Knowledge Web 2004 Year End Report

Much of our energy this year was devoted to the post-production and promotion of ReConnections, as well as preparing the content and software, and doing outreach to teachers. Reconnections, the 25th anniversary special designed to introduce the K-Web, is available to public television stations via American Public Television. The program will air nationwide beginning in April (You can view a clip at http://www.kcsm.org/Reconnections/Reconnections.htm). Contact your local station for dates or to request they carry it.  In order to prepare for the launch, we're having a Town Hall strategy planning session Saturday February 26, (note date change) 9-11 am Pacific Time. See below for details.

Team Updates:

Education: Judy Bonne and I conducted another round of Hewlett Foundation supported teacher workshops in Seattle and San Jose, which yielded useful feedback on the betas and ideas on developing lesson plans for K-Web to be used in schools. We are working with UCSC Extension and other educational organizations to involve more teachers, as well as create an online professional development course for teachers who can't come to face-to-face sessions. I also demo'd the K-Web to very enthusiastic teachers at several statewide conferences, universities, as well as Sun's Digital Library and eLearning conference.

Thanks to Brendan Rawson at the Osher Foundation, we conducted a lifelong learning summer class based on Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, a play so full of dense allusions to diverse aspects of cultural history (painting, landscape gardening, mathematics, classical plays) that the K-Web was perfect for its exploration. James participated via videoconference. So successful was the course, in the fall we based another lifelong learning course specifically on K-Web itself, encouraging personal exploration and authoring of content.


Software Development: the team added a second open source beta for testing (touchgraph.org), and we are discussions with other software companies as well (thebrain.com, thinkmap.com). We are currently adding improved search and filtering capabilities, as well as geographical display. A very exciting possibility, demonstrated to James several years ago before it became public, is Sun's Looking Glass, a 3D browser which will enable users to fly into K-Web content, and display that content in various compelling ways. Looking Glass is open source and interested in partnering with K-Web. James met with Sony Playstation research and development and Adobe Atmosphere teams to discuss immersive 3D virtual reality spaces so that user can interact with people and places in the K-Web.  We still have a need for Java, XML and 3D programmers in order to have K-Web ready in time for the ReConnections broadcast. Contact me if you'd like to help.


Content Team: we are nearing completion of the content needed for launch, but there are significant omissions we need to fill soon; also we need folks to edit articles and find public domain images and other media. Contact Becky Barber (rbarber@slis.sjsu.edu).

Administrative Team: these folks applied for government (e.g., National Science Foundation) and well as foundation grants (e.g., SBC, Sun), but it'd be very useful to have more help in researching and applying for grants.

We were lucky enough to have James for several visits this year, and we had very productive team meetings, as well as talks with some of our local advisors, Engelbart, Spohrer, Brown, Rheingold and Lanier. However, we want to find a way to meet more frequently and to involve everyone. Fortunately, Ken Ketch has generously donated advanced collaboration software, GroupMind, which we will use for a Town Hall strategy planning session Saturday February 26 (note date change) 9-11 Pacific Time. We'll have informal and social chat in our Activeworlds virtual reality headquarters http://www.activeworlds.com/edu/ an hour before and following the GroupMind's session. Please let me know if you'd like to participate. Watch for details posted on our news page http://k-web.org/about/news.html.


Although we've made steady progress across the board, a great deal needs to be done to prepare for launch, so don't hesitate to contact me if you have ideas, time, questions or resources.


Thanks for your support and best wishes for what promises to be an exciting year for the K-Web!

Patrick McKercher pmmckerc@ucsc.edu