Invitations and Becomings

I was lucky enough to attend a demonstration of some of Vignette's latest offerings, beyond their more well-known content management system, VCM. One of these is Vignette Recommendations.

Recommendations is best described as a behaviourist's wet-dream. It aims to anticipate the behaviour of a visitor to the site, and provide the content that the visitor will ultimately find most valuable. The thing is that this content may not actually have anything in common with what the visitor thought they were looking for - e.g. it may not share any keywords with the search that brought the visitor to that site.

Clay Sharky has posted a great talk over at his website "Gin, Television and Social Surplus". The social surplus he's talking about is a cognitive surplus, and Sharky reckons we've been squandering ours on TV the way the first generation of the industrial revolution squandered their productive surplus on gin. The good news is, we're waking up, and finding new ways of putting it to work for our collective benefit. Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. Sharky argues that the thinking time spent in the US each weekend watching ads (about 100 million hours) is equivalent to building just one Wikipedia. Imagine what we could do with the other 200 billion hours (and that's still just counting the US)!

There's a nice post over at distributedcreativity, describing some of the art being created to expose and criticize semantic capitalism. If you've never heard the term (I hadn't) this is a good first pass:

"One of the most interesting facts is that we have reached a situation
in which any word of any language has its price, fluctuating according
to the laws of the market." - Christopher Bruno

Installing the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor for drupal turned out to be a little unintuitive. This is a record of what I did, which seems to have worked fine. (This post was written using the editor.)

Thanks to Stewart Mader for putting us onto Rogers Cadenhead's post about Wikipedia beating both blogs and the NY Times in a Google search for the top stories of 2007.

A couple of cents worth I'd like to add. In my opinion, the result isn't nearly as interesting as it's being made out to be, because we're comparing numbers of apples and pears here. An encyclopedia is not a news source. A better comparison would have been with wikinews, rather than wikipedia.

That said, the differences between wikis and published media like blogs and the nytimes are very interesting.

Over at my other blog, I just posted a note on VoiceThread, a collaborative media site. It got me thinking about the profound socialisation of everything, from bookmarks to blogs to production processes, in the context of my Masters thesis.

There (ch3), I presented a version of the argument that intersubjectivity is a transcendental condition of our experience. If that's true then it raises the question of why we need to have the shared character of things reflected back to us, if they're inherently intersubjective?

Originally published Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:35:43 GMT
http://eduspaces.net/jtauber/weblog/164286.html (Eduspaces is sadly shutting down)

What is an educational design template? It seems like such an easy question to answer. Surely, it's just a model that can be replicated or customised to reliably achieve a learning objective. My institution works with Blackboard CE6, and so naturally, when I think of producing a design template for academics, my first thought is to create a CE6 site with the relevant tools. But if the challenge is to make academics comfortable or effective with using these tools, then this is obviously both too little and too much.