Edubloggers Links Feed – Join In!

http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=697

It’s been two months now since I started subscribing to an aggregated feed of FURL and del.icio.us feeds from various EdTech bloggers. It’s been a very fruitful experiment, and according to Bloglines at least 9 other subscribers seem to think so as well. For me it is providing a second channel of good resources with just enough context (e.g. the fact that they are all edtech bloggers I respect) to know they are worth considering but without the reading committment that blogs require.

This post is simply another shout out to any EdTech bloggers out there who also maintain a FURL, del.icio.us or other bookmarking site that offers RSS feeds to add their’s to this site – it’s open to anyone to add to. Currently the really active source feeds are from the cogdog, Brian, D’Arcy, Will Richardson, Trey Martindale and Greg Ritter, but there are tons of other folks whose interesting URLs I’d love to see. – SWL

InCommon Shibboleth Federation

http://www.incommonfederation.org/

I’ve known about Shibboleth for a few years now, but to be honest haven’t followed it that closely, in part because, as important as issues of authentication and authorization are, they typically bore the *!#$ out of me. So I had Shibboleth filed in the back of my mind as ‘hey neat idea, I’ll wait a few years and maybe this will move from idea to testbed implementation.’

Wow, time flies, and folks involved with Shibboleth have clearly not been fooling around – not only is there already this very real production level federation called InCommon, but they have a nifty ‘starter’ program called InQueue which allows organizations just starting with Shibboleth and federated trust to try it out.

For those who are wondering ‘what the heck is he talking about?’, check out the Shibboleth ‘About’ page which has about as short an explanation as you can give, or else this recent Educause presentation by Michael Gettes which also does a nice job of explaning it. Long story short – as more organizations join federations, you’ll likely be able to get access to protected materials you couldn’t before without individually having to arrange that access.- SWL

Rideshare to Northern Voices from Victoria?

(Clearly of only limited interest to anyone not on Vancouver Island, but hey, it’s my blog!)

The Northern Voices blogging conference is fast approaching – I am driving over from Victoria the night before, catching the 3pm ferry and have room for 2-3 others. I am returning the next day likely on the 7 or 9pm ferry. Love to have company and hate to drive to the mainland with empty seats in my car, so let me know if you could use a ride. – SWL

The 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Crises of 2004

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/
2005/top10.html

This isn’t an educational technology post, but if it has any relevance in that regard it is to keep things in perspective. Click on the past years’ reports only makes it worse to realize how ongoing some of these issues have been. And count the number in Africa. – SWL

DC-Education Application Profile

http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/
DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile

Possibly of interest to some of you metadata mavens out there is this wiki where you can find ongoing work of the Dublin Core Education Working Group, including this early draft of an application profile of Dublin Core to apply to educational materials. It’s not exactly ‘knock your socks off’ kind of stuff but then let’s hope metadata never is considered such.

Clearly an improvement over straight ahead Dublin Core in adding things like ‘Education Level,’ but as some folks from the library community recently reminded us, it’s not like anyone’s actually using much more than the equivalent of Dublin Core anyways when they use the LOM. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, automatic metadata generation/harvesting is going to save our souls and use all the LOM elements to then rapdily (magically, automatically…) re-assemble personalized learning. LOM mani padme LOM. Boy, am I having a rough Saturday! – SWL

Great Post/Article on Metadata (really!)

http://www.computer.org/multimedia/mu2004/promo1.pdf

Raymond Yee helpfully points out this great article by Dick Bulterman titled “Is it Time for a Metadata Moratorium” from which Raymond extracts this true nugget:

“For nontext data – such as video, images, audio, and so on – direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation.”

Seems obvious, right? And yet, hyperbolic testimonials to the wonders of flickr and del.icio.us aside, this seems exactly the problem (one of many) that countless repository initiatives seem destined to replicate in positing a repository ‘container’ that isn’t even loosely coupled with either the content creation or content use/re-use environments or workflows. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa. – SWL

Not Bloglines’ Problem After All

Looks like my earlier post may have been an overreaction (won’t be the first time), but not without productive results. The reason I posted my email to bloglines publicy was because I had heard from a few folks I asked that they had experienced similar problems, and also that they felt they were getting stock ‘we’re looking into it’ responses.

But luckily it also drew the attention of one-time fellow blogger Greg Ritter (Greg, come back, we miss you 😉 who cannily diagnosed the problem as likely being caused by extensions to Firefox that were messing with how Javascript was behaving. A quick google indicated this was entirely likely, and sure enough, disabling most of the extensions and upgrading a few others seems to have fixed the problem. I now have to go back and figure out systematically *which* extension caused the problem, but this test (along with checking Bloglines in a few other browsers) confirmed Greg’s hunch. My bad. So a tentative hurray that Bloglines seems to be working o.k. Note this is a different problem then the one that Michale Feldstein’s feed has been suffering, and I continue to be concerned that other feeds are similarly affected. – SWL

Letter to Bloglines

(O.k., I promised the one before was my last one today, but you know… procrastination and all that)

For the sake of posterity, here is the email I wrote Bloglines tech support today. I would urge others to do likewise who are experiencing the same problem.

“Hi, I contacted you a few weeks back about this problem, and since then have canvassed a number of other bloggers and learned they too are experiencing this problem. There is a regular, reproducable problem with bloglines correctly updating the feed count ofr a feed but then not displaying the feed content if that feed is selected (unless one forces the ‘last x hours’ of content to be displayed.) This is a SERIOUS problem. I love bloglines. I know it is free. If it doesn’t get fixed, though, I think this would bode very ill for continued user loyalty and adoption. A *detailed* reply would be appreciated, I’ve had the ‘we’re working on it’ responses before. Maybe something in your news feed? People know about this problem. If it is a question of being with specific feeds, let us know and we can tell you which ones it happens with (because it does seem feed specific). thanks, Scott Leslie, Edtechpost (http://www.edtechpost.ca/)”

FreeLists – Free mailing lists with RSS feeds

http://www.freelists.org

(This has GOT to be my last post today! If you’ve ever wondered why my posts are so short, it isn’t because I have nothing to say 😉

Thought this would be interesting to the ‘small pieces’crowd – FreeLists.org is a free email listserving service (with no advertising and industrial strength admin controls on your lists). I’ve used it for a number of projects in the past where I didn’t have access to my own mail server and wanted to run a list. It provides users with their own web-based admin as well as web-based archives, and (what prompted this post) just announced the availability of RSS feeds for any of the list archives. They do say the lists must be ‘technology focused’ but in the past I have found them willing to accept ‘educational technology’ as easily fitting that bill. Free. Web-based. RSS. Seems like at least 3 of the magic words these days. – SWL

EdTech Terms in Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_learning_environment

EdTech bloggers may be interested to get in on the action over at wikipedia where a number of edtech terms are being defined – the above link points to the already reasonably flushed out artcle on ‘Managed learning environments‘ and there are many other related terms, including ‘learning objects‘ and ‘elearning‘ for example.

I personally didn’t mind any of the entries too much, though was slightly put off by the redirection from Course Management Systems to ‘Managed Learning Environments,’ but the wonderful thing about wiki is to add your two cents if you don’t agree. Wonderful opportunity for those in the field who are interested in wikis to ‘walk the talk’. – SWL