23 | January | 2006 | Visible Procrastinations

Archive for January 23rd, 2006

Published January 23, 2006 geek Leave a Comment

Would you like a thumb-drive with those schools shoes?

Cool for school
Lia Timson, January 21, 2006 [The Age]

Children will soon be back at school and will carry much more than books and a new pencil case in their backpacks. Laptops, PDAs and memory keys will accompany mobile phones and digital music players as technology begins to merge classroom and home.

But do children really need all that? With some schools adding high-tech devices to stationery lists, parents must decide which technological tools their children really need.

…

From as young as five, children learn to “identify and use” a limited range of computer-based technology. This changes to “evaluate, select and use” in year 6 and by year 8 students should “demonstrate appropriate ethics and etiquette in relation to computer use such as general computer care, passwords, file security, network use, printing and shared resources”.

…

At a minimum for home use, Wright {Guy Wright – Kingscliff High School}, recommends a PC, an internet connection and a USB key (also known as flash drive or “nerd stick”) to replace floppy and compact discs. And he says children need Microsoft Office, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, at home rather than the programs included with Microsoft Works, which is often sold with budget-priced PCs. “We’ve had some difficulties transferring files if they don’t have Word,” he says.

…

I find “We’ve had some difficulties transferring files if they don’t have Word,” a bit disturbing, this reeks of teaching products rather than techniques … ever heard of RTF, let alone Open Office?

[1.] Cool for school [The Age]

Glossary

Published January 23, 2006 geek Leave a Comment

The project to have a definitive list of definitions for use within ed-IT, and in the future EDFAC? What do we mean by the term resourcing, does this mean the same thing in HR and Finance?

glossary an alphabetical list of technical terms in some specialized field of knowledge; usually published as an appendix to a text on that field [1]

The next step is the migration of a lot of the content from \ed-it_ops\ to either \glossary\ or to \docs\. Now that is a fair bit of a mapping project to ensure that things don’t break (too much).

[1.] glossary [WordNet Search - 2.1]

Social Bookmarking

Published January 23, 2006 blog , Flickr , geek , Web2.0 Leave a Comment

Charles Wright’s posting on the bleeding edge blog [3] has got me thinking a bit more about the use of del.icio.us, and various other social informaton network techniques. This is something that popped up on my radar last year, was was removed with the whitenoise that was the chaos of last year I had investigated some forms of tagging, and social information exchange {backpack, technorati, Flickr [Yahoo] …}

What the heck is social bookmarking? [2]
Social bookmarking is basically a web based bookmarking service on steriods. It gives users the ability to access bookmarks from anywhere and share web pages that has been deemed “bookmarkable” by its network of users.

What kind of name is del.icio.us?
Pronounced “delicious,” del.icio.us is both the company name and domain name (http://del.icio.us) of a service that allows people to bookmark web sites to an online account rather than to a favorites folder in their web browser. The service was created in 2003 by Joshua Schachter and turned into a company in 2005. While del.icio.us certainly has a tasty sounding name, that’s probably not why Yahoo bought them.

Social bookmarking produces a different ordering/ranking than search engines due to the vastly different methods involved in the listings; this is both the strength and the weakness of the method …
“One important feature of systems such as these is that they do not impose a rigid taxonomy. Instead, they allow users to assign whatever classifiers they choose. Although this might sound counter-productive to the ultimate goal of organizing content, in practice it seems to work rather well, although it does present some drawbacks. For example, most people will probably classify pictures of cats by using the tag ‘cats.’ But what happens when some individuals use ‘cat’ or ‘feline’ or ‘meowmeow’ or ‘my.favorite.cat’?” [4]

Folk Futures [5]
Despite all the current hype about tags – in the blogging world, especially – for the authors of this paper, tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc. Rather, they are a supplemental means to organize information and order search results.

It will probably take some time to get a few links entered, and then we’ll see how useful the cross-links between other users are. I’ll also try to increase the tagging at the bottom of each blog (see today’s tags).

…s).