Today, I attended an excellent talk on Semantic Web by Michel Gagnon from the École Polytechnique. One cool idea Michel has is to create an ontology for Linux documentation so that you can search the documentation for concepts and not just keywords. I’m puzzled how the user interface would look like.

Yesterday, Yuhong flew over from Fredericton to the big city (Montreal). I had a great time chatting with her. Some of our joint work, though still a bit immature, is turning out to be quite exciting. Thanks to Yuhong, I discovered the field of qualitative modelling and I really ought to know about it a long time ago.

Today, I had lunch with Gilles Raîche at UQÀM professors’ restaurant. Yes: it is little known facts that UQÀM professors have a small restaurants to call their own downtown. It was news to me! Gilles works on user modelling problems in education.

From Peter Turney, here are two books to convince you that analogies are an important concept: Metaphors We Live By and Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.

From Jinan, I learned about CSCWD 2005. Looks like an interesting conference on computer-supported collaborative work in design. Call for papers has December’04 as a due date.

It seems like I have been searching for a directory of open access journals for years. Well, I found it at last! There are others, but this one seems to be really good.

Our graduate-level e-Business course, CS6905, at the University of New Brunswick started today. This was announced on Yuhong’s blog some time ago. Yes, I know, I’m in Montreal, but I’m an adjunct professor there and I just can’t seem to get enough of the maritimes. Owen put his slides for today on a page on his web site. I’m still looking for the rest of the slides… Seems like we failed to organize a web site for the course. (Yuhong, are you there?)

Update: I found Yuhong’s web site for the course but no sign of the missing slides.

Second update: the slides can be had through the course outline page. Thanks Yuhong!

Through Downes’, I found this great paper on Exploring the user of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector.

Looks like a great paper:

This paper explores the potential of blogs as learning spaces for students in the higher education sector. It refers to the nascent literature on the subject, explores methods for using blogs for educational purposes in university courses (eg. Harvard Law School), and records the experience of the Brisbane Graduate School of Business at Queensland University of Technology, with its ‘MBA blog’. The paper concludes that blogging has the potential to be a transformational technology for teaching and learning.