

Sphinx is a speaker-independent large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer under Berkeley's style license. It is also a collection of open source tools and resources that allows researchers and developers to build speech recognition system. Sphinx 4 (beta) was released September 24. [From slashdot.]

Educators increasing use of video streaming for the deaf

From the Ohio News Network, September 29, 2004:

.....
     "Nobody in the hearing world cared if the video was a little jerky because they had a soundtrack with it," said David Stecca, chief executive of Deaf Video Communications of America Inc. of Wheaton, Ill. "Video streaming is still far from perfect, but with high-speed Internet connection, a deaf person can now see good, clean-motion sign language over the Internet."
.....
     Alton Brant, an associate professor of American Sign Language at Clemson University in South Carolina, said deaf people are becoming technologically literate through online programs and other devices at a faster rate than many hearing people.
     "I now see everything moving increasingly away from the classroom or campus setting and going online," Brant said. "The possibilities for deaf communication with video streaming and other improving technology are endless.

K12 Linux Terminal Server Project

SunSITE is now an official mirror for the K12 Linux Terminal Server (K12LTSP) software (ftp or http). K12LTSP is based on RedHat Fedora Linux — also mirrored on SunSITE (ftp or http) — and the LTSP terminal server packages, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. K12LTSP is part of the K12Linux in Schools Project

Literacies Informational and Technological

Just came across these three projects devoted to information and technology literacies:

Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is a unique public-private organization formed to define and incorporate into learning the skills that are necessary for every student's success in the 21st Century. Funded by US Department of Education.

IMSA 21st Century Information Fluency Project. The goal of IMSA’s 21st Century Information Fluency Program is to help librarians, teachers and students (learners of all ages) enhance their ability to locate, evaluate and use digital information resources.

Pacific Bell/UCLA Initiative for 21st Century Literacies. This private-public partnership invests in projects that explore the meaning of literacy in an age of rapidly changing technologies and growing diversity through three critical areas:

• Educating the User: Enhancing the abilities of young people, teachers, librarians, and all citizens through the integration of information, cultural, media, visual, and other 21st century literacy skills.
• Improving the Information System: Improving access and use through system design matching the literacy levels, technological capacities, and other characteristics of the user.
• Addressing the Policy Issues: Defining the digital divide's multiple dimensions and developing indicators to measure the gaps and progress in closing them.

Michael Lorenzen has recently cited two interesting related articles, Technological Literacy from ERIC (2001) and Information Literacy: The Benefits of Partnership from the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing (2001). Also currently in circulation and being discussed is Information Literacy Primer from the Edutopia (2001).

Also came across this conference on information literacy at Georgia Southern University October 8-9.

The New Literacy

Interesting article from Technology & Learning. "What do students really need to be learning today in order to be ready for an unpredictable future?" My favorite quote: "Michael Cox, a chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank, predicted to a group of students that they would have at least five jobs after they graduate, four of which haven't been invented yet."

Refining the Search Engine

An interview wth Ramesh Jain from Georgia Tech. "Current search engines like Google do not give me a 'steering wheel' for searching the Internet.....The search engines get faster and faster, but they're not giving me any control mechanism. The only control mechanism, which is also a stateless control mechanism, asks the searcher to put in keywords, and if I put in keywords I get this huge monstrous list. I have no idea how to refine this list. The only way is to come up with a completely new keyword list. I also don't know what to do with the 8 million results that Google threw at me. So when I am trying to come up with those keywords, I don't know really where I am. That means I cannot control that list very easily because I don't have a holistic picture of that list. That's very important. When I get these results, how do I get some kind of holistic representation of what these results are, how they are distributed among different dimensions."

Videoblogs as 'Collective Documentary'

Jon Hoem gave an interesting presentation at BlogTalk 2.0 (slides here, paper here). "Videoblogs can facilitate practices which promote media literacy and collaborative learning through the making of collective documentaries. Videoblogs with wiki-like functions promise to turn users into producing collectives rather than individual consumers of audiovisual content. This paper outline parts of the theoretical and technical framework which is needed in order to design an online environment stimulating collective production of video."

Blogs in Higher Education

Jeremy B Williams and Joanne Jacobs have published an excellent overview and literature survey of blogging in higher education in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. One of the many interesting articles cited is Content Delivery in the 'Blogosphere' by Richard Ferdig and Kaye Trammell, published in Technological Horizons in Education (February 2004). Ferdig and Trammell list four benefits of student blogging:

• The use of blogs helps students become subject-matter experts.
• The use of blogs helps students become subject-matter experts.
• The use of blogs gives students legitimate chances to participate.
• The use of blogs provides opportunities for diverse perspectives, both within and outside of the classroom.

[See also this article from the September 23 Guardian, Inside the ivory tower: Blogging is allowing academics to develop and share their ideas with an audience beyond the universities. (Free, but registration required.)]