Europeana, the European digital library, museum and archive put its first prototype online last week.  After 2 years of building, the database comprises some 2 million digital objects and an intended 6 million by 2010, the database includes film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers sourced from already digitised content in European museum collections. As an open access database and cultural and historical resource, it is certainly an impressive project. But perhaps even more impressive is the fact that the site went offline after less than a fortnight due to the unexpected flood of traffic – an average of 10 million hits an hour which put the server into meltdown. The site is down until next month pending the construction of a more robust system that can cope with this unexpected demand. It certainly appears the demand for online cultural heritage archives is not to be underestimated.

Ive been recently looking at some of the bigger institution-wide WordPress and RSS sites, and looking at ways that WordPress installs may or may not be integrated into other LMS / CMS systems. One seemingly small but significant thing I’m coming to appreciate is the utility of simple overviews when it comes to a ‘blog central’ kind of aggregation page. Maybe I’m just a sucker for sitemaps and other kinds of simplistic visualisations of information architectures that are formed from distributed complex and dynamic data networks, but I think there is something to be said for them. In terms of building research and learning communities and sharing information for the current UNSW project, I think the more accessible the information about various RSS sources, authors, topics etc the better. Not only that, but clear representations of a potentially chaotic MU site architecture might go some way towards convincing certain ‘stakeholders’.

MIT’s Open Course Ware has central RSS feed page – simple and effective, although it must be said that its not aggregating WordPress MU based research blogs. The page lists the topics, departments, courses etc as a list of RSS feeds, and encourages poking around and exploring instead of immediately being drawn into a “recently updated” vortex. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard has something in between, a slightly clearer central blog aggregation page, but still no clear overview. (One interesting example more generally is the Digital Natives course bring together a WordPress blog, a course Wiki, a whole bunch of RSS and Web 2.0 widgets for Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube etc as well as an add for a book of the same name all from the course font page.)

UMW’s central aggregation page looks exactly like any other WordPress blog. From a design perspective this seems to be a bit of problem here in that there is little to differentiate the aggregation blog from the individual blogs that are feeding it, visually or otherwise. Given the apparent level of activity within the UMW community, a clearer, dare I say it more ‘structured’ overview might give a new user a better sense of the scope of the research community. There seems to be a resulting proliferation of aggregate feeds like “New Blogs” “Active Blogs” “Sitewide Updates” “Blog News” and every other imaginable configuration, and yet no simple overview of individual blogs or departments etc? Or at least if it exists, i couldnt easily find it from the front page. Could this be a symptom of WordPress MU or it might it be an intentional choice?

Succint post by L. L. Wynn about the need to keep learning objects open access. The basic point is that people won’t share their time and skills with you if you don’t. It probably should be noted that Macquarie has a particularly over-protective policy when it comes to protecting IP in learning contexts.

This is a good slide set by Ardessie summing up the semantic web. Not only does it begin to tell us things about that and journalism, but it helps understand the potential role of metadata and so on in education. This is part 3. There are also parts one and two.

Nice post at Weblogg-ed about why changes to media education are important in relation to the decline of heritage journalism. It links through to the NY Times article involved. And there are some useful comments.

Just some quick links ..

from Clioweb – designing the front-end … part of a series of useful tutorials

the Rip Mix Learners projects from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa …

the use of an exhibition plug-in in WP …. for a course titled Arte 3007 …

a very nifty new RSS plug-in for WP – again from Bavatuesdays

This science news, which of course might be taken with a grain of salt, does make some sense. It suggests that people “perform” better, and more creatively, when using pencils and paper than using computers. The problem is too much “user guidance” … and it seems to me that edtech has to face the problem of design carefully here. When do you need transparent technology, and when do you need to provide the computer/software equivalent of a pen and pencil? This is probably too easy to overlook in some complex technical assemblage which nevertheless guides the user through every part of the process. And of course we are somewhat hamstrung by a whole education-theory edifice that worships pre-determined outcomes, smooth processes etc. Maybe the reason we so passively accept all this bunk comes down to cats .. and I should say, I like cats a lot … on the other hand you don’t see dogs giving us toxic brain parasites .

A somewhat rambling route – looking for references to Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life – took me to some interested work done by Diane Zorn on the imposter phenonemon in educational contexts (she’s more or less an enactivist with Foucauldian leanings and also an expert in distance ed). She’s also written articles with Megan Boler, who has written great books on emotion and politics, as well as another on new media and activism. Her lecture online slowly and quietly builds a pretty radical case for reconceiving university education in a political/emotional setting. It’s based on the soundfoundry approach though so you might need to download a plug-in. Edutechie gives a nice summary of some of Zorn’s main points. Zorn also writes about “Reciprocally Adaptive Learning Environments”.

I quite liked the example described over here at Explorations in the ed tech world – not really for its specifics (although I love that the example in Paedeatric Dentistry!) but as the basis for modelling a system that facilitated these interactions in a fluid and intuitive way. This is more about distributed learning systems- rather than open-ed specifically……