Aldo de Moor

27
Oct
2008

Evaluation SURFnet pilot Active Worlds

After a very intense period of finishing projects, I am now recharging my research batteries. As I am travelling and networking a lot, time for my blog is limited. However, I will try to give brief summaries of some of the events I have attended recently, but not written about yet.

SURFnet provides a high-quality network specifically intended for higher education and research in the Netherlands. It is a subsidiary of the SURF organisation, in which Dutch universities, universities for applied sciences and research centres collaborate nationally and internationally on innovative ICT facilities. One of its R&D topics is how to use virtual worlds in higher education.

On October 1, an inspiring evaluation meeting was organized to discuss the results of a pilot using the Active Worlds virtual world environment.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Conferences, 0 comments
16
Oct
2008

Pitching social enterprises at The Hub

Having finished my portal project, I am in Berlin now. As it’s been a very intense project, I really felt the need to “reset my brain” and decided to have a creative breather in Berlin. It’s a great city to visit for such a purpose, and to get inspiration for new R&D ideas. At the end of the week, I will be attending Barcamp Berlin 3.0, more about that later.

To warm up, I attended a nice event organized by Self Hub Berlin yesterday. Such hubs are increasingly being established in cities all over the world as creative places for social entrepreneurs. I already visited The Hub Rotterdam, and was curious to find out how things are done in their Berlin counterpart.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Conferences, 0 comments
10
Oct
2008

The Tilburg University student portal at a glance

Some information on the Tilburg University student portal, which was launched on September 30, 2008:

The Tilburg University web site has dedicated information pages for the various target groups, including students, lecturers, and prospective students. Through the students target group page, students can login to their personal portal. The portal has been implemented in Blackboard, and integrated with its existing Digital Learning Environment. Once logged in, the student sees three tabs: My Study, My University and My Stuff. The portlets (channels or views on applications or information resources) on the portal tabs are by default only, and can be (re)moved by students as they like.

My Study contains study-related portlets. The default portlets on the My Study tab include My Courses, My Course Announcements, My Study Facilities, Webmail Notifier, My Week Schedule, My Schedule Changes, My Exam Schedule, and Language Tools.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in CommunitySense, Projects, 0 comments
14
Sep
2008

Building Capacity for Learning: towards a Library 2.0

On August 27, I attended the Library & IT Services Innovation Lecture at Tilburg University.  The speaker was Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix’s Vice President of Innovation. His talk was titled “Building Capacity for Learning: Affordable Technology Preparedness“.  Stephen held a passionate plea for reform of university library practice, urging librarians to fully embrace rather than feel threatened by the Web 2.0-and-beyond world that students live in. Stephen raised many interesting points, a few of which I will mention here, as they are so relevant to collaborative and learning community capacity building in general.

The rate of library change is going to be orders of magnitude higher than before, we ain’t seen nothing yet. There is going to be a change of paradigm.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Presentations, 0 comments
14
Sep
2008

Meeting The Hub

It’s been a busy time with my projects, too busy to keep up my blog. Of course, that is no excuse as very useful finally-get-into-and-stick-to-that-writing-habit sites  like Write to Done try to tell us all the time. Well, us lesser mortals will have to keep practicing to get more disciplined, I guess.

On August 11, I attended a very inspiring lunch meeting at The Hub Rotterdam. Guest speaker was Maria Glauser, a host and co-director of The Hub London.  We all shared stories about what we do and aspire as the “social entrepreneurs” of the present or near future.  In their own words:

The Hub’s business is social innovation. Our core product is flexible membership of inspirational and highly resourced habitats in the world’s major cities for social innovators to work, meet, learn, connect and realise progressive ideas.

… Read more...
Posted by Aldo de Moor in Conferences, Ideas, 0 comments
03
Aug
2008

Tag clouds on the move

Yesterday, I discussed Wordle. Today, I came across a related tool, TagCrowd:

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

  • as topic summaries for speeches and written works
  • for visual analysis of survey data
  • as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
  • for data mining a text corpus
  • for helping writers and students reflect on their work
  • as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
  • as resumes in a single glance
  • as visual poetry

Interestingly, both tools seem to indicate the growing realization that tag clouds have many more uses than their original, narrow application for indicating blog topic frequencies.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
02
Aug
2008

Word (art) clouds

A friend pointed out Wordle to me, which “is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

I tried it out with the text on the CommunitySense home page:

Apart from truly being a piece of art and aesthetically pleasing, such “tag clouds ++” should have real business applications. It would be interesting to see how, say, a 100 page report would look like and whether its visualization could help in quickly grasping some of its essential meaning.

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
02
Aug
2008

Installing MediaWiki

Wikis are great not only to co-author documents, but also to implement private or public knowledge bases.  For CommunitySense, I wanted to install a number of wikis. Two issues arose: which wiki and to have it hosted somewhere else or host it myself?

The quest for the right wiki took me quite a while. A good starting point for comparing the features of the many wikis around is the WikiMatrix.  I tried quite a few of the wikis listed, but none of them served all the purposes I intend to use the range of wikis for (co-authoring, file management, personal information management, etc).  One option would have been to use different wikis for different purposes, but the learning curves and maddening variations in syntax caused me to make the principled decision to focus on one wiki only and master it well. … Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Tools, 0 comments
15
May
2008

International Workshop on Community-Based Evolution of Knowledge-Intensive Systems (COMBEK’08)

Call for Papers

International Workshop On Community-Based Evolution of Knowledge-Intensive Systems COMBEK ’08

Monterrey, Mexico, Nov 9 – 14, 2008

http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/index.html?page=combek2008cfp

WORKSHOP THEME

COMBEK seeks to address the need for research that explores and embraces the novel, difficult but crucial issue of adapting knowledge resources to their user communities, and vice versa, as a fundamental property of knowledge-intensive internet systems. Through a deep understanding of the real-time, community-driven, evolution of so-called ontologies, a knowledge-intensive system can be made operationally relevant and sustainable over long periods of time.

By addressing the notion of “community” in this way, COMBEK hopes to innovate the science of ontology engineering and unlock the expected (and unavoidable) paradigm shift in knowledge-based and community-driven systems. Such a paradigm would affect knowledge sharing and communication across diverse communities in business, industry, and society.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Conferences, 0 comments
17
Apr
2008

Researching with Communities

Researching with Communities: Grounded perspectives on engaging communities in research

Edited by Andy Williamson and Ruth DeSouza

Researching with communities presents a range of personal and grounded perspectives from academics, researchers and practitioners on undertaking research in ways that promote and privilege the voice of the community, is respectful of local or indigenous practices and is culturally safe.

Most definitely not a ‘tick list’ for approaching community-inclusive research, this book provides grounded exemplars, guides and discussion about the experiences of doing research respectfully and inclusively. It does this by drawing on the perspectives of researchers and community practitioners and by providing a range of reflective chapters that explore what community-based research means in a range of settings and for a range of people.… Read more...

Posted by Aldo de Moor in Publications, 0 comments