Comments on: Episode 34 – Extra, Extra!

By: Are EdTechers Ahead of the Curve? « The Leisurely Historian…

Are EdTechers Ahead of the Curve? « The Leisurely Historian… — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:35:39 +0000

[…] And I couldn’t help but notice that it was much less nuanced and thought-out than a similar discussion that Tom Scheinfeldt, Dan Cohen, and Mills Kelly had last November on the Digital Campus podcast. […]

By: Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:57:23 +0000

As one of the developers behind FortyChapters, I just wanted to thank you for mentioning the service.

Also, I found the processing.org information very interesting and am going to check it out now. Keep up the good work.

By: David Lankes

David Lankes — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 04:02:18 +0000

Yes, someone from Reference Extract is indeed listening. Ou raise some great points about the co-mingling of commercial and academic content. We are quickly evolving from the “just a search” engine world to a credibility engine that can feed a Reference Extract search engine, and be incorporated into other services, including other search services.

Anyway. Enjoyed the webcast, and are always interested in ideas.

By: Sterling Fluharty

Sterling Fluharty — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:43:13 +0000

I am glad to see an information professional respond to your podcast. The perspective of librarians is often lacking from your show. I think what would be fascinating would to be host a debate between Thomas Mann (of the LOC) and Michele Frisque (of Northwestern University).

I too am sympathetic to the outsourcing of college e-mail. But I think you are overlooking a whole lot of issues and concerns related to this topic. Consider the following questions, for instance: How will schools maintain compliance with FERPA regulations if e-mails are not stored on their servers? If somebody violates the FERPA rights of a student, do the lawyers serve the subpoena to the school or to Google/Microsoft?

I like your continuing discussion of simplified methods for learning programming. Have you checked to see if there is a literature for teaching and learning in computer science? I know that some computer science professors have designed classes for non-majors. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from their approach.

By: Virtual worlds in decline? « Picking Up Sticks

Virtual worlds in decline? « Picking Up Sticks — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:18:57 +0000

[…] according to the new Digital Campus podcast, virtual worlds haven’t had the success rate that was predicted for them either. The […]

By: Stephen Francoeur

Stephen Francoeur — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:12:16 +0000

About Reference Extract, I wanted to note that it is actually not really meant to be a search engine per se but perhaps a preliminary building block for a grander project that would allow libraries to repurpose chat reference and email reference interactions to build a knowledgebase. The conversations that librarians and patrons are having in email and chat reference systems generate recommendations for resources of all kinds (URLs, databases, books, videos, etc.). Those recommendations are context specific (they are made based on the unique information need that brought the patron to the library to ask for help). If those context-specific recommendations can be captured, stored, and shared, then libraries will have found a way to move beyond being seen as warehouses of information to places where knowledge itself is being created (we are helping create the connections between things).

As someone was lucky enough to be asked to participate in one of three recent focus groups about the feasibility of such a system, I must admit to having my own doubts about scalability. But the hope is that the extraction of sources recommended, of connections being made, can be done automatically with whatever meaning extraction tools we now have (or will have soon). I don’t think there are any plans for individual items recommended being approved one-by-one in this new system. Instead, the system would slurp them up from the email and chat interactions we already have. (There are of course real issues about privacy to be worked through, too.)

If you want to get a better sense of where this project is headed, you may want to check out this video by David Lankes, one of the two principal investigators for the project:

http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/blog/?p=615