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Wikis, Blogs & Wombats | Warp Baya

Warp Baya

Wikis, Blogs & Wombats

Wikis, Blogs & Wombats – Brown Bag Lunch at Emory & Henry – March 20, 2008
Harry Baya – 43 MB MP3 file, 36 minutes
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Wikis, Blogs & Wombats – Brown Bag Lunch at Emory & Henry – March 20, 2008

Harry Baya (hbaya@ehc.edu) – Based on N.I.T.L.E conference at Davis Elkins College, January 25, 2008. – Bryan Alexander

This is an outline of the topics covered, plus some added notes and web links.

Why Wombats !   Total Whimsy!           [ pouches are backwards. Marsupial brains do not have a corpus calosum ]

Recommended Applications:

Some Additions – On Line Resources

 

Media Coverage – strongly anti-technology, biased exploitation.. – what sells

Terms in this presentation :If you would like a definition, look them up in wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org/)

Moore’s Law  – [ click here for wikipedia definition ]

Computer speeds tend to double every two or three years. This has been so since about 1970 and is expected to continue for at least another ten years. Computers have a “footprint” (size, weight, cost, etc. ). The “footprint” is decreasing by 50% every two to three years.

Two key measures of the power of technology are:

  1. Processing speed – how long does it take to do a specific unit of digital work – at a fixed cost
  2. Communication speeds – how quickly can bits of data be moved from one location to another- at a fixed cost

Significant increases in either of these can cause dramatic changes in technology – “changes in kind”. Moore’s law seems to fit both at this time.  The bottom line is that things that had been economically unattractive become attractive. New things start being done. New doors are opened. New opportunities, often unforseen, emerge.

Moore’s Law can be viewed as an engine pumping change into our society. These are not just changes in degree, they become changes in kind. We are witnessing, and will continue to witness for many years, paradigm shifts in our culture due to the rapid increase in the power of computer technology.

Changes in Kind – Some result in cultural paradigm shifts

When anything increases by a multiple of 7 (or 5, or 10, or something around there) it ceases to be “more of the same” and becomes “different in kind”. This is not “true” in any absolute sense, but it does seem to explain some things.

Marx: “When you change something enough it becomes something else.”

“The changes brought about by today’s instances of digital convergence may be changes in degree or in kind; some may be changes in degree that are so significant as to be changes in kind.’”

We are in a period where significant paradigm shifts may occur every 2 to 3 years.

My opinion is that the advent of computer technology will have an impact on culture on the same scale as the advent of writing. My best guess is that it will be more significant than the impact of the industrial revolution. We are at the beginning of a massive change in our culture. This is very difficult to see from within the changing culture – but we are all aware of aspects of it. I think the biggest identifiable impact on culture in history was the advent of language. I don’t know where to rank computer technology vs things like tool making and agriculture, but I think it will have around that general level of impact.

Computer History

Earliest modern computers – 1940’s

“Main Frames”

“Time Shared” Computers” (1960’s, 70’s)

Personal computers – major change impacting culture. Main impact started about 1979

The Web  – Major change impacting culture
Early versions : Arpanet,   Compuserve
Main impact started about 1994 with wide spread of first graphic browser (Mosaic)

Google

Wikipedia

Blogs
Wikis
Discussion boards
List Serves

Podcasts ( audio & video) –term created around 2004  

itunes  (podcast reader)BBC, NPR, anyone – sources of podcasts.
Make a podcast (audacity, MP3, Need a host… )
Time shifting
15 minute modules

“enhanced podcasting” – podcasts with attached files, like a lesson file
RSS Reader  (BlogLines – free RSS reader service)
RSS Feed site

youtube

Web 2.0

Micro-content
Multi-author –  personal vs corporate, any size contributor
Open
Mashups – data, media

Meta-data
Open source is an important component
Interaction, sharing, support
Personal resources – like bookmarks, files, address lists, – can be shared as much as desired, or kept private

Web 2.0 is a trend in World Wide Web technology, and web design, a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, information sharing, collaboration, and sharing among users. It is almost defined as the new era of the World Wide Web. [ Wikipedia]

Social Networking

Folksonomic
Crowd sourcing
Social Bookmarking
Facebook

Myspace
Second Life
– free low end visit. 3-D interactive non-game environment. Living in cyberspace, learn, share, create, teach

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1] [ Wikipedia ]

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science). [ Wikipedia ]

Project Gutenberg

Economic Models for web base services – free or fee ? (Microsoft vs Linux)

Flickr – personal, searchable, large database of free usable photos, add personal notes, share as desired

Games –Giant Industry – bigger than Movie Industry, World wide, U.S. less than half

Expected to be bigger than music industry in 2008

Single player
Massive multiplayer on line games –World of Warcraft – 10 Million players
Educational Games

NOTE: I said it was bigger than movie and tv industry combined. I cannot confirm this. It is probably wrong. I have heard that it is bigger than the movie industry.. but I can’t even verify that. It is big, and growing. I’m sure of that.

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Harry Baya