Thursday, July 17, 2008

Google as a Long Tail Filter - Part 2

Having introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking in a previous post, Amit Singhal continues his explanation of how Google ranking works by giving an overview of the technologies behind their ranking system. Here are the points he stressed in his explanation:

- Understanding pages
- Understanding queries
- Understanding users

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Future of Online Learning - Ten Years On

Via George Siemens.

A presentation by Stephen Downes about the future of online learning. Slides are available here.
I do agree with Stephen in many points he raised and especially that the learner has to be put at the center and that Personal Learning Environments will replace Learning Management Systems.

Monday, July 14, 2008

John McCain Hates Me and Many of You

McCain: “Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information.”

Friday, July 11, 2008

Google as a Long Tail Filter

A post by Amit Singhal introducing the core ranking team at Google. According to Amit, the philosophies behind Google ranking include:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Is Knowledge Management Dead?

Via Doug Cornelius.

A video of an interview by Patrick Lambe of Larry Prusack and Dave Snowden on whether KM is dying/dead.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

PLEF: A Conceptual Framework for Personal Learning Environments


Yesterday, Mohammad Ridwan Agustiawan successfully defended his master thesis "PLEF: A Conceptual Framework for Personal Learning Environments". Under my supervision, Mohammad has designed, implemented, and evaluated a personal learning environment framework which can support the learners in taking control over their learning experience. These requirements have been achieved by the designed and implemented system. Based on Web 2.0 concepts and technologies, the system allows the learner to e.g. aggregate, manage, tag, comment, and share their favorite learning resources (e.g. feeds, widgets, and different media) within a personalized space.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Informal and Web 2.0 Learning Survey Results

Some time ago, I participated in a survey of informal and web 2.0 learning by Jay Cross. As promised, Jay emailed me the results of this survey. The raw survey results are here, and graphs of the data are here.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0

Via Grainne Conole.

A recent article in First Monday by Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy on key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is a buzzword introduced in 2003–04 whWich is commonly used to encompass various novel phenomena on the World Wide Web. Although largely a marketing term, some of the key attributes associated with Web 2.0 include the growth of social networks, bi–directional communication, various ‘glue’ technologies, and significant diversity in content types. We are not aware of a technical comparison between Web 1.0 and 2.0. While most of Web 2.0 runs on the same substrate as 1.0, there are some key differences. We capture those differences and their implications for technical work in this paper. Our goal is to identify the primary differences leading to the properties of interest in 2.0 to be characterized. We identify novel challenges due to the different structures of Web 2.0 sites, richer methods of user interaction, new technologies, and fundamentally different philosophy. Although a significant amount of past work can be reapplied, some critical thinking is needed for the networking community to analyze the challenges of this new and rapidly evolving environment.

Friday, July 04, 2008

Social Networking Services in Education

Via Stephen Downes.

Digizen just published the results of a project exploring the potential use of social networking services in education.

The project is designed to investigate how social networking services can and are being used to support personalised formal and informal learning by young people in schools and colleges.
The complete report can be downloaded here (.pdf).

Thursday, July 03, 2008

oAuth Explained

In this post, Thejesh explains oAuth and gives a simple example on how to use it from a consumer point of view. Thejesh writes:

oAuth is an open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications. oAuth is not not a new concept. It is similar to your Google AuthSub, AOL OpenAuth, Yahoo BBAuth, Upcoming API, Flickr API, Amazon Web Services API but more open and not proprietary.

How is it more safe? You have a guest at home. You feel good to have a guest at home and you want him to enjoy his stay. Since your and your guests timings are not matching you like to give him key of your home. So he can manage when you are not around. But this key is a special key and not your regular (master key) key. With this key your guest can enter your home and kitchen but not your bedroom. oAuth works on similar principles.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Digg Recommendation Engine

Digg released a recommendation engine in beta beginning this week as they write "to discover new content on Digg". More information about this new feature is available in the video below and in this Whitepaper.


Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.