Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
(Clearly of only limited interest to anyone not on Vancouver Island, but hey, it’s my blog!)
The Northern Voices blogging conference is fast approaching – I am driving over from Victoria the night before, catching the 3pm ferry and have room for 2-3 others. I am returning the next day likely on the 7 or 9pm ferry. Love to have company and hate to drive to the mainland with empty seats in my car, so let me know if you could use a ride. – SWL
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/
2005/top10.html
This isn’t an educational technology post, but if it has any relevance in that regard it is to keep things in perspective. Click on the past years’ reports only makes it worse to realize how ongoing some of these issues have been. And count the number in Africa. – SWL
http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/
DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile
Possibly of interest to some of you metadata mavens out there is this wiki where you can find ongoing work of the Dublin Core Education Working Group, including this early draft of an application profile of Dublin Core to apply to educational materials. It’s not exactly ‘knock your socks off’ kind of stuff but then let’s hope metadata never is considered such.
Clearly an improvement over straight ahead Dublin Core in adding things like ‘Education Level,’ but as some folks from the library community recently reminded us, it’s not like anyone’s actually using much more than the equivalent of Dublin Core anyways when they use the LOM. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, automatic metadata generation/harvesting is going to save our souls and use all the LOM elements to then rapdily (magically, automatically…) re-assemble personalized learning. LOM mani padme LOM. Boy, am I having a rough Saturday! – SWL
http://www.computer.org/multimedia/mu2004/promo1.pdf
Raymond Yee helpfully points out this great article by Dick Bulterman titled “Is it Time for a Metadata Moratorium” from which Raymond extracts this true nugget:
“For nontext data – such as video, images, audio, and so on – direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation.”
Seems obvious, right? And yet, hyperbolic testimonials to the wonders of flickr and del.icio.us aside, this seems exactly the problem (one of many) that countless repository initiatives seem destined to replicate in positing a repository ‘container’ that isn’t even loosely coupled with either the content creation or content use/re-use environments or workflows. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa. – SWL
Looks like my earlier post may have been an overreaction (won’t be the first time), but not without productive results. The reason I posted my email to bloglines publicy was because I had heard from a few folks I asked that they had experienced similar problems, and also that they felt they were getting stock ‘we’re looking into it’ responses.
But luckily it also drew the attention of one-time fellow blogger Greg Ritter (Greg, come back, we miss you 😉 who cannily diagnosed the problem as likely being caused by extensions to Firefox that were messing with how Javascript was behaving. A quick google indicated this was entirely likely, and sure enough, disabling most of the extensions and upgrading a few others seems to have fixed the problem. I now have to go back and figure out systematically *which* extension caused the problem, but this test (along with checking Bloglines in a few other browsers) confirmed Greg’s hunch. My bad. So a tentative hurray that Bloglines seems to be working o.k. Note this is a different problem then the one that Michale Feldstein’s feed has been suffering, and I continue to be concerned that other feeds are similarly affected. – SWL
(O.k., I promised the one before was my last one today, but you know… procrastination and all that)
For the sake of posterity, here is the email I wrote Bloglines tech support today. I would urge others to do likewise who are experiencing the same problem.
“Hi, I contacted you a few weeks back about this problem, and since then have canvassed a number of other bloggers and learned they too are experiencing this problem. There is a regular, reproducable problem with bloglines correctly updating the feed count ofr a feed but then not displaying the feed content if that feed is selected (unless one forces the ‘last x hours’ of content to be displayed.) This is a SERIOUS problem. I love bloglines. I know it is free. If it doesn’t get fixed, though, I think this would bode very ill for continued user loyalty and adoption. A *detailed* reply would be appreciated, I’ve had the ‘we’re working on it’ responses before. Maybe something in your news feed? People know about this problem. If it is a question of being with specific feeds, let us know and we can tell you which ones it happens with (because it does seem feed specific). thanks, Scott Leslie, Edtechpost (http://www.edtechpost.ca/)”
(This has GOT to be my last post today! If you’ve ever wondered why my posts are so short, it isn’t because I have nothing to say 😉
Thought this would be interesting to the ‘small pieces’crowd – FreeLists.org is a free email listserving service (with no advertising and industrial strength admin controls on your lists). I’ve used it for a number of projects in the past where I didn’t have access to my own mail server and wanted to run a list. It provides users with their own web-based admin as well as web-based archives, and (what prompted this post) just announced the availability of RSS feeds for any of the list archives. They do say the lists must be ‘technology focused’ but in the past I have found them willing to accept ‘educational technology’ as easily fitting that bill. Free. Web-based. RSS. Seems like at least 3 of the magic words these days. – SWL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_learning_environment
EdTech bloggers may be interested to get in on the action over at wikipedia where a number of edtech terms are being defined – the above link points to the already reasonably flushed out artcle on ‘Managed learning environments‘ and there are many other related terms, including ‘learning objects‘ and ‘elearning‘ for example.
I personally didn’t mind any of the entries too much, though was slightly put off by the redirection from Course Management Systems to ‘Managed Learning Environments,’ but the wonderful thing about wiki is to add your two cents if you don’t agree. Wonderful opportunity for those in the field who are interested in wikis to ‘walk the talk’. – SWL
http://www.infrae.com/products/railroad
I am really not sure why I haven’t seen more of this, as the longer I look at the LOR problem the more sense it makes to me that ‘conventional’ repositories can be reasonably easily built on the back of existing (large and relatively stable) open source Content Management Systems. This comes as well with a realization that try as one might, it is likely not feasible to omit the content management of learning objects from one’s solution. This repository system, from a software development company based in the Netherlands, runs on top of Plone or Zope and appears to support OAI harvesting of Dublin Core records out of the box.
In truth there are a couple of repositories I know of that have taken the similar approach – Connexions is built on Plone, and Rob Woodbury’s Avire (though not explicitly an LOR) on top of TikiWiki. And then there is Eduplone, but to be honest I have never quite sussed that one out. – SWL
http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/adeta_blogtalk.ppt
The above points to the powerpoint slides for an online presentation I just gave to the Alberta Distance Education and Training Association (ADETA). Likely nothing new there for the old hands, but I promised James I would post it once it was done. Like everything else on this site it is posted under a Creative Commons license, so reuse as desired.
I tried to build on the work I did a few years back on the ‘Matrix of Uses’ for blogs in education – truth be told I haven’t spent a lot of time since then focusing on the issue, so don’t know if my thinking has progressed that far.
In a nutshell, my messages were
– focus on ‘blogging’ as process and not ‘blog’ as noun
– blogging is important in representing a number of significant ‘firsts’ (easy XML publishing tool, easy personal publishing, networked writing, easy way to create identity online)
– yet important to learn the lessons these ‘firsts’ teach irregardless of the specific manifestations (I know I’ll catch flak for that one)
– represent a move towards bringing our educational life online and are online lives together (for better or worse, you decide)
It’s hard when you don’t know your audience/can’t even see your audience. I ended up with too much background and not enough time for the meat. Maybe someday there will be enough awareness of blogs as a phenomenom that all of us can forsake all the introductory comments, but it still feels fringe enough to me when I talk to educators ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, that I feel compelled to include it in these kinds of talks. – SWL