x28's Blog, Archive 2004

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15.12.04

Personal categorization

Stimulated by L. Efimova's thoughts about personal categories and D. Pollard's report about his getting-things-done experience, I decided to write down what my personal categorization strategy looks like.

To summarize: Without shortcut links, I would be lost. Using them allows me to rest on fairly deep and fairly long-term filing categories. More...

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05.12.04

Trackback to the future

Blog posts written at different times on related themes, make the traces of knowledge construction visible, as is explained in this post by L. Efimova and another post by D. Pike found on the way to the linked-to past.

I wonder if the effect would also work in the reverse direction, i. e., if older posts contained trackbacks to newer posts within the same blog: Track"back"s to the future! This type of usage is rarely seen, though. Perhaps it is not as useful as I imagine, or it is just too cumbersome.

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21.11.04

Visualization techniques, big and small

The ever amazing paths of social network links led me via KM Europe to H. Haller's paper on Mapping Techniques for knowledge organisation.

I am not quite sure yet if the high-tech /AI /SemWeb oriented approach of some in his group will convince me, or if I provisionally stick to the small tricks with ubiquituous software I described below (#28). At least for some large trees and networks, visualization becomes difficult, anyway.

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06.11.04

Cognitive one-dish meals?

L. Efimova pleads guilty of some binary thinking and notices that this seems "more natural for our brains". I would add that it also helps her to distinguish cognitive styles as clearly as it is rarely found elsewhere. E. g., when she analyzes what she does not like with tree thinking: the "loose ends" (the boring leaves of the tree?), and what she likes with web thinking: the "shortcuts" (the cross references, see #02 below, that make trees sufferable?)

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11.10.04

Information scent of a hyperlink

According to the "information foraging theory" quoted by , Infovis, we are hunter-gatherers for information prey.
So, it's no wonder that we read much more from a not-yet-clicked link (see below, #23) than might be expected if links are thought of as mere distractions (see below, #24) to be immediately followed.

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19.09.04, English version 30.09.04

Evaluation Metadata

Learning Object Metadata entered by one user type can be leveraged as recommendations for users of similar type ("neigborhood users"). More...

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25.09.04

Knowledge Worker connotations

A blog discussion is going on about the terminology of "Knowledge Worker" (M. Röll). For me, the main connotation is: a very normal, ordinary occupation. More...

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19.09.04

Nonlinear New student

Digital generation needs "Multi-threaded stream of discourse" rather than neatly pre-packed content. More...

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11.09.04

Preferences

I wonder if there is a correlation between liking blogs for KM and disliking patient research documentation?

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06.09.04

Content Repositories und Social Software

OLS (Open Learning Support) presented by D. Wiley at USU ITI conference. More...

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October 2003, English revision 28.08.04

Usability and Translation

This thread of the dotLRN (open-source eLearning platform) forum suggests how much translation is tied to usability: in some cases, translators are needed to make the US original more readable.

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September 2003, English revision 28.08.04

Easier Studying

This (German) Guide is supposed to complement a detailed study guide with some tips for using the personal computer as a tool for thinking support. It shows how to use databases and graphics programs to reorder, rearrange, and visualize concepts in an easy way, for instance, with simple bent connectors for hierarchical relationships, and curved connectors for cross-reference relationships.

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January 2003, English revision 28.08.04

More on link figuration

This German text from Uni Dortmund contains useful thoughts about link figuration . E. g., about the of metacommunicative link indicator using deictic words like here or this: it is bad style, but "Wholesale ostracism of the method should ... not be uncritically adopted...". And suggestions about link arrows matching my favorite vision (see #02).

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December 2002, English revision 28.08.04

Intra-Textual Links

Intra-textual links increase distracting "referential navigation", and this, in turn, reduces orientation ... more

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September 2002, English revision 30.08.04

The Benefit of Not Yet Followed links

There is nothing magic with the hyperlink except that it intensifies the magic of the ordinary paper reference pointer ... more

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March 2002, English revision 28.08.04

Differences between text and hypertext

The HyTex project asked challenging questions: what precisely are the most important differences between text and hypertext? more

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March 2002, English revision 28.08.04

Tree-ifying another encyclopaedia

Again experimenting with hierarchical arrangement of index words. This time, I used the hierarchy for prioritizing the hyperlinks ... more

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October 2001, English revision 28.08.04

Encyclopedestrianization

J. Souttar's great essay shows aspects from philosophy, history, and design, regarding context-less, atomized content. Abstract

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August 2001, English revision 28.08.04

Indo-Europeans were more Multimedial than we

Looking at word roots, an interesting observation can be made: "multimedial" subject groups are over-represented ... more

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April 2001, English revision 28.08.04

Funnel language

"The alphabet is a funnel", says R. Horn - in his visual language, of course.

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April 2001, English revision 28.08.04

Virtual pointer stick

Now that we can deliver narration of slide presentations via narrow bandwidths into every distant student's hut (e. g. this streaming file), the only missing thing is a virtual pointer stick being inserted onto the slide in the browser to indicate where the speaker has arrived. This is especially useful when the student had just hit the Pause button to get himself something to eat. Let alone the didactic benefit. Here is a small Javascript sample exercise. (In the meantime, the "technical overkill" camp demands higher resolution to capture the handwriting on the whiteboard ...)

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December 2000, English revision 28.08.04

Tree-ifying a dictionary

Experimenting with (poly-)hierarchical arrangement of word lists from the etymological dictionary ... more

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December 2000, English revision 28.08.04

Gripes about links in a paper dictionary

Unsystematic, inconsistent link marking, linking structure, link selection, and poor text presentation design could be overcome by borrowing from hypertext elements and visualizations ... more

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April 2000, English revision 28.08.04

Gripes about CD encyclopaedias

Alphabetical encyclopaedias are not tuned for context, even after the practical compulsion of the sort order for the print versions no longer apply... more

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April 2000, English revision 28.08.04

Verb and gender in multimedia grammar

Multimedia "grammar" could use the hyperlink as the verb, and the link type (hierarchical or cross-reference) as the gender of verb.... more

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December 1999, English revision 28.08.04

Hypertext's fascinating potential: bridging camps

The main reason why Hypertext has a fascination on me since a long time, is probably the fact that it acts as a bridge between two basic, opposite, and complementing elements that may be called gender of knowledge representation: tree and shortcut... more

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Matthias Melcher