Friday, February 28, 2003

"Computing is not about computers anymore. It's about living" — Nicholas Negroponte

Thursday, February 27, 2003

"Making E-Learning Work in the Nonprofit Sector", by Jacques LeCavalier, with a contribution by Bill Tucker, Brandon Hall, Sunnyvale, CA, 2003. The 84-page guidebook is partly a primer on e-learning for nonprofit executives, board members, training managers, and developers, but also designed for those in foundations and other grantmaking agencies looking to maximize the impact of training and education initiatives. It covers the basics of e-learning, including definitions, examples, and a summary of key areas of interest such as e-learning strategy, learning management systems, and requests for proposal.

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

UK Joint Information Systems Committee and US National Science Foundation have announced a 9.5 million, five-year initiative called Digital Libraries in the Classroom to "investigate and exploit the potential of online resources in learning and teaching across a range of pre-selected subject disciplines". This initiative "consists of four projects, each of which will pool the resources and expertise of British and US Universities with long and distinguished track records in the use of information and communication technologies":

• The Spoken Word — This project will look at how audio resources can be manipulated, applied, and used within a variety of learning situations.
• Teaching and Learning Anthropology — This project will develop digital tools and the approaches and methods to use them successfully in undergraduate anthropology courses.
• Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning in Geography — This project will explore how cross-national collaboration can enhance and enrich the learning experiences of geography students.
• Accelerating Globally Distributed Team Innovation — This project will enable students to take part in global team-based design engineering projects in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of different information sources via a range of appropriate technologies.

Sounds pretty interesting, even considering that the fourth project very much resembles the work done within the Global Product Realization course and the Globalization and the Information Society Seminar.

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

ACT is testing the feasibility of building stable, robust, collaborative applications (from simple to complex) for the recently released Flash Communication Server MX (Flashcom) from Macromedia. Such applications could open up access to synchronous collaboration for organizations and individuals unable to afford current high costs of tools like Centra, Placeware, or Webex.

The following applications have been assembled so far and are available for your viewing/testing:

• Video chat (with text chat) for two participants
• Video chat for four participants
• Whiteboard (with audio chat)
• Conference room (with text "slides", audio chat, text chat)

Monday, February 24, 2003

C&T 2003

• International Conference on Communities and Technologies
• Held September 19-21, 2003 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• The conference serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating research into all facets of communities and information technology.
• Topics include: Virtual Community Formation and Development — Knowledge Sharing and Organizational Learning — Communities and Innovation — Communities of Interest vs. Communities of Practice — Virtual Communities vs. Location Based Communities — Digital Cities — Ethnographical Studies of Virtual Communities — Social Capital and Communities — Design Methods for Communityware — Innovative applications