Entries Tagged as 'Content Management Systems'
May 19
"Learners are doers, not recipients."—Walter J. Ong, "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past"
It's high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead. For one thing, Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.
It's been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed "few differences in accuracy" between Wikipedia and theEncyclopedia Britannica. Though the honchos at Britannica threw a big hissy at the surprising results of that study, Nature stood by its methods and results, and a number of subsequent studies have confirmed its findings; so far as general accuracy of content is concerned, Wikipedia is comparable to conventionally compiled encyclopedias, including Britannica.
There were a few dust-ups in the wake of the Nature affair, notably Middlebury College history department's banning of Wikipedia citations in student papers in 2007. The resulting debate turned out to be quite helpful as a number of librarians finally popped out of the woodwork to say hey, now wait one minute, no undergraduate paper should be citing any encyclopedia whatsoever, which, doy, and it ought to have been pointed out a lot sooner.
By 2009 the complaints had more or less faded away, and nowadays what you have is college librarians writingblog posts in which they continue to reiterate the blindingly obvious: "Wikipedia is an excellent tool for leading you to more information. It is a step along the way, and it is extremely valuable."
Read more research from the full article here from the TheAwl.com
Oct 14
Posted by DevLearn Staff
Categories: Content Management Systems
Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.
Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDLwould make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.
Read the full article HERE
Oct 6
Posted by DevLearn Staff
Categories: Content Management Systems , Social Media
With 500 million people using Facebook and Twitter seeing more thantwo billion tweets per month, one would assume that social media usage is skyrocketing. New research from Forrester suggests that while participation is on the rise, actual content creation may not be.
Forrester’s Social Technographics Profile analyzes consumer social behaviors and trends on an annual basis. Forrester classifies social network users by type: Creators, Conversationalists, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. In the past year, their research shows no measurable growth in the Creators category — the audience that creates social content.
In the U.S., the Creator audience has actually dipped a percentage point from 24% in 2009 to 23% in 2010. Japan was the only country measured to show a rise in Creators, growing from 34% to 36% in the past year.
When it comes to social media, it would seem then that the average user feels most at home taking more passive actions, and that a majority of content creation is primarily limited to the existing content creator crowd. As Forrester reports, “One-third of online consumers in the U.S. regularly watch user-generated videos on sites like YouTube . But only 10% of U.S. online consumers upload videos they’ve created to public sites.”
Read the full story HERE
Aug 28
by Avram Piltch | Laptop
I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.
At LAPTOP, we’re still testing mobile Flash on a variety of handsets, but the early returns are a mixed bag, with some sites performing really well and other “unoptimized” videos and games causing restless thumb syndrome. When Flash 10.1 for Android is good, it’s great, but when it’s bad, it can make even the harshest Apple critic want to e-mail Steve Jobs an apology video playing in HTML 5.
Read the full article HERE
Jul 1
By Tony Bradley, PC World
Google has expanded the functionality of Google Docs viewer on the iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile devices to include the ability to view PDFs, *.doc, *.docx (the Office 2007 and Office 2010 file format that replaces *.doc), and even Microsoft PowerPoint (although there is no mention of the newer *.pptx format for PowerPoint) natively within Google Docs Viewer. So far, though, Google is taking a "look, but don't touch" approach--providing the ability to view multiple file formats, but still lacking the functionality to create or edit documents, even in Google Docs.
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