Author: sleslie

Edutools Course Management News (but displaying on the EdTechPost site)

I help maintain the news page at Edutools where we post timely items of interest to the course management system industry. Our developer kindly enabled an RSS feed of the page, so I can also see it in my aggregator, and will occassionly repost relevant items to this blog. But I thought it would be nice to offer the same content on this site, and this handy code from Dave Winer allows one to display the contents of another RSS feed directly in ones’ own Radio blog. How’s that for write once/publish everywhere! I’ll put a link to this page on my regular nav bar at some point, but for now it seemed like an interesting experiement. – SWL

Follow up on Copernic Summarizer

So I installed this software at work and have used it a few times on some fairly complex documents, as well as on some more straightforward ones. It’s o.k. as far as these things go – I guess I was hoping for a little more vulcan mind-meld type functionality; the reality is that even with the summaries it produces you still have to work through these, and they can be lengthy, and I question whether I don’t naturally do a better job myself in skimming through documents (e.g. it seems mostly to look at work frequency and placement, and summarize based on initial sentence in paragraph, though it is doing some analysis of structure that enables it to grab phrases that are buried more deeply.)

Still, an interesting experiment; when I get some time I’m going to dig further into the field of latent semantic analysis (partly based on Bruce’s recommendation that I do so) to see what developments there have been of recent days in this field. This as part of my belief that the solution that will emerge to find order amongst the chaos of the net will be a combination of automated techniques and methods that analyse actual behaviour of users and help aggregate their decisions and choices. – SWL

Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars

Great article on using wikis as both a PIM and collaborative content tool (and in fact on all things wiki, though there is so much here you almost have to know quite a bit about this before it starts to make any sense). By David Mattison, Access Services Archivist British Columbia Archives, Canand (GO Canada!!) Also has a great sidebar comparing wikis and blogs. Be warned though: if you haven’t played with wikis and you thought blogs were addictive, be prepared to get sucked into a massively intertwined universe in which you can spend days! Think ‘surfing the web’ to the nth degree! – SWL

Aaron’s Radio Experiment

“Everything you need to know to connect Radio and Zope via XML-RPC can be found at these three links:” Apologies for all of these blog-tool type posts, I am working on the site infrastructure itself and so it reverts back to its original role as my online knowledge base as I find new things I want it to do and need to remember. – SWL

Copernic Summarizer

Another tool in the endless battle to deal with the ever growing mass of information we deal with daily. This product uses “sophisticated statistical and linguistic algorithms, [to] pinpoint the key concepts and extract the most relevant sentences, resulting in a summary that is a shorter, condensed version of the original text.” It will be interesting to contrast this approach with the one we tried at the last company I worked at, speed reading software. – SWL 

Radio Userland Community Tools Directory : Master Tool Directory

I’ve been using Radio8 since last August, and if I have any complaint about the tool it’s the fact that you end up spending more time searching for documentation than you do actually using it. It desperately needs one central place in which links to all relevant documents, and links to all 3rd party tools, can be found. This post is simply just a breadcrumb that I am dropping so that one day I may find my way back to this collection of community developed tools. – SWL