Mark Lee noted in a private message (but may be persuaded to publish in a blog) that Learning Objects (LOs) and Reputation, Attention and Trust (RAT) would be a good topic for a paper. It seems most of the literature is concerned with educational aspects of LOs such as standards and retrieval and not much on evaluation in a slashdot-like manner.
Slashdot and similar systems depend on the "wisdom of crowds"(WoC)-type evaluation. Whether there is a sufficient number of people interested in LOs with the motivation to evaluate LOs to get the WoC effect is an interesting research question. Do LOs need a high-level of evaluation or would blink evaluation with a lot of people work sufficiently well.

Ken and I wrote the 200th column for the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser liftout run on Tuesdays called "You Magazine". In it I described the job of an academic at least as I see it. The job is in six parts: research, scholarship, administration, professional development, teaching, community engagement and other activities as directed by the Vice Chancellor (or his nominee).

• Research is finding new knowledge and is the main activity of an academic. Writing grant proposals to win money for research is a significant related activity.
  
• Scholarship is learning and writing in an academic manner with the aim of being an acknowledged world leader, published regularly in high impact journals or having substantial commercial benefits already achieved from the work, a winner of awards and an invited guest/presenter at the most important discipline conferences.
• Administration is contributing to the running of the University and often consists of lots of meetings.
• Professional develop is learning about the job of an academic.
• Teaching is giving knowledge, skills and experience to students.
• Community engagement is things like contributing to public debate by writing in the newspaper or being interviewed for radio or television.

Of interest was a blog entry by an ex-Microsoftie (who now works for Google) on the design of Windows Vista Shutdown. In it he noted they have a Macintosh "that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI design". Joel Spolsky who also used to work at Microsoft on an early version of Excel details the ways that Vista can be turned off and described how all but one could be eliminated.

I was watching a presentation called Human Computation by Luis Von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University. In it he describes his invention of "Captchas" those distorted words you have to type so that scripts can't get some service such as a free email a/c. "Captcha: A program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass but current computer programs cannot pass." (CACM Crypt)

He noted that nine thousand million hours of Solitaire was played across the world in 2003. The Empire State building took seven million person hours (ie 6.8 hours of world solitaire play) and the Panama Canal took twenty million person hours (ie less than a day of world solitaire play). All right these aren't feasible because of the logistics but what if you used the internet?

A project he's been working is the ESP game. In the game, players are randomly paired and shown an image. Each player has to type a word or phrase. If there is a match they both get points and move to the next image. There's a bit more to it but apparently the game is fun and even addictive. The global purpose is to label images on the web. One million images have been labelled so far. The ESP game is a symmetric game since both players respond equally. He also has been working on asymmetric games such as peekaboom where one player shows a portion of an image the other guesses what is being shown. The words and phrases used come from the ESP game. Another game is verbosity where words and phrases and corresponding commonsense facts are matched. "Milk" is usually near cereal in a bowl. Skynet here we come.

One interesting side issue is what happens if a player's net connection goes down. Apparently the software stores images and already recorded timed responses so the player can keep going. What if the pre-recorded player was the examiner who knows the correct answers and the other player a student sitting an exam then we can evaluate the student against a standard and give them a grade.

I'm thinking of doing a PhD on "A Model for Online Collaborative Software using Reputation, Attention and Trust." If you look at successful sites such as MySpace, SlashDot, or Digg I think they depend on a model of RAT. I've been using online communications since 1979 so feel I can make a contribution. A really good roundup of Reputation and Trust can found here. Adding Attention might mean a gap and an interesting model.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
With hindsight he probably meant Google-like mega data centres of which I think there are only a few world-wide.

"640KB ought to be enough for anybody." – Bill Gates, 1981.
His company became the main cause of bloatware. If CPU instruction sets were of a high-enough order and most data-processing was done at a mega data centre your handheld device might only need 640KB or so of local cache memory.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." – Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.,1977.
No hard-to-setup and use computer system at my place please. I want to be educated and entertained and to be able to communicate richly. Give me an appliance no more complicated than a 'phone or a TV/PVR and I want one that does what I want not what I say or do.

An interesting Macintosh application is QuickSilver. I've only used it to launch applications from the Finder but after reading its Wikipedia entry I think I might try some of its other features.

I did a Google search unique presentation styles of Dick Hardt and Lawrence Lessig to look for some more stuff on their presentations and came across one small voice and the discuss of "web of trust". I knew about the web of trust but I didn't know about CAcert the open-access certification authority. I'm thinking about joining. On the about page "CAcert Inc. is a non-profit association, incorporated in New South Wales Australia."! Trust increasing!

Open-access educational content: First Stanford, then MIT, now Yale. Also interesting is "The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation". Hewlett was the H in H.P. From the foundation you can find publications such as Web 2.0 and New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning and Story Thread Analysis: Storied Lives in an Online Community of Practice

At my institution I have to fill a form if I want to even speak in public in case the institution's IP leaks.

Here's Dick Hardt's presentation on Digitial Identity in a similar style to Lawrence Lessig's presentation on Free Culture. Remember the refrain: "1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. 2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it. 3. Free societies enable the future by limiting the past. 4. Ours is less and less a free society."

Apart from the interesting style (no bullet-points) the content is important. What I got from Dick was the notion that identity==reputation. In my search for meaning in online reputation, attention and trust I thought identity had to be in there too but it looks like it is a corollary.

I've developed a lot of Power-Point style presentations over the years. Firstly with carefully drawing on overhead slides but realising how wasteful they are anxious to use computer-generated. First with Amiga using Scala then with web pages. Edward Tufte hates the traditional PP for dumbing down presentations. Here an article on the Lawerence Lessig presentation style and here's a presentation on the history of BSD called (tongue-in-check) BSD is dying (Warning some slides might be offensive to some viewers).

I'm listening to Richard Aedy talk to Patch Adams 20:59. "Every day in each of the five cities (in Australia) I'm going to I'm doing a four-hour workshop called 'What is your Love Strategy?' proposing the idea that it would be nice to have one. Think about it Richard are you ready to write a two-thousand-word essay on 'What is your Love Strategy?'" "I can't say I am." "Right and you're just like everybody else. In the years that I've been doing this no-one has ever submitted one. And would you agree that loving is the most important thing in life?" "I wouldn't argue with that at all." "And isn't it fascinating that even though all over the world everyone agrees that loving is the most important thing in life never have I been able to interview somebody that was able to tell me their strategy for doing the most important thing in life."

I'll continue working on writing my teaching philosophy summarised as "Do no harm". Perhaps I should be including my "Love Strategy".

Netcraft reports more than 100 million web sites are now on the internet. Back in April 1994 I compile the CERN web server on a University server connected to the internet and used a Mosaic browser on an Amiga 4000 to look at the contents.

In 1992 (I think) I found this networked hypertext system in the newsgroup that published source code. I compiled the client and server part and it seemed an interesting idea. Unfortunately because of disk space constraints I had to delete this toy system. The system was a step-up from Gopher where the network was really a hierarchy based back to a root page back at the University of Minnesota.

With day-light saving in the news I thought http://tf.nist.gov/general/faq.htm would produce some interest. Perhaps it would be unfair, but what if I suggested that the US-Aust FTA might mean that Australia will follow the US and extend DST just as the Copyright Act in particular the number of years before creations return to the community has been extended from 70 to 90 years. Someone said if drug companies who spend hundreds of millions developing drugs only get twenty years (patent period) to recover their money why are copyright holders so special?

I spend a lot of time reading http://slashdot.org http://digg.com http://radar.oreilly.com and other news sites and sometimes find interesting tid-bits. After some encouragement from James http://eolh.org and others I decided to record them in a blog. I thought about making this a Writely (now Google Docs and Spreadsheets) document but perhaps this makes better sense.