Mathemagenic

I wasn't posting about the discussions at the end of each panel: I was in the listening mode. To get an impression about issues we discussed by Kieran Shaw

Ontologies

Topic blogs vs personal blogs

Blogs across the world

Blogs in business

Blogtalk day 1

...the general consensus seems to be that it is hard to get people blogging unless there is an obvious benefit to the individual to do so. We need to make blogging socialable and fun first, and then gently move them into education without them knowing it."

Another overview of the day (including comments to specific presentations): Blogging and Streaming at BlogTalk by Dan Gillmor

Continued:  comments | TrackBacks | Links from other weblogs

More on: BlogTalk 

The question that came into my mind: what happens with your ideas that you posted to a weblog inside certain boundaries (e.g corporate blog or course blog) after you leave these boundaries. Both Martin and Sebastian suggest that it should be your property and you have to be able to take it with you as your own learning resource. Ideally, I would say the same, but I don't think that it's going to happen easily in practice.

Companies and educational institutions are recognising that they could benfit from aggregating ideas produced by people (e.g. course assignments from previous courses could be reused in a new course). An individual knowledge worker, from other hand, wants to have access to his own thought, may be throughout his whole life. This is not interesting for a company (it's competitive advantage!) and it should be ideal educational institution to take care of it (at the end no any educational institution is responsible to your own life-long learning).

In one paper knoweldge workers were addressed as investors bringing their knowlegde for corporate use. This is good metaphor, but unlike real investors knowledge workers can not take their investment back. Even worse, if you leave treads of your knowledge work in corporate context they are likely to belong to a company (often copyrighted), so they in fact risk loosing some of their investments.

In a long-term this could be a problem to weblogs adoption in a corporate context: I'm more motivated to write something down if I know that it stays with me and I can come back to it than if it's locked in a corporate knowledge management system or e-learning system (see more about motivation to post in order to keep track of your learning - Why I blog more than use discussion tools).

This is also somehow related with the discussion on institutional versus personal speech by Ross Mayfield.

Later: some directions for solutions could be found by operationalising ideas of Andrius Kulikauskas on copyright.

Oliver Wrede about weblogs, learning, teaching and higher education

Oliver provides examples of using weblogs in teaching worth looking closer and many pointers to relevant ideas. Something to come back.

Blogged by:

• David Weinberger
• Kieran Shaw

Martin Röll talks about weblogs in business

This talk is funny, but Martin is talking about something really important: evolutionary introduction of weblogs in corporate settings. He proposes to start from examplary project log and than move slowly to individual knowledge logs.

Martin says later that he also thought about interrelating intranet weblogs and internet weblogs. Going to catch him in the break.

Blogged by:

• David Weinberger
• Kieran Shaw

Sebastian Fiedler talks about uses of weblogs for learning

I'm not going to write a lot about it: Sebastian has posted his paper, Weblogging as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning, we discussed it on-line and off-life.

The presentation is well crafted to represent originally complicated ideas. I'll probably go back to it and post summaries of some slides.

Blogged by:

• David Weinberger
• Kieran Shaw

Maria Milonas speaks about blogs in Poland. Some highlights:

Polish blogs are more personal journals. Low tech (no RSS+). Many young women writing.

"The majority of bloggers feel better after posting"

Blog suicude: someone being forced to shut up a weblog

Weblogs are very much popularised by media.

Two weblogs are getting publishes as books.

Blogged by:

• Azeem Azhar
• David Weinberger
• Kieran Shaw

"Weblogs, an Iranian perspective" by Hossein Derakhshan

Hossein present some specific characteristics of Persian weblogs. I find especally interesting connections between characterisctics of blogging  and social situation in Iran.

Yesterday Hossein said he wanted to do research on social aspects of blogging. I'm looking forward to it.

Blogged by:

• Ton Zijlstra
• David Weinberger
• Kieran Shaw

Azeem Azhar
Gilbert Cattoire
Lilia Efimova
Dan Gillmor
Heiko Hebig (with pictures)
Jorg Kantel
Nico Lumma
JJ Merelo
Kieran Shaw
Ulrich van Stipriaan (and on non-BlogTalk topics)
Ton
Fernando Tricias
David Weinberger
Oliver Wrede (auf Deutsche)

Sebastian blogs some photos

Ethan Eismann talks about topic weblogs and knowledge communities.

Ethan talk about best practices for topic blogs. I feel that this approach is a bit too formal. This could help if you want to use weblogs to discuss things with students or to create a formal channel on a topic for your customers.

Still, it's worth checking the presentation for guidelines in case of implementing weblog focused on a topic in settings you can control (e.g. corporate blogging). The link should lead to the presentation, but so far it's broken.

Blogged by:

• David Weinberger
• Oliver Wrede

The "problem" I currently have with the notion of »topic weblogs«: Sometimes there are topics not clearly defined, with blurry edges, experts that even do not know that they would be considered an expert to that weblog. Would they find that weblog? Would they actually search? Would they be attracted?

• Kieran Shaw

"The blogosphere map" by Gernot Tscherteu, Christian Langreiter

These two guys demonstrated a great tool that shows how topics travel around the blogosphere. The tool shows map of 400 weblogs and changing size red dots to show when topic is mentioned by a weblog. This looks like heart beating.

The demo may be availiable on-line in a couple of weeks. I'm really looking forward.

Blogged by:

• David Weinberger
• Ton Zijlstra
• Kieran Shaw

"The algebra of copyright" by Andrius Kulikauskas

What happens when weblogs written under different copyright licences reuse content of each other?

"asking for permission is very taxing for micro-content"

Reading someone's weblog regularly can exceed "fair use": it's may be copying the whole idea which goes behind many posts.

I believe that the ideas behind this talk are important, but the language is too difficult for me to get through. I'm going to wait for practical implementations.

Blogged by:

• Azeem Azhar
• David Weinberger: "Andrius Kulikauskas, the Last Remaining Idealist, is talking about this "algebra of copyright." "
• Kieran Shaw

"Semantic blogging" by Steve Cayzer: "blogging is cool - but it could be even cooler"

How could it be cooler?

• semantic view: ways to see weblogs beyond chronological view
• semantic navigation: finding the meaning of links (e.g. who is agreeing with me?)
• semantic query: who is blogging on related topic

More at Semantic blogging for for bibliographies project.

Blogged by:

• David Weinberger
• Kieran Shaw

Presentation by David Weinberger. I will do only highlights.

Three stages of weblogs history: hard-coded expressions -> webpublishing with tools -> links and conversations.

Weblog without links looks like marketing.

"There is something important about writing badly". Draft writing is liberating: you can be who you are and be accepted like that. Your readers do not expect edited version.

Constructing a self with weblogs. Your web-self is only public.

Our relation to web-self is more like a relation between an author and a character.

Subjectivity is important: it captures the richness of reality. Weblogs allow multi-subjectivity.

Thomas Burg started BlogTalk conference with posting to the weblog. We have Internet connection, so stay tuned.

See also live reports.

Ok. Here are the news: I'm at BlogTalk sitting in a hotel late at night. Feels strange...

I was reading Seb's PhD dissertation on my way to Vienna. It was interesting to see many points from his weblog taking more formal shape. I also found out that my weblog was one of case-studies described there. I'm going to read that part again and to use it as a mirror...

In overall: I believe that there are a many good points/pointers that I can apply to my work. It is also good to see that weblogs are making it to the "serious" research, so they are more likely to be considered seriousely.

BlogTalk. We had many random dinner discussions. It was much like blogging: local dialogues, joy of discovering similarities, jumping from topic to topic, but overall feeling of being connected. I'm happy to see people I got to know on-line and, of course, not-technology-mediated conversations are more efficient.