Stephen wrote an article: Whither the Semantic Web. We agree so much that you’d think I steal my good ideas from him (I do).

Semantic Web researchers need to realize that the Semantic Web is happening now. But it isn’t happening where they think. My blog, my entire web site, is described using simple, accessible XML in a RSS format and useful software access it now. Millions of people do the same, either because they are technically capable or by using existing some of the great software out there, much of it free.

On the other hand, the W3C is in a sea of insanity with specifications adopted merely for their political merits, certainly not because they’ve proven themselves to be useful. Don’t get me wrong: some of XPath and XSLT is truly useful. DTDs are useful. But then, things like OWL? Please! I’ve seen no demonstration that such sophisticated specs are actually usable in the real world. Yes, people are lazy and stupid: take it into account when designing new technology.

I think that a lot of this insanity is motivated by researcher’s need for difficult and complex problems to justify their existence. After all, if Joe in his tavern can understand your problem and your solution, it can’t be very serious research.

Let complexity be thy guide.

The following page points to some research on the impact of latency on gamers and, in particular, on recent research involving Unreal Tournament:The Effects of Loss and Latency on User Performance in Unreal Tournament 2003.

I think this is an absolutely great way to attract students: do research on gaming technology. In fact, I once proposed to NRC that I could do some research on Web porn technology, but my boss (Bruce Spencer) seemed reluctant for some reason to invest government dollars in the porn industry.

I still haven’t given up on using porn technology as a research topic though. However, I think that just like gaming, you’d need to work extra-hard just to justify your research topic.

Which is not to say that my research is not on cool topics. I think that inDiscover is quite cool. I also have other things coming that may appear as sexy to some people (but no porn research as of yet).

Just like art, I think that research should be thought provoking.

Here’s an interesting post by viral-learning about Learning Object reuse. One of the defining factor for Learning Objects ought to be reusability, you’d think. However, Downes once correctly pointed out to me that reusability is not really a defining factor… indeed, can you point out to a non-reusable learning object?

It remains an interesting topic. One of the pretensions of object-oriented programming is object reuse. You see it in textbooks. Supposedly, people would continuously reuse code because code is embedded in objets. In practice, it is a claim I haven’t seen come true. It hasn’t proven to be a powerful paradigm in my experience. Objects are useful modeling tool, but they are no magical bullet and they don’t clearly make reuse easier. Not in my experience.

What works? APIs. Coherence sets of function calls you can use in many of your projects.

What would be the equivalent in the Learning Object setting? The closest thing I could think of is a textbook. Are textbooks dead? I don’t think… they may simply no longer be printed in the near future…

Here’s a cool project: OpenTextBook. When I was at Acadia, we often wondered why students had to pay CAN$80 for a Calculus textbook when it was obvious that all such textbooks are the same, they have to be, and all of the content has been known for quite some time.

What are we paying publisher for, exactly? We could never quite figure out, but because, neither the university nor the professor ends up paying the bill, we keep asking students to buy expensive textbooks for no good reason.

To be fair, professors are not evil. Not all of them. Many wondered whether we could write a free calculus textbooks ourselves. I think there are some free textbooks but who would dare trusting them? I would trust a textbook that the community can peer review though. If people find mistakes, they can come in and correct the mistakes. It would not converge into a free, perfect textbooks, but it might end up producing an acceptable textbook, for sure.

I co-wrote this really cool document on Series. It is free! You can have the LaTeX source if you ask or are clever enough to navigate my hidden Web.

One day soon, I’ll co-wrote an open textbook. I should make a note of it.

Onde anda su? picked up on some of my recent commentaries and wrote a small post on them. I will assume it is in Portuguese, though my Spanish is so bad that it might as well be in Spanish… I can read it only because I speak French and latin languages are all fairly similar.

The interesting matter here is that I chose to write in English. There are people who choose to have a bilingual blog. People like Seb and I write in English. Yet, all these people live in French.

Is English the blog language? The answer, of course, is that you can write in whatever language you want. Nobody will care. Except that I doubt many people would read me in Brezil if I wrote in French. I’d have a slightly larger readership in Québec and in France, but I would lose out everywhere else.

It is not always the case that English is the best language on the Internet. For example, in my posting boards, I have some very active French posting boards. Because I setup these posting boards with the motivation that all these questions addressed to me could find a better home on a posting board, and because many of these questions where in French, it made sense to have French posting boards. These days, I write all my scientific papers in English. I’ve even heard that among UQAM faculty memebrs, it was frowned upon to write your papers in French. The pattern is somewhat clear: the higher level your work, the more beneficial it is to have in English. One should be careful though: my French home page has as many hits as my English home page. I also suspect that for e-Learning to fullfill its promise, we will need to accomodate a very wide range of cultures and languages.

So, why am I blogging in English? I guess maybe Seb would have the same intuition on this one: because blogging is part of my scientific research and that’s squarely in English, for convience.