Search...

Delivery Note

I will try to publish this newswire by the 1st and 3rd Mondays of each month beginning next year. If you aren’t using an RSS reader, you might consider trying it out, as it helps alert you of periodically published things like this newswire. Check this article below for a short overview of using RSS.

Flamenco Search goes Open Source

UC Berkeley researcher Marti Hearst’s well-regarded search tool in now freely available and open source. Flamenco uses a technique she’s called “hierarchical faceted metadata” which makes it easier to surf through large amounts of material by making what would complex Boolean conjunctive searches simple to do. Check out the Fine Arts images demo at the Flamenco site.
http://flamenco.berkeley.edu

MPEG-7

This is not another movie compression format, but a rich standard for adding information to stored images to make them easier find once cataloged. Wikipedia has the best overview of it, but basically it hopes to standardize how one describes visual content contained in pictures and movies. There are some tools emerging, such as Caliph and Emir, that use MPEG-7 as an on-ramp for the Semantic Web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-7

Calibrated Peer Review

This innovative technique models the traditional academic a peer-review process as a classroom teaching tool for kids to assess each other’s work. Developed by the late UCLA chemistry professor Orville Chapman, Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) has been used in over 500 schools (mostly undergraduate) and have quantitative studies that it improves learning by 10%, in addition to the new reviewing skills gained, and as reduction of faculty load.

In a nut shell, the teacher set’s up a writing activity, defines some rubrics for assessment, has the kids write the essay, then "calibrate" their reviewing ability with an internal activity that helps hone their reviewing skills. The kids then review (double-blind) three of their peers work according the rubric. Finally, the kids review their own essay. This idea has really resonates with me and looks potentially powerful for K-12 education
http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/
Educause has a good two-page summary of the project here:
www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI5002.pdf

OpenURL

A recent NISO standard called OpenURL has emerged and links a URL with keywords in the address (i.e., www.myurl?genre=book). Documents would provide a unique number at the end of each article, called the Document Object Identifier (DOI) which in theory will help stop link rot either by searching for the DOI, or using a service they provide called CrossRef, which provides cross-publisher linking.
www.dlib.org/dlib/may06/apps/05apps.html

Microsoft Live Academic Search

Ever wanting to keep up with the Googles’s, Microsoft has an academic oriented search engine associated with their Live website. They have indexed a fairly wide selection of journals for full text retrieval (it uses the IP address to see if your institution is a subscriber for resources that need it. They are an active supporter of the OpenURL standard. Interestingly enough, they support FireFox as well as IE…
http://academic.live.com

Zotero

The digital history crew at George Mason University have released a free Firefox extension that makes it easy to collect, cite, tag, and annotate web-based resources from within the browser. It’s kind of a “RefWorks meets iTunes” and keeps the information locally so you can access it when you’re offline. The interesting part is that they will soon have a way to save these on the Del.icio.us online bookmarking site so the collected knowledge can shared and searched. They also plan to host their own server, so documents, images, and other media can be shared.
www.zotero.org

Riverdeep buys Houghton Mifflan

Irish Edutainment software publisher Riverdeep (Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego, Destination Success math and science) bought text book publisher Houghton Mifflan for $1.8B. This is a man bites dog scenario, as most people assumed textbook publishers would scoop up game makers, not the other way around.

---

+ Audio & Book of the Week

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville talks about information architecture and what he calls ambient findability- “the capacity to find anything or anyone from any where at any time.” His book by the same name is short, very readable, and offers a good overview of the state of “search.” 47 minutes, recorded at the Emerging Technology conference in 2006

www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1154.html (talk)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007655/stagetoolscom (book)


Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill