2002/03/20: Building the first working prototype of B-OLE

Where is Michael Jordan?

The Self-Organizing Web: "The Michael Jordan he was looking for is a computer scientist; when Flake tried to track him down, he was hard to find. Eventually, by typing in parts of Jordan's bio--his title, published papers--he found Jordan's home page. It got Flake thinking: 'Wouldn't it be nice to bias my search to science, not the [entire] Web?'

Well, I had no problem finding Michael I. Jordan since his office was next door to mine when I was working in the Statistics Dept at Berkeley.

Just in case you didn't know

What I write here in this blog are not necessarily the official opinions or positions of my employer, the University of California, Berkeley. I would think that this fact would be very clear from the context of my blog. But just in case it isn't, I've decided to cobble together a disclaimer based on the Interim E-Berkeley Policy. Here's mine (which you see on the bottom of all the pages on my blog now): "The opinions or statements expressed herein should not be taken as a position or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley. Links on these pages to commercial sites do not represent endorsement by the University of California or its affiliates."

This disclaimer is based on two sections: One on Personal websites, which includes the following sentence: "Personal sites shall not give the impression that they are representing, giving opinions, or otherwise making statements on behalf of the University or any unit of the University unless appropriately authorized (explicitly or implicitly) to do so. Where appropriate, an explicit disclaimer shall be included unless it is clear from the context that the author is not representing the University. An appropriate disclaimer is:..." The second is Use of the University name and seal, which states: "When an electronic communication might give the impression that the author's endorsement represents an endorsement by the University, the communication must include an explicit disclaimer."

I don't think that my site either gives the impression that I am speaking for the University or that my commercial endorsements represent the voice of the University...but it can helpful to be explicit in this regard.)

Also, in case you are wondering why I place the disclaimer at this point in my blog writing and why I am drawing attention to my disclaimer. I suppose that it is an attempt to make explicit what I assume to be clear but what I have remember might be quite unclear to the rest of the world. I see a weblog and assume that it's obviously in the personal voice -- and therefore does not speak for the institution. Especially at a university that prides itself on free speech and open debate. Now if I saw my blog under a corporate domain, I'd be very, very surprised since I expect a much tightly controlled voice from the institution. I need to remember that a lot of people when coming upon a university-based blog will still think of it as an official opinion of the university....Maybe a disclaimer would help.

Versioning in Manila

It's nice to hear again from David Davies, who has been looking into implementing versioning in Manila. I think that being able to roll changes back in Manila would be extremely helpful. Indeed, being able to undo changes is one of the great things of such systems as Zope.

David also pointed me to Peter Baumgartner's ICT and Schooling site.

The next round of B-OLE development

I've been spending a lot of time pondering the mysteries of specifications interoperability between educational technology software and those of the libraries. I still have much work to do to sort the issues out.

I also want to be working on setting up a prototype of B-OLE with some baseline functionality. What that baseline functionality is and how to practically implement these features is what I want to spend some significant time thinking about for the rest of the week.

Your Comments?

Feb Apr

The opinions or statements expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement by the University of California, Berkeley. Nor should the opinions or statements expressed herein be taken as a position of or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley. Links on these pages to commercial sites do not represent endorsement by the University of California or its affiliates.