Amsterdam Adventures

Tonight I went to a discussion group that is being started by someone at the ISchool about the Semantic Web. It was really interesting and engaging and made me feel like I have so much to learn. We discussed ontologies a lot but also touched a bit on wikis, semantic wikis and social software. Hopefully at the next one we'll dig deeper into social and networking software which I think will be interesting for my research. I did pick up a good article on the social networking that happens on wikis. I also got a bunch of good book recommendations from it some of which I've heard and some of which I haven't. I put most of them on hold at the library. Some of them are:

• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell


• Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Lazslo Barabasi


• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki


• The World is Flat: A Brief Histoy of the 21st Century by Thoman Friedman

I've got some reading to do.

Dutch football fan.

I found some info about a conference called IASTED Web-Based Education 2006. The proceedings look really interesting. Unfortunately, the UW doesn't have them, so I'm trying to get them through interlibrary loan (at least the articles that look good). There's a lot of good info about studies that have been done on ALN technologies, mostly used in distance education (not physical classroom ed.) but they still look pretty relevant to my research topic.