Google Apps Towards a Complete Web Office Suite

With the acquisition of Tonic Systems, "a technology for presentation creation and document conversion" in April, and newly Zenter, "a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations", Google is adding presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to its Apps family towards a complete web office suite.

Security in Windows/Mac/Linux

In a recent report, Jeff Jones, Security Strategy Director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, compared Windows Vista with Windows XP, several Linux distributions and Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger). The report can be downloaded here. Actually I´m not sure if it´s true that Windows Vista is more secure than a Mac or Linux platform!

My PLE/PKM

My Personal Learning Environment...My Personal Knowledge Management System...

Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning and Development

Stephen Downes on Web 2.0 and personal learning; a presentation video with some nice photos from his recent trip to Taiwan.

PhD Project

My PhD project is "Social Media for Knowledge Management and Technology Enhanced Leaning".

Overview:

Learning and knowledge management have become essentially two sides of the same coin as the two fields are increasingly similar in terms of input, outcome, processes, activities, components, tools, concepts, and terminologies. Apparently, previous models of learning and knowledge management have failed to address the problem of learner and knowledge worker performance. In the past few years, Web 2.0 concepts have been opening new doors for more personal, dynamic, and social learning. And, social media, also called social software, has emerged as the leading edge of Web 2.0 and has become a crucial means to connect people not only to information repositories but also to other people, in order to share knowledge and create new forms of social networks and communities.

The goal of this PhD research is to achieve a new vision of blended learning defined by the convergence of learning, knowledge management, and Web 2.0 concepts into one integrated solution toward a new model of network learning through active participation in different communities. The main results of this PhD will be the design, implementation, and evaluation of a framework for social media supported learning (SMSL) and social media supported work (SMSW).

The main research questions can be formulated as the following:

1. How learning and knowledge management can be viewed as two sides of the same coin?
2. Why previous models of learning and knowledge management have failed to address the problem of learner and knowledge worker performance?
3. What are the factors needed for the success of future learning and knowledge management models?
4. How Web 2.0 concepts and social media technologies can leverage learning, support the building and maintaining of knowledge ecologies, and enhance individual performance?
5. Why a social media driven approach to learning and knowledge management can succeed whereas previous models have failed?

Here is 1 page description of my PhD project as pdf.

Your valuable suggestions and comments are welcome!