LibraryLookup Greasemonkey Script for Victoria Public Library

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/GVPL_LibraryLookup.user.js

O.k., o.k. already! I am showing my age/lameness. In my exuberance over learning that my local library’s catalogue was now searchable via Jon Udell’s famous LibraryLookup bookmarklet (and trust me, I can get pretty exuberant), I forgot how terribly passe and 2003 that was. Apparently time has moved on since then; last year Udell released a small Greasemonkey script that searches your libraries catalogue in the background and adds a link if the book is available right on the Amazon page.

If you happen to live in Victoria, you can grab my ever so-slightly modified version of that script at the URL above and install it in your Greasemonkey-enabled Firefox browser. And turns out this post isn’t so out of date after all – if you are really keen, Udell released the extra souped-up version of the script (which requires you to get your own Amazon-API) on January 26th. Soo coool! All praise Udell. – SWL

Finally, “LibraryLookup” bookmarklet for my local library

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/
2002/12/11/librarylookup.html

Hard to believe, but it’s almost 3 years since one of the first really cool Web2.doh! mashups, Jon Udell’s ‘LibraryLookup’ boomarklet, first hit the streets. You remember this one (maybe you use it everyday?), it allowed you to query your local library’s catalogue with one click from any book-related page that had an ISBN number in the URL (like an Amazon listing, for instance).

I remember being very excited when I first found this, only to become frustrated that my local library, the GVPL, was using a library catalogue at the time that couldn’t be queried via ISBN, so the bookmarklet wouldn’t work.

So I forgot about it, until the serendipity of the blogosphere brought me back to Udell’s site today, and I thought maybe I would try it out again. And it worked!

This is very cool – I actually keep my ‘things I’d like to read‘ list basically in Amazon’s wishlist and this provides a nice tie-in for me to easily folow up now into my library catalogue to see if the book’s there. Not groundshaking, maybe, but I know this will actually increase the number of these books I end up reading and not just wishing for. – SWL

Why del.icio.us doesn’t suck (but I do, and Firefox Quicksearch definitely doesn’t!)

O.k., so while I still think it sucks that I can’t currently import my old bookmarks into del.icio.us, Greg Ritter (yes, that Greg Ritter, he’s still alive, just lurking but not blogging) quite reasonably pointed out that there is no time like the present to make the shift to del.icio.us, and that the lack of an import feature doesn’t need to be reason not to. He recommended just starting to use it regularly, and then setting up a quicksearch shortcut in Firefox to my FURL collection. It’s not perfect (something that quickly searched across both collections would be even better) but as an interim solution until the cats at del.icio.us fix their import feature, it seems pretty good. (Though if it wasn’t obvious, my post was less a cry for a workaround and more a public challenge to del.icio.us to get off their duffs and fix this!) Still, thanks Greg, as the Firefox quicksearch feature is a nice suggestion in and of itself. – SWL

Why del.icio.us sucks

That got your attention, didn’t it. Actually, it doesn’t suck at all, in fact my complaint is that I want to use del.icio.us because of all the cool tie-ins it has spawned, but I am not going to abandon 18 months worth of FURL’d links, and del.icio.us refuses to fix their import feature. There has been a message on the import page for del.icio.us for going on at least 4 months that says “Our import feature has been turned off for a few days while we fix some bugs. Sorry!” and the reply I got to my email back in November was “Should be done soon. We are removing the last final bugs.” Gee, thanks. If there is anything worse than not responding to potential customers, its responding to potential customers and lying to them.

Maybe this is what a rapid infusion of cash does to a company. Oh well, I guess this is what I get for backing the wrong horse in the first place, but sheesh, they’re only links, how hard should it be to export and then import these things? – SWL

Wayfinding at UBC

http://tinyurl.com/dac35

I’m lucky to be invited out to UBC tomorrow to give a little talk and meet with a few folks. I’ve been there maybe a half-dozen times but I really don’t know my way around the campus that well – it is truly immense! I was about to email my contact there to ask for direction, but then thought to check the university’s own website for maps.

Wow! Was I gald I did. I would have felt foolish to be asking after what I found at the Wayfinding at UBC site. The link above points to the final map I produced and printed – what I loved was the ability to plot not one but at least two distinct locations (and get directions between them if need be) and to add or subtract information to my final printout page (like closest parking, local details) if I wanted. I also loved they way they tied into Google where needed or where more appropriate.

Perhaps I don’t get on to enough campuses and the quality represented by this site is commonplace elsewhere and I just don’t realize it. But I think not – apparently the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education were also impressed enough to award it the 2004 Gold Prix d’Excellence for ‘Best Department or Program Site on the World Wide Web.’ And well deserved at that; the gold standard as far as I am concerned for helping people find their way around campus. (Have I just inevitably damned myself to be driving around downtown Surrey while my talk is going on though, I wonder 😉 – SWL

Reports from the CETIS Vocabularies Project

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_vocabularies.html

Wow, what can one say, these reports from the Cetis Vocabularies Project are nothing if not exhaustive. Pretty well everything one could ever want to know about controlled vocabularies for pedagogical resources are contained in these three reports. And if you needed more evidence of the width of the gap between the ‘big standards‘ approach to learning resources and where the best minds of the loosely coupled elearning blogosphere seem to be going, well look no further.

I am really in no position to cast stones; I’d be lucky if my house were made out of even glass, and I sure ain’t without sin. But the 121 pages that comprise the first two survey reports, the Pedagogical Vocabularies Review and the Vocabulary Management Technologies Review, seem hardly to justify the tepid 7 page ‘Recommendations’ document that follows. Study study study, disseminate, more study, pilot a bit, repeat. Sorry guys, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this; I want to take succour in the belief we can control the growing chaos, find sense through old patterns and methods, but you know what, I can’t do it anymore, I have seen the light, and this is not it. Whoa, dude, your unconscious is showing…put on a towel or something, at least! – SWL

Happy Solstice

This is going to be my last entry for 2005 before I fly off to Wales tomorrow to join my family who have been over there for the last 10 days with our inlaws. Just wanted to send everyone sincere best wishes and hope for their joy and successes in the new year. I am totally stoked about 2006 and look forward to more cool projects, collaborations, meetings-up and general rabble rousing with you all in the coming year. – SWL

OSS Watch – Documentation issues in open source

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/documentation.xml

Bravo to the OSS Watch guys for tackling this hoary issue straight on – the best way to fight ‘fear uncertainty and doubt’ is by talking about the issues and showing how one can address them. Not that I know of any open source project that have this problem, ahem, but this short piece contains the sensible advice to make mailing lists, chat logs, etc., accessible to search engines and bookmarking systems, as well as to encourage new users to contribute documentation as their first contribution to the project. – SWL

An Evaluation of Open Source CMS Stressing Adaptation Issues

http://moodle.org/other/icalt2005.pdf

This paper looks at the ever expanding world of open source course management systems, but adds to the comparison the factors of “adaptability, personalization, extensibility and adaptivity” (this later meaning “automatic adaptation to the individual user�s needs”). The results; Moodle is judged to be the best in terms of its adaptation capabilities, though all of the projects are deemed to be light on end-user adaptivity. – SWL

Unicon provides Sakai ‘Test Drive’ sites

http://www.sakaitestdrive.com/

If you haven’t already had the chance, Unicon has made it even easier to have a look at Sakai 2.1 (just released on December 1, 2005) through their new “Test Drive” sites. The sites, available for free for 90 days, give you access to a demo course and worksite and allow you to change roles so as to see the system from various user perspectives. The background here is that Unicon once developed a CMS on top of uPortal called Academus, but appear to now be piggybacking on offering Sakai support and other uPortal support based on their years’ of experience.

This will not change anyones’ mind who had already decided they were not down with the ‘course managed’ approach, but for those looking for an alternative to their current CMS, this provides one more method to kick the tires, and just in time for Christmas! – SWL