Lecturers & students: actors on a market

By Harry Smals on 7 November 2010

Most students are eager to learn. A school is a good place for that, because there are many lecturers who are eager to teach. Sounds like an ideal situation of actors who offer (lecturers) and demand (students) information, knowledge, experience and competences. But it isn’t.

tagged with: information market, competence, sending and receiving, blended learning

Hyves and de Telegraaf

By Rogier Brussee on 3 November 2010

De Telegraaf Media Group (TMG) has bought the Dutch Social media website Hyves for an undisclosed figure, rumoured to be 40 million euros .  The Telegraafs interest in the site must be relatively recent however!

tagged with: telegraaf, social media, crossmedia, hyves

“Eschew obfuscation”

By Dick Swart on 31 October 2010

It is not often that I read something that enlightens me in a way that I feel that a much deeper truth has opened up to me. I read an essay that I can recommend to everybody. Its in the Cloud so you won’t have any problems finding it. Let me quote a few paragraphs. They speak for them selves:

Creative or not? That’s the question.

By Niniane Veldhoen on 27 October 2010

At every marketing event for at least the past 5 years you hear marketers telling you to use social networks in you marketing campaigns. This because you have to join the conversation, hear what everyone has to say about you, create your free fan base and most important: let your fans promote your brand for you! But they never tell you how to do that..

tagged with: pink ribbon, ikea, facebook, social media, Marketing

PhD research proposal; social media a marketplace for esteem?

By Erik Hekman on 15 October 2010

More people than ever before interact with each other. Numerous individuals connect with friends, family and even strangers on Facebook, share their thoughts, activities and experiences on Twitter and publish, comment and rate video clips on YouTube. The latter examples depict only a small array of the social activities in which users partake using social media services. Human activities on the Internet, made possible by these social media services, continue to grow. It is not a complete surprise that companies, politicians, scholars and the popular press display a deep interest towards these social media services that facilitate human activity.

tagged with: social media, research

Library 2.0

By Michiel Rovers on 10 October 2010

When I was younger than I am today I went to the library many times. The main reason I came to the library was to search for summaries of the books we had to read for our exam. But it was also a place where it was nice and quiet, where you could smell the books and where you could escape the turbulent life of school. Strange enough these visits stopped after I was graduated. All the literature I needed could be found in the library at my university, and therefore it wasn’t necessary to go to the public library anymore.

tagged with: digital information, library, young people

Media: emotion or reason?

By Yvonne Buma on 4 October 2010

So what do you write about on the Monday after super Saturday and before lightning Tuesday? Or is it not a day in between , but also a day of significance? Judging Monday? But who is judging whom?

tagged with: media event

TIR/DEXA 2010, Bilbao and the Guggenheim museum

By Rogier Brussee on 2 October 2010

At the end of August I spend a week in Bilbao, sponsored by the MyMedia project in which I worked when I was still at my old employer Novay, thanks to Christian Wartena, my co-author and driving force behind the papers I presented. You can skip down if you just want to read about Bilbao and the Guggenheim, but I was there for the TIR 2010 workshop on text based information retrieval. The workshop was part of DEXA2010, itself part of a group of related conferences (DAWAK/ EC-web/ TrustBus/Globe/EGOVIS/ITBAM…) going on simultaneously and held at the Deusto University Bilbao. In practice, this just meant that that there were many different simultaneous tracks to choose from. Some of the most interesting talks were in fact in tracks of conferences going to as a whole. The general theme is databases, expert systems, data management, E-commerce and data manipulation but it has branched out considerably to the point where recommender systems, semantic web, bio informatics and Grid/Cloud computing have become important subjects. 

tagged with: wilders, ec-web2010, dexa2010, tir2010, automatic text analysis, information retrieval, guggenheim, bilbao, conference

SCI: The death of Social Media

By Harry van Vliet on 28 September 2010

Now one of the biggest mainstream entertainment companies of the world (Endemol) has encapsulated social media in its new television format ZOOM, we can finally say social media has arrived big time. In this television format five ‘subjects’ are followed in their daily routines, 24/7, with the possibility of the audience to constantly peak into their lives, much like Big Brother, the breakthrough television format of …Endemol. Endemol ensures that it deviates from the Big Brother formula, for one thing: there is no voting involved. Instead ‘the’ social media are constantly monitored and the ‘buzz’ about the different contestants is harvested and aggregated into a so-called SCI: Social Communication Index. As soon as one of the contestants’ SCI-score drops below a certain threshold he or she is eliminated (from the show that is).

tagged with: endemol, social media, television

Who owns information?

By Harry Smals on 20 September 2010

Why is it that I like to download from YouTube? Since I have put RealPlayer on my computer it offers me to “Download This Video” every time I watch a video on YouTube or any other website.

tagged with: realplayer, future of teaching, blended learning