I have already mentioned the MITUPV Exchange project a couple of times and here you have a complete explanation. To put it in a nutshell, it’s like the ‘proto social network’ from 2000. Anyway, I’ve been participating in the project for 2 years and despite the effort, sacrifice and energy that requires, it’s really a rewarding project. I don’t want to provide a tainted or rosy summary of the project’s process.
I’ve never been fascinated by corpus linguistics, I understand its extraordinary importance to derive sets of rules, etc. but it never got my interest. However, an experiment based upon The British National Corpus called WordCount did get me thinking. WordCount is a minimalist visual experiment by Jonathan Harris from number27, a belated but great serendipitous discovery.
At Million Futures (part of the Beyond Current Horizons project by Futurelab and the DCSF), virtual paper planes invite anyone to add their views and replies to questions on the future of learning (though originally intended for the UK, questions apply to learning in general and are food for thought for educators and learners around the globe.
- Had to hit some PhD thesis deadlines. Afterwards:
- Got severe pharyngitis.
- Which has derived into a terrible cold (worsened by cold wave sweeping across Europe).
- Brain’s sized up by this cold and thus prone to less thoughtful posts and to more *brief* sharing via Twitter.
To sum it up, Chinswing is a short of audio-based discussion board: it’s a place where you can post your question or thought to create a conversation (or to answer an existing one) and wait for others to reply in the same fashion. Besides, it gives you the option of keeping a watchlist and get updates via RSS subscription. Conversations can be downloaded as podcasts. Every piece of discussion is searchable by categories or tags (what they call ‘keywords’).
Image 1 from Chinswing FAQ:
Catching up with Twines, I get to a blog called This Is Indexed, where I find this simple but yet effective definition of what web 2.0 means (to Jessica, the author, and many more). I revamped it with Gimp (I’m useless at drawing), and added a 3rd axis. We could add a 4th one: value (i.e. whether more quantity means more quality or more quality comes from selective aggregation…”if the more users, the better the app gets”…can we say the same thing about the social networks we belong to? my own list of contacts?). More axes?
