NY Times story on mapping..

..please share with teams working with mapping features:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/technology/27maps.html?th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1185674824-rIy86jXTlN/ic+UuZPFgHQ

nifty tools for our work

Here's an interesting article from ZDNet about some mashup tools that might be just what some of us are looking for to help online collaboration in this process. My husband stumbled across this on one of his listserves and passed it along, thinking we might find this useful. I am posting it here at Kim's suggestion ...
Here's a little snippet from the piece by Dion Hinchcliffe:

A bumper crop of new mashup platforms

... I’ve been been tracking many of these new or evolving mashup platforms and thought I’d compile my take of the leading players in the mashup space today, particularly given the number of new or significantly upgraded products in the last few months. To make the cut, all the products listed below had to allow live integration of functionality or content (data) over a network, provide an easy-to-use development model that is theoretically accessible by end-users, be available in at least beta form, and either consume and/or produce Web-based applications and services. Using this refined selection model, you’ll see this list looks a bit different from last year’s round-up of mashup platforms. Yet despite the removal of a few products, the list is bigger than ever with 17 products currently available that offer credible mashup assembly capabilities today...

A list of collaborative tools

from the folks at Mashable (a social networking blog)
http://mashable.com/2007/07/22/online-collaboration/
Might be some tools the groups can use now - or after the August meeting when we're down to 3 groups;projects

they have a list today of mapping tools. earlier this summer there were lists of wordpress add ons, blogger tools, tools for online photo and video editing, and wiki tools.

Worth a look...Kim

Faculty Webinar check-in on Tuesday

Looks like Tuesday, July 24 at noon (eastern) works for the majority. I will contact Brandy to set up a Webinar call, and you will hear from her directly as to the phone number/access code.

Talk to you then!

Faculty conference call (pre-Ithaca) requested

Following today's Webinar conversation with Dianne and several faculty members, it seems important that we (the faculty mentors) have another Webinar call together before our return to Ithaca on August 2. (Dianne said she would be hugely grateful for our input on two items.)

1) Are there students who have not been participating adequately in the process and should be disinvited at this point in time? If so, does it make sense to ask them not to come to the August meeting? It was agreed that the project's performance measures were adequately and clearly explained in Dianne's e-mail letter to all students in June.

2) How much time at the beginning of the Ithaca meeting should be given to the students to tweak ideas/finalize presentations? Should they be asked to present upon arrival or have an evening or 24 hours to reconnect (particularly mixed teams) and practice? A good chunk of the Ithaca meeting will be spent synthesizing ideas to three and defining teams/roles for phase two of the project.

Dianne will send another communication to students within the next day or so re: her conversations with folks at the ONA and key news executives (interesting developments!)..as a kind of positive motivator/reminder about the importance/seriousness of this project, with the potential for their ideas to redefine online news for the industry. (That'll put the fear of God into 'em!)

How about a Webinar call next week, Tuesday, July 24 at 5 p.m. Eastern? Or Friday, July 27 at 12 noon Eastern? Other suggestions?

August Presentation Template?

greetings everyone:

would we like to consider devising a template for the final presentations in august? when i've been a judge for advertising campaign competitions in the past, the students have had a plug-and-play format including elements like objective, history, intended audience, sample implementations of print/radio/video/etc. (which would translate easily to our prototypes here).

a consistent outline across teams seems to force researched and reflective content while reducing fluff, consequently improving the clarity of the final best ideas.

just a thought that may be discussed here or during our conference call...

cheers.

Team Awesome plus one

An update: We have adopted Steve Patterson from team 2. He attended tonights Skype session and is interested in Team Awesome's idea.

Comments feed is active!

The comments feed is now active. If you note the top of the sidebar, you now have a choice of subscribing to the "posts" feed or the "comments" feed. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't allow you to integrate them into one feed and I don't want to mess around with feedburner, so...I suggest you all subscribe to both feeds. This will keep you up to speed on all things going on with this blog.

Thanks to Sam for graciously opening up the guts of the blog to me so I could get this up and running.

Team Voltron update

My group has had difficulty making a decision (on a single idea) via consensus. No contentiousness among members, just challenges in agreeing on a direction. So, we are in the process of voting on our blog (a weighted system, where their #1 choice gets 3 votes; #2 idea gets two votes; and #3 gets one vote). We should have our sole idea posted by tomorrow morning at the latest.

Another bit of news: Tyler Machado (St. Mike's), of Team 2, will be joining Team Voltron beginning today through our return to Ithaca (when teams will be reconfigured). Apparently Kim's Team 2 has lost four of the five students through lack of participation on their parts. Kim has asked us to "adopt" Tyler for now, so he can have some experience of creation netting with other folks. Tyler also showed an interest in some of the ideas Team Voltron was working on. I conferred with my team members and they are happy to have him on-board. Not sure what happens to Team 2's ideas? Any suggestions, Kim?

future research

in our june ithaca meeting, we talked about future research ideas surrounding this project, one of which was kim's proposal of conducting a thematic analysis on the chat transcripts.

after our conference call last week, it occurred to me that we may not have all the data we might need to succeed at something like this if some groups are using phone interfaces and others are meeting in person (and probably not recording/transcribing those conversations).

my interpretation may not be accurate on this, but i thought i'd mention it in case we wanted to make sure we had such data from here on out.

happy monday.

monday presentation

greetings.

i wasn't sure how detailed we wanted our team presentations to be tomorrow, so here's what i suggested to my students:

state project description
state project objective
outline project (key phrases/bullets fine at this phase)
state project benefits.

let me know if this is fine, too vague, or too comprehensive for what we'd like to see tomorrow.
thanks and happy monday.

feedback weekend

just an update that i've urged my team to offer feedback for other team ideas as immediately as possible. at this point, our feedback flow is weak. my students are still shuffling through ideas and seem to be hitting walls when it comes to conjuring a truly innovative idea that holds the potential to revamp journalism technologically while maintaining traditional ideals. may the epiphanies soon flow...
cheers.

Raising the red flag on feedback (or lack thereof)

So, I've scanned all seven team blogs and there are at most five comments for Sam's team's ideas (out of a possible 30-ish per blog). My Team Voltron's ideas have received only a single feedback response. My students were hesitant to narrow from three ideas to one tonight on our Skype check-in because of the lack of feedback. (The solitary response was actually quite helpful to them in furthering development of an idea.)

Charlotte-Anne, you asked me to "raise the red flag" on Thursday if there was limited feedback, and I am doing so tonight! Somehow, we need to light a fire under the masses to get them commenting on each other's ideas before Sunday.

Are the top ideas easily identifiable on the blogs? Some are, and some are not, in my students' opinions. My team will be revamping its presentation of "Top 3 Ideas" tomorrow morning to (hopefully) make it clearer where to comment. This is our last chance to press them for inter-team feedback before Ithaca in three weeks. Good luck!

Faculty chat summary

Thought I'd list my take on what we talked about. Please make additions/corrections.

1. Individual students will go to the other teams blogs, read their ideas and post comments. These comments are due by July 6th. However, some students have been told July 9th and may be posting over the weekend. Participation is mandatory and noted.

2. Faculty should remind students who have written comments in email to copy and post them to the specific ideas on the team blogs.

3. On July 9th, each team will post on their own blog, a description of the one idea that they will develop.

4. The individual teams will present their idea to the group at the Ithaca meeting in August.

5. The issue of "mixed groups" will be discussed and considered again in phase two of the project. Add faculty mentor?

6. Faculty should be posting and commenting in the faculty blog.

7. Faculty should be editing the project plan located in Google Docs.

8. Team meetings have been taking place by face to face, chats(AIM) and phone (Skype). What works best? What is the procedure for recording the Skype conversations? (Hijack?)

9. How best to practice and present group presentations? (web/conference call?)