Ahhhh, love those Google searches. Whilst searching (and still seeking) information about the standards compliance of WebCT CE 6 content exports, I stumbled across this find, the dynamic Learning Content Management System. Built as an extension of the open source CMS called Silva, dLCMS bills itself as a “content management system for web based learning materials” built on top of Zope and released under a BSD license. It stores resources in XML format and has created packages which have been successfully imported into OLAT, ILIAS, Moodle and WebCT. It looks to have been produced by ETH Zurich (and possibly on soft money that’s now run out) but possibly worth a look. – SWL
Author: sleslie
Familiar Taste – Greasemonkey script to help you remember what you’ve tagged
http://www.blackperl.com/javascript/greasemonkey/ft/
So after about the 100th time of trying to tag a site in del.icio.us that I’d already tagged before (early onset alzheimer’s?!? More likely the effects of my misspent youth), I thought to myself “Someone has got to have already built something that queries del.icio.us in the background and lets you know if you’ve already tagged a page.” And sure enough, someone had, using Greasemonkey.
This script (great name!) displays a small piece of text on the screen with the tags you used (and optionally, how many other folks have tagged it to) on any page you visit that is already in your del.icio.us links and then gently fades away (the fade time can be configured). I use the del.icio.us extension for Firefox already, and this would seem like a natural addition they could build into it, but until then, this script does exactly what I want. – SWL
Blogs to Advise Users of Server Status
http://openomystatus.blogspot.com/
The link above is just an example, but doesn’t this one seem obvious to anyone else? Blogs to inform your users about a server/services status – hosted SOMEWHERE ELSE if you’ve got a clue. Yet, I still get these interminable emails about planned server outtages, upgrades, etc., and NO communication after unplanned outtages actually do happen. I guess there’s no faith that the RSS feed would get read (and lots more, perhaps misplaced, faith that the spam-like emails will). – SWL
Article – “Limits of self-organization: Peer production and ‘laws of quality'”
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_10/duguid/�
So at least 5 weeks ago, First Monday publishes this article by the co-author of The Social Life of Information, Paul Duguid, that asks questions about the oft-asserted transferability of “laws of quality” from open source software projects to the peer production of ‘knowledge’ in sites like Wikipedia, and literally almost no one replies (well at least one well read blogger did)?
Maybe everyone just read this already and went on with their business. But this smells like the fart in the crowded room of social software acolytes that nobody wants to acknowledge (jeez, somebody crack the window already!) Duguid can easily be faulted, as he does himself, for the anecdotal examples, but his article doesn’t read like one from the establishment “enemy” camp trying to argue for the quality of existing authorities, but instead a call for a thoughtful examination of some assumptions that enthusiasts of the peer production of knowledge (and I count myself as one) continue to make but which, if questioned, might actually improve these processes. Not that the examples he cites, like Wikipedia, aren’t always trying to grapple with these issues. Still, the silence is deafening. – SWL
Slightly Tongue in Cheek Presentation on “The Future of CMS”
So last Friday I gave a talk at the WCET conference titled “The Future CMS.” A flash version (13Mb) with both audio and slides is available, but if you’d prefer you can just grab the slides on their own (7Mb) (if you view them in ‘Notes’ mode you can pretty well see the full text of the talk.) Be warned, I have a hard time taking myself seriously as a prognosticator (as likely will you by the end of the presentation.)
A little context; the crowd at this conference is mostly policy and admin folks – very few techies and faculty in the crowd. While there were certainly more people who had heard of the social software/Web 2.0 explosion than in previous years, it’s still a crowd that I hope finds value out of this kind of presentation. This year was notable for the marked increase in both Web 2.0/e-learninig 2.0 topics and blog-savvy presenters. I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Jaren Stein and John Krutsch, the two lads responsible for the recently announced Moodle OCW module. In addition, I got to hang out and see present both Terry Anderson and Chris Lott, and finally meet the indomitable patent battlers Al Essa and Barry Dahl. Rather than being one of the self-congratulatory post-conference blog posts Terry mentioned that he hates, I actually mention all of these folks, as well as the number of blog and wiki-savy attendees in the audience, as proof of the every growing awareness and practice; at this conference I I have seen through the last 3 years the topics and practices of Web 2.0/elearning 2.0 slowly moving into what I’d consider the ‘early adopters’ and even the start of the ‘early majority.’ – SWL
Great Social Software Presentation from WCET 2006 Presentation
http://community.uaf.edu/~cde/wiki/SSW
I am sitting in a session at the WCET 2006 conference in Portland listening to a really fabulous presentation by Chris Lott and Terry Anderson, amongst others. Chris is presenting with the above wiki, and offered up this tagcloud of affordences for education by social software as a new rubric to organize examples of social software use. Have a good example, add it in, we’re live right now (1:42 PM Friday November 3). – SWL
BCcampus Study on EdTech PD Needs in BC Post-Secondary
I’m hoping this is of interest to folks outside the province too – my employers, BCcampus, commissioned a study done by Janice Johnson of UBC to examine professional development needs around educational technology in public post-secondary in British Columbia. Through a combination of surveys, face-to-face meetings and an environmental scan of existing offerings, the report paints a picture of the current practices and potential needs for PD in our province. It also recommends a number of approaches for addressing these needs, including ways to harness existing resources in the province at a larger scale as well as the idea of dedicated ‘demo’ spaces, places where educators can try out new tech with very low barriers and cost.
We should start to see various activities come out of this soon which I am very excited about. – SWL
Ulises Ali Mejias on “The Tyranny of Nodes”
http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/10/
the_tyranny_of_.html
The only reason I don’t recommend reading Ulises Ali Mejias’s Ideant is that you may never get back to work, so deep and thought provoking do I find his essays (calling them posts would seem a slight). But if you have the heart, head and time to have followed some of Stephen’s longer posts essays, then you must read these as well. These represent for me the two intellectual views on networks between which I currently vascillate (though careen would likely be the better word).
When Ulises writes in conclusion that while “self-interest might be a functional principle to organize networks … it might not be sustainable as the basis for a social ethics, which requires a degree of selfless engagement” he gives word to a fear that has been nagging me since I first heard Stephen disparage “networks of proximity” and have myself tried to give feeble voice to in posts like this one on Canada day and in conversation with other edubloggers. What I appreciate so much about Ulises’ piece as I read it was that it was not demonizing networks nor underplaying their power, but instead questioning what we lose in adopting them as a governing metaphor (and more, an actual organizing principle).
What I’m left with, though, is the same question I feel in the face of my children’s over-mediatized future, which is not how to make it go away, as I don’t think it ever will, but instead if there are ways in which we can adopt the technologies (and ways of being that we can adopt that aren’t on the network) to help us, if not evade, at least amend, this ‘tyrrany.’ Like I said, careening!!! – SWL
Educause Evolving Technology Committe Report on Open Source LMS
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/DEC0602.pdf
There’s nothing really wrong with this report but also nothing very exciting either – basically a short synopsis of Sakai and Moodle and the state of affairs in LMS adoption in the US. If I were one of the 50 or so other open source learning management system projects out there I might be a bit choked by the continued lack of recognition (and it certainly gives pause to claims I’ve seen made within the open source CMS community that there’s no inherent competition between open source projects) but if you need a short synopsis document on the topic to stick in front of a still skeptical CIO, this is one place to start. – SWL
NoteMesh – another student-centric note taking service
http://www.notemesh.com/?a=home
Along the same lines as stud.icio.us, which I wrote about last month, NoteMesh is driven by students and creates wikispaces for an entire class to take notes in. I actually much prefer the stu.dicio.us model, in which each student is taking their own notes but the class ‘tags’ create a collective note space, over this one, where instead students collaborate on one set of notes for the entire class. If I’m understanding correctly, this is partly the distinction Stephen was getting at in his recent whiteboard drawing. Still, encouraging to see the being aimed directly at the student taking control over their own knowledge creation processes rather than having to be always mediated through instituional infrastructure. – SWL