Author: sleslie

More OpenSource (or free) CMSes.

I have no idea why, but the post by Elizabeth Lawley a few weeks back bemoaning the state of CMSes and stating her desire for an open source option seemed to bring responses from every direction. This one contains a host of options, most of which were familiar but there were a few new ones.

  • Spaghettilearning.com – out of Italy but seems to have multi-language support, PHP and MySQL-based.
  • Xtention.Net – they offer a free version of their LMS for organizations that only need to deal with SCORM objects. It’s ASP, SQL 2000 based.
  • MnITS Internet Teaching System – relies on  Apache, MySQL, and PHP (and I wonder if it is in fact the same systems as another one out of Minnesota that I am currently looking at named MnMaster?)

I will have to recompile the list I have going at http://www.c2t2.ca/article.asp?item_id=3744 as these are coming out fast and furious. I think some finer cateogires are going to be necessary too, as some of these (moodle, atutor, many others) look a whole lot more than others like what we have come to expect from a full-featured CMS. – SWL

e-Learning Centre

http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse/default.htm

This is “an information resource website for e-learning aimed at educators and training professionals.” I love finding sites like this from other countries – this one is from the U.K. – as they do truly have a different perspective on this field and you find all sorts of interesting links and products in here that are simply not on the radar screen here in North America (at least not on mine). Large collection of annotated pointers to a wide variety of elearning resources, from tools to implementation guidelines and more – SWL

SWAD-Europe: Semantic web applications – analysis and selection

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/
open_demonstrators/hp-applications-survey.html#OntoShare

“This report concerns the selection of two open demonstrator applications designed to both illustrated the nature of the semantic web and to explore issues involved in developing substantial semantic web applications given the current state of the art.“

Another great collection of pointers to applications that illustrate the potential wide-ranging uses of meta-data and the semantic web. This list is sorted into the following categories of use, useful in and of itself for illustrating the motivations behind the semantic web initiative:

  • Catalogue/thesaurus management
  • Data dependent agents
  • Data integration
  • Knowledge formation
  • Knowledge management
  • Metadata for annotation and enrichment
  • Metadata for discovery and selection
  • Metadata for media and content
  • Ontology Management
  • Personal information management
  • Semantic indexing
  • Syndication Category

 

Site List – Social Networking

http://www.newsisfree.com/click/-1,15394656,2572/

I probably would have missed this post and this blog, even though I can now see about 4 points of possible intersection, were it not for the ever-valuable elearningpost (I love this feed, just wish that the descriptions came through with the titles and URLS in the RSS feeds as seen in the Radio aggregator).

There were at least a half-dozen ‘social networking’ or community building softwares that were new to me on this list. Some definitely worth checking out. There seems a real opportunity for someone to create a taxonomy of collaboration software and an associated list of features, and maybe start doing some comparative analysis of these packages? Or maybe someone is already doing this? – SWL

– from [Unbound Spiral] via [elearningpost]

Searching the Blogosphere

http://www.alpern.org/weblog/php/blogsearch/writeup.html

If you haven’t seen this yet, it is sooo cool. Micah Alpern has put together a script that lets you do a search of only those sites whose RSS feed your subscribe to using the Google search API. It uses your mysubscriptions.opml file, which contains all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to, to set the scope of the sites to search. And in a brillant turn of usability, he added one’s own blog and the web in general as the other two ‘collections’ to search through the same search box. Plus he’s built a little form on his site that will generate all the code for you. All you need to do is go get a free account at google in order to get an API key, and away you go.

You can try it out on the right hand menu. This is great both as a personal knowledge tool, but also to allow you to look deeper through other people’s prisms on the world. – SWL

Introducing blam! and blaxm!

http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2003/03/18.html#a837

Posting by Sebastian Paquet on Blam from Alf Eaton

blam!has become a templating tool for writing reviews of (so far) books, CDs and DVDs.

The structure here is for reviews of books and records, but it would seem fairly straightforward to take the same idea and instead use Cancore or IMS Metadata fields to be describing learning objects (and could be extended, I suppose, with evaluative data too).

Isn’t this sort of what Stephen Downes was on about?