Mark Greenfield

In the spirit of the holidays I’d like to share the story of the newest member of my family. (please note that this long post is slightly off-topic.)

In February 2007, the Humane Society and local authorities raided a farm in rural Tennessee and found over 100 dogs living in horrible conditions in a barn. The dogs were in very poor health and many didn’t survive. One particular dog named Wolfbane was found outside tied to a tree. Although there are no records, he appeared to be part German Shepherd and part Siberian Husky. Given his appearance and behavior, there was also the distinct possibility he was part wolf.

He was taken in by the local German Shepherd rescue organization and spent the next four weeks there. A search began for another rescue organization that could take him. He was sent to Buffalo, New York on March 19 to his new foster home, part of the Brightstar German Shepherd Rescue organization based in Rochester, New York. His foster family in Buffalo renamed him Rafe, which is an old German name meaning “wise wolf”.

Upon arrival in Buffalo, he was taken to the vet where they found two serious medical problems. The first was a bad case of heartworm. He was treated in the hospital for two days and spent the next several weeks recovering. His weight dropped to 65 pounds (he should weigh around 95). The second problem was x-rays revealed that he had been shot. There was a .22 caliber bullet lodged in the base of his back. The doctors decided that it was too dangerous to remove and that he would be better off with leaving it in place. I adopted him on May 2. He is fully recovered from the heartworm and is now living the good life in upstate New York.

Rafe is definitely a Web 2.0 dog. He’s recently become a member of dogster.com and the aspca social networks. The husky in him makes Rafe the consummate escape artist. Since I prefer not to spend my days chasing him across the Western New York countryside, his next birthday present will be something right out of everyware. Dogtracs uses the latest GPS and wireless technology to notify you via text message if your dog leaves his “geofence”.

I will be taking a brief hiatus to enjoy the holiday with family and friends. Happy holidays and best wishes for the coming year.

Another great video from Michael Wesch at Kansas State. Based on the work of David Weinberger in his book Everything is Miscellaneous - the power of the new digital disorder.

E-mail has been hijacked by the forces of evil. Spam and misuse have caused many people to declare e-mail bankruptcy, something that I may do in the near future. And now the millennial generation is here and they prefer to communicate through IM, text messaging and the communication tools built into social networks making e-mail almost irrelevant to students today. I know there is a problem when e-mail sent from the president at my university is automatically sent to my junk e-mail folder - by filters set up by the university.

While I’m not advocating that everyone stop using e-mail, I would recommend exploring other communications channels, especially those of you who work directly with students. The good news is that there are now numerous alternatives that can augment and even replace e-mail.

Further Reading

• Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
• Report: Spam Accounts for 90-95% of All Email
• E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’
• The death of e-mail
• Email is broken
• E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform
• Web Trend #6 - Syndication and the End of the Web Page Paradigm

Conceptually, most people think of the web as a collection of sites with each site containing individual pages. The page is the atom of the web, the smallest unit of the web. Sites and pages are connected by creating hyperlinks between pages. This basic paradigm has been evolving over the past few years.

Syndication - sharing content across multiple web sites - has been around for a long time. It offers many benefits including:

• Improved efficiency because content is only being produced once
• Better version control because all sites are updated simultaneously
• Mitigate the risk of inaccurate content

RSS has made syndication simple. It provides an easy way to share content and this sharing is not done at the page level, but at an even smaller level. Related sites can now be connected through syndicated RSS feeds rather than links.

RSS has enabled the growth of the read/write web. For content creators, it provides a simple standard to free your content. For content consumers, it provides an easy way to keep up with dynamic content.

A new paradigm is required that moves beyond the page. Web analytics can no longer rely on the “page view” as a basic web metric. Assistive technology needs to adapt to AJAX and other technologies that break the page paradigm. Syndication and micro-content is the future. In the words of Adam Green -

“Web content is external rather than internal. Instead of a website being a “place” where data “is” and other sites “link to”, a site is a source of data to be remixed collectively both internal and external to a given “site””.

Related Links

• Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content (by Joshua Porter - from Digital Web Magazine)
• Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content
• Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore?
• The Copyright Debate & RSS

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform

For many, the concept of web as platform really defines what Web 2.0 is all about. Today we now expect instant access to all of our digital information no matter where we are and what device we are using. We increasingly want to share it with others and combine it with other data in interesting ways.

We are seeing the death of the desktop. Digital information will be moving online, not locked away on some remote hard drive or server. In the near future I see myself using Zoho instead of Microsoft Office for much of my work.

The web as the platform has numerous benefits over the desktop application paradigm including:

• Central storage of data
• Easy sharing and collaboration
• Hardware and OS agnostic

I have been reinvigorated in this new world of API’s, mash ups, widgets and Office 2.0.

Further Reading

• What is Web 2.0
• The Death of the DeskTop
• From Web Page to Web Platform
• The Web is the Platform
• The State of Office 2.0 and its Future

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality

In Jason Frand’s article “The Information Age Mindset“, one of his 10 attributes is “Reality is No Longer Real.” Spend time with any teenager and you will be amazed with the amount of time they spend in virtual worlds playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games ((MMORPG). A generation who grew up with World of Warcraft are now college students and there is tremendous opportunity to engage these students in virtual worlds.

My experience has been that virtual reality is the most difficult emerging technology for college administrators to understand. Second Life has received a lot of publicity in the last year, both good and bad. While many see the value of creating online virtual tours and conducting classes, especially distance learning classes, in Second Life, they are concerned about development costs and the dark side of this environment (crime, sex, etc.). I’m hoping for the day when an open source MMORPG platform specifically targeted at higher education comes along.

Further Reading

• Education Meets Virtual Reality
• The Ultimate Distance Learning - New York Times
• Digital Life vs Life Digital: Our Inevitable Digital Future
• Teachers, college students lead a Second Life - USATODAY.com
• Educators Are Split About the Viability of Second Life - Chronicle.com