Author: sleslie

RSS feed of Archive of All Low Threshold Applications

I’m heading home ‘cos my Crohn’s is acting up, but I wanted to post something today so… as a follow up to a post last week where I commented that ‘wouldn’t it be nice to get the archive of ‘Low Threshold Applications’ from the TLTR group as an RSS feed. Well, here it is – http://myrss.com/f/u/n/unlArchiveMzxune3.rss91. The page pointed to in the link of this article is just an HTML rendering of the feed using Adam Curry’s javascript RSS displayer.

I’m not sure exactly why I did this other than because I could, and I suppose this violates all sorts of copyright issues…not to worry I’ll take it down soon enough, but maybe if someone knows these guys better than I you could stick a bug in their ear? – SWL

Some open-source voice-chat/whiteboard packages

A while back I participated in an online audio conference as part of the open-education group that was facilitated using vClass by Elluminate. I had used the software before and each time been very impressed with how well it works. But given that the focus of this group is ‘open source’ as it applies to educational content, someone very astutely commented that we should be looking for an open source alternative to vClass to support this group’s work. This comment really stuck with me, also because a number of institutions in B.C. have been investigating possible solutions to facilitate synchronous online classes, and ending up with some fairly pricey solutions.

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Wiki Is Not Your Blog

As recently as yesterday (in this article on Blogs as a CMS by Dr. John Baggaley of Athabasca) I’ve seen people equate blogs and wikis (cf. ‘a new variant of the blog—known as a “wiki”‘). Well, they simply aren’t the same thing. Sure, they both provide ‘easy’ ways of creating web content. They both started to get hyped around the same time, and you can find more and more software that either combines both types of functionalities or provides feeds from one to the other. But if this particular author had actually read the source he was citing (http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num2/emerging/default.html) he would have seen that they weren’t being equated, simply mentioned (as is now often the case) in the same breath as new “Environments for On-line Collaboration”.

It’s not really fair to pick on this particular author, as these two different phenomenom are more and more being conflated. But it highlights for me why the seemingly interminable blogging about blogging (and I suppose wiki’ing about wiki’ing) is still so prevalent – there isn’t necessarily a deep understanding yet about these phenomenom, and regardless of recent articles that make these technologies seem widespread in their adoption, we are still very much in the early adopters phase if we look at the internet’s population as a whole. </rant> – SWL

University of Florida Selection Process recommends Vista

http://at.ufl.edu/~cmsag/

Thanks to Michelle L. from UBC for pointing this site out to me – the University of Florida’s CMS selection committee seems to have settled on a recommendation of adopting WebCT Vista. They publish all of their meeting notes here as well as their required feature lists, which may be of interest. In general when we consult with institutions on a CMS selection proces, I always recommend they establish some sort of web presence as part of the process and publish as much material there as they can. CMS selection is already frought without enough issues and lack of transparency need not be one of them – SWL

RSS for Job Postings

Tim Bray’s recent piece RSS: Promise and Peril lists a number of potentail applications for RSS. Here’s another one that’s a bit of a personal crusade – job postings!

Is this not obvious to anyone else? Well apparently not to most HR departments, many of the ones I have to deal with will not accept anything but hand delivered paper resumes and only got dragged kicking and screaming on to the net a few years back! Maybe it just seems obvious to me as I spend more time now looking at potential employers’ job openings sites. But wouldn’t it be pretty straightforward at the bottom of your (regularly refreshed on a chronological basis, hint hint) job postings page to place a link to an RSS feed? Not only could it then be aggregated together with other postings at more central sites, but individual job seekers who are specifically interested in *your* company, as opposed to just any old company, could actively be pushed potential openings. You’d think reaching people who are already interested in your firm might be a good thing. But perhpas I simply don’t understand the hiring game well enough. – SWL