The CompreHensive collaborativE Framework (CHEF) initiative has as its goal, the development of a flexible environment for supporting distance learning and collaborative work, and doing research on distance learning and collaborative work. This project is staffed by University of Michigan School of Information and Media Union staff. We are working closely with and are contributing to the OKI reference architecture, and are collaborating with other groups interested in open source collaboration standards. Communities targeted for CHEF use include those involved in the scholarly activities of teaching, learning and research at the University of Michigan, and their students and colleagues involved in teaching, learning and research that are outside of the Michigan community.
Sitting and listening to J.C. address the CNI opening plenary. She's hitting a few good marks for me. She's author and partnern on Joystick Nation, Inc. (NB: which has a website under construction). Her talk began with the issue of "context" being a critical element in identifying or working with knowledge and information. She put down "metadata" yay as requiring more effort than perceived value. Blogs and Wikis make up an important part of the presentation as being new components of "social software." I'll add any useful links later.
We plan to use this blog to highlight new developments in the social software field, and also to provide commentary and conversation on the uses of social software in varying contexts. We welcome your participation in these conversations, through the use of comments--a first on a Corante blog.
TypePad is an upcoming hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart's popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a turnkey service, suitable for beginners and experts alike.
Sounds good to me.
Thesaurus is a visual representation of the English language.
I've referenced this before in earlier posts, but thought it should have it's own. This is in reference to a comment that blogs are not organized well. I wonder what blogs would be like with user interfaces such as the Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus, or Scopeware, or VisIT from UIUC, or TouchGraph
Questia - The Online Library of Books and Journals
Questia is the revolutionary online library offering the full text and images of scholarly books and journals focused in the humanities and social sciences. Combined with powerful search and writing tools, Questia provides access to students 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to help them study, conduct better online research, and write better papers.
Just to let the reader know, last week I attended a Conference XP workshop at Microsoft. While I thought I'd be doing a lot of video stuff, there were a lot of very nifty applications that are primarily focused on teaching and learning, but can be applied to collaborative research environments as well. So, without much comment I've added links to the speakers' pages and to other topics like Zooming Interfaces that came up during the workshop.
Thanks to Charles Yun's comment about my Boxes and Arrows post earlier, I've added some more Information Architecture links in the last couple of postings.
Information architecture, usability and interaction design issues, plus the odd thought
eleganthack.com is a one-person website devoted to exploring and furthering the emerging art of user experience design and information architecture on the web.
AIFIA | Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture
The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA) is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture.
Eastgate Tinderbox: the tool for notes
Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.
Eastgate is perhaps the oldest producer of real hypertext software and hypertext content. Tinderbox looks like one helluva a tool that I'd have lots of fun with. Now to convice the home office to get me a 12" TiBook.
It comes with all sorts of back end tools. Victor Lombardi uses it to drive his blog -- Noise Between Stations. Have a look at how.
They are a revolutionary way to create robust, full-featured graphical applications in Java, with striking features such as zooming and multiple representation. Jazz is an extensive toolkit based on the Java2D API. And best of all, Jazz is not only free, it's open source!
Pad++: Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs)
Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs) are where zooming is a fundamental part of the user's interaction with the computer (also known as multiscale interfaces)
Virtual Rooms version 3.0 (VRVS)
Another important component of the growing puzzle that it video conferencing. VRVS works to aggregate and integrate as well as acts as a bridge from one service like H.323 to Access Grid.
Patrick Bristow, David Pan, Chad Peiper presented a good demonstration of their classroom tool e-Fuzion. There is an article, "e-Fuzion: Reinventing Education" from the Alumni journal that describes the software they've been working on. the e-Fuzion site is more about process and general organization.
Another presentation from the Conference XP Workshop today. Colin Perkins and Ladan Gharai have been working on HDTV and large scale (attendance) video broadcasts on the net as well as congestion control issues which map to Access Grid and Conference XP.
Presenting about LiveNotes: "a practice and a technology for small-team collaborative learning in regular lecture classrooms. Livenotes uses wirelessly-networked PDAs to allow students to take notes and annotate lectures collaboratively and in real-time."
Fred also works at Unv of Washington in Conf XP projects. One thing he's been doing is to provide a way for folks to receive Conference XP streams in Windows Media Player. There's a link to it on this page.
Richard Anderson's main research interests are in Educational Technology and Computer Science Education. He is particularly interested in using technology to improve the classroom environment, and in educational applications of the Tablet PC.
Ask Tog: STARFIRE A Vision of Future Computing
Sun Microsystem's Starfire project drew together the talents of more than 100 engineers, designers, futurists, and filmakers in an effort to both predict and guide the future of computing.
The output of this effort was threefold:
>> Starfire, the Movie, showing a day in the life of a knowledge worker in the year 2004.
>> Starfire, the Book, better known as Tog on Software Design, which not only covers the film in intimate detail, but lays out several more equally thought-provoking scenarios, even if they were not enshrined in celluloid.
>> Starfire, the Paper, published in the CHI Proceedings, outlining the rules we followed in attempting to build a scientifically "legitimate" video prototype, as opposed to simply confabulating a fanciful, but non-implementable, vision.
HCI-Presentations of Matthias Rauterberg
Presentations in User-System Interaction
This page has pointers to video clips of the Apple "Knowledge Navigator" from the late 1980's as well as clip from Sun Microsystem's "Starfire" ca. 1995.
I used to have these tapes. Guess I loaned them out and didn't get them back. Much of what is seen in these scenarios from 8-15 years ago are still goals that we're trying to reach now.
Knowledge Navigator: Technologies to Get Us There and Beyond - Video / The Valley Library - Oregon State University
color / 69 min / LB1028.3 .K661 1990 pt.1-2
Members of Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group describe future possibilities in educational technology using the Macintosh computer. Includes interactive computers which respond to speech; the "spider" communication system which allows persons to see and talk to each other via computer while looking at the same document on the computer screen; simulations of meteorological phenomena; and other computer-based educational technology now being developed. Emphasis is on applications in higher education.
Video Clips: Apple 'Knowledge Navigator'
Here are two clips from the short film Apple commissioned back in the 80's
Boxes and Arrows: Because we can
Boxes and Arrows is the definitive source for the complex task of bringing architecture and design to the digital landscape. There are various titles and professions associated with this undertaking — information architecture, information design, interaction design, interface design — but when we looked at the work that we were actually doing, we found a “community of practice” with similarities in outlook and approach that far outweighed our differences.
Domain Names - Concepts And Facilities
This RFC is an introduction to the Domain Name System (DNS), and omits
many details which can be found in a companion RFC, "Domain Names -
Implementation and Specification" [RFC-1035].
Domain Names - Implementation And Specification
This RFC describes the details of the domain system and protocol, and
assumes that the reader is familiar with the concepts discussed in a
companion RFC, "Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities" [RFC-1034].