The Horizon Report 2008

This time last year when we started this whole Learning 2.0 Training program with staff at ECU Library, one of the first landmark reports we read was the Horizon Report of 2007. Now the 2008 Horizon Report has been released.

The yearly Horizon Report is one of the major reports outlining technology trends in higher education. The report is put together by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative . Each year the report seeks to define a research agenda by selecting six practices and technologies for particular attention. The 2008 Horizon Report highlights the six areas of:

grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence, and social operating systems.

You can download the 2008 report, and all the Horizon reports going back five years, from the Horizon Project Wiki

Resources mentioned in the report are tagged “hz08” and can be accessed on Del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz08

Go to the Talis blog for a podcast interview with the New Media Consortium gurus about the 2008 Horizon Report.

Anzac Day 2008

There was a lot of activity around the Aussie blogs on Anzac Day

On the Matilda Australian literary blog Perry Middlemiss posted a poem by C.J. Dennis: The March - Anzac Day, 1928. Perry has been active on the net in Australian literature for over ten years now.

On Club Troppo there was a wonderful photo of a kid draped in an Australian flag

Here on the West Coast the surf was up. Just a few weeks back in this same Indian Ocean they finally found the wreck of the HMAS Sydney, which went down in 1941 with the loss of 645 young lives. Read the story on the Australian War Memorial blog

I couldn’t help thinking how lucky those surfers were, enjoying Anzac Day 2008.

A group "sandbox" on iGoogle

Although iGoogle is not normally used for group work, it can be done. Some ECU academic staff have tried a novel way of using iGoogle as a group "sandbox". They use the sandbox to share work and try out new Web 2.0 applications. To do this you just need to set up a Gmail account and then establish an iGoogle page. For this to be effective you would need to keep the group small and ensure that no one changes the password!

Trying out iGoogle

After much prompting from my colleagues I decided to give iGoogle a go. I'm not sure I really am an iGoogle fan. You can put all you put all your RSS feeds together on your iGoogle page, but you can do that anyway on Firefox and the new IE. It is great to be able to use the fun widgets (Google calls them "gadgets"). My favourite gadget is the world webcam which flips over to a new live cityscape every 3o seconds, so you can empathise with those stuck the Tokyo traffic jams, or marvel at the city lights of Stuttgart. The only downside of the world webcams are the camera night shots of ... well nothing but the dark.

At the CAVAL workshop recently Richard Wallis was saying that he has two separate computers: one that has iGoogle on it and one that doesn't. The iGoogle gives him quite different and more relevant Google search results due to the cookies. If you use iGoogle for some time on the same machine this will happen.

Kevin Rudd Addresses Peking University Students

Video on Flickr

Flickr is moving into providing video content. Is it too little too late? YouTube already have the mass market here in partnership with Google. But will Flickr aim for the high quality end of the market?

Technology Review in Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, expands into video with new service, gives a potted history of the last few years of online video and Flickr's new venture.

Only Flickr's ''pro'' members will be allowed to upload video clips, but anyone will be able to watch them. So this should weed out the dross that appears in YouTube More about video on Flickr here.

This move makes sense as the influential Horizon Report 2008 lists grassroots video as being on the first adoption horizon of new media technolgies in the short term.

Richard Wallis in Perth

A blog post could not do justice to Richard Wallis’s thought provoking presentation at the State Library of WA this week.

The questions from the audience added to the interest and left me with a slightly better understanding of the semantic web which we’ve all been hearing about for a few years now.

Wallis is from the UK library software company, Talis, where they are developing a Global Semantic Web Platform. He describes himself as a “technology evangelist” and indeed the next wave of innovation on the web will be technology driven. Web 2.0 by contrast is been driven by social forces.

Some are already calling this new wave Web 3, or the semantic web. It will dramatically alter the underlying foundation of the web, open up the connections between silos of information and expose them to greater exploitation and interrogation.

Richard Wallis’s presentation, “Web 2.0 - Where Next?”, can be found on his blog, Panlibus.

The Talis website also has lots more information and videos on semantic web developments. CAVAL Training sponsored the event.