The Open University announced today a £5.65 million (US $9.9 million) Open Content Initiative (OCI) to make a selection of its learning materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world. KMi's OCI team has played a key role in shaping this, and will be integrating its collaboration, presence and knowledge mapping…
This week La Sorbonne, Université de Paris IV hosted the International Workshop on Annotation for Collaboration, sponsored by CNRS, the French National Research Council. KMi's Simon Buckingham Shum presented his research to the gathering which brought together researchers from across Europe. The presentation outlined the use of lightweight discourse semantics to add a new dimension…
The International Labour Organization (ILO) is the UN specialized agency which seeks the promotion of social justice and internationally recognized human and labour rights. KMi's Simon Buckingham Shum has been working with the ILO's HIV/AIDS Education in the Workplace programme as they develop their knowledge management capacity. With HIV/AIDS decimating workforces in many regions around…
KMi is in Utah this week, contributing to the primary international gathering of educators and researchers, debating the future of the Open Content movement. Open Content is the educational analogy to the Open Source software movement, with the mission to make top quality learning material freely available to any student or educator, in a form…
KMI, the technology lead partner in the international not-for-profit Compendium Institute, is delighted to announce that v1.4 of the Hypermedia Knowledge Mapping tool is now released. The major advance is the integrated Apache Derby database enabling single click installation. This will be default database for new users, who will no longer need to manually configure…
The primary journal in the field of Hypertext and Hypermedia research, “New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia”, has published a special bi-annual issue on the theme of “Scholarly Hypermedia”. Edited by KMi's Simon Buckingham Shum, this issue focuses on how early visions and technologies since WWII for linking and structuring information have transformed scientific and…
An exciting new experiment in computer-supported argumentation launched today as the GlobalArgument.net website was published, and the controversial Iraq Debate begins to be mapped. Conceived by KMi's Simon Buckingham Shum, and co-led with former Australian Cabinet Minister Peter Baldwin, GlobalArgument.net operates around the concept of Argumentation Experiments, in which 'Players' focus on a topic for…
On Fri 25th Feb, 2005, Simon Buckingham Shum ran 3 hands-on, interactive sessions with 90 Year 5 pupils (9+10 yr olds) at Bushfield Middle School, Wolverton, Milton Keynes, introducing them to the joint work he's been doing with the Mobile Agents Project at NASA (as part of the e-Science CoAKTinG Project). Pupils were shown videos…
On 11 Feb Simon Buckingham Shum (KMi) and Wendy Stainton Rogers (OU Research School) hosted a Joint Workshop between The UK GRAD Programme and The Open University. This broke new ground in the integration of KMi's social software and knowledge mapping technologies, with both physical and virtual attendees participating, virtual presence being provided by Peter…
The GRID is the emerging next generation infrastructure for researchers. The AccessGrid is the GRIDs video conferencing and collaboration environment. Recognising the success of the CoAKTinG e-Science project, specifically the work with NASA on e-science tools for Earth-Mars scientific collaboration, JISC has funded KMi with a 21 month follow-on project under their Virtual Research Environments…
