the big event…

After 4 years of slaving away on evenings, weekends, and vacations, I’m happy to be preparing for my PhD defense–The Negotiation of Teaching Presence in International Online Contexts.  Any sage advice?  I’ve been to defenses before but how do you actually prepare for the unexpected??

 

CNIE 2008

The CNIE conference in Banff was all round the best conference I’ve been to. Great organization, great food, and every presentation was worth going to. I’m happy that many of the presentations I would have liked to have seen are being posted over at slideshare (tagged CNIE2008). The two that I co-presented are embedded below.

Online classroom or community in the making? Instructor conceptualizations and presence in online discussion forums. Abstract here.

Learning and teaching at BCIT: The myth of the digital learner. Abstract here.

Creating a global brain

“Google? That’s old school. Intelligent new Web 3.0 applications will revolutionize the way we interact with the world’s data.”
― The Globe & Mail, May 1, 2008

Today’s Globe & Mail offers an intriguing look at “the next generation of intelligent web applications . . . that bring together people to add content, organize information and build connections between different kinds of data. These applications will build on the success of Web 2.0 social technologies and become more intelligent as their user bases grow.” Collective knowledge systems, the semantic web, contextual browsing, and natural language searching characterize Web 3.0 technologies, writes Ken Hunt of the G&M.

These technologies include:

• Freebase: an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge
• Twine: allows users to organize and find the connections between different kinds of information
• AdaptiveBlue: a Firefox plug-in that allegedly recognizes the main subject discussed on a page.
• ClearForest: another Firefox plug-in. This one scours a page for every noun mentioned and organizes them into categories.
• Powerset: a natural-language search engine.
• TrueKnowledge: a search engine that seeks to answer a question outright rather than simply returning a list of search results.

You can read the full article here.

Choosing the most approriate information display

You have carried out your research, you’ve amassed your data, and you’re ready to share your data sets with colleagues, students or the world. Now, are you really going trot out that tired old pie chart once again? Is that going to help your audience make comparisons, see relationships and patterns, and understand your material? Why not identify the information display most suited to your purpose? Christian Behrens, a Masters student at Potsdam University’s Information Design program, has developed this handy interactive reference for doing just that (follow the link then click Pattern Search).

Just fill in the principles, goals, classes and dimensions you require…

and voila! Options!

Click to enlarge: the detail is important.

Christian even provides examples, definitions, and best practices for each of the dozens of information display styles in his elegant site.

Perhaps the best feature of Christian’s site is the pattern search because it forces the user to think hard about the purpose of the data.

Neither Christian’s site nor Christian himself will help you create the information graphic, however. If translating data into useful, clear graphics is not your thing, give Many Eyes.com a spin. At Many Eyes, you upload your data (from an Excel spreadsheet, for example) to the Many Eyes server, select a visualization style, and your information graphic is made for you. You even get a url and forum unique to your graphic.