Blogs, course management and content management, from Cyberdash

http://cyberdash.com/node/view/125

Charlie Lowe at cyberdash picks up the thread where John Kruper left of on the viability of blogs as course management replacements. I agree here with Charlie; blogging is interesting, has many educational applications and commercial CMS can learn a lot from watching them, but the real challenge could instead come from one of the existing open source *content* management systems. While some of them have a ways to go, a few of them (Charlie points to Drupal and Postnuke as strong contenders) are emerging as broad platforms on which a variety of applications, not just content management, can be built. And after a while a lot of what is done with a typically C(ourse)MS does start to look a bit like fairly straightahead content management, sadly.

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Are We There Yet? Effects of Delay on User Perceptions of Web Sites

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/aug03.asp#susan

The latest newsletter from Human Factors International has this report on recent research into how download times affect user perceptions of Web pages. It’s long been a truism in web design that users hate to wait for web pages and so download times and file sizes are the bane of many designer or developer. The studies in this article spin this a bit more – not only do users apparently hate to wait, they will actually judge the same material to be less interesting if made to wait for it. – SWL

Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?

http://homepage.mac.com/john_kruper/iblog/
B905739295/C1776019690/E1401376105/index.html

John Kruper of the ‘Electric Lyceum‘ has posted this longish piece that neatly summarizes many of the recent posts concerning alternatives and dissatisfactions with conventional commercial course management systems.

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Educational Leadership Learning Network – ELLNet

http://www.ellnetportal.com/

“The Vision of the Educational Leadership Learning Network (ELLnet) is to create a leadership community among Canadian Educational leaders who will actively share their experience and expertise through an electronic medium.” Came across this very obliquely – a new Canadian project to creating a national/international leadership learning curriculum framework using peer-to-peer learning object technology. Hmmm, where have I heard that phrase before. Any Canucks out there have any more info on this? – SWL

This Month’s SideBars: Focus on CMS

http://online.bcit.ca/sidebars/current/index.htm

If you haven’t seen it before, Sidebars is an always fun and educational newsletter produced by the staff of the Learning Resources Unit of the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). This month they focus on all things CMS – they are undergoing their own change process currently and have published their well-worth emulating evaluation plan, and various staff also contribute pieces on a few existing open source choices as well as rolling your own CMS.

On this last one, I don’t disagree that you can piece together a variety of inexpensive components that make up part of what we now think of as a standard CMS, but I’m pretty sure you can’t get something that is entirely functionally equivalent, as well as integrated, without a lot of time, effort and money. This is where the CMS movement started from – trying to provide an easier way to access a common set of apps that were being implemented piecemeal. Whether one in fact needs all of that functionality is another question, a good one that doesn’t often get asked enough, and again the folks at Sidebars point to a useful Syllabus article by the Steves from TLTR . Great issue. – SWL

Whither (wither) the Relational Database

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3718

Short thought-provoking piece about whether we will see a reduction in the role currently played by relational databases, specifically in relation to issues like indexing, because of the ever onwards march of processing speeds. Indexing systems are inherently less efficient then structured searching, but at a certain point that may appear to matter less in the face of insane processing speeds. – SWL

When is spam not spam? When it’s in context

In the comments area on a recent post by David Davies on unwanted blog comments was a note by Bill Brandon describing a more common form of spam, email spam, generated by harvesting email address from blogs. Anyone who has been publishing a blog for some time and is also publishing their email address is probably subjected to this.

But what it reminded me of was a message I received about a month ago by someone in the field of elearning simulations that was for me an example of spam that wasn’t spam, or at least that I didn’t treat as such. This person made mention of the fact that I published a blog, and then went on to introduce me to their new book on elearning simulations.

Was it spam (or ‘unsolicited bulk email’ to use its more useful/less colourful name)? It was unsolicited and it was email. Was it ‘bulk’? Well, the author may have hand-culled my email address and typed up the message to me. I don’t know. I kind of doubt it. I expect it may have come out of one of the ed tech OPML files floating around, or someone’s web-based blogroll. But the point is, I couldn’t really tell for sure. The tone was such that it appeared somewhat personal, and it was very on topic. If the author hadn’t actually read the manifesto, he was at least very much on the cluetrain. 

Did I buy the book? Well no (not because I wasn’t interested, but because it’s about 49th on the list of things I can’t afford right now). Did it work as a email  marketing exercise?: I’m not a converted buyer, so not by that measure, but I kept the email in my inbox for a few weeks(regular spam lasts 2 nanoseconds in there), I was interested enough to research the author a bit more, and I’m posting to my blog about it (though you’ll have to puzzle out the specifics yourself, as I won’t shill for a book I haven’t read 😉

I don’t mind unsolicited messages; I just mind unsolicited messages that treat me as just another email address. – SWL

Trillian Pro – Windows IM client that communicates with AIM, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ clients

Buried within this recent slashdot thread on MS’s move to license access to MSN Messenger users for non-MS Messenger clients came reference to this multi-protocol Windows-based IM client that was new to me (I’m a real IM newbie, if you couldn’t tell).  

Not only does it support messaging to all these various other clients, it apparently has an RSS plug-in too so you can read your feeds in it! This is probably not news to regular IM users, as apparently the free version has something like 11 million downloads to date. But having just installed 3 different IM clients last Friday, I must say I am very attracted by its potential (and thus concerned about what the MS announcement might mean for it, but that’s another story). – SWL