The Library of Congress Pilot Project on Flickr

Announced yesterday, The Library of Congress has uploaded more than 3,000 historical photographs to Flickr, the online photo sharing website. These are shared under a new No known Copyright Restrictions category, which means that the library is not the intellectual property owner. There are two possibilities:

1. There was a copyright and it was not renewed
2. The image is from a late 19th or early 20th century collection for which there is no evidence of any rights holder

The aim of the project is to invite us, the public, to tag the photographs, thus categorising them and making them searchable. Clever, eh?

There are two collections: 1930s-40s in Color; and News in the 1910s.

David Gallo: Underwater astonishments

Another great video from TED talks. This 6-minute presentation shows some incredible underwater creatures. I especially like the disappearing octopus at the end.

Digital Libraries & JeromeDL

Digitial Libraries have been growing in number and strength since the term was originally popularised in the early 1990s. There is something intrinsically human about our desire to catalog and organise our intellectual work into meaningful and sharable collections. More recently, many universities and indeed countries are building academic repositories of books, papers, theses and teaching materials.

Sebastian Kruk has been working on a semantic digital library within DERI for the past while, and recently has put together an evaluation version of their JeromeDL system. If you wish to check out what this system is all about he also has an introductory presenation that outlines how library resources can be enhanced for browsing and retrieval with various semantic empowered services inclucing social annotations.

There is also a guided evaluation available on http://q.digime.name/ which steps you through some tasks, prompting you to provide feedback at various stages. This is probably the best place to start, and will give you an opportunity to reflect on what you think of digital repositories and to contribute some thoughts on how they might be improved, along with getting to play with the system using the accompanying guided instructions.

Facebook and neocon libertarianism

Tom Hogkinson, writer of "How to be Idle" and "How to be free", comments on the ownership of Facebook in the Guardian yesterday. He provides details of the political/philosophical outlook of the three major funders/owners, painting a somewhat disturbing picture for those who are keen to upload their lives onto Facebook's server farm. Of course, two of the owners are major players in new technology investment and Facebook isnt their ownly 'finger in the pie'. The question of whether their attitudes matter or not, is a valid one, since many of us buy products and services from other companies without questioning their political standpoint. One of the main differences, though, with technologies such as Facebook is the gathering and harvesting of personal data and information and to make this point, Tom summarises some interesting paragraphs from the Facebook use agreement.

PS(3) I pod you

So, you've just installed your new flat-screen digital TV and Santa brought you an iPod, but all of that is, I'm afraid, so "last year". The must have technologies for the home of the future (remember the Jetsons?) are listed on the BBC's website today.

The Future of Learning in a Networked World

This is an unusual and open event, taking place from the 16th to the 28th of January, in various locations (Thailand, Sydney, New Zealand, etc.), but accessible via Skypecasts, Second Life and asynchronous discussions. It is called the Future of Learning in a Networked World, 2008. Topics are on a range of themes relating to networked learning.

I missed the first of these events in 2006, much to my regret. It seems such a novel and participative way of sharing ideas and experiences. To cite from the 2006 conference, this "...was variously referred to as an unconference, an open space conference, a bar camp, or even a travelling elearning circus or roadshow. Invited participants mostly referred to it as an unconference - the prefix ‘un’ denoted a definitive contrast from the typical style of ‘stand and deliver’ professional development event that we were all familiar with."

If you wish to participate in this years unfolding events, check out the itinerary, and subscribe to the blog to find out how to collaborate in the exchanges.

Have a mathemagical new year!

This from TED talks is worth a look for those of us whose brains are still groggy from the New Year celebrations.

Intel withdraws from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme

Intel has withdrawn from the OLPC programme following a 'philosophical impasse' (Chuck Molloy, Intel spokesman) between the two organisations.

The programme was founded in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte, former Media Lab director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original concept was to offer a $US100 laptop to consumers. A prototype design of an OLPC laptop (using an Intel chip) was due to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7-10.

Intel have been developing their own inexpensive laptop, called 'the Classmate', and are targeting some of the same markets as the OLPC laptops. For further information click here.

Mobius Transformations Revealed

Following a link from the Chronicle blog, I have to recommend this video which explains Mobius transformations in a most beautiful way. It was released on YouTube in June and has been watched more than a million times. You can also download a high resolution version from the creators, Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness, of the University of Minnesota.

EduSpaces shutting down

On Sunday (16th December) users of EduSpaces, the social website for the education community, received an email announcing that it was closing down on January 10th. This came as quite a surprise to the community of users and a lot of discussion followed, speculating on the reasons for the closure and wondering about alternative platforms for their content.

Yesterday evening an explanation was posted. In a nutshell:

When we launched the site three years ago, we were embraced by some members of the community and have enjoyed positive support and coverage overall. Contrary to popular opinion, we have never been affiliated with an institution or other backer; we personally funded it because we believed in it. We still believe in the underlying ideals we started with. However, we need to pay our bills, and it has become clear that the educational community is not the best way for us to do that; correspondingly, that is no longer our core focus. Running a community takes a lot of time and hard work, which we have no longer been able to give EduSpaces, and in that light, it seems both unfair and unwise to keep the site going.

Ben and Dave take care to highlight the distinction between EduSpaces and Elgg, which is still (according to them) going strong.

NDLR Symposium 2007

The 2007 National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR) Symposium took place on Tuesday 11th December at Trinity College Dublin.

The day kicked off with two keynote speakers Prof. Phil Race of Leeds Metropolitan University and Chris Pegler of the Open University.

Phil’s talk was entitled “Making Learning Happen with Digital Resources” and apart from the fun we, as attendees, had interacting with each other and Phil during the one-hour session, we learned a great deal about digital learning, and maybe a bit more about how to keep people awake, interactive and interested during a one-hour session.
Some of Phil’s points included considering how we learn, with papers strewn across our desk, on the floor, on the spare chair and basically on most available spaces. His point was: “What can we do with just one screen?” - something worth considering. His website http://www.phil-race.com/ features the slides from the session.

The second keynote was given by Chris Pegler on “Reflections on Reuse: What are Repositories and who are they for?”. Among other points, Chris talked about what to keep in mind when developing objects for repositories, and one of the points that I brought away with me was that “Repurposability maximises reuse”.

The keynotes were followed by a day jam-packed full of examples of the great things teaching staff are doing around the country’s third level institutions, maximising resources available to them for teaching and learning.

All presentations will be made available as podcasts from the NDLR Project website in the near future at http://www.ndlr.ie/

IntraLibrary Repository Conference 2008

We've just received notice from Intrallect that the IntraLibrary Repository Conference 2008 will be held on the 21-22 February in Edinburgh. As the leaflet/poster puts it: "You don’t need to be an intraLibrary user to attend – come and see why so many people are intraLibrary users – but for intraLibrary users this is a great chance to see what others are doing with intraLibrary, to see what Intrallect is about to release, and to provide input into what you would like to see in intraLibrary." The company will also be using the event to launch version 3.0 of their product.

IntraLibrary is used within CELT, here in Galway, to manage multimedia assets and more widely in Ireland's National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR) project. In addition, it forms the core of the UK's national HE & FE repository: JORUM.