mpasiewicz's blog

Over the last couple of years, I've filled my commute with lots of great information from a range of podcasts often tailored to my own personal interests ... that is until recently ... when my list of feeds somehow got corrupted (or otherwise disappeared). As a result, I've rediscovered public radio and have been tuning into my local station. One of these days I want to spend some time thinking about the pros and cons of my consumption habits, but for now, I thought I'd pass along a little gem that I recently discovered.

Colorado Public Radio's Ryan Waner recently sat down with University of Colorado at Boulder professor Diane Sieber to talk about how's she's working with students to manage digital distractions. In their interview, Dr. Sieber shared some thoughts on the results of an informal study about students who were "virtually absent" during one of her classes. Interestingly she established a feedback loop aimed at developing self-awareness about managing attention and the negative effects of being digitally distracted. She also shared some interesting thoughts about establishing social norms that helped students create a climate aimed at policing distractions born of peers using digital devices.

You can listen to the interview here
http://66.162.107.141:8787/comatters/20090324_01.mp3

I've been sitting on this blog entry for a while now as I've other priorities to manage, but this is one of the most interesting interviews that I've heard in quite sometime and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the topic. Frankly, I guess I'm glad this post was delayed, because Google just upgraded my GrandCentral account and I thought this would be a great time to see what it would mean to use Google Voice to collect some comments. Use the widget below, leave me a voice mail, and I'll try to post your comments (and the transcript) as soon as possible. 'Should make for an interesting experiment.

The folks at Opera have created a new search engine, the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA). This tool has produced some interesting stats about the structure of the web and is somewhat akin to the pet project I've been working on ... not just akin to it, but might outright put it to shame. I'd encourage you take a peak at Brain Wilson's early findings ... and I LOVE the following note from his introduction.

What follows is not as informal and witty as a blog nor as dry and formal as a research paper - it lies somewhere in between. Those expecting rigorous academia will forgive the occasional humorous turns of phrase or moments where personal observations and experience intrude - I try to limit it to places where they seem useful or interesting. For blog junkies, this will grow into a long, multi-part saga (hopefully) worthy of a company from Scandinavia.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/

I just ran across an interesting article about Abilene Christian University's iPhone Program. 650 freshmen with GPS devices. Interesting. See also this story about a university requiring GPS support of all students.

I was carousing around the site earlier today and ran across a really fun job posting. Check it out!
http://www.educause.edu/JobOpportunities/UniversityEthicalHackerPenetra/126930

We quitely relaunched a new version of our old Peer Directory Service earlier this year and exteneded it an a variety of different ways. Several weeks ago, we added another new feature ... the ability to browse by events you've attended. If you haven't stumbled across it recently, you might consider giving it a whirl. Just before I started this message, there were almost 3,000 people that opted to make their profile available in the new system. The annual conference is a big event, but hopefully this will prove an interesting way to get a jump start on the face-to-face networking you'll be doing in Orlando. Now, we just need to get more folks tagging themselves! Common now ... aren't there more people interested in open source?

http://www.educause.edu/Community/Browse/People/575

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great, but a regrettably very short podcast about a new book from Hal Abelson and Harry Lewis. Highly recommended, but left me wanting for more.

http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i49/abelson_lewis/

It seems the authors are also operating a blog about topics relevant to the book :)
http://www.bitsbook.com/blog/

No, this article isn't about SMS or cloud computing ... its about text, curiosity and tag clouds. On some level that seems a bit passé ... tag clouds again? Isn't that old news? Yes, sure, but Catherine Howell's recent commentary on my little home page experiment left me wondering what else might be gleaned from more experimentation on tag clouds as a means of visualizing bodies of text (as compared to tags about text). So, once again, I decided to invest some more time on a not so little side project. I'm not sure if its as interesting this time around, but I thought I'd go ahead and share my results (and highlight the process that went into creating them).

The university home page search I created over the weekend was interesting from a number of perspectives, but perhaps one of the most interesting insights to be gleaned from it involves the depth to with Google has entangled itself with higher education's use of the web. Almost 70% of those sites I captured data from mention Google somewhere in the source of their home page. Meanwhile, more than half of them appear to use Google Analytics. Of course, this is just home page data ... a whole range of sub sites exist within the context of a university's web presence and their authorship, governance and oversight are often highly distributed. One might imagine many more touchpoints interspersed throughout the vast spectrum of web pages hosted by a university. I'd love to get empirical data on this (and other use cases) from a broader, deeper sample ... and who knows, maybe I'll find the time.

Building on my work here, I was wondering what it might look like to create a tag cloud from the text of university home pages. Nothing especially interesting to report from it ... just the usual suspects. Nonetheless, I thought I'd go ahead and share it. 'Guess it might be interesting to compare to a future snapshot.

Ever wonder if any other universities are using jquery or or scriptaculous? Ever wanted to get a feel for how many universities mention blogs or podcasts on their home page? Ever wanted easy access the the home pages of 1,831 universities? I've been working on a pet project and wanted to share what I've worked up this far. Take a peak at the links above, carouse around, and let me know what you think.