Wonder how that worked?

Sounds like you could enter comments on the eTech conference in Twitter and they would aggregate them. Might be an interesting way to gather up quick notes from conferences.

On one side of the discussion where issues about what is lost if you bring the social software inside of the firewall. Bob Morgan of University of Washington pointed out that you need critical mass for much of the magic of social software to work. You need many people participating with overlapping interests to form virtual communities. You multiple people to tag the same object to build a meaningful folksonomy. Would you reach critical mass if the population was limited to the enterprise or do you need to be sharing in the wide world for the magic to occur?

An example that I used was Chemical Engineering students using social software out in the world might discover other students at another university. The two groups might work together and learn more both about their projects that the world at large. These forces tend say that we should just use the world-at-large suite of tools.

On the other side is the fact that these systems are out of the control of the university but may be considered by some (especially parents of students) to be under the control of the university. I mentioned a case of an instructor who is using a Wiki on their personal web site for instructional purposes. Students need to go to this site. They may need to participate. This leads to institutional business being conducted at a site that is completely out of the control and governance of the institution. It also leads to institutional information – course content and possibly student performance data (e.g. test data, quizzes and homework data) – being de facto outsourced to an untrusted partner. Who knows what the ISP will do with this information?

The hot discussions around MySpace, Facebook et al show the depth of concern about student privacy and safety and the concerns about the belief that these third party sites are somehow blessed by the University.

Adding to the complexity of these issues is the fact that it is so easy to set-up and use a lot of the Web2.0 / Social Software tools that are out there. You can get a blog set up and running in a couple of minutes. My personal blog is run on Dreamhost. They have one click installs for a variety of software. It would be easy for me to set up blogs, wikis, bulletin boards and galleries for a class. It would take about 15 minutes – tops.

Going back to the earlier example of the faculty member and their wiki – they used their personal web site because their institution doesn’t have any support or offerings for doing wikis in house. Any barriers that the institution erects (including charges) will lead to outsourced solutions. In house solutions may not work as well as the wide world solutions but the institution is mandated to protect student privacy and security. The institution is also legally bound to keep records of performance and it has an interest in keeping an archive of instructional materials.

Is there a balance where students participate in the wide world of social software in a safe and educational way?

1. UW-Madison’s SOA Migration Strategy – what is it and how do we get one
2. Folksonomy and Web 2.0
3. IT Architecture – What is it and why 3 isn’t enough
4. Identity Management Nouns and Verbs

Note that the Folksonomy slides are from an Internet2 version of the talk and are more inclusive than the slides I used at U-Minn. Actually, I meant to grab these slides not the ones that I used. There are a list of links of the URLs that I used in the Folksonomy demo here:

Links I Use in My Folksonomy Demo

This site hit the front page of digg.com (a site that is catching on as a way to stay on top of cool stuff – front page on digg is like front page on Slashdot).

I’ve posted his results below. The first results are the US News College Rankings where available. The second number is his SVM ranking. (this is easier to read on his site http://vcmike.blogspot.com/2006/01/ranking-colleges-using-google-and-oss.html)

Note that U Washington was rated top by his method and Princeton fell from first place. The interesting thing is how much of a role Google, digg, Facebook and other “Web2.0″ software will play in new students decision making about the College that they attend.

Name 	USNews 	 SVM
University of Washington 	57.4 	98.929
Yale University 	98 	98.081
Harvard University 	98 	97.953
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 	93 	92.996
Stanford University 	93 	92.922
National University
92.523
Columbia University 	86 	92.255
Princeton University 	100 	90.609
New York University 	65 	85.271
University of Chicago 	85 	85.052
Indiana University 		83.973
University of Pennsylvania 	93 	83.91
Duke University 	93 	79.487
University of Southern California 	66 	78.645
University of Pittsburgh
78.274
Cornell University 	84 	78.051
University of Florida
77.864
University of Colorado
76.877
The American College
76.597
University of California, Berkeley 	78 	76.192

Hi all,

Sorry for starting a kerfuffle this morning. I think what I was trying to communicate was lost in the numbers.

I agree that his method and numbers are imperfect at best. But, take into account this was his (first) attempt to build a complex suite of searches against Google to “rank” Colleges.

As Kathi Dwelle points out – his search method found only 170 faculty for UW-Madison out of our 2,064. Other places seem to have a better Google presence for their faculty not more faculty. The fact that his number is wrong does mean his ranking is wrong. It also means that Googling trying to learn how many faculty we have returns bad numbers. This is the issue in my humble opinion.

If students start making choices based on Google (and they are making lots of choices based on Google), then we should be sure that Google returns the results that we want for our institution.

As for Facebook, he is not using Facebook in his ranking but I believe that these types of social software will impact the choices that prospective students make. If they find lots of cool people in Facebook that attend UW-Madison, they will want to come here too.

I am certain the he and others will continue to work on this alpha-test idea. There will be a “Click to see the Google Ranked of Colleges” in the near future and it will probably be pretty popular. We should understand the methods that are used AND make sure our information is presented such that we rank well.

Those were my real points – not that U-Wash is a 98.929 and we are 71.137.

There are three sections:

* Tagging and Multiple Tag browsing
* Folksonomy and Social Discovery
* Cool Apps, REST and RSS

Part 1 – Tagging and Multiple Tags

* http://del.icio.us/
* http://del.icio.us/jimphelps
* http://del.icio.us/jimphelps/folksonomy
* http://del.icio.us/jimphelps/folksonomy%2BConnotea
* http://www.technorati.com/
* http://www.technorati.com/tag/itarchitecture
* http://www.technorati.com/watchlist/add/
* http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/seattle/
* http://www.youtube.com/

Part 2 – Folksonomy and Social Discovery

* http://del.icio.us/url/fd3ba631e0adbe85e25f3cd519882341
* http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/06/23.html
* http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2005/05/28/tagclouds-and-cultural-changes/
* http://cloudalicio.us/tagcloud.php?button=Graph+Tag+Cloud=http://del.icio.us/url/19456e761687204e2bc7857cbc52fe4b

Part 3 – Cool Apps, REST and RSS

* http://www.connotea.org/
* http://www.citeulike.org/
* http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/31/74927_HNredhatcommits_1.html
* http://del.icio.us/infoworld
* http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/iwx/explorer.html#top
* http://www.technorati.com/tag/wag_edu
* http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/
* http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/index.php/tagcloud/
* http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/index.php/category/socialsoftware/

* The Web 2.0 movement is about empowering people to publish their own content quickly and easily with a minimum of knowledge. Flickr, Youtube, del.icio.us, Blogger et al allow people to publish content with little knowledge of apache servers, domain name registrations and the rest of the system admin knowledge usually needed to run a web site.

* Social software (which Clay Shirky put as, “the stuff that gets spammed”) allows people share their content with others, to learn who is interested in their content and to learn who has interesting content. It is the “who” part that is of interest. Social software enables the discovery of people of interest similar to how Google enables the discovery of content of interest.

* Folksonomies enable the loose classification of content. This classification is done by people and is not a rigid hierarchical taxonomy but a loose metadata based classification scheme. This classification scheme is great for informal content such as blog entries or URLs and content that may be interpreted differently by different social groups.

Knitting these three things together, we get a system which enables the easy publishing of content, discovery of the people behind the content and of others interested in similar content and a simple way to classify information content. Employing these systems inside of an enterprise should allow for much better communication and collaboration with the added benefit of social discovery. Jon Udell uses scripts to analyze del.icio.us data to discover people with similar interests and content that they are reading that he has missed (Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us).

In the early days of System Operations and enterprise computing, we were working on Data Management. The big question was, “how do we store all of this data and then recall it when we need it?” Huge tape libraries with colored number codes were built and technicians fetched and threaded tapes. We then advanced to Information Management where the issue changed from data management, which is raw and uninterpreted, into, “How do we find the actual information inside all of the this data?” It was no longer good enough to find the file by file name, we wanted to find the file that had the information we needed. This was followed by the Knowledge Management movement. The enterprise wanted to find the patterns that were present in the information to glean a higher level understanding of the enterprise.

Enterprises that take advantage of the Web 2.0 / Social Software / Folksonomy movement will move on to next level: Social Mining. This will enable users to mine the informal content within the enterprise and find others with similar interests and the content that those others find interesting. As one person I work with put it, “it is virtual mentoring”.

Thoughts?

- JJP