Thin-Client Desktop Viewing with VNC

http://www.tightvnc.com/doc/java/README.txt

This will likely not come as a surprise to any of you who actually read manuals, but for the rest of us, you may be as surprised as I was to learn that you can share a view of your desktop (and any running applications) with multiple other users simultaneously using the VNC server without your viewers having to install any software. I’d known about VNC for years and already had it running on my machine, but always connected to it using a VNC client and used it as ‘remote control‘ software. The problem, though, was if all you wanted was for other users to simply see your desktop instead of control it (for instance to do a guided tour or walk them through a document over the phone), requiring them to have their own VNC thick client installed seemed a bit onerous.

It was only when I was about to sign up to use the Glance software and serendipitously read their licensing agreement that I noticed that Glance is in fact built on top of VNC. This piqued my interest – and sure enough, when I dug only a little bit into the documentation, I came across the fact that VNC has a built in HTTP daemon as well as a Java-client, and so by simply giving (potentially multiple) users your IP address and the appropriate port number they can view your machine running the VNC server through their Java-enabled web browser. For free. You may have to futz a bit with opening holes for specific ports in your firewall, but it’s about 5 minutes work to get simple desktop broadcasting working. – SWL

Report on “Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning”

http://www.a-hec.org/e-learning_study.html

This report by Rob Abel aims to detail some of the “Common Factors and Best Practices of Institutions that have Been Successful at e-Learning” and serve as a counterpoint to last year’s more negative “Thwarted Innovation” report by Zemsky and Massy.

I’m sure some will take issue with it, but many of its findings seem reasonable enough – institutions that “do well” at elearning see it as critical to their missions and have organized and resourced accordingly. A few suprises too – seemingly contrary to conventional wisdom, the largest portion of ‘elearning’ at these ‘successful’ institutions is fully online courses and programs, not ‘blendid’ or ‘hybrid’ courses, which typically are portrayed as the easier half-step. Seen via Jane Knight’s elearning Centre. – SWL

Grand Central Communication’s Business Services Network

https://network.grandcentral.com/en/home/index.jsp

Via Loosely Coupled – this has got to be significant, a company seems to think it can make a go of “application integration as a hosted service.” The current list of service providers is relatively small but a start – the well-known suspects like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and PayPal but others like gelco, salesforce.com and StrikeIron.

Hey bloggers – TAKE THE WEEKENDS OFF! Seriously, you all are generating just WAY too much interesting stuff to wade through on Mondays! – SWL

ELATED – Front End to Fedora

http://elated.sourceforge.net/

Seeming to prove out the model of ‘repository as service’ is this front end to the Fedora repository system. And also seeming to provide a good example to back up Charlie Lowe’s recent point on how open source can itself provide learning opportuniites within educational institutions, this was built as part of the Associated Colleges of the South Technology Center’s Software Engineering Internship.

Interestingerrr and interestingerrr… – SWL

“Learning Objects and Instruction Components” – IFETS Formal Discussion Summary from February 2000

http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_2_2000/
discuss_summary_0200.html

That’s right, you read the title of the post right, from February 2000. So what am I doing posting this 5 year old discussion summary from the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society discussions. Have a read yourself and decide – depending on what frame of reference you choose, 5 years can be a very long time or the blink of an eye. So reading this may seem like proof of how far we’ve come, or how many times our wheels have spun round.

Must … drink coffee … smell flowers … take medication … [and to think, Victoria’s had one of its least rainy springs in years] 😉 – SWL

Edutech Mauritius

http://www.edutech.mu/

I remember having to go look up Mauritius on a map a few years back when I first heard about the learning object repository project that had started there (a PHP-based repository that looks to be steadily growing).

Apparently not content to rest on their laurels for being the smallest (and one of the first) country to have a learning object repository, someone there has decided to innovate further and create Edutech Mauritius, a Drupal-based site offering some free online courses, as well as serving as the hub of a community for “promoting and applying information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the educational experience.” I don’t know at all that these two initiaitves have any conntection, but to see both of them come out of this rather small island nation is amazing and impressive. It’s things like this, plus announcements like these, that make me want to focus on getting back to hacking solutions on my own again. – SWL

BECTA’s Packaging and Publishing LOs: Best Practice Guidelines

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/industry/
content_packaging.pdf

This new guide from Becta gives the grand tour through most of the relevant learning object related standards, and contains a few useful starting points, for instance the “Packaging and publishing checklist.”

The document rightly points out that “because content packaging is both a descriptive and mapping discipline, as well as a technical practice, it is recommended that it is addressed as a key process during the development of the learning object itself, from start to finish, rather than something that is performed once the object has been completed.”

Good advice it would seem, but what’s frustrating about documents like this and its ilk is that the various standards and specifications are presented to users as something to be concerned about outside of the context of specific content development tools and practices. This is not totally their fault – while others may argue differently, I think it fair to say that there’s neither an overwhelming array of good development tools which support this standards-based vision, nor well documented (or well practiced) instructional design processes that marry reusability with learning effectiveness as dual goals of the content creation process. In my mind, until both of these are addressed, resuability (and to some extent the lesser challenge of interoperability) will be things that remain at best tacked on at the end of the development process, and likely by only the more sophisticated professional developers. – SWL

JISC’s non- technical guide to E-Learning Frameworks

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/nontechguide1

I expect this is actually as ‘non-technical’ as one should expect a document to be about something as nerdy as E-Learning Frameworks but it’s not necessarily for the faint of heart. (actually, it really is pretty well non-technical!) Still, I’d encourage you to have a go if you’ve come across the Framework before but aren’t really sure what it’s about.

For my part, I keep wondering how long its going to be before the ‘small pieces’ folks (you know who you are!) protest this – these needn’t be antagonistic, but if your goal is to abolish all enterprise computing (instead of the silo’d monolithic systems that are the target of this type of approach) then you’d better come out shooting! Seriously, I’m just taking the mickey, (it’s Friday afternoon and all,) but certain calls to arms would have you believe we’d do better to have a student information system on every desktop (or better yet, none at all!) – SWL

Fedora 2.0 now available

http://www.fedora.info/

You’ll likely see this a few times today, but the Fedora project have released version 2.0 of what they term their “general purpose repository service.” This should prove interesting – Fedora has been talked about at various times as a possible LOR solution, even though its origins are in the ‘institutional repository’ space. Tip o’ the hat to David Mattison for spotting this. Stay tuned! – SWL

Post-conference Reflections on NorthernVoices

There was no way I could pass up attending the Northern Voices blogging conference given that it was only a ferry ride away, and for the most part I came away glad to have made the effort. Here are some reflections, in no particular order.

The High Points

– Dinner with Brian, D’Arcy and other friends the night before. In truth, the whole trip was worth it for me for a few hours of good food and conversation with some old and new friends.

– Stephen’s presentation, nominally titled ‘Community Blogging‘ (in essence the notion that communities are defined by semantic affinity, not network proximity, and that we need to develop systems which help us derive meaning that emerges out of collective/aggregated contexts) was for me the highlight of the conference from the perspective of presentations given. It deserves a post of its own and for me was the most concise synthesis of what Stephen’s been driving at for the last few years I’ve seen.

– UPDATED: I forgot to mention the other highpoint of the conference, a 2 minute description on the use of RSS feeds and wikis for sharing and collaborating on the research at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The fellow making the point sat patiently with his hand up throughout almost all of the question and answers in the ‘Blogging in Academia’ session, and then in the space of about 2 minutes simply blew most of our minds away with the description of the collaborative knowledge sharing ecosystem they had assembled using syndication technologies and wikis. Worth far more than the price of admission itsself.

– Realizing one’s blogosphere ‘bozo filters’ are incredibly accurate when you finally hear the bozos f2f. The downside – not having f2f bozo filters.

The Low Points

– ItÂ’s probably an unfair criticism, but the format of the presentations/conference (sages on the stage, plebes in the audience gazing longingly) basically replicates a lot of hierarchical structure that seems antithetical to what’s interesting about the blogosphere. Undoubtedly there exist power laws, ‘a-list bloggers’ and the like, but for the vast majority of us, what’s interesting is not a quest to be listened to by everyone else, but to participate in ‘elocutions’ with as few as 2 people (even 1 in ‘blogs as soliloquy’ mode) and can grow as large as the net. So, suggestions for improvement: more coffee breaks/networking time (there are never enough), and less formal presentations. Instead, look to ‘workshops’ or other participatory models as a way to engage everyone and create useful outputs, not just speeches. (To be fair, Tim Bray’s did make some fun efforts at including the audience and seemed quite well received). And sheesh, with that much technology in the room, formally engage with it, not just accidentally through flickr tags and the like.

– Nametags: I guess I must be getting old, but my eyesight can’t handle 8 point type from more than a few feet now. Any really, a blogging conference without the name (not just the URL) of people’s blogs in bold print on their name tags?

Still, much fun was had by this attendee, and the organizers are to be thoroughly lauded for their efforts. Bravo. For any shortcomings, it was still one of the more fun gatherings I’ve been to of late. – SWL