Alex drove in from Buffalo today, to meet with me and a few colleagues about the proposal. We had a nice lunch, then found an empty room with a whiteboard and had an excellent brainstorming session.
I've transcribed the crazy whiteboard scribblings into an outline, and will post that later this week (after I've gotten it into some form of reasonable organization). Alex took pictures of the whiteboard before he left, so I'm guessing (hoping...) he'll post those here.
One thing we talked about at lunch that didn't make it onto the whiteboard was the "why RIT? why us?" aspect of the proposal. Lots of good reasons for that. One is our ability--as a "PUI," or primarily undergraduate university--to incorporate significant undergraduate and graduate student research into the project. Another is our richness of faculty research interests, ranging from database/data mining expertise to HCI to information science to virtual worlds. We've already begun integrating blogs into our curriculum--using/customizing blog environments in web design classes, writing blog software in web programming. It feels like a perfect fit--let's hope NSF agrees!
The NSF ITR grant deadline is 2/12, so we've got to get a move on. But today's meeting was very positive, with a lot of good content coming out of the brainstorming. It's amazing how much more bandwidth is available in a face-to-face meeting of five people than there is in a text-based simulation of same. That's one of the strong justifications for building workshops/seminars/colloquia into the proposal ("blogshops," as one colleague called them), so that those interested in research and tool development can meet like this more often.
Thanks, Alex!
The big version seems to have some information cut off...it only goes as far as the evangelism piece--but I see the rest in the smaller version.
Posted by: Liz on January 27, 2003 07:07 PMBy default, MT doesn't do scroll bars. It was just hiding off the right side of your screen. I went in and put in a scroll bar in case some browsers weren't rendering it.
Posted by: alex on January 27, 2003 10:00 PMBroadly, we want to:
- study the informal networks and practices that have evolved around microcontent in various milieux (with special attention to international networks);
- determine the degree to which these can be formalized, explained, and exploited;
- build the technological tools with which we can both observe and distribute information (hence "grok the milieu as Jon put it);
- generate a set of "best practices" and resources for using microcontent publishing collaboratively within research and teaching, as well as the interstices between the two;
- publicize this work through a microcontent research portal.
I think this encapsulates the more detailed approaches that ended up on the board. I was pushing hard for deliverables, since any limited experience I’ve had with funding shows that granting agencies want a clear indication of what will be produced as a result of the funding they provide. In this case it will take several forms:
- published descriptive work of current practices in using microcontent publishing for the collaborative process of innovation and research
- a repository of both tools (crawlers, parsers, automated content analysis, network analysis, visualization) and data sets to be made available to a larger research community
- a series of workshops for researchers who make use of microcontent publishing to come together and discuss their work among their peers
- a set of resources and reports to support the introduction and effective use of microcontent publishing within collaborative research and learning environments.
These are pretty much a personal summarization of the direction I think we took. I invite alternative interpretations or corrections, of course.
Posted by: alex on January 28, 2003 09:06 PMFrom a brief look at what you guys are doing, it seems like the good old "knowledge management" at work... terms like best practices, decriptives, relevancy and data mining... I wrote a simple piece on for one of my classes:
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Wednesday, October 30, 2002
posted by Kevin Lim at 5:13 PM
This evening I present my LIS507: Information Science/Services mini-conference topic on "Personal Knowledge Management: How to blog what you know". Feel free to download the paper and presentation. http://home2.pacific.net.sg/~hardwired/happy/2002_10_01_archive.htm#83791245
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