How creativity is being strangled by the law

Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, has an excellent presentation on TED talks this week. Watch it here.

VizThink - Are you a Visual Thinker

The website for the VizThink Conference '08 asks Who are Visual Thinkers anyway? The answer is

Visual thinkers are people who use any form of the visual arts such as graphic design, illustration, photos, video, animations, sketches, 3D, etc. for communications and learning.

The conference topics sound very interesting, including:

• Moving beyond bullet points...using storytelling for presentations
• Aligning individuals using visualization
• Visualization in 3D? When does it matter
• Facilitation using photographs
• Designing compelling and effective information graphics
• Virtual worlds: future or fad
• Creating a global visual language
• Organizing your world with visuals
• Using visuals for powerful presentations
• Storytelling through comics and graphic novels
• Visual techniques for analyzing data
• Visualization principles for software design
• Facilitation through live sketching
• Can there be a true language with grammar and structure that uses visuals?
• Visualization as a brainstorming tool

Unfortunately, for a conference site which states Who should not attend?

• Those who think bullets are best

the site contains an awful lot of bullet-pointed lists!

The conference site links to a blog, where one of the challenges is to picture the visual thinkers community, resulting in some beautiful images and not a bullet point in sight! There is also a conference wiki which includes lots of pre-conference information.

Unfortunately, the conference is in San Francisco at the end of January! Might be worth keeping an eye on the wiki though!

separate lives

The Guardian today has an article which summarises some of the findings of a recent report from JISC in the UK on student attitudes to Web 2.0 technologies. Entitled "Get out of My Space" the story explains that whilst universities and academics are desperately keen to have a presence in social networking sites (such as MySpace and Facebook), students themselves like to keep their space on such sites for personal activity and not study. Pretty obvious if you've ever surfed such sites. The notion that your tutor is eavesdropping on your chat, your hobbies and worst of all your personal photos and videos is a bit disconcerting for many no doubt. Still, the report does make the point that the provision of such tools can be very useful for distance learning (and presumably also, part-time) students in terms of creating a social space to replace the 'student bar'.

The World Digital Library

The Independent (UK), The Washington Post and The New York Times all report on the World Digital Library project, a prototype of which was unveiled in Paris on October 17th. The project involves the US Library of Congress, Unesco and libraries in Egypt, Brazil and Russia, as well as financial support from google and technical support from Apple.

The project is to digitise and make available, for free, in multiligual format, primary resources from around the globe, including maps, rare books, manuscripts, photographs, film and music. While the prototype is not currently available, there is a nice little video Experience the Vision.

Inaugural Symposium on Communities & Shared Digital Resources for Teaching & Learning, (NDLR2007)

The inaugural NDLR (National Learning Digital Learning Repository) symposium has recently been announced. Further information is available on the NDLR website.

"The 2007 International Symposium on Communities and Shared Digital Resources for Teaching and Learning (NDLR2007) will take place on Tuesday 11th December in University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

This symposium is aimed at members of NDLR Communities of Practice (CoP) and academic staff across many different subject disciplines across Irish Higher Education. Participation and attendance is also invited from International Subject Networks or Communities of Practice."

The man who invented Google Earth..

Berkeley's webcast service has provided a link to a recorded lecture by John Hanke, Product Director for Google Earth. John has had a fascinating and varied career in technology innovation as can be seen in his brief biography from the Berkeley site, reproduced below.

"Product Director for Google Maps, Local, and Earth, John Hanke has an accomplished career in the world of interactive software where he has pursued advances in technology to pioneer new kinds of products. In the early days of the web, Hanke was involved in the start up of one of the first massively multi-player online 3D games ("Meridian 59"), which was acquired by 3DO in 1996. He co-founded a second company, Big Network, to pursue "casual gaming" online. That company was acquired by eUniverse in 2000. He co-founded Keyhole in 2001 to create a new kind of global 3D map of the world. He forged partnerships with Sony, Nvidia, CNN and others as the company introduced its "earth browser" to the world. Keyhole was acquired by Google in October 2004. The Keyhole technology re-emerged as "Google Earth" in July 2005. After receiving his MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in 1996 and BA in Plan II from The University of Texas at Austin, Hanke worked in foreign affairs for the US Government in Washington, DC and Southeast Asia."

democratic participation online

Pat Kane flagged up the "CanadaJam" event that's looming in January in one of his recent blog entries. Essentially, its about taking IBM's online brainstorming and policy making "jam" technique and extending it into the realm of political debate. Incorporating wiki type approaches and online discussion postings, with a lot of analysis, the scheme is an attempt to stimulate national debate on key topics of public concern. The World Urban Forum was informed by such an event and you can learn more about that at HabitatJam which managed 25,000 participants! The CanadaJam document explains the process.

Sounds fascinating - does it always work? How are the practical aspects handled? Fancy one for the future of education? I note that the costs are (Canadian)$2 million for the event in January.

you've been Googled

Jaiku, the little mobile phone text-blogging tool that I've demonstrated earlier (have a look down the right hand side of the page) has now been snapped up by Google. Initial information about this can be found on the jaiku website in a Q&A format.

http://jaiku.com/help/google

you stream, i tube, we pod....hmm

Well, ustream.tv the simple, open access video streaming service is continuing to spread across many websites , judging by some recent surfing. I have to say that the quality of streams that I've tapped into hasn't always been great, but it is free and very easy to use. Essentially built on Flash and similar to a service we already have within NUIG ("virtual meeting rooms"), ustream let's anyone set up a live link between their PC and webcam to anyone who chooses to watch/listen. Passwords can be set for restricted access or broadcasts can be public. Some of the better examples online at the moment have been associated with conference keynote presentations, etc. Gordon Moore, of Intel and Moore's law fame provides an example here. Interestingly, ustream is now also available as an application within facebook. So to paraphrase the BBC's motto: geek shall speak unto geek!

Fidelity Investments Technology Conference in Galway

For those of you based in Galway, Fidelilty Investments are hosting a Technology conference on the 18th October in the Ardilaun Hotel. Areas such as Mobile Web 2.0, Social Networking and Collaboration platforms, the emergence of Virtual Worlds as well as security concerns with Web 2.0 architectures, will be discussed.

Speakers include Chris Horn (former CEO of Iona Technologies), John Breslin (DERI), Ajit Jaokar (FutureText), David Burden (Daden Ltd., UK) and Richard Mooney (Vordel Ireland).

As far as I am aware, there is no registration fee.

ICT initiative of the Year in UK HE

Over in the UK, JISC has announced the shortlist for outstanding ICT initiative of the year (in HE). Some 'weel kent faces' (as we say in Scotland) are in the list and all are worth noting. The open source software Elgg raises its head since that's the basis for community@brighton (as I understand it) and the OU's OpenLearn initiative made it to the list also. Have a look at the listing here and place your bets as to the ultimate winner!.

Dictionary - paper or electronic?

Lexicographer, Erin McKean talks passionately about the nature of dictionaries and the ways in which print based formats are challenged in the new electronic age. Very entertaining presentation.