Author: sleslie

CETIS Article on Automatic Metadata Generator

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20050127043826

This article by Wilbert Kraan of CETIS will undoubtably make the rounds in the next few days, but it seemed too signifcant to not post on myself.

Many of us have heard speechs and read articles by one of the IEEE LOM’s creators, Erik Duval, to the effect that metadata needs to become more invisible to end users, in part through automating its creation. Well Erik and the crew at KU Leuven haven’t just talked about it – as Wilbert describes, they have released an open source ‘framework’ for the automated generation of metadata based on the context of its use. Extremely exciting news. – SWL

New Questia CMS built on top of Library System

http://makeashorterlink.com/?N21E1465A

I know nothing about this system, but it caught my eye as significant as it is the first CMS that I know of coming from a library catalog vendor and being built on top of collection of library materials.

For those who lament the seemingly dominant instructivist bent of current CMS this seems hardly a good thing, likewise the ‘small pieces’ crowd. But as my colleague Bruce Landon keeps reminding me in our discussions about learning object repositories, at the end of the day, libraries are the ones with the budget dollars and seemingly more entrenched institutional mandates and may well end up being where many of these systems get located. – SWL

Bloglines Problems – Seriously Concerned

http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/comments/223/

I am a huge fan of Bloglines and use it ever day (some people even claim I have an RSS ‘habit’ and need help). So I have been increasingly concerned with the weird behaviour I have seen over the past weeks in Bloglines. Specifically, I’ve noticed feed counts getting updated but the feed contents not displaying when you go to read them unless you specifically force it to display the last x days. The other problem I’ve reported is that the Bloglines search facility is demonstrably not working on a regular basis.

I’ve emailed Bloglines and got a response on both problems that they were ‘looking into the problem.’ O.k., great; it’s a free service and they replied in under a day, which is pretty impressive.

But then quite by chance today I went back to Michael Feldstein’s e-literate site because in the back of my mind I wondered why I hadn’t seen anything from his blog of late. And there I found the above post which indicates that Bloglines hasn’t been updating his feed for quite some time. I unsubscribed and resubscribed and he’s right – sometime back in October the feed stopped being updated and you can’t get anymore through Bloglines.

I don’t know about you, but if you are a Bloglines user I would suggest this is VERY unsettling news. Anyone else experiencing weirdness like this? (I’ve turned off comments recently as my ISP helpfully broke my MT-blacklist comment spam filter with a PERL upgrade, but please email me or post on your own blog if you are experiencing similar difficulties. The irony being of course that if you read this feed through Bloglines, who knows if you will or won’t see this post). And as Will Richardson recently reminded folks, back up your OPML files. – SWL

Wikiversity

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity

O.k., I admit I chuckled when I first saw this, but heck, I regularly turn to Wikipedia now for quick reference info (as does the Gurunet desktop reference app I use to check word definitions) so maybe this is one of the faces of open education to come. Not much there yet, though there is a page with some ideas on what it could become, but you gotta start someplace. – SWL

Metis Digital Library Workflow System

http://www-serl.cs.colorado.edu/metis/index.html

One of a number of interesting services and tools funded by the NSDL, Metis is “a workflow system designed to support the workflow needs of digital libraries.” This Java-based application seems ot only work against its own internal store of users, but different events and roles can be configured to perform actions such as file compression, mvoing files, creating timers and new users and email notification. There is an API published, and you seem to get the source code in the download though no indication I could find of the license status. – SWL

PLANET Digital Repository

http://ants.etse.urv.es/planetdr/

On the surface just another repository project, but of interest to me because it is a current project from outside of Canada that seems to have picked up the Edusource Communications Layer (ECL) developed by Marek Hatala and others as part of the Edusource project.

This is the second piece of information I’ve had in as many weeks that Edusource isn’t maybe as moribund as it’s original website would lead one to believe. I guess some of the action has moved on to this eRIB site and to this eduSource Registry of Services, but still, it seems pretty unclear to me what in fact is still going on. Would love to know, though. – SWL

University of Arizona’s DLearn – DSpace-based LOR

https://www.dlearn.arizona.edu/index.jsp

I have wondered out loud a few times whether anyone was attempting an LOR on top of DSpace. I got some lukewarm responses but nothing very concrete to back up DSpace’s own claims that it could be used as one. Today I stumbled across this – I don’t know for an absolute fact, but this sure looks like a DSpace-powered site, ostensibly serving ‘learning objects’ hedged as ‘digital learning materials.’

Given my current predicament (some of you will know of which I speak) I’m not really feeling like one to throw stones, glass houses and all that, eh. But this performs kind of how one would expect it to – straightforward support of single object binary blob uploads, searching and browsing, collection support, workflow for submission and fine and dandy archiving using MD5 checksums. And maybe in the end this is all there needs to be, though it seems like we’ve seen enough of that style of repository to convince that it has some shortcomings. Certainly, nothing by way of authorization, DRM, handling of XML content or content aggregation which seem to be where things are heading. So clearly not an endorsement, simply an example. – SWL

New EdTech blog – Tim Wang’s Education Blog

http://blog.loaz.com/timwang/index.php

A warm welcome to the blogosphere for a new Ed Tech blogger from B.C. Tim Wang is a Flash developer with the Arts Computing group at U.B.C. For those of you not familar with their work, these are the folks behind a set of Flash-based learning tools they call ‘Learning Object Template Tools,’ including the flash-based Timeline Tool that made the rounds a few months back.

I am really looking forward to reading Tim’s blog, both for the ideas he brings to the field but also the connections he brings. In addition to being a great Flash developer, Tim also speaks Chinese and has of late been making more and more connections with educational technologists in China. I often find backlinks to EdTechPost from Chinese blogs only to find I can’t make heads or tails, so it will be great to have a guide to new happenings over there. – SWL

Fangs: The Screen Reader Emulator Plugin for Mozilla

http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?show/fangs

A few years back now my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon brought a blind student with him to one of our BC Ed Tech gatherings to have him demonstrate accessing a course within a CMS via the screen reader JAWS. JAWS is, as far as I know, a market leader and often held up as a de jure standard for accessibility.

What the demonstration showed me and others was that, even though on a technical level the CMS (in this case WebCT) was accessible through JAWS (e.g. JAWS could read it and the student could access different parts of the course) it was absolutely UN-USABLE – a streamingly long scream of text and navigation links one after another that even for the student, who was used to both JAWS and WebCT, presented difficulties. (To be fair, this isn’t an anti-WebCT screed, and from what I know they have made improvements in this regard).

The point is, meeting accessbility standards is a bare minimum, but it doesn’t make the content usable for those using assistive technolgoies.

And here’s where this plug-in comes in. The free, open source ‘Fangs’ plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox avoids one of the challneges designers have with creating accessibly usable pages, which is that JAWS has a license cost associated with it and so many people simply assume that if it conforms to W3C WCAG or Section 508 guidelines, that’s enough. It’s not, and it’s a case where ‘seeing’ (actually ‘hearing’) is believing. ‘Fangs’ allows you to read web pages more like how the users of an assistive reader will hear them. And trust me, usually it ain’t pretty. – SWL