The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Business Book, Wiki-Style
Pearson Publishing is experimnenting in book creation and development using a wiki - can a wiki-style editing process result in a worthwhile business book?
The publisher is putting together We Are Smarter Than Me, a new book that tries to help businessmen make sense of blogs, online communities, and other interactive Web media. Professors at Penn and MIT have already written the volume’s chapter titles and introductory anecdotes. Web surfers are invited to stop by the book’s home page and edit or add to it as they see fit.
But - apparently community created isn't up to par - Pearson will step in next year - and ghostwrite the text into "a publishable book". And of course they will then sell it - keep that in mind as you add to the content.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Monday, November 06, 2006
The Social Software Tsunami Watch
The more I read, the more I see, and the more that I talk about social software, the more I feel that a tsunami is coming and educators are just not watching the horizon. It isn't just that children as young as 5 have e-mail addresses, and more and more kids are maintaining their own websites and blogs, or that Ratemyteachers.com has almost 6 million postings about 900,000 teachers covering almost 85% of North American schools. And it isn't just that I'm astounded by the number of primary and secondary school teachers who are working in social software and exposing their students to the world, or that I'm woefully disappointed in the slow take up by college and university professors). I do worry about the future of higher education as these students start to arrive on campus in the next 5-10 years. I worry that the millenial students will feel that the campus is so woefully inadequate and the learning experience so out of touch and authoritarian. I worry that we could have done so much more for them, with the tools and approaches available to us, yet chose to continue with the same old - old approaches, old language, old learning models, bound by copyright and software license. They'll enter the campus expecting the world, and we'll offer them a provincial gated town with limited access to the world. I'm worried that we will rein them in, contain them, and stifle the curiousity,creativity and connections they have cultivated throughout their lower grades. But really, they are resilient, and there is a social software world awaiting them beyond the walls of the campus. They will survive. It's us I worry about - at least those of us who fail to see the wall of water before it is too late.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
School Tools - Class of Web 2.0
Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1: Follow the link above and be prepared to be intrigued, overwhelmed and maybe you'll find something useful... a valuable resource for students, teachers, and school administrators...a compilation of Web 2.0 products grouped into two main categories: “Tools”; and “Office Applications”. Some more specific services include: organizers, gradebooks, research tools, document managers, diagrams, and more.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Create, share, post, earn from videos
Brightcove enters the game- and webcast video takes new turn on the web - the connected web.
Contribute and view your video creation on the Brightcove site or create your own video "station" page in Brightcove or syndicate Brightcove's video offerings to third-party Web sites (blogs and more) offer your videos as paid downloads or streamed for free, with ads. Brightcove will sell ads and pool them among its customers, or it will plug in commercials that content creators sell themselves.
“Launch a business in our system in a week,” said Brightcove's founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, who formerly was chief technical officer at “Flash” graphics creator Macromedia Inc. before it was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc."
The concept...Back in the spring of 2004, a couple of us dreamed up the future of television. We dreamt of an open model for TV, fashioned on the architecture of the Web. We saw a world where there were no gatekeepers, but rather a web-like distribution network that could create a marketplace for video distribution. In this new world of video and rich media colliding with the Internet, we envisioned that content creators and media owners would be in control -- that they could directly reach consumers, and could tap the incredible power of the web to match their content to a global, fragmented audience that was incessantly clicking from site to site, from search to search. We thought, how could we help enable and organize this imminent chaos? A lot of existing models and ideas inspired us, including eBay for it's open, self-service and democratized commerce platform, Google for it's ability to organize chaos, and create value through every node of every website on the Internet, and even Comcast and DirectTV, who in their own way have created expanding distribution networks that have contributed to the fragmentation of TV that is underway, while providing platforms that content owners could rely on to reach consumers.
Contribute and view your video creation on the Brightcove site or create your own video "station" page in Brightcove or syndicate Brightcove's video offerings to third-party Web sites (blogs and more) offer your videos as paid downloads or streamed for free, with ads. Brightcove will sell ads and pool them among its customers, or it will plug in commercials that content creators sell themselves.
“Launch a business in our system in a week,” said Brightcove's founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, who formerly was chief technical officer at “Flash” graphics creator Macromedia Inc. before it was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc."
The concept...Back in the spring of 2004, a couple of us dreamed up the future of television. We dreamt of an open model for TV, fashioned on the architecture of the Web. We saw a world where there were no gatekeepers, but rather a web-like distribution network that could create a marketplace for video distribution. In this new world of video and rich media colliding with the Internet, we envisioned that content creators and media owners would be in control -- that they could directly reach consumers, and could tap the incredible power of the web to match their content to a global, fragmented audience that was incessantly clicking from site to site, from search to search. We thought, how could we help enable and organize this imminent chaos? A lot of existing models and ideas inspired us, including eBay for it's open, self-service and democratized commerce platform, Google for it's ability to organize chaos, and create value through every node of every website on the Internet, and even Comcast and DirectTV, who in their own way have created expanding distribution networks that have contributed to the fragmentation of TV that is underway, while providing platforms that content owners could rely on to reach consumers.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Prof gets funding for virtual Shakespeare world
Reuters/Second Life » Prof gets funding for virtual Shakespeare world: "Prof gets funding for virtual Shakespeare world
Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:10pm PDT
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Indiana University Professor Edward Castronova has made a name for himself as an economist who studies virtual worlds. Now he’s been awarded a US$240,000 grant to create one himself, based on the world of William Shakespeare.
“What we plan to do is have people encounter the texts in Shakespeare and ideas in the text at many points within a really fun, multiplayer game, so without even knowing it, they gradually are learning more about the bard’s work,” said Castronova, (right) author of “Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.”
But Arden, Castronova’s planned world, will have a hidden purpose beyond teaching: he plans to use it as a Petri dish for testing out economic theories by creating controlled experiments within the game’s population.
“You have two randomly selected populations and do a policy variation in just one of them,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “What if (Karl) Marx had been able to say ‘Hey, let’s try out communism, we’ll set up two worlds and in one the workers will own the means of production, and in the other they won’t, and we’ll see what happens to equality and growth and all these things we care about.”
It’s a strategy that could give social scientists unprecedented ways to test out their theories.
“If we set up parallel worlds and get people distracted to go hunt the dragons or something, behind the scenes we can run little experiments that they may not necessar"
Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:10pm PDT
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Indiana University Professor Edward Castronova has made a name for himself as an economist who studies virtual worlds. Now he’s been awarded a US$240,000 grant to create one himself, based on the world of William Shakespeare.
“What we plan to do is have people encounter the texts in Shakespeare and ideas in the text at many points within a really fun, multiplayer game, so without even knowing it, they gradually are learning more about the bard’s work,” said Castronova, (right) author of “Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.”
But Arden, Castronova’s planned world, will have a hidden purpose beyond teaching: he plans to use it as a Petri dish for testing out economic theories by creating controlled experiments within the game’s population.
“You have two randomly selected populations and do a policy variation in just one of them,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “What if (Karl) Marx had been able to say ‘Hey, let’s try out communism, we’ll set up two worlds and in one the workers will own the means of production, and in the other they won’t, and we’ll see what happens to equality and growth and all these things we care about.”
It’s a strategy that could give social scientists unprecedented ways to test out their theories.
“If we set up parallel worlds and get people distracted to go hunt the dragons or something, behind the scenes we can run little experiments that they may not necessar"
Sloodle - 3D Learning Management System
Sloodle - 3D Learning Management System: "SLoodle is a project to integrate the VLE platform Moodle with the 3D world of Second Life. Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world. "
It had to happen - the creation of a v-classroom. take the 3D artefacts of second life and integrate into an open source LMS and voila - the v-classroom.
It had to happen - the creation of a v-classroom. take the 3D artefacts of second life and integrate into an open source LMS and voila - the v-classroom.
IBM eyes move into Second Life v-business
Reuters/Second Life » IBM eyes move into Second Life ‘v-business’: "Computer services giant IBM has plunged into Second Life at the urging of its “metaverse evangelists” Roo Reynolds and Ian Hughes, using it as a location for meetings, training and recruitment. But the company is also eyeing revenue opportunities that could have it vying with Second Life design firms to bring real-world businesses into the virtual realm.
“E-business was a strategy for us, why not v-business?” said Reynolds, known in-world as Algernon Spackler, at the “My So-Called Second Life” conference in London on Tuesday. “I don’t mean to be competitive with Rivers Run Red or Electric Sheep, but just like we set up a bricks and mortar business online, we could integrate a company’s services in a virtual world.”'Integration with services, integration with data — exactly what we helped people do back in the days of e-business, that’s sort of what I envision us doing,” he said. “Mind you, I’m an evangelist, not a strategist, but if I had to guess that’s where we’re going.”
IBM has embraced Second Life to an extent unmatched by any other major company — it has more than 230 employees spending time in-world, and it owns some half-dozen islands. Some are open to the public, but most are private, with restricted access for the public."
“E-business was a strategy for us, why not v-business?” said Reynolds, known in-world as Algernon Spackler, at the “My So-Called Second Life” conference in London on Tuesday. “I don’t mean to be competitive with Rivers Run Red or Electric Sheep, but just like we set up a bricks and mortar business online, we could integrate a company’s services in a virtual world.”'Integration with services, integration with data — exactly what we helped people do back in the days of e-business, that’s sort of what I envision us doing,” he said. “Mind you, I’m an evangelist, not a strategist, but if I had to guess that’s where we’re going.”
IBM has embraced Second Life to an extent unmatched by any other major company — it has more than 230 employees spending time in-world, and it owns some half-dozen islands. Some are open to the public, but most are private, with restricted access for the public."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)