ICTlogy

Michael Saunby
Climate Change Mashups

Climate change: not a change in the climate but (also) a change in the variability of the climate.

By looking at the map applications, it is easier to see where e.g. there’ll be water stress in the (nearest) future, or human health crisis due to high ozone levels.

Mashups are about e.g. enough people collecting, reusing and distributing public sector information on already existing (commercial) online applications — e.g. Google Earth — so anyone can contribute again and close the loop — and make the scope of diffusion way wider.

It’s possible to mashup news RSS feeds with Google Earth so you can geolocate where the news took place.

To my (provoking) “concern” that you might be putting all your eggs in one basket, and relying too much on third parties’ applications to publish your content, Michael Saunby answers that it is just about tracking those applications as they appear and evolve, and go along with them, not that you invest on them, but just use them — use them for your own purposes and with all the benefits they have.

More info:

• WeMapr
• Lat Long Blog
• Google Code, to find out about the mashup editor (and other Google open API related things)

Patrizia Monteduro
GeoNetwork OpenSource: Geographic data sharing for everyone

Provide a common platform and standards to (online) manage geographic data, improving accessibility while monitoring quality.

Features

• Metadata and data publication and distribution
• Metadata and data search
• Interactive access to maps
• Metadata editing and management
• Different metadata standards
• Different sharing levels

Metadata harvesting and synchronization allows the system to gather metadata from distributed information hosted in other services/servers, done by the user himself.

More info:

• GeoNetwork Community Website

Akiko Hemmi, Sian Bayne, Ray Land
Research methods for Web 2.0 practices: investigating e-learning using Web 2.0 in higher education

The importance of social context when writing/contributing to a wiki, e.g. others’ consent to be written about. Same, even more, when concerning changing others’ writings.

Second Life seems more suitable for informal chat than for exchange/creation of information and knowledge. Indeed, it is not a really reliable tool at this stage.

Identity issues in Second Life and Facebook and how you present your self (Goffman) in virtual realities.

Paolo Lattanzio, Mauro Sandrini
e-learning and web 2.0 – learning spaces for people or machines

The Web 2.0 is not, as it changes and evolves along time by using it.

Possibilities of strong personalization of learning.

Not intended to destroy the old methods, but enhance, complement them.

Possibility of dialog, not a monologue: blogs, podcasts, web radio, etc.

Activate the teachers’ peer community, sharing experiences, resources, etc. Available content should ease the updating of own content.

Not just reuse content, but also the tools.

By using Web 2.0 apps, students also learn not only to collaborate but how to use some tools.

Michael Thelwall
How do general social networking sites embed in the Web?

A hyperlink comparison of 20 social networking sites: hyperlinking is an endorsement to a site.

LexiURL Searcher

It looks that the sites with heavy blog component are more linked than you’d expect by their size/traffic. Blog seems to be a key component in the linking nature of Web 2.0.

Flavour: for each site, the flavour is the top-level domain that most frequently links to it, compared to the other sites. e.g. Facebook is linked by more .edu sites than any other kind of top level domain, while MySpace has the .com as the main referrer and Bebo with .uk.

57% of the links come from personal websites, most of them here’s my website and here’s my personal profile in Facebook/MySpace/whatever, 33% from commercial (especially music and film industry), 3% from educational.

LiveJournal and MySpace have, between them, much more shared links than any other platform with any other one.

Two very differentiate kinds of members in MySpace according to days since last entered the site: frequent users vs. created account and never entered back.

Female users more likely to be “here for” friendship and male users more likely to be “here for” dating (but only a minority). Males and females both preferred to have more female friends and Top 8 friends. Fremales preferred a greater proportion of female Top 8 friends. So, especially in the case of guys, does MySpace really reflects (as it’s been said) offline relationships?

Quite a usual use of swearing in youngsters (16 to 19 y.o.) sites on MySpace, more on guys.

Graham Lewis & Darren Reed
Science Blogs: Experimenting with practice and performance

What are science blogs?
Do they perform any science?
Or is it just science communication?
Or just merely personal diaries?

What are methodological and theoretical challenges for social science analysis

Partial immortalization blog, RealClimate.org

Mertonian norms or ideals (Merton (1954) The Normative Structure of Science

• communism (communalism)
• universalism
• disinterestednesses
• organised scepticism

Science in the real world

• messy and complex
• competitive
• publish, prestige, tenured positions
• funding
• intellectual property

Scale of science blogging: 4% of the total (tagged “science” and found in Technorati)
ScienceBlogs.com

Nature Network, SciVee, LabAction, Second Life / Nature Island / Drexel University

Bora Zivkovic (2006) The Open Laboratory

Most of scientific bloggers define themselves or their blog as scientists writing (whatever they write), and just a few of them state that they’ll be publishing content, findings, data, etc.

Useful Chemistry / Useful Chemistry Wiki, being the wiki the place where scientists put up practices and describe procedures (e.g. to repeat an experiment).

Evidence suggests little science practice.
Blogging slowly moving from ‘fringe activity’ for scientists?
Web 2.0 as policy-making tool.
Are ‘science blogs’ really anything new?

More scientific communication than science blogs.

My comments

• I guess we should clarify some concepts and state the differences between science, scholar, academic and research blogs, for instance. While research is part of academic or faculty activity, teaching and diffusion are too, so we shouldn’t forget the these two activites also are or should be or could be part of the concept / activity of scholarly blogs. Darren Reed agrees, stating that it is a new (thrilling) area to explore, but that the “research” part is the most interesting as there’s the need to separate data, evidence from opinion, speculation… and some so-called research blogs are not that honest… and this has all but added to the common believe that blogs (in general, not just scientific) are frivolous literature.

Nicholas Hookway
Entering the Blogosphere; Some strategies for Using Blogs in Social research

What blogs can offer social scientists? Adding it into the researcher toolkit.

So far, the predominant blog genre is the personal diary-style blog (or life-log).

Differences of academic blogging from diary-style

• Impression management
• The presentation of self in everyday life (Goffman)
• A paradox between visibility and invisibility

What about trustiness? Can they be identity playing?

Blogs are instantaneous, publicly available and low-cost tools for gathering data. Good for collecting sensitive information and ‘ever-changing’ present. A way of figuring ‘the everyday’ without the intrusion of a researcher.

Enric Senabre Hidalgo
Stigmergy, meritocracy and vandalism in peer-production: how can wikis grow

Wikis: open, observable, easy, organic, overt, secure, tolerant, discussed.

Similarities to open source software

• human language = code = software
• wiki pages = program modules
• more transparency implies more security
• every change is saved and revisable
• each content has its own discussion, often bigger than the content itself
• improvement loops, parallel tools

In wikis, users are gathering around content, while in blogging is content that gathers around a blog (content in the center of contributers vs. the blogger in the center of content)

Collaboration by stigmergy: communication through signs left in the environment.

Wikis as a way of appropriating content; more content, more traffic, more edits, more content, more traffic, more edits… And quality increasing due to more edits.

Task distribution/specialization of work

• content: writing, translating, editing typos
• technical: tools, bots
• social: welcoming, mediating, helping, guiding

Organic generation of rules. The constance presence of vandalism, due to extreme opennes. But there’s a continuous redefinition of vandalism, needs for new rules, etc.

Adaptive online identity and content driven reputation = you are what you do (edit, comment, help, repair) within the system, which implies trust and proven experience enabling you to participate in different levels.

My comments

• More edits mean more quality, but this is because errors are detected or because of increments of content?

Both open source development and Wikipedia require free time, cheap equipments and communications, and breaking large and complex tasks into small and independent modules.

Camille Roth
Viable Wikis

State of the wikisphere and processes of viability.

In general, there’s technological and functional regularity across platforms and established/running wikis, though there’s organizational variety:

• scope: “defining” the wiki, the language (and its implications on the geographical distribution of this language and the natural selection of contributors)
• policies: “neutral point of view”, historical, evolution of wiki rules through policy pages
• technical policies (eventually): who can contribute, how is interaction and social identity defined, new technological features

Wikis are a group of users, possibly becoming an active community — population dynamics: recruitment, retention, exclusion/leave
Wikis are a group of pages, possibly becoming esteemed content — content dynamics: growth, stabilization, quality articles

Population dynamics

• Bootstraping period: centralized set of initial norms, first incentive landscape
• User incentives: altruistic, “socially concerned”, selfish
• Enrollment, leadership: explicit role distribution, implicit role distribution (quantitative differences, informal authority)

Two development regimes of growth: after bootstrapping, there is a phase of recruitment of many other users that is essentially different, qualitatively and quantitatively.

Greg Hale
Pumping up the fun on Web 2.0: Can psychology give a helping hand?

“They” will use user generated content
What is user generated content — and who are “they”

Problem on doing research on films: everyone’s an expert on films.

Work with schemas, structure and cognitive structures.

Schema cluster: structural, behavioral, entities, actions.

Schema as a psychological regularity. Familiar schemas help people share experiences, identify patterns and situations, and thus congregate around user generated content.

Ismael Peña-López
The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with research diffusion

There is unchallenged evidence that both researchers and research interests in developing countries are underrepresented in mainstream academic publishing systems. Reasons are many but publishing costs, research infrastructure financing and the vicious circle of researcher invisibility are among the most mentioned. Efforts have been made to mitigate this situation, being open access to scholarly literature – open access journals, self-archiving in institutional repositories – an increasingly common and successful approach.

It is our opinion that focus has been put on institutional initiatives, but the concept and tools around the web 2.0 seem to bring clear opportunities so that researchers, acting as individuals, can also contribute, to build a broader personal presence on the Internet and a better diffusion for their work, interests and publications.

By using a mesh of social software applications, we here propose the concept of the Personal Research Portal as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher – tied to his digital public notebook and personal repository – and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in congresses, the Personal Research Portal would be a knowledge management system that would enhance reading, storing and creating at both the private and public levels, helping to bridge the academic digital divide.

• Dowload presentation
• Dowload article
• video + slides streaming recorded by the University of Lancaster
• some other vide + slides recordings

Elisabetta Cigognini, Jose Mangione, Chiara Pettenati
Favouring a critical, creative and ethical use of the network resources through Web 2.0 applications

How can Web 2.0 strategies provide significant support towards a better personal knowledge management?

Context: connectivism (is not the content, is the pipe that matters), lifelong learning, web 2.0, empowerment through “individual” knowledge.

Why Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)?

• Knowledge is a key asset
• PKM is focused on helping an individual to better learn/know/work
• The overall goal is to enable individuals to operate better in social networks

PMK Skills

• Create
• Organize
• Share

Higher order abilities basic for a personal growth oriented to a lifelong-knowing approach: criticism, ethics, creativity

To find what we need we rely on taxonomies […], computer-assisted ways of localing what’s relevant [and] recommendations made by people we trust, David Weinberger

Ethic-quette: adoption of a code that govern the expectations of social behaviour within the network society.

Creativity is a mental attitude which needs to be nurtured: Serendipity 2.0.

Teemu Arina: Serendipity 2.0: missing third places of learning.

• Serendipic learning
• homo contextus
• parasitic learning.

Awareness 2.0: traces so an individual can place himself in the knowledge pipe.

Erkki Sutinen
Can an ICT professional be trained to spark innovation? Background for a contextualized ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania

EdTechΔ research group, focusing on educational technology creation, under these premises:

• Making a difference in action
• Triangulation in research
• Multiple perspective in development
• Bidirectional partnerships

How come does our education system train professionals who can design an architecture to meet the needs written in a specification, for making existing processes more efficient, but not experts who can creatively, critically and supportingly talk with their customers and identify their real needs?

New project in the ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania, to make the students re-link their new skills and knowledge to the needs of that society where they have come from

Principles of the ICT program

• Contextualization, local problems as starting points for projects
• Practical and interdisciplinary orientation
• International recognition
• Continuous research for the program’s formative development

Which color is ICT professional’s collar when mining a problem? Is it blue? Should it be white?

ICT program in the light of ICT4D dialectics

• exogenous vs. endogenous? ethnocomputing.org to culturally discover meaningful entry points to ICT, in the spectrum between practical needs and theoretical models of computaion
• top-down or bottom up? gaining ownership to emerging vs. guaranteeing access to given
• open source or proprietary software? garage mentality
• partnership or delivery? I4D, VISCoS, Knowledge Management journal, Vol 3, No 1: monographic about Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in development

Back in March 10th, 2006, I was asked to impart a workshop about Web 2.0 and diffusion of research. The workshop was improved, repeated and even published with a strong focus on teaching.

The subject quite caught on me and I’ve been working since to (a) strengthen the theoretical framework and (b) give it the “for development” bias that I’m so fond of. There’s quite a bunch or articles that I’ve been publishing here exploring ideas, doubts, thoughts about the issue — just on my previous article, for instance.

Finally, it has taken the appropriate shape and been published in the Knowledge Management for Development Journal, in an issue under the topic of Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in development, coordinated by Nancy White, Beth Kanter, Partha Sarker, Oreoluwa Somolu, Beverly Trayner, Brenda Zulu and Lucie Lamoureux. Having an article accepted — and commented — by such a team is something that makes you feel really good, as they all are people of reference in both the researcher and practitioner fields.

The full reference is:

Peña-López, I. (2007). “The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access”. In Knowledge for Management Journal, 3(1), 35-48. Amsterdam: KM4Dev Community. Retrieved July 30, 2007 from http://www.km4dev.org/journal/index.php/km4dj/article/view/92

On the other hand, a live presentation of the contents of this article will take place at the Web2forDev Conference in Rome next 25 to 27 September 2007.

Feedback welcome!