However, if you’re going to try and find what you want through the web, make sure that you follow a few rules. Using a large search engine to start your search is a great idea and you should always do this – Google is a great place to start. You should also bear in mind that you’ll need to search locally. This means entering your city or town name with the search term you enter.

If you do this properly, you should end up with a great range of results that are tailored to your needs. Once you’ve done this, you can then start to compare courses and consider which construction courses are suitable for you. There are various different courses available and you’ll need to consider your current skills as well as where you want to get to.

You don’t want to enter an advanced course if you can’t even cement a wall. Make sure that you don’t throw yourself in at the deep end. Take it slowly and you should succeed with whatever it is you want to do. Construction courses are available in almost every city throughout the UK and other countries so make sure that you’re only looking at courses near you – you don’t want to be travelling more than you’re learning!

Most of the time, you should find a good range of options on the web but it’s worth making notes as you browse the web so that you can keep track of your research. Don’t be tempted to sign up for anything until you’re completely sure it’s what you want to do and that it’s something you can do.

Overall, finding construction courses on the web is really easy as long as you do your research. Search the web properly and make sure that you are making notes and you should find what you’re looking for. Just remember that it doesn’t matter what you need – the web will have information to help you.

Author Tia D Sanderson talks about finding construction courses on the web. http://www.buildingskillscentre.co.uk has a huge range of options and information available, you should easily find what you’re looking for.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tia_D_Sanderson

Yahoo is working on their own Web TV. A free to use, “widget” based system where web widgets would line the bottom of your television viewing screen giving some interaction to the user. Widgets do not encompass the full spectrum of Internet reach though and will allow users the “section” of Internet activity that each individual widget offers. Having a defined focus for engaging without the use of a type pad, Yahoo’s choice of widgets should be a click away for the information offered in them. Their will be no “browser” selection or web search capability planned for now, but Yahoo may indeed be the breakthrough company to the highway from the television to the Internet.

The incredible growth on the Internet taking the flip side view (from Internet PC to television access) is, however, quite massive. Sites have sprung into being on this concept alone and other sites have expanded their “text” and photo format to use this technology to feature and highlight a given topic of the site.

Flixster is a social network created for TV and movie lovers alike. Actually a place from your personal PC to watch, rate, and interact with friends while enjoying the shows and films you love. While sites that feature individual television shows have incorporated video for viewing these featured shows directly from the net. Sites like The History Channel, CBN, CNN, or Discovery and SciFi come to mind here for it’s programming efforts viewable online.

Are we choosing to leave the comforts of the living room, with the big screen and recliners for the desk style settings of an office? My guess would be no from the amount of chatter about having to “tough it out” on the PC to catch up on missed television shows or hearing “I wish I could watch the YouTube videos from my big screen”. Trading comfort for convenience is the issue at hand in this scenario.

So, whether the future of TV is on the Internet or the future of the Internet is attainable through your TV is yet to be seen. Watching the reels spin will be an interesting event. Action!

Stephanie is a co-host on 2 Blog Talk Radio shows! Check them out:
http://www.VideoGamesAndGaming.Info
http://www.BlogsAndSocialNetworks.Info
Stephanie is a business owner, wife, mother of two brilliant teenagers, friend, research and beach enthusiast, video gamer, and blogs and social networks buff who enjoys writing, playing video games, keeping up with blogs and social networks, reading, learning, and teaching.
Stephanie Haile aka Wavecritter Google Me

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Stephanie_Haile

General Entry Level Characteristics

General learner entry level characteristics are ones that most learners have in common. These can be gender, age, or education. Learners may have different access points to the course but these are still considered general characteristics because all learners have them.

Specific Entry Level Characteristics

Specific entry level characteristics focus on skills the learner must have prior to taking part in your educational offering. What this means is that students must have prior knowledge, or experience, to optimally participate in what is going to be delivered in the Web-based learning experience. If for example, a web-based course was covering upper level accounting skills, the pre-requisite for the course could be training in developing and understanding spreadsheets.

These specific characteristics can be assessed using some sort of inventory such as a survey. Because you will delivering a Web-based learning experience, it might be best to use an online survey to perform this assessment. The by-product knowledge would be that you will be able to assess how well the potential students navigate and manage the inventory.

Assessing Learning Styles

There has been much research undertaken in regards to the affect of tailoring materials to the learner preferred learning style. A learning style is the participants preferred way of taking in information. For example, they could be visual learners, kinetic learners, or best learn through exploration. With Web-based learning, it’s not always possible to meet the needs of specific learning styles, but ways can be developed to accommodate most styles.

How to Assess Entry Level Characteristics

One of the best ways to determine the entry level characteristics of learners in Web-based learning is to perform an assessment inventory of the learners. This assessment inventory can be done via a computer survey or via paper or even with personal interviews. These inventories should include a battery of questions that take learners through all possible preferences of learning. These assessment inventories should be thorough but not too exhaustive. Learners should be able complete them in ten minutes or less.

It is important to realize and communicate that while learners do have learning style preferences, not all learning styles can be reasonably accommodated. Web-based learning does have its limitations, and it is best to spell these out upfront to avoid any misunderstandings.

Susan Bond is a part of IQ-ity.com – provider of a top-rated Learning Management System for schools seeking to teach courses online. IQity’s LMS includes an online study guide for the Ohio Graduation Test (OGT). Ohio teachers can add a product review of OGT practice tools and help other teachers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Susan_Bond

Now, astronomers have actually detected a “universal web”. Vast filaments of hot gas tracing the web have been “seen”. Astronomers using NASA’s X-ray satellite observatory, Chandra, “viewed” the filaments stretching for millions of light years through space, with one passing through our own galaxy. They calculate that the filaments contain five times more mass than all the stars in the universe!

Invisible Filaments in Space

Astronomers say that the filamentary structures are so hot that it would generally be invisible to optical, infrared, and radio telescopes. These invisible filaments are detected only because higher density ordinary matter tends to accumulate and condense in them – generating radiation which can be measured by scientists to confirm their existence in intergalactic space.

Being invisible, they are by definition components of “dark matter and energy”. Dark matter and energy are invisible matter and energy that make up more than 99% of our universe – according to scientists. Studies show that both ordinary and invisible dark matter work in concert to build filaments in space, with dense junctions where galaxies cluster. The resulting structure looks something like a spider web, dappled with water droplets.

The filaments betray the presence of invisible dark matter because gas at millions of degrees centigrade found within these filaments has a natural tendency to spread. To find it confined into filaments means that a very strong gravitational field must be pulling it into place and only dark matter can do this – according to the scientists.

Invisible Filaments in the Subtle Body

In 1904 metaphysicist Annie Besant reported that “During human antenatal life a single thread weaves a network, a shimmering web of inconceivable fineness and delicate beauty, with minute meshes. Within the meshes of this web the coarser particles of the bodies are built together. During physical life, prana [which is a plasma of charged super particles according to plasma metaphysics] courses along the branches and meshes.” This web interpenetrating the human fetus certainly has features which resemble the cosmic spider web – with currents of charged prana (or qi particles) coursing through its ‘threads’ and denser material accumulating (i.e. “coarser particles”) on it.

It is a well accepted fact in metaphysics that there are filaments within our subtle magma bodies, which have been referred to as “meridians”, “nadis” and “channels” – in the Chinese, Indian and Tibetan literature, respectively. In Taoist and Qigong literature, they are also referred to as “circuits” and “orbits”. For example, Qigong practitioners may speak of microcosmic and macrocosmic orbits. The microcosmic orbit is really the main meridian through which particles are accelerated in the relevant practices to bring energy to the rest of the subtle body.

According to plasma metaphysics, these meridians are magnetic lines of force within the subtle magnetic plasma (or magma) bodies. The currents flowing through them are “Birkeland currents”, i.e. currents in which charged particles flow through magnetic field lines. The large scale structure of the universe, with a web of filaments punctuated with rotating galaxies, undoubtedly bears a strong resemblance to the web of acupuncture meridians or nadis punctuated with rotating chakras (or vortexes) and acupoints that is found in the etheric component of the physical body.

“I envisioned hundreds of little DC [direct current] generators like dark stars sending their electricity along the meridians, an interior galaxy that the Chinese had somehow found and explored by trial and error over two thousand years ago. It was obvious that the acupuncture charts had an objective basis in reality. Our readings indicated that these meridians were conducting current.” – Robert Becker, The Body Electric

The meridian system, chartered by Chinese acupuncture, can be considered the arterial system of what metaphysicists would describe as the “lower physical-etheric body” (which is not separable from the physical-biomolecular body). These meridian pathways are ordinarily invisible to the biological eyes – just like the invisible cosmic filaments. Just like cosmic filaments, these invisible meridians can be detected when they generate radiation.

French researcher Pierre de Vernejoul injected a radioactive substance into the acupoints of patients and measured the radiation using a special camera. He found that the substance migrated along classical Chinese acupuncture meridian pathways. Other injections made by Vernejoul into random points of the body and into veins and lymphatic channels were unable to demonstrate similar results, suggesting that the meridian system is a unique and separate network of pathways in the body. Further experiments showed that terminating a meridian that related to the liver resulted in a rapid degeneration of liver tissue. Without energy supply from the lower physical-etheric body via the meridians; tissues, organs and cells of the physical-biomolecular body do not appear to function properly.

The Universal and Human Physical-Etheric Bodies

The invisible cosmic web of filaments together with the dark matter that shapes them is in fact embedded in the lowest energy physical-etheric body of our universe. When we look out from Earth what we are seeing is the physical-dense universe, shaped by the lower physical-etheric body of the universe. Astronomers say that the invisible filaments in space are detected only because higher density matter tends to accumulate and condense in these filaments. Similarly, the invisible meridians in the subtle body can only be detected because of radiation from other substances that are channeled through them.

Plasma naturally forms filaments in response to electric and magnetic fields within the subtle body (which according to plasma metaphysics is composed of dark matter). Charged particles are guided within these filaments by the magnetic fields and accelerated by the electric fields – generating currents – as observed by Robert Becker.

Just as the lower physical-etheric body of the universe generates a web of filamentary currents (or filaments) that plays an important part in the large scale structure of the universe, the lower physical-etheric body of the human body generates a web of filamentary currents (or meridians) that is instrumental in developing the physical-biomolecular body of a human being. Of course, the Chinese already knew this – they have been exploring these filaments for more than three thousand years!

Jay Alfred is the author of three books on a new field called “plasma metaphysics”. The books include Our Invisible Bodies, Brains and Realities and Between the Moon and Earth. Plasma metaphysics is the application of plasma and dark matter physics to the study of our high energy subtle bodies and their corresponding environments. These bodies include the “bioplasma” bodies and “astral” bodies found in the metaphysical literature. Plasma metaphysics provides an internally consistent framework for the study of these bodies against the backdrop of modern physics. The books are available at Amazon online bookstores.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jay_Alfred

Search engines are tools that allow you to search for information available on the Web using keywords and search terms. Rather than searching the Web itself, however, you are actually searching the engine’s database of files.

Search engines are actually three separate tools in one. The spider is a program that “crawls” through the Web, moving from link to link, looking for new web pages. Once it finds new sites or files, they are added to the search engine’s index. This index is a searchable database of all the information that the spider has found on the Web. Some engines index every word in each document, while others select certain words. The search engine itself is a piece of software that allows users to search the engine’s database. Clearly, an engine’s search is only as good as the index it’s searching.

When you run a query using a search engine, you’re really only searching the engine’s index of what’s on the Web, as opposed to the entire Web. No one search engine is capable of indexing everything on the Web – there’s just too much information out there! Additionally, many spiders cannot or will not enter databases or index files. Consequently, much of the information excluded in search engine queries includes breaking news, documents, multimedia files, images, tables, and other data. Collectively, these types of resources are referred to as the deep or invisible Web. They’re buried deep in the Web and are invisible to search engines. While many search engines feature some areas of the deep web, most of these resources require special tools to unearth them.

Estimates vary, but the deep web is much larger than the surface web. Approximately 500 more times information is located on the deep web as exists on the surface web. This consists of multimedia files, including audio, video, and images; software; documents; dynamically changing content such as breaking news and job postings; and information that’s stored on databases, for example, phone book records, legal information, and business data. Clearly, the deep web has something to offer almost any student researcher.

The easiest way to find information on the deep web is to use a specialized search engine. Many search engines index a very small portion of the deep web; however, some engines target the deep web specifically. If you need to find a piece of information that’s likely to be classified as part of the deep web, search engines that focus on such content are your best bet.

Like surface web engines, deep web search engines may also sell advertising in the form of paid listings. They differ in their coverage of deep web content and offer dissimilar advanced search options. Engines that search the deep web can be classified as first vs. second generation, individual vs. meta, and/or separate vs. collated retrieval, just as with surface web engines. Thus, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the options that are available and gradually add the best engines to your bag of research tricks.

Let’s look at two popular deep web search engines for an illustration:

1. Complete Planet (www.completeplanet.com) is a free commercial search engine. It acts as a gateway to other search services, providing links to over 70,000 search sites. For easy browsing, the links are organized by subject into a “browse tree.” You can also search their links by keyword, which will retrieve a relevance-ranked list of results. While they do sell advertising, paid results are clearly labeled as such.

2. Scirus (http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/), in contrast, is more limited in scope. An academic engine, it does not sell advertising or feature paid listings. Rather than trying to provide access to the entire deep web, it focuses on scientific content. Users can search over 167 million scientific web pages, databases, and journals with Scirus. Results can be sorted in several ways, including by relevance and source. Scirus is provided free by Elsevier, a company that also markets databases to individuals and institutions.

Obviously, Scirus is a more scholarly search engine than Complete Planet, and thus is more appropriate for your academic research needs. Well, assuming that you’re conducting research for a physics or psychology class, of course! If literature’s your thing, perhaps you might want to try out another academic deep web engine, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) or the New York Public Library’s holdings (http://www.nypl.org/).

When doing research for a class, you need to be just as discriminating with deep web search engines as you are with other online tools. Always look for an engine’s advertising policy, and consider where it gets its funding. Look for non-profit engines that only index information from reputable sources. Search engines with a filter are a plus; for example, Scirus’s engine discards non-scientific web sites and relies mainly on information from the top-level domains “.edu” and “.org”.

As with the rest of the Internet, the deep web can be an excellent resource – but only when used with caution!

Copyright Kelly Garbato, 2005

Kelly Garbato is an author, ePublisher, and small business owner. She recently self-published her first book, “13 Lucky Steps to Writing a Research Paper,” now available at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com) or through Peedee Publishing (http://www.peedeepublishing.com).

To learn more about the author, visit her web site at http://www.kellygarbato.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kelly_Garbato

By looking at the trends of today we can begin to develop a image of what the Web of the future will look like. I believe the Web will improve and grow in a way that will dwarf its present existence and will improve and enrich everyone’s lives way beyond what we can imagine today. The Net will become as integrated into everyone’s everyday lives as much as, and even more so, than the television or phone (in developed nations first, then everywhere). Television, communications and the Internet will merge.

The Web will become increasingly realistic, interactive, and three dimensional. Two dimensional displays will evolve into three dimensional displays. And the Web will probably incorporate more than just the two senses of seeing and hearing. It will first be incorporated into all other electronics found in household appliances, copy machines, automobiles, and anything else with a microchip. Then it will be integrated directly into our brains.

I also envisage this new Web creating an unimaginably sophisticated data sphere that surrounds and envelops the world like a warm electronic blanket, connecting everyone and everything. And it may some day become an autonomous and sentient entity in its own right that we may even come to depend on for life itself.

When a person switches on his wireless Web chip and connects with the Net, he’ll be looking at and interacting with the Web of the future. He’ll manipulate objects, click on links, download information, and communicate with anyone by simply thinking it. In fact, when he navigates to a grocery store to buy food, for instance, he’ll be able to “pick them up”, “feel them” and even “smell” the food he wants to buy just by thinking the appropriate thoughts.

In the future, Web-based software agents will constantly build dynamic lists and instructions to help people in personal and professional activities. These software agents are subroutines, or small programs, which may be part of a responsive ‘Internet Operating System’ that serves humanity, or possibly even destroy it. Programs may become responsible for doing some of the basic thinking that we get stuck routinely doing today. Additionally, it may be responsible for storing a percentage of our memories as well.

The Web has already become something we rely on for memory, and that reliance will only grow. We’d rather look something up on Google two or three times instead of trying to remember it initially. And eventually, we’ll come to rely on the Web for memories and immediate information so that it will seem like we are missing a part of our own brain when not “jacked in” to the Net, to borrow a phrase from science fiction writer William Gibson. The Net will be such a part of our existence that we may even feel profound separation and isolation when not connected.

The Evolution of the Web Display

Of course we’re not going to jump from flat screen LCD monitors of today to displays that exist only “in our minds”. Three dimensional displays may be the bridge. There is a device in existence today called a Heliodisplay(TM) that produces holograms which exist in three dimensions and are created with photographic projection using advanced laser technology. It’s possible that all displays will employ this technology in the future. The gaming industry ceaselessly works at making their artificial gaming experiences more realistic and is a powerful driving force in computer display technology.

The Web of our future will first be truly device independent where each piece of equipment is a different window that peers into the same global Web. From handheld devices not unlike the Star Trek Communicators, to cell phones, televisions, automobile dashboards, embedded refrigerator displays and MP3 players, all will be portals into the same World Wide Web.

And of course everything will be connected. Instead of applications running on individual personal computers and devices, applications will operate on the Net and be accessible to anyone, creating a loose Internet Operating System.

Ultimately, the Web of our future will most likely abandon standard two dimensional and even three dimensional displays and instead be projected right onto our corneas, skipping the middle man, so to speak.

FutureWeb is Closer Than We Think

Already demonstrated in the lab is the ability to cause a computer to react to thought alone. Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis works in the field of BMI (brain-machine interface). In an experiment involving a monkey, a computer and a monitor, Nicolelis and his team successfully caused the monkey to communicate with and control a robotic arm through its brain’s neural signals alone.

The monkey’s brain activity and signals were first monitored with numerous electrodes inside its scalp while it manipulated a joystick. The scientists taught the monkey to move the joystick with its arms to accomplish movement on the monitor. Nicolelis’ team then took the joystick away, but continued everything else the same way. Since the monkey’s brain was hooked up to the computer, each time it had the thought of moving its arms, the desired affect actually happened anyway on the monitor, triggered by the monkey’s thoughts alone. In fact, the monkey was even able to control an artificial arm over the Web 600 miles away in the same manner.

There are two important applications for this technology that are driving its research: medicine and war, two constants in all of human history. Doctors will someday be able to attach a prosthetic arm to a patient, wire it up to her brain, and succeed in enabling her to control the prosthetic fingers by simply thinking it.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) manages the research for the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2003, DARPA invested $23 million in BMI programs, including the one at Duke University cited above. Their goal is to allow soldiers to control weapons of all kinds by thought only. These super soldiers will be able to stealthily navigate through a battlefield willing robotic gliders above to drop their payloads of smart bombs on the enemy over the next hill, without endangering their own lives.

Ethical questions aside, brain-machine interfacing will someday mature and become integrated into our lives. Since the Web is already such a part of our world, the marriage of the two is inevitable.

This technology can be utilized in the other direction as well. Just like a thought can produce computer behavior, the computer will someday be able to send back sensory data other than just sight and sound. If a computer is hooked directly up to the brain, then smell, taste and touch can be affected as well. The Web will literally come to life.

The Semantic Web, Web 2.0 and the Collaboration of Humanity

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, wrote an illuminating book called Weaving the Web that I recommend all Web professionals read. Among the many profound ideas expressed are two concepts relevant here. One is the Semantic Web, which is explained as “The Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.” Metadata is the term used for data about data. Most Web pages today have embedded in the html code metadata that gives information about the Web page. Eventually, this information will become much more robust, allowing more intelligent searches to become a reality.

The Semantic Web may have the potential to help make the Internet an entity in its own right. Parallel processing, the connecting of computers to make super computers, has been in existence for some time now. In fact, that’s how the human brain operates, by conducting many operations at the same time.

The other fascinating idea Berners-Lee expressed in this landmark book is that his original idea for the Web involved much more of a two-way exchange of information. His original vision for the Web was one of collaboration. He wanted people to be able to post information to the Web as easily as it was to view information. Unfortunately, the latter has been embraced more readily by the general population.

But now we see the emergence of “Web 2.0″, a fairly new term that describes an innovative type of website that is built on the participation of its users. Blogs, wikis Podcasts and social networks all fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella. Today we are finally achieving what Berners-Lee had in mind all along. With websites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Squidoo, and Digg, non-technical users can now post information and contribute to the Web as easily as they can access it. The Web of the future will embrace this concept even more, causing its speed of growth to eclipse today’s rate.

It’s not difficult to see that the Web could be a vast parallel processing farm, that given enough artificial intelligence programming, the infusion of Semantic Web systems, and the constant additions from billions of intelligent beings (namely humans), it could have the potential of becoming something of a unified intelligence, a data sphere that surrounds the planet and is more powerful that the sum of its parts.

This concept of technology’s exponential growth turning onto something we cannot even imagine with the possibility of the Web becoming sentient is not new. Vernor Vinge, a retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University, a computer scientist and a science fiction author, wrote about the Singularity in a 1993 essay.

A super-intelligence emerging out of the Web was also written about by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine in August 2005 and also published on KurzweilAI.com.

“. . . we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number—but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine [the Web of the future] is.”

An online search will yield many examples of bizarre concepts that existed only in science fiction later becoming reality. The Web is something that Earth has never seen before. It not only has the potential to connect everyone, but it can also extend every brain and grow exponentially. It may take a lot longer than anyone thinks, but eventually the Web of our future will be immensely different and much more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine today.

Jason OConnor is CEO of Oak Web Works, LLC (http://www.oakwebworks.com), an e-strategy firm.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jason_OConnor

Regardless of one’s view of tenure, the critical success factor for the tenure process in the majority of schools is research. In Life-Sciences and Engineering, funded research plays a crucial part in the tenure decision, while in the Liberal Arts, Business, and Law, there is a stronger emphasis on published research in refereed journals. Most universities aspiring to the loftier strata of the rankings system place a huge emphasis on research-all kinds of research, whether funded or published.

A recent BusinessWeek interview with Drew Faust, President of Harvard University (Businessweek, 12/10/07) and a follow-up public letter by a group of eleven public university provosts testify to the strength of emotions that research evokes in academia and the competition that exists between universities. The research mission and competition for research funding and accolades are imprinted into the DNA of top-tier and aspiring public and private research universities, as expressed by their university administrators. In 2006, over $47 billion was spent by universities on research and development (NSF, 2007), while competition for top journals was more intense than ever before.

Yet, in this increasingly competitive research climate and culture, there is a marked contrast between lofty research ideals and the conduct of research itself. In this era of the Internet, Web 2.0, social networking, blogging, and instant messaging, the conduct of research in universities has remained essentially the same over the past century. Despite advancements and computerization of the tools used and increasingly sophisticated methodologies, there have not been comparable advances in the organization, reach, and range of research collaborations.

Upon scanning the resume of a typical professor, one would find his/her collaborations to be largely local. In other words, most research professors write articles and grant proposals with other professors who they already know. These include their colleagues and graduate students down the hall, and past colleagues or professors from their own doctoral program. Only in rare cases does the list of collaborators expand to include other researchers they may have encountered at conferences.

Thus, if there is a researcher halfway across the world with strikingly similar research interests, sadly, there is scant hope of the research professor ever actually working with him or her. Even if the first researcher is aware of the other researcher through bibliographies, there is no easy ’social’ means of connecting, short of directly emailing or calling. Of course, few professors initiate contact in this way. Perhaps they think the other researcher may be unwilling to work with them, or perhaps they need more information about the researcher and obtaining this would be too tedious. Most often therefore, it is just easier to go with the ‘known’ quantities of accessible colleagues in what could be called “collaborations of convenience”.

So the obvious questions to ask are: can the Web 2.0 toolset accomplish for academic research what it has done for social and business networking, and what are the tools that might facilitate this transformation? Millions of previously improbable business and social relationships and opportunities have been created through such tools as Facebook and MySpace (social relationships), and LinkedIn and Ryze (business networking). Therefore the question of the potential of Web 2.0 technologies is a relevant one not only for universities looking to add to their arsenals in the research “arms race”.

What would a Web 2.0 portal look like? What tools might be on offer? What changes would be required in the mindset and practices of today’s academic researchers? Are there emerging tools in this category that may foretell the future for the conduct of university research in the near future?

Web 2.0 portals for academic researchers must include elements from the realm of social networking. These would include forums, searchable professional profiles, and various means of communication, such as instant messaging. Blogging would also make a natural addition to the research environment, where researchers could share their professional experiences and ideas. Business networking tools might also contribute meaningfully to portals for research collaboration, through their approaches to contact management, referrals, and communication. In addition, while their knowledge taxonomies for classification of businesses and are somewhat rudimentary, these concepts may be useful in organizing the much deeper knowledge taxonomies essential for the research communities. Perhaps then, instead of collaborations of convenience, researchers might transition to global “collaborations of opportunity”.

While still in their infancy, Web 2.0 research portals are sure to become major tools in the never-ending research “arms race” that characterizes research universities. They offer the benefits of collaborative global research – more extensive and better-fitting global collaborations, better-quality information for researchers, improved content for research papers and grants, and increased volume of publications and grant proposals. In other words, Web 2.0 tools could bring about a complete transformation of the practice of research and with it, major productivity gains.

Modern Web 2.0 research portals such as this allow researchers to collaborate on the site itself, manage actual documents and also network with colleagues and other potential researchers. It enables powerful web-based searches and the classification of results into personal taxonomies.

The portal uses comprehensive knowledge classifications for categorizing users and their research interests and abilities, which translates into being able to find ideal research collaborators with accuracy. It employs forums, blogs, expert article postings, sophisticated project management and news feeds of the latest research news. In addition, it incorporates specialized research tools that academics use most often, such as survey creation/deployment tools, citation tools, bibliography management and many others.

These new web portals seem to point to the way ahead for academic research. As traditional as the academic research culture can be, it seems inevitable that universities will ultimately embrace the sea change brought about by the Web 2.0 paradigm. The challenge for Deans, Provosts, and Vice Presidents of Research is how to change the existing research culture and rapidly adopt these tools for the significant gains they can bring to university research output. The world is flat and new synergies from global collaborations cannot be ignored. Certainly the early adopters will have the potential to advance their research rankings by investing in Web 2.0 toolsets for their researchers. In any event, the influence of Web 2.0 on academic research will be exciting to watch over the next several years.

Bay Arinze, PhD
Founder and Senior Editor
MyNetResearch
Empowering Collaboration™
http://www.MyNetResearch.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bay_Arinze

For that matter, many top accredited online universities and top accredited online colleges are offering Web Design Degree Online programs which focuses on creating effective and attractive websites. If you choose to go for the field of Web Designing then Web Design Degree Online program offered by top accredited online universities and top accredited online colleges is the first step you have to take in order to boost your career. In a Web Design Degree Online program you would mainly be learning key concepts of website designing, graphics designing, scripting languages, E-commerce, web security etc.

Coursework

Some of the courses offered by different top accredited online universities and top accredited online colleges in Web Design Degree Online program are:

· Concepts of Web Designing
· Visual Communication
· Scripting Languages
· Graphics Designing
· Animation
· Digital Imaging
· Fundamentals of Design
· Technologies
· Marketing
· Graphic Design, theory and practice
· E-Commerce

Achieved Skills

The main concept of a Web Design Degree Online program is to develop an understanding of advance concepts of creativity, conceptual visual skills, skills in computers, e-commerce, high-tech software programs, authoring and scripting etc. After successfully completing Web Design Degree Online coursework, you would be able to create attractive websites with interactive graphics and sound usage.

Career Outlook and Salary Information

After completing Web Design Degree Online program from any of the top accredited online universities or top accredited online colleges you would be able to get a good job as a Web Designer or as a Strategy Manager for any marketing firm or a web/graphic designing firm. You can even get a job in media houses, media consultancy firms and earn around $50K to $70K or more per year.

For further information regarding different top accredited online universities and top accredited online colleges offering Web Design Degree Online program, please visit: http://www.webdesigndegreeonline.net/

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