Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/michelle/
archives/000466.html
Michelle Lamberson from UBC points to this important white paper on ePortfolios that was published recently by the ePortConsortium. The paper is a great attempt to outline the many possible uses and forms of ePortfolios with specific illustrations. – SWL
http://www.syllabus.com/news_issue.asp?
id=155&IssueDate=11/12/2003
Blogs are ‘outside’ the CMS. Should they be? There’s really two questions here. One involves the functionality involved in creating and maintaing a blog, what we typically think of as the blog software itself. Should this remain outside the CMS? No, it’s an obvious candidate for inclusion and you should expect to see it in a CMS near you soon. The second, far more interesting question, one that actually doesn’t seem to be asked in the article, is whether student blog content should remain inside the walled off ‘silos’ as a few have called them, or whether they should be out in the wild like all the rest of the blogs. This is a far thornier issue, and in my experience gets to the heart of some of the resistance to using blogs that I’ve seen so far. – SWL
http://aa.uncw.edu/digilib/documents/
The Ilumina repository is one of the LOR projects funded by the National Science Foundation. As repositories go it seems fairly mature and appears to contain quite a bit of useful material. They have built this page of technical background info off to the side; much of it is specific to this site and maybe a bit arcane, but perhaps of interest is the flowchart of their review process, as well as an illustrated summary of their review process. – SWL
You kind of knew this was happening somehow, but here’s the public face of it. Check your server log analysis for ‘unrecognized agents’ with the name “NPBot http://www.nameprotect.com/botinfo.html)” and this is who it is; a bot that scours the web for unauthorized uses of brand names and trademarks. I expect this is a very small example of all the bots currently keeping tabs on what you say. (Although apparently it honours robots.txt, so…) – SWL
http://www.edtechpost.ca/gnews2rss.php
Julian Bond at Voidstar (the man who brought you the original RSSify) has created a simple PHP script that converts Google News searches to RSS (I say ‘simple’ but I doubt I could have written it). You can use it from his site, but he’s asked folks to download and install in on their own servers to help conserve bandwidth and server demands. I’d been using it and so installed a copy on my own server. It took about 30 seconds. If you want you can use it too, though this isn’t intended as an open invitation to the entire internet. Maybe’s there’s another way to do this (I’ve seen the email alert service for Google news) but I haven’t found it yet. Depending on what kind of stuff you’re looking for, google news can be a pretty decent source. Here is a look at the feeds I’ve created (the ‘Google Feeds’ folder). – SWL
http://www.micta.org/newsdetail.asp?ID=139
Earlier this year I posted on MiCTA and their extensive RFP process that led to Desire2Learn winning ‘Endorsed‘ status for their members, and WebCT earning an ‘Approved‘ status. There was a third vendor that MiCTA was trying to negotiate a licensing arrangement with, Blackboard, but as MiCTA states on their site they were “not able to arrive at a contract that was beneficial to the MiCTA membership.”
Today came the announcement that the first of MiCTA’s members has taken advantage of the licencing terms that were brokered as part of that RFP process. Florida Distance Learning Consortium has chosen to go with D2L after their own extensive evaluation. – SWL
“Studying self-organization is equivalent to investigating the attractors of the system, their form and dynamics.” – http://www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm
If the ‘blogosphere’ is a self-organizing system, what are its attractors, their forms and dynamics? – SWL
It’s difficult to believe, but I expect there are now many users on the Internet who have never participated in one of the oldest forms of ‘online community’ – Usenet Newsgroups. In large part I expect because of the influx of spam, but also with the rush to other forms of communication and community, Usenet groups don’t get the recognition, nor I expect the trafffic, they did in their heyday…
Continue reading “Internet FAQ Archives”
Via Edward Bilodeau comes a reference to this interesting sounding project. LEDA which stands for “learning environments for the digital academy” is a project by 4 European partners, three of them design schools, to create a next-generation learning environment, one that can “capitali[ze] on the knowledge generated by students within research and design programs”
Not much info available – the final report is available, but the site they highlight to get access to the software seems a bit thin. Still, worth keeping on the radar screen. – SWL
http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/
2003/11/techlearn_trip_.html
Mark Oehlert lets us know that Michael Parmentier’s notes from the recent TechLearn 2003 are now online. Having tried to produce conference notes myself, I am awed at the thoroughness and real usefulness of these notes. One can actually get a sense of what each of the speakers was focused on, and even an overall sense of the conference. A great model to emulate in the future. – SWL