Everything is going ....2.0, Web 2.0, Facebook 2.0....what next?

Web 2.0,  just like facebook 2.0, - the second generation of web-based services and communities that emphasise online collaboration, networking and user-created content - is growing at a phenomenal rate. The one thing that should be capturing the imagination of the corporate managers is the widescale use of blogs, wikis, podcasts and other online pit stops for consumers to share their opinions about products, services, and the behaviour of companies. What this means for business is not always clear, but most senior executives have a sense that the organisations must respond to this shift in power.
Research points to three fundamental shifts as a consequence of this new technological power play: firstly, Web 2.0 means that organisations are no longer in sole control of their message; secondly, that Web 2.0 is fragmenting their marketing channels; and thirdly, that Web 2.0 offers the consumer a real channel to voice their opinion.
But this isn't all about threats. There's a flip slide for those corporates that have the imagination and the business agility to respond. Web 2.0 also offers companies limitless opportunities for direct engagement with their customers. Fragmentation has its upside - offering access to clearly defined demographic groups. And access to these channels comes at a fraction of the cost of more traditional media channels. Web 2.0 also allows organisations to respond directly to any criticism. Rather than ignoring criticism, or even fearing it, organisations should seize the initiative and use Web 2.0 to respond in the most direct way.

Check out Facebook 2.0

I disagree with blogger James Madigan in his review of Wikinomics in which he accused the authors of hyperbole and oversell. Madigan, www.jmadigan.net, was underwhelmed by Tapscot and Williams' 'evangelical' enthusiasm of potential benefits of the specific collaborative techniques that wikinomics offer. Madigan acknowledged that outsourcing, open source software and Creative Commons licensing helped the company he once worked for, GameSpy. But he argued that Tapscot and Williams underplay the dark side of wikinomics.

Tapscot and Williams do not advocate that Web 2.0 Enterprises adopt the missionary position. They need to maintain solid internal goals before investing resources. However these principles are complementary to proprietary approaches with companies maintaining their core intellectual properties (Tapscot and Williams 2008:312-3).

They cite the Swiss drug maker Novartis as Tapscot and Williams consider the Novartis initiative as encapsulating wikinomics principles of openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (2008:288)." Novartis provided free Internet access without restrictions to all its raw data on its multi-million dollar research to unlock the genetic basis for type 2 diabetes.

In his book entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture, (2007) Andrew Keen cautions against the inaccuracy of information shared on the Internet which he considers to be lacking in the more reliable and legitimate vetting processes where expert gatekeepers protect quality. Keen argued that the unintended consequence of Web 2.0 and the democratization of media results in democratization of talent and the flattening of culture by the masses who assert uninformed opinions, lack aesthetic judgment and are incapable of evaluating quality content. According to his arguments a democratized media would never have produced Mozarts, Hemingways, Universals or the Warner Brothers (Tapscot and Williams 2008:272).

Keen's arguments resonate with those of Robert Hutchins (1936) and Allan Bloom (1987) who argued that mass movements threaten educational standards and eventually modern democracy. Tapscot and Williams liken Keen's defense of the "old model" with its gatekeepers to saying that "democracy is bad for the average citizen because the average individual is a poor judge of his or her own interests (2008:272).

The most wide-spread pedagogical model in Canadian public education systems in 2008 is based on active, participatory teaching, learning and research methods and theories in many ways similar to those proposed by John Dewey in the 1930s. Dewey promoted an educational model of active, participatory learning to prepare citizens who would be "informed participants in a well-functioning democracy, resisting threats to democratic freedoms posed by political and corporate monopolies, aware of the importance of intellectual independence and individual rights, but also understanding that rights engender responsibilities to the community at large (Gonshak 1997)."

In a Calgary school, for example, Grade Five students "research" the Arctic regions online with much of the material based on wikipedia entries. They compile the information using PowerPoint and paper posters presented to the rest of the class. Grade Seven students "research" specific historical topics such as the fur trade in a debate format again using online sources to produce their arguments. The goal is not to memorize truth claims about historical events. It is a more sophisticated form of memory work. Students learn how to think critically and to investigate truth claims using a variety of sources. In the end it is meant to lead to the individual investigation of truth. By junior high, if not before, these students are already aware that wikipedia is written in a collaborative, organic fashion and that not all entries can be fully trusted. By highschool they will hopefully have a fairly balanced picture of the risks and benefits of Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons and William Gibson's cyberworld.

This is a 180 degree turn about from the ontological certitude of the 1950s and it is probably the knowledge industry nightmare that Hutchins and Bloom feared.

This generation of students will continue to refine and reshape wikinomics. While winning companies like Wikipedia successfully benefitted from mass collaboration, they also provided open access to information.

"Winning companies today have open and porous boundaries and compete by reaching outside their walls to harness external knowledge, resources and capabilities. They're like a hub for innovation and a magnet for uniquely qualified minds. They focus their internal staff on value integration and orchestration, and treat the world as their R & D department. All of this adds up to a new kind of collaborative enterprise- an Enterprise 2.0 that is completely shaping and reshaping clusters of knowledge and capabilities to compete on a global basis [. . .] Leaders must prepare their collaborative environments. Capabilities to develop new kinds of relationships, sense important developments, add value, and turn nascent networked knowledge into compelling value are becoming the bread and butter of wealth creation and success (Tapscot and Williams 2008:315)."

Selected Timeline of Critical Events in Wikinomics

1936 Robert Hutchins wrote The Higher Education in America in which he argued that the the goals of education was to provide an elite group of intellectually superior students destined for positions as future decision-makers, with truths of Western culture. Mortimer Adler and Hutchins created the Great Books program at the University of Chicago, a program which later included conservative academics like Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. In John Dewey's scathing review of The Higher Education in America he argued that Hutchins' traditional pedagogy was a process of passive transmission in which teachers were reduced to being a mere conduit and students, inert receptors. Dewey promoted an educational model of active, participatory learning to prepare citizens who would be "informed participants in a well-functioning democracy, resisting threats to democratic freedoms posed by political and corporate monopolies, aware of the importance of intellectual independence and individual rights, but also understanding that rights engender responsibilities to the community at large (Gonshak 1997)."

1987 Allan Bloom (1930-1992) published his bestseller The Closing of the American Mind in which criticized American higher education. Bloom argued that American political and intellectual life in the 1980s cure was in desperate need of a cure of the malady of the times by reintegrating the Great Books of Western Thought as a source of wisdom in prestige universities to restore seriousness to education and to open students to a philosophic experience. Bloom was shaken by his first hand experiences as professor at Cornell University during the 1960s mass movements and student uprisings that shook the foundations of academia. He equated the violence and political uprising on academic campuses in the 1960s with a general social malaise. (Bloom's mentor was Leo Strauss who was critical of the way that universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements in Europe in the 1930's.) The university "epitomizes the very spirit of free inquiry, which in turn is at the root of a free society, he concludes that ''a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis'' for a modern democratic nation (Kimball 1987). Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative New Criterion, anticipated that The Closing of the American Mind would have many critics and it did because of its,

avowedly traditional vision of what it means to be an educated person. And no doubt many will object that this portrait of liberal education is in many ways a caricature or an exaggeration. Certainly, there are exceptions to the rule of mediocrity and ideological posing that Mr. Bloom anatomizes in these pages (Kimball 1987)."

Kimball (2005) re-iterated Bloom's question on the role of higher education,

"The chief issue is this: Should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens--or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question " 'What is man?' in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs (Kimball 2005)."

2003 Flickr started as an online multiplayer game in which the photo-trading feature was almost an afterthought. Hundreds of thousands of Flickr users social community unexpectedly changed the direction of the company by uploading, tagging and describing their own photos and commenting, rating (favouriting) and awarding those of other Flickr users (Tapscot and Williams 2008:310)."

2005 Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative New Criterion praised ''the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox News . . . and the spread of interest in the Internet with its many right-of-center populist Web logs'' as ''heartening signs'' that conservatives are becoming ''a widespread counter to the counterculture'' of universities.

2007 Swiss drug maker Novartis provided free Internet access without restrictions to all its raw data on its multi-million dollar research to unlock the genetic basis for type 2 diabetes. Tapscot and Williams consider the Novartis initiative as encapsulating wikinomics principles of openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (2008:288)."

2007 Andrew Keen's book entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture, was published in which he cautions against the inaccuracy of information shared on the Internet which he considers to be lacking in the more reliable and legitimate vetting processes where expert gatekeepers protect quality. Keen argued that the unintended consequence of Web 2.0 and the democratization of media results in democratization of talent and the flattening of culture by the masses who assert uninformed opinions, lack aesthetic judgment and are incapable of evaluating quality content. According to his arguments a democratized media would never have produced Mozarts, Hemingways, Universals or the Warner Brothers.

2008 The most wide-spread pedagogical model in Canadian public education systems are based on active, participatory teaching, learning and research methods and theories in many ways similar to those proposed by John Dewey in the 1930s. For example, Grade Five students "research" the Arctic regions online with much of the material based on wikipedia entries. They compile the information using PowerPoint and paper posters presented to the rest of the class. Grade Seven students "research" specific historical topics such as the fur trade in a debate format again using online sources to produce their arguments.

Folksonomy: Internet:social aspects, Internet:economic aspects, Information society, social change, self-publishing,

Webliography and Bibliography

Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. Foreword by Saul Bellow. 392 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Gonshak, Henry. 1997. "Review of Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Kimball, Roger. 1987 "The Groves of Ignorance." New York Times.

Kimball, Roger. 2005-05. "Retaking the University: a Battle Plan." New Criterion.

Keen, Andrew. 2007. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture. New York: Doubleday.

Madigan, James. 2008-08-15. "Book Review: Wikinomics." 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Sleeper, Jim. 2005-09-04. "Allan Bloom and Conservative Mind." New York Times.

Tapscot, Don; Williams, Anthony D. 2008 [2006]. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin Group: New York/Toronto/London.

Tapscot, Don; Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics: the blog

Would be a nice experiment for a Reading class, for instance.

Also visit Ficlets, which allows users to create stories collaboratively with feedback, sequels, etc.

Learn About StumbleUpon

Subscribe (free) for daily e-mail digests, and check out their Bookshelf.

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/

Cooperative or collaborative divorce puts the separating couple on a path, together, to settle the issues involved in their separation. The cooperative process makes a lot of sense for most people, saving the money involved in formal discovery and court time as well as the emotional destruction that often accompanies the average divorce scenario. After all, these two people are going to be tied together in some manner forever, either through memories or more often, in dealing with children. Children grow up and then have their own weddings and graduations and children. Can you really expect to co-grandparent with someone you have thoroughly trashed earlier in life?

The process requires those involved to be open with information exchange and to discard any hidden agendas. Ideally, the parties and counsel work with financial and mental health advocates to craft something fair to all--a win-win outcome, if you will. In the event the matter is not settled, counsel is discharged, and the parties move on to hire litigators.

This sounds so hopeful to me, and I hope it comes to our area soon.  Several Pittsburgh attorneys are studying to be the sort of mediators who participate in cooperative divorce, so maybe it will.

But having actively dealt with a dozen families going through separation and divorce in the last week, I've got to admit I'm skeptical.  Sure, collaborative divorce doesn't work for everyone--those with drug/alcohol or domestic violence issues aren't playing on an even field, and so should be screened out.  I'm talking about ostensibly intelligent, capable people who would seem to be able to see where their hostility and long-term angst is taking them.

For example, the man whose wife has lived with another man for over two years, stealing all his money in the process ...but he won't even think about divorce because "she's a great wife" some of the time.

Or the wife who went to pick up her belongings after she'd moved out and found the boxes her husband had packed full of her things--mixed with used cat litter.

Or the couple who both want the house neither can really afford--just because it's the only asset the other wants. Each has spent well over $10,000 on the divorce so far, and have litigated through domestic violence court, criminal court, support court, custody court and now divorce court.

What about the husband who agreed he and his wife would split his pension, then retired without telling her, collecting his checks for years before she even found out she should be getting money?

It's no wonder that lawyers, particularly in family law, get burnt out. I know when I came here to practice, there was a delighted rush through the ranks as so many of the general practitioners wanted out of marital law and referred cases to me.

Some days, after hours spent steeping in the bitter brew of family discord, it's all I can do to come home to my own loved ones and remember I love them. But I'm grateful that they help me recharge those acid-soaked batteries and go out to--hopefully not fight--another day. Let's hope more people jump on that wagon.

***

This week, I'm featured at the Carnival of Family Life; please come by and read some of our interesting posts! Also, this blog has received another award-- thank you so much to Julie and also to Casdok, who made it possible by including Little Miss on the Faces of Autism blog!

Here you are, corporate fellows. Increase customer, partner and employee productivity with on-demand web meeting from WebEx. Do you have time and distance constraints? Are you late for a meeting? Free yourself from these and collaborate productively around the world.

Cisco WebEx is here, a Web, Video, Audio Conferencing and Collaborative Solutions for you to host meeting, no matter where you are and what time it is.

Stop meeting in a boarding room, let us meet online!!

I experienced it today. I was sick and could not attend an important seminar. But WebEx brought that to a webinar!

View more

How Media Use Collaboration to get Content From Readers

Ahead of Hurricane Gustav, the New York Times’ Web site made an open plea to readers to provide, via the Web site, first-hand accounts of the hurricane and its potential wreckage. In April 2007, the most dramatic footage of the Virginia Tech massacre was an amateur cell-phone video of a shootout, taken by a student and sent to CNN via its iReport Web site.

These examples reveal the cutting edge of the newsgathering business, where news organizations—including newspapers, TV and radio—are turning to collaboration to solve the mounting problem of dwindling profits and declining readership. By leveraging the Internet and engaging readers directly, companies hope they can cut costs, while halting the loss of readers at the same time.
Collaboration has been used by these news organizations since the onset of the Internet—message boards, commenting functions, online chats and breaking-news updates have been a part of Internet news sites for several years now. Remarkably, nevertheless, it took a long time for these companies to make their Web sites more than just repositories for already-run news stories or television segments.

In their early stages, several news organizations have begun leveraging familiar online functionality from the outside to collaborate with readers and make a name for their brands. The Washington Post, Slate and Politico.com are among the companies whose reporters used Twitter to interact with readers during the most recent presidential conventions. Last fall, the widely seen video of a University of Florida student being Tasered by police at a John Kerry event was taken by a reporter from the Gainesville Sun; the newspaper posted the clip on YouTube and it became instant hit, with over 3.1 million page views to date and extraordinary publicity for the newspaper.

Other news groups are trying to implement their own sites to draw readers—and advertising revenues—by erasing the buffer between the news and the people who read about it.

At the Chicago Tribune, a novel tack is being taken with its new Triblocal.com. Currently expanding throughout the Chicago area, the site employs four staff writers, who work with local, amateur journalists to provide news about what’s important to them and submit photos for the world to see. Weekly, Triblocal prints a hard-copy edition featuring many stories written by these amateur contributors. The Tribune hopes that this user-generated work—for the most part free of cost to the company—can draw in new users and raise revenues.

Whether these collaborative enterprises result in a turnaround for the newsgathering business remains to be seen, but the new methods can provide a model for consideration to this and other businesses. Two years ago Doritos challenged amateurs to create an ad which would be run during the Super Bowl—the site drew millions of visitors. Recently, Major League Baseball launched mlblogs.com, which allows regular fans to write free, unedited blogs about their favorite team.

It's an approach that melds the traditional model of a news resource, with aspects of in the spirit of emerging social media. It attempts a confluence of user and company generated content, of business and blog, all backed by credentials with viability to the consumer– and commercial potential and viability to the franchise.

So last night when I got a Tweet from Steve Hargadon that he was doing an Elluminate session with Adam Frey of Wikispaces to celebrate wikis, I had to jump in.  After some brief introductions and descriptions of their services, Adam did a brief demo of how to make and use a wiki.  For some reason, this was what I needed.  Just to watch someone who knows what they are doing create a wiki and set it up.  All the while he and Steve were explaining uses in the classroom, security and even touching a bit on Creative Commons and copyright.  As they were talking, others in attendance chimed in with uses ranging from individual activities in class all the way up to replacing their school websites with wikis.  Suddenly it all became clear.  So lets talk about it:

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is an easily created, easily editable website like interface for collaborative interaction.

What separates it from a blog?

IN GENERAL, it is subject specific.  In other words, everyone is doing research and building the wiki on a topic.  Anyone in the group (or the general public, if you allow it) can add content specific to the topic, edit existing content, make pages with related content, add links to other sites, wikis, blogs, etc. and add images to support the subject.

Why not just blog?

Blogs are very much unidirectional communication.  I post, you comment, I respond, etc.  With a wiki, the material is much more liquid and the communication is omnidirectional.  Anyone can edit any part of the wiki at any time (within reason).  The information changes and grows as more people collaborate on the subject.

Sound like chaos?

First, understand that sites like Wikispace for educators, pbWiki and others DO provide controls for security.  You can lock down your wiki so that only people who register can access it and manipulate content.  The only real issue comes when two people are trying to change the exact same part of the wiki at the exact same time.  In this case, the last person to hit save wins.  You can monitor users and even block users who post inappropriate content.

So why doesn't everybody use them?

They don't know about them.  They don't understand them.  They are technology shy.  They need someone to teach them not just how to make them or even how to apply them in the classroom, but how to educate tech coordinators and administrators on the value, ease of use and safety of these tools if done properly so that they will become more accepted in schools.

One final thought:

Another big argument I hear against wikis is that the kids will "abuse" them and the content will spiral out of control.  This usually comes from people who have never worked with a wiki but are really good at playing devil's advocate.  Here is my response:

Since when do we introduce a topic or a tool or an activity in schools without establishing clear rules for it's use?  Even when we teach kids to read, the first thing we do is teach them how to interact with the book and proper uses for it so they don't end up beating each other over the head with them like monkeys...  What is the difference here?  The difference, in my opinion is that this technology is so new that most (generalizing here) TEACHERS don't know how to use the tools well enough to teach the kids how to use them.

So do this:

Set CLEAR guidelines for use such as;

1. No inappropriate content
2. No negative comments about others
3. Cite your sources
4. Follow copyright rules (basically, if you didn't ask for it or make it yourself... don't use it)
5. Only registered users may manipulate content
6. Report inappropriate behavior to the teacher immediately

Now... LOOK at this list.  Aren't these the same rules you (should) use for ANY collaborative project in your classroom?

Then turn the kids loose and let them work.  Guide and facilitate, but try to keep the "teaching" to a minimum.  You will have plenty of time to use that red pen later.

My art is a story piece about going through the IVF process. I used a jar to play on "in vitro", literally in glass, as in a test tube. During the IVF process I got pumped up with drugs to produce as many viable eggs as possible. A one point I produced 21 eggs at one time. It is interesting how the public does not hear much about the women who were not successful with IVF. Perhaps it is the women themselves who do not share this information? It is quite an ordeal to go through and expensive, so it is quite disheartening to still not have a baby at the end of it all.

I am hoping this assemblage piece will be publicly displayed to reach out to other women and let them know they are not alone in this experience.

I hope that when this initiative is over I will continue to blog and learn from other's here on wordpress.

Here are a few of the little things I would like to change if I could, I would love to hear some of yours!

• I wish there were shops, restaurants, hotels that were donation based rather than having set prices, where people paid what they wished and could afford to pay. I think that the good places would be supported and nobody would get ripped off!
• I wish there was `Free Cycle´ everywhere.
• I wish that everybody respected everyone and things enough so there was no need for all of these rules and regulations.
• I wish that having fun was encouraged and maybe even enforced!
• I wish there were places for people to walk safely, either beside the road or through the countryside so we could walk from place to place.

add a comment here

This year's competition theme is "Participatory Learning," which focuses on the collaborative aspect of learning by exploring different and new models in digital media. This may include "major adaptations of existing models of gaming, world building, social networking or other virtual environments; or the development of entirely new programs." The emphasis, however, is on "a strong commitment to making possible new ways of valuable participatory learning, as opposed to simply creating new content."

$2 million will be awarded in sum over two categories: "Innovation in Participatory Learning" and "Young Innovator." The latter's focus is the same, but the targeted group is 18-25 year old persons who are willing to "think boldly about what comes next in participatory learning and to contribute to making it happen."

The winning products and/or programs will be licensed CC BY-NC-SA or be available as Open Source. For more details, see the MacArthur Foundation's August 18th press release and the competition guidelines .

For examples of winning projects, see last year's winners in Innovation and Knowledge-Networking.

This post was taken from the Creative Commons Learn website and was originally posted by Creative Commons' Jane Park.

More information here:

• http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/9023
• http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/08/18/second-hastacmacarthur-digital-media-and-learning-competition/

Randy: Procedural rhetoric is the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric uses oratory and visual rhetoric uses images persuasively. (28)

Me: That sounds similar to what he hinted in the preface. Namely, that “procedural rhetoric is the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures" (ix).

Me (after a provocative pause): Interestingly he also says that procedural systems “actually represent process with process” (14). So there seems to be a meta relationship there...

So, was that game Tenure an example of procedural rhetoric in action?

R: Yes, I believe it was. It performed the processes inherent to the experience of being a 1^st year teacher. And because it is procedural in nature, it can better represent the procedure of that experience: because it is process itself, it can represent process..

Me: But, what makes Tenure special? Aren’t all computer programs procedural?

Isn’t that the question we have to ask ourselves about video games now, what argument is being presented?

R: The ability of the video game to change our attitudes about our world is not in the content of the game. “rather, this power lies in the very way video games mount claims through procedural rhetorics” (ix). The goal of the game doesn’t matter. What matters is that we think this way: that you interact with the game’s rules to see the world as it wants you to see it (i.e. to see the processes that underlie its presentation of reality).

Me: So how is Grand Theft Auto an example of a persuasive game?

R: There, the procedural rhetoric is the claim. As McLuhan would say, ‘The medium is the message.’

Me: If the procedural rhetoric that underlays games is built itself upon a rule-based representation of reality, what happens when you break the rules? Does the game cease to be persuasive?

R: Well, as we read, you can break the rules about returning your DVD player because human elements will allow it in the real world. (In other words, they'll create a new system for dealing with your particular situation that still allows you to return the defective product) But you can’t break the rules in computer game because to do so would have to be allowable in the rules themselves. If you hack Grand Theft Auto, it’s already part of the rules.

Me: So it's not really a hack, just the illusion thereof. Which, if you don't realize the illusion, is quite persuasive. (Actually, it's been said that Apple actually engineered the hack(ability) of the iPhone 3G to generate hype about its new (then) product. Hacking the phone was, from this perspective, then built into the rules of how the phone worked.)

R: Yes, it’s part of the interaction.

At this point, Randy noticed that dinner was being served, and we decided to halt our conversation here.

To be continued perpetually.

]]> http://spamtelon.wordpress.com/?p=5 Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:01:09 +0000 spamtelon http://spamtelon.fr.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/spam-it-gets-me-down/ I use an excellent collaborative spam filter on this blog. It harnesses the power of naive bayesian classification to identify spam, and aggregate’s everyone’s spam to get lots of useful data. In short, it’s really good at identifying ...
www.dougalstanton.net

The committee also resolved to provide funding for the travel required to prepare International Research Training Groups and to bring the foreign allowances for doctoral students in Research Training Groups into line with the higher rates available to postdoctoral researchers, from 1 July 2007.

However, international cooperation is only one of the options that doctoral students will be offered in future from the DFG. New approaches and forms of cooperation, such as collaboration between higher education institutions and business enterprises or universities of applied science, which impart additional experience to doctoral students and improve their carrier prospects, are especially encouraged.

As a result of the introduction of the two-tiered review process for Research Training Groups, only one establishment proposal was received, which was approved by the committee at its June meeting. The German-Japanese project "Structural changes to civil society: A comparison of Japan and Germany" addresses the question of how analogous, but also diverse, structures and behavioral patterns have emerged in the civil society of the two countries. The International Research Training Group will investigate the historical, cultural and political preconditions for these changes. (Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Gesine Foljanty-Jost, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

Further Information

Information, contact names and lists of all funded Research Training Groups can be found on the internet at

www.dfg.de/gk/en

"The Bluetooth protocol can be used for inter-vehicle communication equipped with Bluetooth devices. This work investigates the challenges and feasibility of developing intelligent driving system providing time-sensitive information about traffic conditions and roadside facilities. The architecture for collaborative vehicle communication system is presented using the concepts of wireless networks and Bluetooth protocol. We discuss how vehicles can form mobile ad-hoc networks and exchange data by the on-board Bluetooth sensors. The key design concepts of the intelligent driving service infrastructure are analyzed showing collaborative fusion of multiple positional data could give a better understanding of the surrounding traffic conditions for collaborative driving. The technical feasibility of using Bluetooth for data exchange among moving vehicles is evaluated."

Monskey is a very cool idea.

I’ve got my first as a gift and thought it was a very nice buddy. I think other people have the same impression as we can see at Flickr, for instance.

Despite being a great product and definitely one of the most sympathetic toy art created, it’s the idea and the purpose behind Monskey that I think is even greater.

For those who don’t know it, Monskey’s concept is Equality of Mankind.

To express that, they put the power on people’s hands. This means that anyone who think is capable of designing one can do that and submit his/her personal creation. If lucky enough, the person may see her creation on some shelves from around the world. Of course that designers have a lead and it's nice to see how they are participating.

So, why do I think this is a great idea?

Basically, because it involves some of the main principles that make and idea goes further these days:

It has a well oriented vision and a solid mission stated;

It relies on the power of collective intelligence;

It aims to promote self-expression in a social perspective;

It is a collaborative process in its essence;

It materializes as a fun experience in people’s hands.

At the same time, I think that the Monskey culture could be more mainstream through conversational channels. Basic social tools could be used to amplify the idea, the purpose and to drive business as well.

Really hope that guys over Monskey are thinking about it and working for that.