Yesterday I posted about how some students have retitled their blogs to reflect the course they are in this semester rather than last. That got me thinking about continuity of intellectual life and development from semester to semester — or lack thereof — and the blogging practices that could reflect and/or facilitate it. Here’s a [...]
Posts under ‘Uncategorized’
Course Blogs and Students Palimpsesting Themselves
Much like a good 5-year overdue cleanup of the attic will uncover some gems among the detritus, I discovered something really interesting while cleaning up some of the data used behind Semantic UMW. Due to some earlier code that didn’t clean up title information very well (funny characters, random spaces, etc.), many posts and blogs [...]
An Aside To Other Things
A post on my more technical blog recently caught the eye of the good folks at Talis, and I had a great time talking with them about it. The things going on here aren’t quite directly connected to this project, but some of the core principles about open data, educational possibilities, and linked data show [...]
Semantic UMW in the NMC 2009 Horizon Report
This morning I woke up to the happy discovery that Semantic UMW got a shout-out in the New Media Consortium‘s 2009 Horizon Report. The Horizon Report gives an overview of emerging tools, practices, and ideas that could be significant for education. This year’s report puts semantic-aware applications in the four to five year horizon, and [...]
Goals for 2009
As always, there’s a lot on my plate, but, in addition to smaller tweaks to handle odd characters and improve the scrapers, I’m hoping to make these some of the top priorities for 2009. Prettification Our student aide Serena Epstein has been doing some wonderful work to style up the Exhibits, including a nifty background [...]
Visual design and information design
There’s a funny tension at work throughout the web between the needs of visual design and the needs of data design. Sometimes it results in some funny things when you do what I’m doing — taking the data out of it’s visual context to mix and match it in new ways. Funny, and very interesting. [...]
Hapax Tag-omena
I’ve thought for a long time that tags are overrated as a tool for organizing content. Paradoxically, that’s because of how useful they are. The paradox is that, because they are useful so many things, they are used for many different purposes. The result is that within the context of a single, particular purpose they [...]
10,000 Posts!
The mission of semantifying the University of Mary Washington is coming along nicely — the store of information now knows about more than 10,000 posts from over 1,500 different blogs! There’s also a lot more information that isn’t yet being exposed in the various exhibits and galleries. It’s all a big pile of facts about [...]
Top 10 Lists
Always looking for new and interesting ways to see what’s going on in the world of UMW blogging, I’ve made a few quick Top Ten lists: Audiophiles People with the most audio in their blogs. Image-philes People with the most images in their blogs. Videophiles People with the most video in their blogs. Linkers People [...]
A Timeline of Posts
Just put up a new prototype of an Exhibit/Timeline: Two Week Timeline. This gets a list of all the posts from the past two weeks and puts them into a timeline. I was surprised to find that this one interests me a little more than the others, because the timeline representation might end up revealing [...]
