http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

for the “formal” taxonomy, have you ever tried? any open source solution for creating such dynamic trees from RDF?

Very interested to learn where they go this. Dspace has a lot going for it in facilitating the conventional institutional/library/archive concerns; its lack (and to be fair, the lack of ALL repositories) has always been in how it facilitates the USERS’ concerns around sharing and reuse.

Cheers, Scott

Doug, the tension you describe is also very much on our minds. The notion of defining the engagement is important, though as you note it’s vital not to squash potential emergent uses that are unanticipated.

Erik – MACE looks beautiful, and groovy. I will study it closer, and I will be in touch for some follow-up. Thanks!

Mike – If you think that board is scary to you… Using some third-party tools for enhanced social functions (not to mention data portability and enhanced reuse) is not something we have talked about enough. I appreciate the prompt. And I will suggest looking at the Ning code. If nothing else, it might allow for some rapid prototyping and getting some working models up for feedback. As for the “gotta give to get”, I’ve had similar thoughts… and wondered too if it was nuts. My instinct is that the difference between learning resources and groovy music is too great. Having said that, we have to study what works on the web and these sites work very, very well. I applaud you thinking so creatively.

Paul – you rule, those examples are being looked at and digested. Now, I definitely gotta buy you a beer when I get back to Van Rock City.

I think that’s a great question you pose. You might want to check out the work that Mark Leggott and his team have done at UPEI with Fedora Commons, a back-end repository application that they’ve got feeding into a Drupal module. Nothing social to speak of at the moment, but they have made their module publicly available. This at least demonstrates that you don’t necessarily need to be tied to a repository interface (although in this case, Fedora doesn’t have an interface to interact with). This relates to DSpace because, as Mark mentioned in his blog, they are in the process of discussing possible collaborations (and integration?) with the Fedora team. On that agenda includes things like a personal web-based service for end users and lightweight application integration. Hope that helps.

pj

If you are not faint of heart, you can get Ning source and hack that in. Community structure in Ning is really good, and there’s a photo app in there that should be able to be modified for something like this if you want to get in the source code.

But once again, not sure if I completely get what you are asking. And that board scares me.

On last note on illegal sharing — I’ve been thinking of this re: illegal torrent sites. Because they suffer from a leech problem there’s some interesting stuff that goes on on them that I find fascinating. One key — having both predictable and unpredictable awards for good behavior (e.g. sharing). Another — Points, that allow those that have shared (or annotated or whatever) to buy access to certain high-load features like power searching. And then, sporadic “wild weeks” or times when all the rules are off — or all the benefits are doubled or tripled, etc.

So in the case of note sharing, a system might work like this — everybody gets access to x free notes to start. But at some point you have to contribute to get more, either through providing notes, or annotations, or ratings, or reviews. To fill gaps, specials are announced — triple points this week for uploading any chemistry notes. Custom title to person uploading most blackboard captures, etc.

I know it sounds nuts, but it seems to work on these torrent sites. Of course, people tend to like music and ebooks more than edumacation, so who knows. But it’s certainly worth a look at sites like waffles.fm and other sites which have gotten sharing up to formerly unseen levels, and really dealt effectively with the free rider problem.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/procsilas/3044716385/

two worlds are crossing here…

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=70176&l=f61cd&id=786289873

“Rules of engagement” especially in terms of tagging, or “meta-tagging” may help with the delineation of content along lines that make sense to users, and provide for the evolution of the content, as well as the exercise of tagging itself. The secret comes in providing direction without being so prescriptive that one undercuts creativity in the use (and tagging) of resources.