Partners in Health is going live with an HIV website that “allows visitors to share insights about the manual and experiences in the field, to ask questions of each other, to answer others’ concerns, and to foster a community of care.” The editor-in-chief, Joia Mukerhjee, says: “This on-line manual is distinctly a work in progress. We intend to keep it that way. ”

Excellent.

(Needless disclosure: My cousin-in-law is an engineer on this project.) [Tags: science health_care publishing knowledge science everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Harvard University Libraries held a workshop on social tagging and other such technologies last week. I blogged it here. Now the videos are up. Part I Part II. (I spoke in part I.) [Tags: tagging libraries folksonomy taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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I’m at [well, I was yesterday when I wrote this] a session at Harvard’s Lamoint Library (one of the 90+ libraries here) about Web 2.0 and social tagging. I just gave a 20 minute opener on why tagging matters.

Michael Hemment, the host, begins by showing tag clouds from 50 students who were asked to tag some particular resources. The group quickly guesses that the first tag cloud refers to the libraries, the next is Google, and the next is Jon Stewart. Very amusing,

Michael talks about why slocial tagging matters to libraries. He mentions some initiatives, including PennTags , Stanford IC, and the Steve Museum. Harvard has the CRT (Collaborative Research Tool) and EdTags initiatives. He also mentions iCommons (exploring iSites metadata and tagging) and ARTStor .

He takes a closer look at LibraryThing.com, showing how easy it is to enter titles, organize them, tag them, and get suggestions.

PennTags was created by the U Penn library to enable university members to tag books. (The site is open to anyone, but only U Penn members can add tags.) It begins with a tag cloud of tags used at least 58 times, Users can also create folders to organize bookmarks into projects. [I blogged about it here.]

The Stanford Library Information Center combines tags, blogs and wikis. It includes tagging by librarians who organize resources in a somewhat more orderly way.

Harvard could, Michael says, enable tagging of the libraries’ resources, and the Lib-X tool (a browser add-in that gives you access to Harvard’s onloine resources) could be used to tag sites, adding to what Harvard knows.

Carla Lillvik, Research and Distance Services Librarian at the Gutman Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, looks at “social tagging and bibliographic management.” She says you want not only to find resources and organize them, but also to cite them.

She uses as her example the site Five Weeks to a Social Library. She adds it to her page at Connotea and tags it. She could also post it to EdTags.org. But what about resources she finds in research databases, e.g. EBSCO Host? She could add it to Connotea, even though the URL doesn’t look persistent. But Connotea doesn’t pick up any of the bibliographic info from the database. (Connotea has agreements with a long list of such systems, including BioMed Central, PLoS, Nature.com, and arXiv.org, but not with all of them.) She can instead make a folder in EBSCO, which does indeed pick up all the info. [Sounds like we need a standard API for university e-research systems.] Harvard’s RefWorks has the advantage, Carla says, of enabling batch tagging [LibraryThing does too] and enables output in a variety of bibliographic styles [yay!] RefWorks folders can be shared, even with people who don’t have an account; they can be shared as an RSS feed, too. (RefWorks works with Google Scholar — you can set a preference so that results can be imported into RefWorks.)

Michael Hemment presents Prof. Dan Smail’s Collaborative Research Tool (CRT), a social tagging tool that works within Harvard’s e-environment. In Smail’s course on Medieval Europe (History 1122) , students are put onto teams (e.g., “France, Germany and italy”) and are assigned sources. They create virtual note cards that are tagged, annotated and entered nto a database. Class discussions, lectures, and final papers are based on these cards.

The cards tend to include the passage, comment, related links, and tags. It’s easy to navigate by tag.

Pedagogical implications, according to Michael: Students have to reflect on their tagging schemes. [meta learning] They cards “form the basis of complex intertextual discourse on a broad range of medieval topics.” E.g., you could see how Ulysses appears through multiple literatures. Also, tagging develops a personal relationship to the source material.

[Excellent. But we still need a way to write a document based on cards, so that adding info from the card automatically creates the right footnote and bibliographic entry in the document, and notes where the card has been used. I blogged about this here.]

Adam Seldow, a grad student at the Harvard School of Education, works on EDTags.org. It’s a social network to connect people who share interests in education. It’s open to anyone. You can tag a site, vote on bookmarks, email them, blog them, or find related blog postings. You can upload your papers, photos, presentations, etc.

Q: How does tagging fit with scholarly resource? Is there a way to cite where and how a resource is tagged?
A: (Michael) Not in the major tagging sites, e.g., del.icio.us. The lack of rules has been one of the advantages of these sites.The noise introduced can often be negated at least in part by the good rising to the top.

Q: How about privacy?
A: (Adam) EdTags lets you set the level of privacy. And it’s an actively managed site.

Q: What types of resources does EdTags tag?
A: (Adam) Mainly “gray literature” — blog posts, preprints, Web sites, course-generated papers.

Q: (me) What do we do about the fragmentation of the tagging space? I can tag in del.icio.us, Connotea, EdTags…
A: (Adam) A condition when we built EdTags was that it has to be able to talk wth del.icio.us or export to an XML file. Personally, I use different tagging sites for different types of research.

Q: What are the patterns of use at EdTags?
A: EdTags has been live for a little over a year. (It started as TeacherShare.) First year doctoral students, who were trained on it, use it. It’s being used in some specific courses and teacher education programs, plus a community of faculty members interested in emerging trends in education technology. The person who uploads the most bookmarks is a woman from Slovenia. There are about 400 users. About 100,000 hits/month.

Q: Did you build it from scratch?
A: It’s a mashup of Scuttle, an open source platform, with lots of custom work.

Q: HW and SW behind it? How did you finance it?
A: (Adam) A Harvard Provost Innovation Grant financed it.

Q: How to encourage the use of social tagging at a library?
A: (Michael) I don’t know that we want to encourage it. We’re exploring. [Tags: libraries tagging social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy]

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Chris RageBoy Locke — whom, btw, has posted a knockout portfolio of his Web design work — points out in an email that pages Google translates automatically now let any reader suggest a better translation. So, if you go about a third of the way down this page and look for the first book cover, you’ll see a work by Alan De Benoist, titled “On Being a Floyd.” Hover over the title and you’ll see “On Being a Pagan” in a popup, with a button for you to suggest your own alternative translation. RageBoy is the one who suggested “On Being a Pagan.” Chris refers to Google’s approach as “wide area knowledge acquisition.”

If evil-ass spammers start translating Rilke’s poetry into Viagra ads, then Google will have to come up with some social way of monitoring the reader-contributed translations. But this is another instance of the 1% rule: A tiny percentage of people can make the world better for all the rest. And it’s pretty darn cool. [Tags: ragrboy translation google everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Michael Hemment’s new blog, Research Forward, looks at the latest in how researchers are researching and sharing research. It’s chockablock with good stuff.

For example, there’s a post about a Harvard course using social tagging to build info about the Middle Ages, a consideration of the future of tag clouds, and Chinese political history as revealed by mapping data. See, I told you it was good stuff! [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tags education research michael_hemment ]

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John Mayer, the Exec Dir of the Center for computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk called “Subclassing the Commons.” CALI is 25 yrs old, incorporated by Harvard and the U of Minnesota Law Schools. 204 US law schools and 23 international law schools are members. So are more than 100,000 law students. CALI makes lessons available on line. This year, there will probably be a million lessons run. [John Palfrey has blogged the session here.]

He points out that there are sites that aggregate material put into the commons via Creative Commons licenses. But there’s not a lot there for law students. The commons by itself isn’t granular enough for communities of users, he says. People post on their blogs, “I’ve posted a paper at SSRN and would appreciate any comments,” or “I’m working on a project and was wondering if anyone else had,” or “Where can I find…?” John says, “If we aggregated all answers to those question across all institutions, would that be a commons, and would it have amazing value?”

“We’re best known for our lessons,” he says. He shows a flow chart of a question. Law professors throw out a question, he says, knowing the ways the students will get it wrong. If one gets it right, the prof branches differently. It’s a “pruned tree.” CALI’s authors write questions as a tree. There are about 600 lessons. Their model is to get 5 profs to write 5 lessons (25 mins each) over 8 months; the profs are paid.

He describes another project: Classcaster , a blog network using open source software. It’s built on top of PBX software (!). “With classcaster, you can make a phone call, you can leave an hour message. Then it instantly podcasts it.” But it was expensive paying for the phone call and the recording quality is crappy. Instead, they gave authors $1000 and a free digital recorder. There are now 60 faculty members doing podcasts that way. They’re available for free as part of the commons. As a result, “students started to tell us that they have this crappy evidence teacher so instead they listen to this other evidence teacher’s podcast.” And faculty noticed in listening to themselves that they’re skipping over some things, so it’s helped them improve. Other faculty learned teaching techniques by listening to others. On the other hand, in some courses (e.g., family law) it can suppress class participation.

Lessons are tagged according to a “topic grid,” based on how faculty describe their lessons, the “elevator pitch” of what a course is. CALI took a first cut at the taxonomy by looking at syllabi and then letting faculty refine it. They’re now going back and tagging the podcasts.

Another project is Access to Justice. CALI designed an interface that asks one question at a time (audibly asks) to help people find the right legal forms. It uses avatars because otherwise you get hung up on providing avatars of every race and gender, in a wheelchair or not, etc. Instead, it provides a non-racial — “blank” — male or female avatar. [Looks pretty white to me.] It shows the avatar on a path to a hall of justice. There are people in eight states working on the navigators for all the forms, but they reuse one another’s work because the forms are generally 90% the same in the states. One of the federal courts is interested in doing it and sharing it with the rest of the fed courts. (It’s all XML data and is written in Flash.)

ScholarshipPulse is in alpha. On the left it shows a paper. On the right is a comment system. It distinguishes comments as peers, professors or students. They’re experimenting with having the font size reflect one’s standing in the system. “I know we’re playing in ego space here.” But, John says, why not let people comment on their own blogs? Press a button and it’ll take a capture of the paper and your comment, and post it straight into your blog.

eLangdell.org (named after Langdell Hall at Harvard Law, or maybe after whoever Langdell Hall was named after, which I’m guessing is someone named Langdell) pools syllabi, cases, podcasts, etc. so you can dynamically create case books and other course materials. You can print out your own materials via lulu.com AALS, CLEA and Counseling Central do something similar, he says.

Q: Are you doing anything to help people who are not in law school?
A: At CALI’s LearnTheLaw.org lets you pay for access to the CALI lessons. [It’s $50/yr.]

Q: What’s your business model?
A: 200 schools pay us $5K year. For that they get everything we produce, but I’m trying to give away as much as possible. Not the lessons. If gave them away, the law schools would stop paying us. Everything else, just about, is open and free.

Q: (Charlie Nesson) MIT’s open courseware opens up syllabi. They’ve just started videoing classes — 21 of them. They’ve raised the question for us about whether there’s an opportunity for Harvard Law to step into the video YouTube space, recognizing the Law School’s mission as offering a legal education — not necessarily for credit — to the world. You’ve been at this for a long time Somehow there’s a relationship between the profit and non-profit. Suppose a company came to you…
A: We don’t need profit but we do need sustainability. The case book market is about $90M. Suppose you came in with uber casebooks that you could mix and match. We’d pay faculty to write those. That would put pressure on faculty to use the free PDF (or $18 lulu version) case book. A $90M market would become a $20M. That’s what eLangdell is.

There are hard problems doing this, he says. One is metadata. “People just drop stuff in.” They’re going to have to make the contributors do it. “Maybe we can hire students,” but for now they have to make it easy. In addition to the taxonomy, they’ll allow tags. Charlie points out that tagging might be the fastest way to get it done and usable. I mention freebase as a model for mixing a starter-set taxonomy, a mechanical Turk approach, and a wiki for metadata schema. John says that with a critical mass, it’ll get done.

Q: (Gene Koo) Charlie, you have a paper-based text book. Would you switch?
A: (Charlie) I’d love to. Unfortunately, my publisher owns the copyright.

A: It’s a Clayton Christensen innovator’s dilemma. We’ll pick off the low-hanging fruit. And, maybe retiring professors will donate their teaching materials into the commons as part of their “legacy.” [Tags: cali berkman everything_is_miscellaneous law education teaching commons creative_commons]

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Yesterday morning I visited the world headquarters of Virtual Ubiquity ‐ yes, it’s a name that brilliantly combines unpronounceability with instant forgetability ‐ an 8-person start-up that includes a few folks I worked with many years ago at Interleaf. Virtub has picked up some of the best of the best.

They’re building an online word processor that was one of the three apps shown at the Adobe conference in October that featured Apollo, the Adobe tech that integrates Flash, PDF and HTML in a single client. The VirTub product is like Writely (bought by Google) in that it runs in a browser and stores your docs on its server, but Virtub’s is a slick wysiwyg word processor while Writely (which I’ve been using and finding handy) is more like a textbox enhanced with plugins. (“Virtual Ubiquity” is the company’s name, not the product’s.)

“We wanted to build a word processor that lives on the Web, and not wrap some word processing commands around a text editor,” says founder Rick Treitman. It’s written in Flex to run on the Flash 9 player because no other cross-platform solution let them get past a non-wysiwyg editor. “We wanted full page fidelity. We wanted to be able to manipulate graphics as well as you can on a desktop app. We wanted a word processor that doesn’t make you compromise on the Web.” Rick shows off the fact that the alpha does line and page breaks in real time, bringing back memories of 1986 when that was news. Of course, then Interleaf was doing wysiwyg, realtime, text and graphics pagination on tricked out Sun workstations with complex client software.

Virtub’s word processor lets you work on a page that looks exactly like a printed page. It does not have anywhere near Microsoft Word’s 1,500 features. But it does have a cool UI “pleat”: buttons in the header that slide a ribbon of controls in. Rick shows off numbered lists (a perpetually broken feature in Word) including a “skip-the-numbering button that lets you add a second paragraph to a list item.” It gives a good level of control over list formatting, but not enough automation to enable outlining. Rick says that they recognize the importance of outlining, and because it’s an online app, they can add features at any point.

There’s drag-and-drop insert and sizing of graphics, with controls for relative placement.

Tables resize by dragging. You can add and delete columns and rows by clicking on little icons in the table itself, rather than going up to a menu. No background colors for tables at first ship, probably.

They’re experimenting with the UI for comments. The comments in this build show up as sticky notes on the side, color coded and keyed to colored text. Select one and everything but it and the relevant text are darkened.(This may change, Rick says.) Comments can hold anything a document can, including graphics and tables. You can drag from comments into the body of the document. They’re adding view-by-user, but maybe not for first ship. They keep document versions and histories “so you can crank back to an earlier version.”

The documents are “trickled” up to the server as you edit it. You’ll also have the option to save locally. The software is itself saved locally, transparently to the user. When Adobe’s Apollo ships, you’ll be able to work offline.

So, who is it for? “Our goal is to be term-paper ready when it comes out,” Rick says. The student market is big in VU’s mind, particularly post-secondary. “Kids access the Web from multiple machines.” And he says that many of their documents are collaborative, if only because they give them to teachers who return them marked. (It will have end notes in its first ship. And they’re looking into “cool ways” of doing online citations.) “We’re looking not to go after the enterprise straight away because it would mean going up against Microsoft.” The secondary market, says Rick, consists of small office, home office, retirees, volunteer groups, and others not working in enterprises.

They feel they’re competing against Google Docs, ThinkFree Office, and Word.In addition, there’s a rumor that Microsoft is doing a virtual version of Works, its defeatured Office product.

It’s going to be free on the Web, supported by advertising as well as possibly search. The ads will be “subtle, under the control of the user.” Not popups. For schools the ads can be turned off. And, no, it won’t be inserting ads into the footer of your documents.

“We’re very aware that playing nice with blogs and wikis is very important,” says Rick. It imports and exports HTML, but it’s very much modeled on word processors, not on wikis that let you build multi-page, linked sites. (I think if they added the ability to create pages just by linking to them — in the wiki fashion — and named the resulting inter-linked pages as a web site,it would change the way we think about the product, as well as giving them a feature that differentiates them from Word and its ilk.)

There also isn’t much there to enable a group to build and manage a document. They don’t know if v1.0 will support groups of users. Likewise, they’re aiming at being able to associate documents (e.g., these are 30 responses to a homework assignment, these are the 5 chapters of a book), and expect/hope to have it in release 1.0, but probably not in the first public beta, which they expect to be available in 3-4 months.

It’s a slick implementation. It doesn’t have thefull functionality people expect from a word processor, but for most uses, it’s got more than what people need. With some more collaborative tools, it could make it as a way for a group to work together on a document without feeling like they’ve been thrown into the geeky world of angle brackets and trying to remember how many equal signs create a level 2 heading.

(Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisors of Socialtext, a company that might be misconstrued as competing with Virtual Ubiquity.)

They’re looking for a marketing person who can help move this through everything-but-the-enterprise. If you’re interested, send a msg to rick virtub.com. They also need a name for the product. [Tags: virtual_ubiquity word_processors wysiwyg web2.0 tools products ]

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MetaGlossary is a definition aggregator that scrapes online glossaries and other sources. It’s got about 2,000,000 English words and phrases, and is particular useful when the words are new or you’re looking for a phrase. (Try “truthiness,” “alternative fuels“, “mission accomplished,” or “miserable failure.”)

Until today it’s been algorithmically driven. The new version of the beta lets anyone suggest a new or improved definition. You can also give a thumbs up or down to an existing definition.

It’s a good start. It’ll be fascinating to see what other social structures emerge. E.g., do we need to be able to edit existing definitions? A way to indicate that two definitions are good but need to be forked? More of a reputation system? It’ll be fun to watch this site… [Tags: metaglossary wikis dictionaries web2.0 everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Jessamyn reports on the Jackson County Library Information blog, where you can read about the indefinite closing of all fifteen branches of this Oregon county’s library system. The reasons are complex, but it comes down to the need to cut lots of services as the county reduces its budget by $23 milllion. Libraries are apparently a “nice to have,” not a “must have,” in Jackson County. (It doesn’t help that a previous ballot measure removed the special levy for libraries.) [Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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From a column by Alan M. Collinge in the Denver Post:

When Congress amended the Higher Education Act 10 years ago, defaulted student loans became the easiest and most lucrative debt to issue and collect. The amendments imposed huge fees on defaulted student loans and took away bankruptcy protection for student borrowers. It banned refinancing of many student loans, and also allowed draconian collection measures to be taken against student borrowers, including wage garnishment, tax garnishment, withholding of professional certifications, termination from employment, and even Social Security garnishment.

Yikes. I hadn’t realized it was that bad. And if it’s true, it makes all the more disappointing the Democrats weasling out of their pledge to fix the mess. The Democrats have scheduled a vote to cut the rates on some students loans in half (yay), but only on needs-based loans, and—despite their campaign promises—the Dems are not reducing rates for parents who get loans to help them pay for their children’s education.

Of course, the Democrats are still doing way better than the Republicans, who in the previous session of Congress cut $12 billion from student loans. (Info comes from the AP.) [Tags: student_loans education democrats politcs]

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