You may have noticed that EdTechPost has been a bit quiet of late. Apart from the regular seasonal break (which should have been over by now) I just found out on the weekend that I have chickenpox! Somehow I managed not to get it as a kid (thanks Mom!) so I have the pleasure of suffering through it now as an adult. Mostly it’s just freaking inconvenient – I was all set to start the new year with a bang, and was really looking forward to attending the Pan-Canadian Elearning Workshop in Vancouver next week hosted by CANARIE. Now it seems highly unlikely that I will be able to go. I know there will be a number of other bloggers there – any session notes you folks can share will be much appreciated. But what I will miss obviously even more is the chance to see folks face to face. Oh well, next time I guess. – SWL
Open standards and software for bibliographies and cataloging
http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/
bib/openbib.html#haystack
Comprehensive collection of pointers to information on open standards and open source software for managing bibliograpies and library metadata. See also oss4lib, the Open Source software for Libraries listing. – SWL
Accessibility-checking Bookmarklets
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/
accessibility-checking-favelets.asp
Large collection of bookmarklets to assist web developers ensuring more accessible sites. Many of these are useful more generally as design tools – for instance the ‘show and label divs with IDs’ is a neat trick that re-renders any page with all of the divs on the page named and outlined in red, useful for figuring out what needs to go where. – SWL
Wiki use to support English class at Texas A&M
http://english.tamucc.edu/pmwiki/pmwiki.php
/Loudermilk3301/Home
Another example of innovative uses of wikis to support online education, this one from Dr. Susan Lodermilk of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. In this particular example she uses the wiki both to post all of the class information and to provide the students each a personal portfolio wiki space; but as can be seen here, she actually uses the wiki for a variety of classes and purposes. I stumbled on to this because the software she uses, PmWiki, is the same PHP-based wiki software I am using to run the EdTechPost wiki. The developer, Patrick Michaud was also previously at TAMUCC, though I think he has moved on. – SWL
Best Faculty-level presentation on Learning Objects from the last 18 months
http://www.designingwbt.com/content/
madison/objectkeynote.pdf
I’m working on a number of different learning object repository projects at the moment and have been spending the last few days digging through masses of material I’ve bookmarked and blogged over the past few years. All of which brought me back to this presentation given by William Horton at the 18th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning in 2002. I know it’s saying a lot (maybe not) but it gets my vote for the best non-technical presentation on learning objects and related issues that I’ve seen over the last few years. I’d especially highlight the third slide on page 19 – ‘What Needs to be Communicated’ – as the best explanation EVER of what SCORM is meant to facilitate without ever mentioning the acronym itself. If your task involves explaining the value, issues and context of learning objects to faculty, you could do worse than borrow some ideas from this presentation. – SWL
Bookmarklet to printout link URLs as footnotes
http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/
default.asp#12012200393
Likely to be the only other post before the holidays; another Christmas present, this one from Alan Taylor’s Eintagsfliegen. A bookmarklet (I think now only for IE, but apparently could be done in Mozilla) that “converts all text hyperlinks into footnotes, and lists out their URLs at the bottom of the page.” I can see a number of places where this could come in handy. – SWL
Get Mailing Lists as RSS in Bloglines
http://www.bloglines.com/about/news
For regular aggregator users this might seem obvious, but the folks at Bloglines have a way of taking such features and implementing them quickly and really well. Bloglines now allows you to setup an email address that will be added to your current list of feeds. You can then use this address to subscribe to mailing lists that don’t provide RSS versions. The one shortcoming I can see so far is that becuase it doesn’t allow you to send email, there might be problems setting up subscriptions for lists that will only act on mail sent from the subscribing account. Still, an awesome hack that will reduce the bulk of email in my inbox and put these ‘news’ related lists in their proper place. An early Christmas present from the Bloglines folks! – SWL
MERLOT’s Development Process Documents and other background tech information
http://conference.merlot.org/projects/technology/
I don’t know if I could tell you exactly *why* MERLOT published all of this – possibly for the greater public good or possibly to maintain a fairly high degree of transparency and formality given so many stakeholders in their development process. In any case, they have shared the policies shaping their development framework as well as a number of other technical background documents, all of which should prove of some use to people developing their own repositories or even just deciding on what strategy to take in implementing one. – SWL
More grist for the ‘Blackboard going public’ rumour mill
http://www.ipohome.com/ipoplus/press/
usatoday_120403.asp
The same day that the article appeared in the Washington Post speculating on the possibility of Blackboard going public because of repeated meetings with investment bankers, the above article was published, concerning the potential re-kindling of tech IPOs. But as if to dampen down the growing rumours, Michael Chasen, Blackboard’s CEO, is featured in the article downplaying his company’s need to go public (which seems quite likely true, what with their recent earnings reports and an overall climate that meant Blackboard has not had “to worry about other overfunded companies in our space.”) The speculation continues… – SWL
Scirus – science-specific search engine
New to me was this search engine that focuses solely on sources of scientific information and returns results either from qualified web sites or from only scientific journals. It points to a different strategy for finding learning resources – highly constrained and vetted search catalogs that instead of relying on metadata simply use good search engines on the already qualified catalog. Some might claim that this falls into the same human scalability trap as Yahoo-style directories, but in my mind it is actually the happy medium between such directories and full-scale internet searching that has little or no knowledge of the quality of the information and relies on (falliable, vis a vis the ‘pagerank blog effect‘)algorithmic techniques like ‘pagerank‘ to calculate the relevancy of a resource…
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