Sue-Point-Oh!

So Twitter was all the rage at South by Southwest this year. I am not deep enough into the scene to know how to properly abbreviate “South by Southwest” or to have so many twitter messages that I need to constantly empty my inbox. I’m still not sold on why I would want to let all my friends know if I flossed or not this morning however I do recognize it’s utility when trying to navigate a Saturday night in the city trying to hit up various parties and social groups.

I think Dana did a good job in explaining how tech geeks and non-tech geeks adopt social software.

By the way, this is the first time I have ever used the Trackback function. Heard from Mr. EduBlog Brian Lamb that it fails 10% of the time anyways.

I just discovered a new Wikipedia program that allows new wiki users to be adopted by more experienced users. I think it’s sort of like a Big Brothers/Big Sisters/Mentorship program. Innocent new wikipedia members can put the {{Adoptme}} code onto their userpage and within 24 hours their wiki big brother or sister will offer to adopt them. I plan to go undercover as a novice user to see who will adopt me. I’ll report back with my findings!
The following adoption rules apply:

Adoption is:

• A mentorship, where the Adopter answers questions and offers friendly advice and support.
• For help with technical difficulties, policy interpretation and conflict management.

Adoption is not:

• Forever. Once experienced, an Adoptee will be able to graduate, though likely to stay in touch with their Adopter.
• A social club. Though fun, Adoption is there to help users use and improve Wikipedia.
• Just for the newest of users. Is also for users with limited experience who want to expand their involvement.

I am curious about what type of people are taking advantage of this program. I’m always telling people that wikipedia is successful because there are such a large number of devoted caring users who make the site a valid encyclopedia. Perhaps these are the same users who offer to adopt new users. Hooray to Wikipedia for once again trying to offer a totally level playing field where accurate information is king and collaboration is queen.

Last night I rang in the season premier of “24″ with a group of friends. We celebrated the occasion by playing a drinking game which consisted of drinking beer for certain key events.

For example -

• Drink one for a “split screen”
• Drink two when someone questions authority
• Drink three when CTU goes in lockdown.

My favorite rule was “finish your beer when Jack plays judge, jury and executioner.”

After browsing the net I realize that our clever drinking game does not live in a bubble. Here are some links to some other great “24″ drinking games. Hope this keeps your Mondays spicy!

24 Drinking Game

24 Drinking Game from Pedro Vera’s Blog

24 Drinking Game from the Chicago Tribune

Maybe I’ve just been watching too much “24″ or spending too much time on my wiki research project but I found this article from the NY Time’s Magazine about the CIA’s use of wikis and blogs for intelligence gathering fascinating! How does a wiki help fight terrorism? Blogs and wikis can help intelligence agents “connect the dogs” of information and intelligence…these were the dots that failed to connect post 9/11. The idea is that agents will use blogs to record the intellgence they receive. The entries will be tagged and linked to other agents blogs. Google like search analyatics can be used to see which tags and intelligence pieces are the most popular and possibly the most relevant. This also will help pass information between the CIA, FBI and other agencies instead of each agency duplicating efforts.

One of the wiki projects involves the Intellipedia, a Wikipedia replica with intelligence articles written and edited by agents. There is less of a fear of the data being corrupt or false since the identities or the contributors are known.

Shockingly, this new Intelligence 2.0 tools are being eagerly embraced by the younger agent who are more comfortable with technology. The more seasoned agents are more resistant because it involves learning new technology that they don’t necessarily trust. These are also the agents that will be retiring soon and using blogs and wikis to capture their historical knowledge would be a very good thing.

Wikipedia has a section dedicated to the topic of schools and universities using Wikipedia for educational purposes. Here are some of their suggested exercises:

Suggested exercises

• Try having students start at an existing or requested article:
  • Wikipedia:Requested articles
  • Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs
  • Wikipedia:Most wanted articles
  • Special:Shortpages
  • Special:Randompage
  • Wikipedia:Requests for expansion
  • Template:Opentask
• Tell students to take existing orphaned articles and link them into appropriate places:
  • Wikipedia:Orphaned articles
• Tell students to fix spelling, factual, grammatical, and other errors.
  • Wikipedia:Cleanup
  • Wikipedia:Pages needing attention
  • Wikipedia:Peer review
• Have students translate articles into English from another language.
  • Wikipedia:Translation into English. As of February 2005 we have an enormous backlog of requested translations from German.
• Students could translate our featured articles into other languages or write their own.
  • Complete list of language Wikipedias available
• Have students contribute to a subject-matter area that has generally been neglected.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias
• Students could work on the collaboration of the week.
• Students could help with the projects at one of the Wikiportals (pages organizing projects on a broad subject area)
• Students could add citations to existing pages, thus helping to improve the credibility of Wikipedia while they learn the significance of citing sources. (Wikipedia:Citing sources and Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards.)

When I first brough my little iPod shuffle to the gym I thought it was the best thing to happen to working out since the oversized plastic abdominal exercise balls. However, all that has changed since I started downloading “Mash-Ups” to my iPod and listening to them while I run on the once onerous treadmill. “Mash-Ups” are songs that are created when a DJ mixes two song togethers like Jay Z’s “99 Problems” and the Beatle’s “Helter Skelter”. The songs are high energy and the constant variation between beats and lyrics helps get my workout energy and enthusiasm high.

Here are some of my favorite Mash Up DJs:

Party Ben

DJ Adrian - Hosts a monthly mash-up bootleg party!

There are also a couple mash-up podcasts that can be downloaded for free through the iTurnes Podcast Directory. These are just getting started so there aren’t that many episodes and they come out infrequently but they are still great:

Mashup.Podcast

Hope you have as much fun with these as I do!

I was noticing my mail friends check their gmail the other day and I saw that my male friends seemed to click on the subject heading of the email to open it while the females clicked on the name of the sender to open the mail. Could this be due to the fact that women are more people/relationship oriented while men are more fact/object oriented? Perhpas it’s time for Dr. John Gray to come up with a “Men are from Mars, Women are Venus, 2.0″ book.

Facebook just came up with a new features that allows you to create a customized “badge” to be inserted into a website or blog. This is similar to the FlickR badge and allows people to quickly access your facebook profile.

Here is my badge:

Today some of my predictions regarding the future of Facebook are reported in article by Corilyn Shropshire in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. As a I said in the article, I predict that people will start migrating from My Space to Facebook because it is so much easier to use and offers more seamless web 2.0 features like rss feeds and photo albums with privacy settings that today’s web users have to come to expect. I just hope the My Space people don’t sabotage my profile by inserting that my favorite movies is “Suburban Commando” or something like that. No offense Hulk!

Thank you to CSU Chico for developing a wonderful rubric to evaluate the effectiveiness of online instruction.  The rubric rates instructional websites on six different categories:

• Learner Support and Resources
• Instructional Design and Delivery
• Organization and Design
• Assessment and Evaluation of Student Learning
• Innovative Teaching with Technology
• Faculty Use of Student Feedback

I think these are very appropriate and easily digestible categories.  The use of a rubric helps bring a quantifable measurement to a qualitative tool like an online course.

 Here is the rubric.