i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 Here's my bootleg recording of bob's 202 review. its a little quiet, and missing the first 20 minutes, but that was the limitation of the tape recorder I was wearing. Happy Studies!

BobsReview.mp3

A friend and colleague of mine, Andrew Rens, who led the efforts against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard in South Africa has a lovely piece on his blog about how the fight went down. It was quite a victory at the time!

It's well known that Eskimos have many different words for snow but the English language also has at least 22 words to describe snow (i.e. sleet, hail, etc). Aside from meteorologists, how easy is it for the average person to define what makes sleet different than hail? I think this exemplifies The Vocabulary Problem.

http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/eskimo.html

When it's a boneless wing — otherwise known as a little chunk of chicken breast pretending to be a wing. In a weird reversal of the typical chicken market, wholesale chicken wing prices are above breast prices these days, so some restaurants that don't want to scrap their wing dishes altogether are faking it with "boneless wings" . . . which aren't actually wings at all.

For those of us new to XML and want some instant(ish) gratification after learning the basic syntax.  The iGoogle Themes API is here.  Dynamic themes can change throughout the day to present a 'story line'.  You still have to make the images e.g. w/Illustrator though.  Enjoy!

-joan

 The point about how every classification scheme is biased reminded me of this passage from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, on why you should never index your own book:

The ten core ideas of 202 (so far....) 

1. Separate content from presentation
2. Organization vs. Retrieval cost
3. Information IQ
4. Naming is hard
5. Classifications are biased
6. The Vocabulary problem
7. Document type problem
8. Abstraction hierarchy of work
9. How much metadata?
10. Scoping the problem 

 According to this article, it looks like there is some movement on creating a semantic web search, though the article writer seems a bit skeptical of its ability to deliver. T2 (a new project by the makers of Twine), which may come out by the end of the year, is hoping to index the top few dozen sites in major categories. Interestingly, T2 will be adding the semantic tags, not the owners of the sites themselves.

... though are we willing to keep the "Web x.0" terminology alive?

Wish I'd known about this taxonomy when I was teaching critical thinking. It really would have provided a good guide for structuring lessons.

Think I'm flopping towards the "Application" level with mixed success right now, with occassional backsliding. How about all of you? And do you think conceptualizing the learning process this way is useful for you as students? As teachers?

(The longer linked piece is even more acerbic, but worth a look if you have the time.)

Ann Rockley's article for L12, "Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy" includes a section at the very end called "Redefining Roles in the Organization" that bugs me. Author, editor, and information designer roles are listed as completely separate roles that seems to imply mutual exclusivity—i.e., authors should just write, editors should just edit, and the design of information and content management systems should be left to a seaprate class of information deisgners.

Today, October 7, could be re-christened "202 day" - it's hard to find someone or something that was born this day that doesn't merit a mention on this blog.

Let's take a look:

During the discussion on content management, namely the section on word level granularity, I was trying to picture what the XML would look like for a document that was very word level intensive, such as a thesaurus. If anyone else is curious, this link shows XML examples of how you could encode a thesaurus document. 

http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/thesaurus/specification.html

I just love this series of notes made by librarians at the ALIA National Library & Information Technicians Conference in Australia in 2007 www.alia07.com about the future of libraries. It made me smile to imagine that librarians can think creatively and optimistically about the world... or is that only Down Under?

Starting around minute 11 of Part A of the show Whad'ya Know (their site provides a link to --boo-- Real Player at http://www.notmuch.com/Show/Archive.pl?s_id=570, iTunes link at http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2196956...), there's an interview with Steven Pinker. Pinker talks a lot about metaphor, is framed as Lakoff's "foil" in linguistics, though Pinker doesn't go that far. And I didn't digest our dense Lakoff reading well enough to be able to tell if what Pinker was talking about really goes against it.