Archives
Monday, February 19, 2007
Can we have it both ways?
It’s an issue that keeps coming up peripherally but never seems to be addressed head on. There was something at Christmas I think but I got distracted by other worries then and now it’s come up again in The Decimal Divide by Joshua and even in Christopher’s “addition of beauty products to a porcine companion” concern about the Sopac.
The issue is this. Libraries are designed for finding information. The way they say men shop: hunt, grab, go. Browsing is pretty much impossible. Bookstores are designed for browsing (to maximize profits). Looking for something specific, not as easy unless you’re really familiar with that store.
So the problem facing libraries is that they require the finding information setup for themselves and researchers and they need the comfortable browsability (it’s a word now!) for the casual users looking for entertainment.
Bringing us back to the question. Can we have it both ways? And its companion. How?
Library Links — laura
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Does distance learning have to be like this?
Basically, anyone who is thinking of getting a graduate degree online needs to read this post with the comments.
It describes my own experience much better than I ever have. Online learning really does change from teacher to teacher.
There was one class that was wonderful because the professor could somehow read the text chat while he was lecturing and answer our questions in the lecture. So there was a sense of community in that class, where we listened to the lecture and discussed the topic at the same time.
There was another class where the teacher used so many words we’d never heard before I surfed all through the lectures and just did my papers from the reading. I wasn’t the only only one I know.
The thing I’ve been trying to figure out for years though was why the best class was from the avowed luddite. Now I wonder if it wasn’t because it was a class he had previously taught online and had already reconfigured for the Internet. I did know it had to do with the fact he put his course notes online, something the other professors resisted no matter how much we begged. They seemed to see it as a way for us to skip class but really we wanted the help in keeping up!
We miss so much communication (like body language) just getting voice and power-point slides that we have to devote extra time and effort into decrypting the nuonces of what the teacher is saying and we miss the actual statements that are being made. Course notes lets online students come prepared with the facts and have the attention to spare for really understanding the material.
So why do the distance thing at all? Some situations, it’s all you can do. I got to keep my full-time job, accruing invaluable experience at the same time I got my degree. Plus I didn’t have to pay tutition (worked for one state school, went to another). There are tons of reasons to put off moving and as stressful as it is it is doable, especially if you get into a good program or find a mentor.
Library Links — laura
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Why wireless carriers should be forced into neutrality
Why wireless carriers should be forced into neutrality
Tim Wu, a copyfightin’ net-neutrality-advocatin’ law prof at Columbia, has posted a draft of a new, stunning paper on net neutrality as it might apply to mobile carriers. In “Wireless Network Neutrality,” Wu demonstrates the way that the wireless carriers have adopted the same bad practices that led to landmark action against the wire-line phone companies in the middle of the 20th Century. Wu makes a compelling case for changing wireless regulation to require the same minimal neutrality from wireless carriers that wired carriers are currently bound to — after all, those neutrality rules were responsible for an incredible leap in innovation and telecoms profits. With walled gardens, limits on handsets and handset features, deceptive billing and crummy, fake-ass Internet services, the carriers are slitting their own throats.
Wu’s paper contains solid, specific proposals for new rules that would benefit everyone:
1. Network Attachments. Carriers exercise excessive control over what devices may be used on the public’s wireless spectrum. The carriers place strong controls over “foreign attachments,” like the AT&T of the 1950s. These controls continue to affect the innovation and development of new devices for wireless networks.
2. Product Design and Feature Crippling. By controlling entry, carriers are in a position to exercise strong control over the design of mobile equipment. They have used that power to force equipment developers to omit or cripple many consumer-friendly features, and also forced manufacturers to include technologies, like “walled garden” internet access, that neither equipment developers nor consumers want. Finally, through under-disclosed “phone-locking,” the U.S. carriers disable the ability of phones to work on more than one network. A list of features that carriers have blocked, crippled, modified or made difficult to use, at one time or another include:
* Call timers on telephones
* WiFi technology
* Bluetooth technology
* GPS Services
* Advanced SMS services
* Internet Browsers
* Easy Photo file transfer capabilities
* Easy Sound file transfer capabilities
* Email clients
* SIM Card Mobility3. Discriminatory Broadband Services – In recent years, under the banner of “3G,” carriers have begun to offer wireless broadband services that compete with WiFi services and may competee with cable and DSL broadband services. However, the services are offered pursuant to usage restrictions that violate basic network neutrality rules, and pursuant to undisclosed bandwidth limits…
4. Application Stall – Mobile application development is by nature technically challenging. However, the carriers have not helped. They have imposed excessive burdens and conditions on application entry in the wireless application market, stalling what might otherwise be a powerful input into the U.S. economy. In the words of one developer, “there is really no way to write applications for these things.” The mobile application environment is today, in the words of one developer, “a tarpit of misery, pain and destruction.”
Computing News — laura
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Podcasting
Extensive article useful for anyone who hasn’t actually created their own podcast or is trying to explain it to non-tech colleagues.
Web Tools — laura
ILS Data Series
I’m not trying to cover many details, provide spec sheets or serve as comparison shopping. I’m just documenting some ILS users’ experiences using their data to see what the landscape looks like.
Library Links — laura
OA because it supports mirrors, mashups, and mining
OA because it supports mirrors, mashups, and mining
The Creative Commons Attribution License under which open access articles are made available by both BioMed Central and PLoS allows others to create sites that incorporate the content of these articles, so long as the original source is clearly acknowledged. Two ways to do this are mashups and mirrors….
BioMed Central officially has four mirrors….
On the mashup side, Free Biomedical Images has made open access images available in a searchable database, mainly (entirely?) taken from BioMed Central articles, and fully attributed. Users can comment on the images, rate them, email them to a friend and jump to the published article.
A key feature of open access is that we don’t hide away the full text of our articles. The entire ‘corpus’ of our open access research articles is available on our data mining page for anyone to download. Gerry Rubin has said that “the most important reason for Open Access is data mining”.
The idea of mashups, scripts and extensions is just beginning to reach the bioinformatics community. A bioinformatics mashup by Alfonso Valencia is iHOP (Information Hyperlinked over Proteins), which links information about genes and proteins to text from PubMed. Not satisfied with just a mashup, Mark Wilkinson has created a Greasemonkey userscript called iHOPerator that enhances the iHOP website with tag clouds. You can read about in his BMC Bioinformatics article. Two other Greasemonkey userscripts link PubMed to social bookmarking sites, one to CiteULike, the other to Connotea. A third links Google Scholar to CiteULike. The iSpecies search engine pulls together information about any species you enter from disparate sources, including scores of biomedical databases and even Yahoo! Image search….
I can’t define Web 2.0 to save my life but this is it. Taking useful information and tweaking it into a far more useful format for your own needs and sharing it for others with the same needs. (The world’s a big place, there’s always someone.)
Open Access — laura
