The video "A Vision of Students Today" created by the KSU class in "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Michael Wesch Spring 2007) quotes Marshall McLuhan (1967) "Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterises the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules."

I'm listening to to vidcast by James Rattner on the 3D Web or Internet. (IE on Windows required for full presentation). His SecondLife avatar started his presentation in but started talking seriously in person about the 2D web in 1993 where people wondered if it would go anywhere. He quoted Steve Kleinhans (VP Research Gartner) "The biggest market opportunities happen when we change the way people interact with computers". Activity in digital communities: creative quadrant, commerce quadrant, social quadrant and play quadrant. Presentation, User content, persistence (leaving tracks), social interaction, modelling (physics). Taxonomies of virtual worlds: metaverses paraverses. Prime time TV dropped by half replaced by YouTube. Animation vs Simulations using Finite-Element Modelling get realistic results. 100-fold improvement in server capacity for each user. 100x the network bandwidth required. User content is computationally expensive. He also talked about trusted identities in Cyberspace. My argument is all you need is reputation (unknown identity) or trust (known identity) not digital identity.

Interest post about how people read web pages. I'm doing this project where I have to handle several terabytes of web site data. I've thought characterising web pages by just recording the shape of the text. The article quotes research where most people web sites in an 'F' shape. It would be interesting to try and describe blogs by their shape.

Here's an interesting view of online social networks. Mark Ghuneim seems to be getting close to RAT. Appears to be reworked from the Attention Book.

If you are watching sport, football, tennis, cricket, whatever, are you projecting on to the players? With the rise of MMORPG is traditional sport doomed? I've been watching Game Revolution and speculating on the future of sport.

I laughed when I heard on the 2007-06-21 05:30 ABC RN broadcast of My Word. Denis Nordon had been asked by Jack Longland "What does the verb mean to Google". Jack used a short "Oh" as in "book" and Denis used the longer "Oh" as in "Sue" that we (post http://google.com) are all used to. I managed to get a copy of Frank Muir's 1976 book "The Frank Muir Book: An irreverent companion to social history" which is a fascinating collection of anecdotes and quotations collected as "Music", "Education", "Literature", "Theatre", "Art" and "Food and Drink". For example, "Show me the main who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore" Robert Morley. Or, "Education, n, That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary".

I've been wanting to write a paper like this for several years. It uses visualisation techniques to determine social roles in online discussions. In this case they can detect what they call "Answer People". I've been following the work of Marc Smith since I listened to a podcast Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net (2004-02-11) from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. I even bought his book (1999) Communities in Cyberspace. I think I can apply these techniques to a large collection I have.

ABC Science Show of 2007-06-02 (podcast from 25:50) Jason Mattingley "To what extent are our attentional mechanisms responsible for shaping the way we perceive the world" William James 1907 one of the founding fathers of experimental psychology he said "Everyone knows what attention is. It the taking by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought focalisation concentration of consciousness are of its essence implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others".

I finished reading the Attention Economy and Free Culture. I heard a reference to Simone Weil and how she encapsulates the mystical experience for Fr. Laurence Freeman, head of the World Community for Christian Meditation. What was important to me was the quote from 2007-05-06 Spiritual Classics podcast 43:00 "Since that time I have made a practice of saying once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or go es to sleep in the minutest degree I begin again until I have once succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention."

Google for Educators
Infinite Thinking Blog
Top universities in the United States are only in session for 26-28 weeks. The rest of the time their academics can do research and even have some time off. I have teaching commitments continuously from the third week in February to the second week in December. That's about forty weeks. Also having distance materials to update and course co-ordination for another four weeks.

Reputation and Prestige.
I always think of Prestidigitator.
While accrediting agencies and regulators will increasingly insist on measuring performance outcomes, Allen says it is incumbent upon higher education institutions to monitor those outcomes to determine the learning rates of their students. "In earlier times, when selectivity was emphasized, the assumption was that if only the few best qualified students were admitted, and if those students put in the required seat time and were exposed to the right faculty, then learning would take place. Higher education in America was built on that premise for the most part. But high access institutions today can no longer afford to make that assumption without measurement, if they want to be quality institutions."
Time on Task

I listened to the IT Conversations podcast from PopTech 2005 by Nassim Taleb on the Scandal of Prediction. His idea is that most people have a much too optimistic belief in what they think is going to happen in the future. Taleb compared published predicitions make by people in various professions against the actual outcome to determine the forecasting abilities of these professionals. Security analysts came out pretty bad. He has two Australian references. I didn't know black swans only occur in Australia but probably knew that building the Sydney Opera House was originally budgeted at costing $7M and ended up costing $117M and was ten years late.
"that the American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows to capture the randomness of the environment" from The Birth of Stochastic Science. I think I agree that any attempt to organise the future based on past behaviour will fail because of an unpredictable major disjoint event so stop worrying.

DBpedia is a structured query site for Wikipedia based on the query language SPARQL.

I've finished my presentation on RAT and now a few people are interested. I've also started looking further and started reading The Attention Economy. I've also found Karen Stephenson's talk where she mentions her site with lots of material. I'm also listening to Susan Blackmore talking about memes. This is her site.
I've been looking for social networking tools and one of those is Many Eyes which has some interesting visualisations of WoW.

The article on Denton's book about

"One of the least attractive manifestations of territoriality nowadays is the rise of managerialism, where success is measured by more power, control and territory. Increased efficiency is not always the result," Denton says.

"This is what we see in the depersonalisation of institutions and a loss of ethos in corporations. Of course, some managers have insight and avoid the effects, while others are driven by a basic instinct from a fairly primitive part of the brain."

(The mind game)

Normally I wouldn't watch any sport competition but I got sucked into the Australian Open. It was mesmerising to watch. I remember the Jetsons cartoon where the future Homer Simpson would exercise by just watching TV. Perhaps I'll be able to exercise my brain by watching TV.

Would a blog entry be a good way of making a To Do list? What is important for a To Do list? You need an item but in my game the due date for many items can extend. It just remains like a thorn in ones side until it is unimportant or must be finished yesterday.

Attention. Would you be interested in the amount of attention I'm paying to your problem? I might have had blink training. Or I might be procrastinating because I'm unsure. I often tell students to only ask one question per email message to which I can give a quick answer. If several deeper questions are posed the answer can take a lot longer. How public do I want to make the attention I spend on your issue? I'm sure it is a factor of reputation, attention and trust. It just needs the research :-)

Enrollments in Computer Science and Information Technology at most universities are down. You need to start interest in these areas back in high school and even primary school. Here's Tim Bell giving a talk about how to interest these groups. More information at Computer Science Unplugged.