Alan, Wayne, All, Just making few notes on this thread as the findability problem is starting to come to the forground in places like DANTE and GEANT, primarily as theeir Media/PR guys are looking at using video as opposed to just wen pages, and a related group is talking how they use 'real time' tools like video conferencing, streaming and building communities around the places where people can be included in a project.
So far the web has been driven (mainly) by the (asynchonous) production of content. When you talk about this from a "real time" perspective the speed of the network is far more critical, and the talk is about 'capturing' content rather than 'producing' it (now). My interest has always been the equivilent online production tools like wikis, but as an AV engineer, the tools are more like running an online production studio/TV station. To cut a long story short, the discussions here are looking at the NREN wen sites in each country and figuring out how to classify the "user communities. The temininolgy come from this page. http://www.geant.net/pages/home.aspx (click on the "users" tab). It'll give you an example of some of the communities that GEANT support. Click on almost any NREN or continental wide site like internet2, and you'll find the same kind of link. All of them point to the few communities they know about, in their own state, region or continent. The point here is that it's almost always the "same" global community. Ultimately, if we lived in an ideal world of fat pipes which contained all the toys (tools) we wanted, the thing WE are trying to do is aggregate knowledge and share it with a group of global peers, and then, if we are OER'ers, share it with people who have an interest in what 'our' peer group might know, and can understand the tools we use to expose it. So the main thig we are sorly in need of is a directory, shared by our NREN's which can point to 'our' communties' online domains. Seems like a big try, no? OK, so the techs and their media people in Europe are beginning to consider that its the "communities" which are important, not the size of their pipes or the ability to syndicate content in each NREN or project web site. So we're about to start talking to a pan Euro group of National Librarians who are responsible for aggregating more content than WE could produce in 10 years. If I'm reading this blank page right, they are having the same questions as to their next steps. http://www.europeana.eu/portal/communities.html?page=view# It's the thing about "findability". So far all the discussions in the academic and research worlds have been about the creation of content = resources. Now WE drown in so much we can hardly find what we might want when we want it. (unless you're in Africa of course). So, I'm arguing, we need to get over this idea that more is better, my tool is better than yours, and let social behaviour let people decide what community is best for them. But regardles of where they come from, a person can never find anything, or anyone, unless their institutions share the same directory. We'll see how this arguement goes from a pan european discussion, first. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
