Month: November 2004

Please do not adjust your sets….

Finally upgraded my MT install (my ISP is threatening to heave me off the server if the comments script on my site keeps bringing the server to its knees, the REAL cost of spam!, and I’m hoping this upgrade will help). Apologies for the intrusion.

Rolling Up Furl and Del.icio.Us Feeds from Edubloggers

http://rollup.org/rollup/rollup.php?id=495

It seems ‘de rigeur’ for the cutting edge edtech blogger to have at the very least a Furl or del.icio.us bookmark account in addition to their blog (let’s not even talk about Flickr for right now).

Some, like Alan, have taken the further step of rolling their blog and Furl feeds together (and in Alan’s case his Flickr feed as well). This makes sense as it keeps the unique individual’s perspective attached to the feed.

But not everyone has taken this step; lots of folks have separate Furl and del.icio.us sites/feeds. I’ve been subscribing to one or two of them in the past, but wanted to get all the ed tech bloggers’ bookmark feeds in one place. So off I went to Rollup.org, where I created a new RSS feed that rolled up the Furl or del.icio.us RSS feeds from Alan, Brian Lamb, James Farmer, Greg Ritter, George Siemens, Trey Martindale, Harold Jarche, Will Richardson, D’Arcy Norman and myself. I would have added more, but these were all I could find.

So the handy thing about this is that I can subscribe to one feed in my bloglines account and see all the URLs collected by all these brainy folks. The downside is that many of these brainy folks read the same things as I do, and the same feeds as each other, and so there ends up being a fair bit of duplication in the feed.

Which leads me on to the idea that another value-added that either Furl or del.icio.us could offer (maybe they do?) is ‘group feeds,’ that is, a feed for a set of Furl’ers, but one that recognizes common URLs and groups them like the main site does.

Anyways, feel free to subscribe to the feed if you are interested. I don’t plan to take it down, though it is still an experiement for me to see how much useful stuff comes out of it. If you want your bookmark feed added to this feed, let me know too. – SWL

Free alternatives to Breeze?

Like Stephen, I was suitably awed by the nifty Breeze presentation on Wikis that Brian Lamb put together, and like Stephen and James, wished I too could do something similar but without the cost of Breeze. (It should be noted, however, that the niftiness of the presentation seems like it was 15% Breeze and 85% Brian’s humour and ingenuity.)

I hunted around for some free options, and didn’t come up with much. But below is a list of possibilities and pointers if you are interested in following up on this:

– OpenOffice’s presentation tool allows you to export as flash presentations; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to do voice narration (yet)
– PowerPoint does actually allow you to do voice narration of your slides, and you may be able to export these in IE-specific formats that preserve the voice narration on the web (though I couldn’t get it to work). You could also investigate one of the many Powerpoint-to-Flash conversion tools that exist and see if any of them preserve the audio narration
– there are quite a few commercial products that offer screen capture and voice narration capabilities. One that I have used is Qarbon’s Viewletbuilder. I seem to think we got it for a couple of hundred bucks. This presentation groups such products under the heading of ‘Demo Software’ (that is, software to create software demos) and lists a bunch of others one could consider, some for as little as $80.

I’m really interested to hear Brian’s own reflections on how big a part Breeze played in this presentation. I get the sense that while one could have produced this using other software, Breeze definitely can help the process along. – SWL

WikiSpam and Passwords

A few fellow edtech bloggers who have taken up wikis have of late been inundated by wiki spam. I too was pelted almost continuously with wikispam from China from around June through to September when I finally screamed enough!

But instead of just chucking my wiki out, I enabled the write password on it. I run my wiki mostly for my own purposes, and for some collaborative editing with a few colleagues. It’s mostly open to the public to read, but ultimately I want it as a real quick and dirty online notepad, webpage builder, URL collector and brainstorming tool.

I run PMWiki, and it has a handy feature that lets you add read, write or administration passwords. Adding a password to the wiki as a whole or a single page is dead simple, and the beauty in my mind is that there can be just a single write password, which works with whatever username you use.

As soon as I enabled this, the wikispam dropped to zero. Clearly, if you want a totally publicly editable wiki, this technique is likely not that useful. But if you’re like me and run one for yourself or a select few folks, or if you are running one in the context of a class, this is maybe something to think about. Consider, start of class a simply announcement like – “if you want to edit the wiki pages, use whatever username you like, and the password is ‘edit’,” or ‘english101’ or ‘speakfriendandenter’ or whatever easily memorable phrase you like.

Some would argue this goes against the original open spirit of wikis. Maybe so. Who cares. I just know that I was unwilling to spend any more of my life deleting wiki spam, and this was a way to eliminate it while retaining many (not all) of the original reasons I took one up, while not also incurring the heavy overhead of username and password maintenance. – SWL

Conflicted about the Edublog Weblog Awards

http://incsub.org/awards/index.php

James Farmer has taken up the challenge and created a site to vote for the Inaugural Edublogs Awards. I fell pretty conflicted about this:

– on the one hand, it’s great to recognize excellence and all of the hard work some folks have put in.

– on the other hand, this feels somewhat antithetical to the sense of collaborative community that some feel is emerging through the blogosphere. I placed a few votes, but as I did so I kept feeling I was highlighting one piece of good work at the expense of another. Also, this feels like it is tapping into a part of the blogosphere I’m really less interested in – people reinforcing their meatspace connections, status and networks through their blogs. Clearly, that’s inevitable, but it rubs me the wrong way, and it feels against the original spirit of ‘meritocracy’ on which the internet was built.

I think I’ve placed all the votes I’m going to place, and have now decided to mostly ignore this. The potential for harm is greater than the potential for good in this sort of thing. There are plenty other ways to indicate what you like in the blogosphere, indeed the ‘blogosphere’ is in some ways simply an emergent conversation that displays an interconnection of p/references. – SWL

Next-Generation Course Management Systems: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy presentation from Educause Conference

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666&ID=EDU04151

Already the Educause resource centre RSS feeds mentioned below bear fruit – this page points to an interesting presentation from the Educause conference on ‘Next Generation CMS.’ This is by the same folks who wrote the Educause Quarterly article of the same title a while back.

There’s a few good things in the presentation (I really liked the graphic of TV convertors they used to illustrate where CMS are today) but even more I just liked this model of recording conference presentations as a way to leverage face to face conferences and create a larger knowledge base. – SWL

RSS Feeds for Educause Resource Centre

http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=11

A few people have noted of late that Educause is sporting some blogs, but news to me was their browseable collection of resources. Of particular interest was the fact that each sub-node in their subject taxonomy had its own RSS feed, making it simple to keep track of new Educause-related resources on ‘open source’ (feed here) or ‘course management systems,’ (feed here) for instance. Not like any of us need any more information sources at this point, but at least it’s RSS.- SWL

CWSpace Poster at SPARC Institutional Repository Workshop

http://cwspace.mit.edu/docs/ProjectMgt/Reports/SPARC-IR-Workshop/sparc-poster.html

Via a post on the Dspace-LOR mailing list by William Reilly of MIT comes mention of this poster concerning various content packaging methods for LOs. The poster was produced for use at the SPARC Institutional Repository Workshop by the CWSpace project, a project investigating the use of Dspace to archive MIT’s Open CourseWare materials. The poster is an awkward size, but well worth a look as it gives a good overview of the issues and some of the alternate approaches to content packaging that are currently converging.

‘I hear that train a coming….’ – SWL