For a project scheduled to end in 2011, Plymouth University researchers will build two robots using software allowing them to interact with each other to exchange learned information like humans. The team will use language-learning techniques designed for children. According to The Engineer, the goal of the project is to teach concepts to robots including the meaning of words. As said the lead researcher, ‘Robots still don’t know the meaning of things. The only techniques we have at the moment are using mathematical tricks and statistics to produce more or less sensible replies.’ These robots will be designed to encourage human interaction. They’ll have a long neck and a face in place of a grip so it can look around or at an object from all sides. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

Less than a week before the convention, a google search for “democratic convention schedule” brings up a fascinating SERP (search engine result page). The first two results are the official Democratic National Convention website: www.DemConvention.com. On that website, the schedule of events — if it there at all — is not readily findable. Perhaps there is politics in this: since the speakers are still being decided, putting a schedule online has the potential for ruffling feathers.

The third link is the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee. Certainly the search engine spiders cannot be criticized too much for confusing the convention schedule of host events with the convention schedule of keynoters, important pols, and roll calls. Understandably, then, the convention schedule on the host committee site has events like these: After Five Jazz & Blues Festival Aug. 23-29, Eco-Friendly Green Frontier Fest Aug. 24, 2008 Rocky Mountain Roundtable Aug. 25-27.

The SERP next links to a smart answer for the mob who would want the convention schedule that will be nominating Senator Barack Obama for President. The fourth link is Wikipedia, where an up-to-the minute schedule is clearly set out for the convention. The Wikipedians are more objective and less worried about ruffled feathers than the democrats in charge of the convention and perform a real service for the mob that will be gathering in Denver next week.

The blogging tents of this week’s Carnival at mobilejones feature the hot buzz of the rest of the blogosphere and media of all types: the topics dominating conversation are Twitter and the iPhone. The Carnival includes Howard’s post about an intrepid fellow he met in Copenhagen: Twitterer/streaming video broadcaster evicted from Olympics.

I was very fortunate to be one of the winners in last year’s HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. Applications are now open for the next round.

Focus: Participatory Learning
Application Deadline: October 15, 2008
Full information at: www.dmlcompetition.net

Application Deadline: October 15, 2008

The second HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition is now open! The focus is participatory learning.

Awards will be made in two categories:

Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards support large-scale digital learning projects
$30,000-$250,000

Young Innovator Awards are targeted at 18-25 year olds
$5,000-$30,000

Full information at: www.dmlcompetition.net or visit www.hastac.org

Commanding Your Browser

The beauty of today’s search engines is their simplicity. Type a few keywords into an empty box, and see the 10 most relevant results. This week, Mozilla Labs expects to launch a similar interface for its Firefox Web browser. The new interface, called Ubiquity, lets users carry out all sorts of complex tasks simply by typing instructions, in the form of ordinary sentences, into a box in the browser.
Source: Kate Greene, Technology Review, August 12, 2008

Citizen-inspired e-government for ‘thin-skinned’ cities

E-government is the ‘in’ thing and a growing number of public services can now be delivered online. A major challenge faced, however, is how to get citizens more involved in public life and encourage greater interaction between the public sector and the man in the street. Three city authorities — Dublin, Helsinki and Barcelona — decided to get together to develop a new tool aimed primarily at improving citizen involvement in civic affairs and increasing the responsiveness of local services.
Source: ICT Results, August 11, 2008

Yahoo knows where you are

Given all the drama surrounding Yahoo’s corporate activities, it’s easy to forget that there is a business still to be run and new products to launch. On Tuesday at Yahoo’s San Francisco-based skunk works — known as the Brickhouse — the embattled Internet company unveiled a new location services platform dubbed Fire Eagle. (Yes, it’s silly name but say it ten times fast and think of Firefox and it begins to sound OK.)
Source: Michael V. Copeland, Fortune’s Techland blog, August 12, 2008

I got my job through social networking

When So, a 32-year-old technology salesman from Dublin, California, learned he had 45 days to find a new job before his company’s division was axed, he turned to friends online. Within hours of updating his job status on the social networking site LinkedIn, So’s contacts won him four job interviews. Within a week, two of the interviews resulted in offers. And within less than a month, his employer counteroffered with a position in another division and a $25,000 bump in his annual salary.
Source: Sarah Jane Tribble, The New York Times, August 14, 2008

Blogger rates local businesses on how accessible they are to disabled

Kenny Cieplik has spent most of his life in a wheelchair. But the day’s events were not just another frustration — they were included in his blog, The Traveling Wheelchair. Cieplik visits all types of establishments — banks, beaches, post offices, libraries, restaurants, and parks — and rates them on wheelchair accessibility, using a scale of zero to five stars. (Zero is bad, five stars is best.)
Source: Emily Sweeney, The Boston Globe, August 14, 2008

Barack Obama dominates Twitter

By Twitterholic’s last count, Sen. Barack Obama stands at 56,661 followers, compared with [Digg's co-founder] Kevin Rose’s 56,442. Obama also has the second highest number of friends on Twitter — 59,338 — according to Twitterholic, which calculates individual statistics for each Twitter user a couple of times a day.
Source: Stephanie Condon, CNET’s Digital Media, August 13, 2008

A Social Network for Your Doctor, Pharmacist and Insurer

Imagine a virtual health clinic: Your lung doctor and heart specialist can pull up your online medical profile and chat, via instant messenger, about your medications. You schedule checkups online, create a wellness journal or even rate your general practitioner. WellNet Healthcare, a Bethesda health management company, is launching the beta version of this social network, Point to Point Healthcare, this month.
Source: Kendra Marr, The Washington Post, August 16, 2008

Nicholas Carr’s recent book The Big Switch has a chapter titled The Great Unbundling. Carr has given us (from the world of finance, as he explains) a key word for understanding the post-Web 2.0 era we have entered. The word unbundling captures the fundamentality of little pieces in an open network. David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous explored the growing understanding that little pieces are where content begins online. The power of little pieces causes unbundling. Weinberger called the pieces “smart” — these pieces can be thought of as mobbing in different ways to create different meaning.

Now bundling is dissolving for textbooks. A report yesterday in The Wired Campus describes how a Management Professor Uses ‘Crowdsourcing’ to Write Textbook. In this case, the textbook is bundled from many little pieces, going a step beyond the unbundling of traditional textbooks now done frequently by making chapters or smaller sections available online:

Charles Wankel is gathering hundreds of co-authors from around the world to write his latest textbook — 926 of them in 90 countries, to be exact.

Mr. Wankel is an associate professor of management at St. John’s University, in New York. Each of his co-authors, most of whom are also management professors, will write or edit a small portion of the final text, which is slated to be published by Routledge. They’re organizing the vast effort using a wiki that lets participants see and edit each other’s contributions.

Mr. Wankel is essentially asking the expected audience for the book to be part of its production, since he hopes that management professors around the world will end up using the text in their courses. He found his co-authors by searching social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for members who were management professors — and of course he invited colleagues he had met over the years. The practice has been called “crowdsourcing,” a term coined by a Wired magazine writer to describe outsourcing a project to a large group using collaborative Internet technologies. . . .

Three minute video on why I think it’s important to teach about social media now.

Ignatia Webs has listed a Top 10 Mobile Tools for Learning. The tools run a gamut from the Opera mini browser, find.mobi, flickr, youtube and more. Ignatia gives a quick explanation for choosing each tool. The array is robust and practical — and a heads up to the real progress toward mobile learning.

Admission is by permission of instructor. Students who find out about it online and contact me before the syllabus is posted on Coursework/Axcess will have an edge. Virtual Community/Social Media, Fall 2008, Stanford University. Educators who are interested in joining a community of interest around the Social Media Classroom, please email me via howard at rheingold dot com.