According to the designers, this instrument is intended to be:
- collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
- intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
- sonically challenging and interesting
- learnable and masterable, even by children
- suitable for novice and advanced electronic music (i.e. installations and concerts)
Key Features (extracted from the Zoho Notebook site itself):
- Intuitive user interface with white boarding and custom layout capability
- Quick “add” buttons for adding text, graphics, photos, audio, video, RSS feeds and documents
- Combine and add Notebook pages from other applications such as Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet
- “Content level” sharing and versioning providing fine grain control of what is shared with others
- Firefox and IE plug-ins for instant web clipping
- Real-time, simultaneous editing and sharing of content
- Skype integration for instant chat and IP telephony
A very happy new year to you!
Today, I’m publishing online two wiki research proposals which I’d written for a Masters in Instructional Design program at the National Institute of Education, Singapore:
- “The UTAUT and Electronic Brainstorming in a Wiki”: This proposal was written in April 2005 for “Implications of Social Psychology Theories & Research for Educators”, a module taught by Dr Angeline Khoo and Dr Lim Kam Ming. Could have worked on this as a project if not for the circumstances (long story). So, imagine my surprise upon finding a very similar project (Global Warming Student Speakout) on the Google for Educators site last October! Not sure though what the specific research questions were.
“Mediating PBL in a Wiki environment” (1): This proposal was written in April 2005 for “MID809: Designing, Conducting, and Reporting Investigations”, a module taught by Dr Chee Kit Looi and Dr Myint Swe Khine. A revised experiment was conducted in November among two classes in a polytechnic. The results were mixed. However, due to more pressing concerns at work, the writeup for the results of this project has been placed on the backburner till now.
Looking forward to your comments, suggestions, queries, etc.
]]>
Most users will never need to leave Google. What an amazing pool of spontaneously generated data this would be for researchers!
By the way, I created the diagram above using Gliffy, another exciting free tool on the Web. And yes, collaborative editing is possible. There’s versioning too. A word of caution though: Remember to save and exit from Gliffy often. It hung my system just now.
]]>
]]>“The drawing depicts the often unnoticed assumptions that inform our understanding of groups, inform our sometimes slavish devotion to groups, and shows how these contrast with my own understanding of how interaction ought to occur, in networks. It’s not just a web theory (though it is that), it is a theory about life and society in general.”
- Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
- Use a simple WYSIWYG editor to format documents, spell-check them, etc.
- Invite others to share documents (by e-mail address).
- Edit documents online with whomever I hoose.
- View any document’s revision history and roll back to any version.
- Publish documents online to the world, or to just who I choose.
- Download documents to my desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
- Post documents to my blog.
Afternote 05-04-2007: Shortly after posting this, I found out that the above list was actually taken from a 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly. Here’s just a note to clarify this.
According to Mr O’Reilly, characteristics of Web 2.0 include:
- Web as Platform
- Harnessing Collective Intelligence
- Data is the Next Intel Inside
- End of the Software Release Cycle
- Lightweight Programming Models
- Software Above the Level of a Single Device
- Rich User Experiences
And here’s a compact definition from Wikipedia:
]]>“Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.”
- Clinfowiki: The Clinical Informatics Wiki
- RHIO Wiki: The Only Online, Real-time Forum on RHIOs and Health Information Exchanges
- Child and Youth Mental Health Wiki: A Pilot Project Wiki Sante mentale des enfants et des ados: un projet pilote
- Health Information Technology: Community of Practice Project Home Page
- Katrina Help Info: Health and Safety
- Health Informatics & elearning
]]>With Miki, SocialText hopes to involve mobile professionals in real collaboration using their mobile devices, not the one- or two-word terse statements common in Blackberry usage, Mayfield (SocialText founder and CEO) said.
Early on in SocialText’s existence, one of the company’s first basic wiki products worked reasonably well on a Palm Treo device.
…Mayfield says Miki could help further the adoption of wikis because it will allow users to walk out of a meeting and keep collaborating, without dealing with the hassle of e-mail. As more and more workers find themselves using mobile devices to stay in touch, it certinaly won’t hurt.
- What is it?
- Who is doing it?
- How does it work?
- Why is it significant?
- What are the downsides?
- Where is it going?
- What are the implications for teaching and learning?
Screencasting. A screencast is a video recording of the actions on a user’s computer screen, typically with accompanying audio, distributed through RSS. Screencasts can be thought of as video podcasts. They provide a simple means to extend rich course content to anyone who might benefit from the material but cannot attend a presentation. More>>
Virtual Meetings. Virtual meetings are real-time interactions that take place over the Internet using integrated audio and video, chat tools, and application sharing. They offer a way to engage students in fully interactive, online learning experiences such as lectures, discussions, and tutoring. Many virtual meeting applications integrate with course management systems, providing students and faculty with a unified learning system including access to online meetings. More>>
Grid Computing. Grid computing uses middleware to coordinate disparate IT resources across a network, allowing them to function as a virtual whole. The goal of a computing grid, like that of the electrical grid, is to provide users with access to the resources they need, when they need them. Grids address two distinct but related needs: providing remote access to IT assets, and aggregating processing power. More>>
Collaborative Editing. Collaborative editing tools allow a group of individuals to simultaneously edit a document, see who else is working on it, and watch in real time as others make changes. As a functional hybrid of wikis and instant messaging, collaborative editing creates a new dynamic for group work and multitasking, two hallmarks of today’s learners. More>>
Instant Messaging. Instant messaging (IM) is a form of online communication that allows real-time interaction through computers or mobile devices. Although typed text remains the primary convention for IM, the technology now allows users to send images, audio and video files, and other attachments. Hundreds of millions of people use IM to stay connected. In many ways, it epitomizes the notion of the always-connected, multitasking student, sending and receiving messages at all hours, from a wide spectrum of devices, while doing several other things at the same time. IM has become such an integral part of students’ lives that many colleges and universities are working to move it beyond the social sphere into teaching and learning. More>>
Augmented Reality. Augmented reality adds information and meaning to a real object or place. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality does not create a simulated reality. Instead, it takes a real object or space and uses technologies to add contextual data to deepen students’ understanding of it. To the extent that instructors can furnish students with a broad context for understanding the real world, students are more likely to comprehend and remember what they are learning. Through exposing students to an experiential, explorative, and authentic model of learning early in their higher education careers, augmented reality may help shift students from passive to active learning modes and thus become more successful learners. More>>
Blogs. A blog—shorthand for “Web log”—is an online collection of personal commentary and links. Blogs can be viewed as online journals to which others can respond that are as simple to use as e-mail. The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means they can rapidly lead to open discussions. Faculty are using blogs to express their opinions, promote dialogue in their disciplines, and support teaching and learning; students increasingly use blogs for personal expression and as course requirements. By carefully evaluating blogs’ strengths and weaknesses, educators are learning to set guidelines and expectations to maximize blogs’ instructional benefits. Structured exercises and clear goals are further enhancing the educational value of blogs. Put into practice with an understanding of their benefits and limitations, blogs are an increasingly accepted instructional technology tool. More>>
Video Blogging. A videoblog, or vlog, is a Web log (blog) that primarily utilizes video rather than text or audio. Videoblogging offers a richer experience than text blogging by combining movies, sound, still images, and text. New technologies make images and video easy to produce, so anyone with a digital camera or camera-equipped cell phone and Internet access can create a vlog. Based on the popularity of blogs and podcasts, and growing access to video tools, videoblogging is likely to increase in popularity among faculty and students. The ability to easily create video segments and quickly post them online makes videoblogs a potential tool for recording lectures, special events, and so forth. Videoblogs can also be used for personal expression and reflection. As a result, they are being incorporated into e-portfolios and presentations. The use of videoblogs for digital storytelling may be one way to encourage strong student participation in e-portfolio projects. More>>
Wikis. Wikis are Web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with a Web browser and Internet access. Described as a composition system, a discussion medium, and a repository, wikis support asynchronous communication and group collaboration online. Their inherent simplicity gives students direct access to their content, which is crucial in group editing or other collaborative activities. Their versioning capability allows them to illustrate the evolution of thought processes as students interact with a site and its contents. Wikis are also being used as e-portfolios, highlighting their utility as a tool for collection and reflection. They may be the easiest, most effective Web-based collaboration tool in any instructional portfolio. More>>
Podcasting. “Podcasting” refers to any software and hardware combination that permits automatic downloading of audio files to an MP3 player for listening at the user’s convenience. Part of the appeal of podcasting is the ease with which audio content can be created, distributed, and downloaded from the Web. Barriers to adoption and costs are minimal, and the tools to implement podcasts are simple and affordable. Podcasting allows education to become more portable than ever before, giving educators another way to meet today’s students where they live and learn—on the Internet and on audio players. More>>
Clickers. Interaction and engagement are often limited by class size and human dynamics (a few students may dominate the conversation while most avoid interaction). Interaction and engagement, both important learning principles, can be facilitated with clickers. Clickers can also facilitate discipline-specific discussions, small work-group cooperation, and student-student interactions. Clickers-plus well—designed questions-provide an easy-to-implement mechanism for enhancing interaction. Clicker technology enables more effective, more efficient, and more engaging education. More>>
Social Bookmarking. “7 Things You Should Know About… Social Bookmarking” addresses a community-or social-approach to identifying and organizing information on the Web. Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks one would normally make in a Web browser to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. The community-driven, keyword-based classifications, known as “folksonomies,” may change how we store and find information online. More>>
]]>…it’s easy-to-use and practically free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail, even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that’s because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that’s rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.
GREAT NEWS TO ME, given that my Masters thesis is on wikis. At the same time, since Dresdner is a Socialtext customer, the BusinessWeek report also sounds like a follow-up on one of the corporate wiki’s customer webpages:
]]>1UP.com, the gaming division of Ziff Davis Media, one of the largest technology magazine publishers in the United States, has been a Socialtext customer for one year. 1UP.com was created to consolidate the online activities of several leading magazines. New General Manager Tom Jessiman sought an efficient and effective alternative to email and attachments as a way of working together.
This customer case study shows how use rapidly evolved from strategic planning to day-to-day coordination and communications, supported the brainstorming and launch of a new product and has led to promising experiments in group writing. Using Socialtext Workspace for group communications has reduced email volume dramatically to result in soft cost savings in excess of $1 million per year for a 50 person team. Project communication accelerated the project cycle of a four-month project by a month.
The initial reason for adopting Socialtext was as a substitute for group communication by email and attachments. When General Manager Tom Jessiman started the job he noticed, “a lot of confusion using email, well over 100 group emails a day, which was unwieldy, even nightmarish. Nobody knew what was the latest version of an attachment, everything was lost in inboxes and you had to data-mine your emails to find anything.”
Yes, perhaps not all will be the kind of conference wikis that I’m thinking of. But a quick sampling yields the names of many conferences:
- X-Tech 2005 – May
- Canadian Library Association (CLA) Calgary 2005 – June
- ALA Chicago 2005 – ALA Chicago Wiki – June
- “What The Hack 2005″ conference – July
- OpenEducation2005 – OpenContentWIki – September
- Web 2.0 Conference – October
- WikiSym 2005 – October
AND THE LATEST conference wiki is — Learning 2005. Eliot Masie’s latest newsletter announced:
“A Program as a Wiki: We have placed our entire Conference Program in an interactive wiki. This means that every session is open for comments, extensions and even revisions by our attendees. Quite a difference from a printed traditional program. In the last few days, we have had hundreds of people start to extend the program, volunteer to co-facilitate and add their perspectives. This is evolving the program from an agenda
publication to a dynamic needs assessment and content evolution tool.”
Sure wonder which one was the first conference wiki of them all.
Personally, while attending the eAgenda 2005 conference organized by NTU last August, the thought of using wikis for conferences first crossed my mind. I was supposed to be a scribe for the two-day conference. Ended up bringing my own notebook PC and started entering personal notes on the conference into my wiki. And I couldn’t help thinking, “How wonderful it’d be if all attendees enter their comments/notes into a common wiki.”
And it is happening now — all over the world!
“US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.
“RECENT THEORETICAL developments in the philosophy of science that matured in the 1990’s, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our nonintelligence National Security colleagues access to these technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the transformation…
“The Wiki and the Blog are complementary companion technologies that together form the core workspace that will allow intelligence officers to share, innovate, adapt, respond, and be—on occasion—brilliant. Blogs will cite Wiki entries. The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki. The Blog will be vibrant, and make many sea [of] changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as the Blog. The Wiki will be authoritative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-upon and corporate.
“The Wiki and Blog, however, while standing together, cannot stand by themselves. Intelligence officers need a wellspring of intelligence from which to build the Wiki and about which to comment in the Blog. Such a wellspring would be a community-wide intelligence repository patterned after DIA’s SAFE or CIA’s CIRAS. These repositories are largely disordered, out-ofcontext piles of cables. That is okay. The intelligence repository is like unrefined ore. (The repository could actually be many federated databases.) The Blog and the Wiki serve as successive refining processes for the unrefined ore in the intelligence repository. The Blog would vet, comment, and establish context for the intelligence. This extracted intelligence knowledge from the intelligence repository would be placed in the well-organized Wiki. Both the Wiki and the Blog would link back to authoritative source documents in the repository.
“While an intelligence repository is required “under” the Wiki and the Blog, two more technologies are required “above” them. One is a search technology and the other is a feedback technology. Part of the agility required in today’s high-speed national security environment is to be able to quickly find information. One needs the ability to search for specific knowledge within or across the Wiki, or the Blog, or the Intelligence Repository in a Google-like (www.google.com) fashion.
“While most intelligence officers are quite familiar with search technology, we are less acquainted with feedback technologies. These technologies are often in and of themselves self-organizing. For example, we might want to know which cables in the repository were most cited by the Blog over the last 24 hours. This feedback lets the visitor quickly know what the community thinks is important. It also lets the originator of the cable understand its impact. Feedback technologies let visitors know what areas of the Wiki are changing most rapidly as an indicator of newly vetted knowledge. Feedback technologies can utilize subscription techniques such as “send me an alert when more than 10 people have read my blog.”
“Wikipedia.org makes extensive use of these feedback technologies on its homepage. Another feedback Internet site (www.daypop.com) has dozens of real-time lists–from the top words to the top blog postings to and the top sources cited. Its Top 40 list not only gives the current ranking but whether the ranking is going up or down.
“Feedback technologies are an integral part of the solution suggested by Complexity Theory. As important as information sharing is to the success of the solution, it is even more important to know who is sharing what information. This allows intelligence officers to accurately understand where they are in the intellectual space of the intelligence community. It also allows intelligence officers to see what gaps exist and where changes need to be made. The feedback technologies allow an agile reading of the current state of play across the wide expanse of the Repository, the Wiki, and the Blog.
“Together, these five technologies (Repository, Wiki, Blog, Search, Feedback), would allow the community to start down the path of implementing the five mission recommendations (self organization, tradecraft, information sharing, feedback, and strategic communication) suggested by Complexity Theory.”
]]>