The Rest – Page 11

OPML file of all Northern Voice attendee blogs

http://wiki.northernvoice.ca/f/nv-feeds-subscriptions.xml

I hate technorati. It doesn’t freakin’ work. And this year, for whatever reasons, there seems to be a reluctance to provide a “Planet Northern Voice” aggregator like in past years. So my solutions was to cull all of the “blog” feed URLs from the attendees pages. I’m using this directly in my Google reading – I had not realized that Google Readers let’s you constrain your search to a folder of feeds, so by simply searching on “Northern Voice” in this folder of feeds, I’ve got my own aggregator of just NV posts that in my opinion provides way more depth of coverage than technorati (and without all the cruft of the Jaiku feed someone put together which includes all the flickr and twitter feeds as well). Hope it is of help – you are of course free to use it yourself and add other feeds if you feel it isn’t comprehensive enough. – SWL

Just One More Book!! Children’s book Review Podcasts

http://www.justonemorebook.com/

Email to me asking me to blog a site almost inevitably end up in the round file, but I’ll make an exception for the playful Just One More Book!! site for a few reasons.

One is simply its subject, reviews of children’s books. As a parent of young kids I can never get enough good tips on new books to read them at bedtime. Another is the design of the site, which is simple, playful and easy to use (I really love the categories on offer, a nice way to approach kids books). And finally for a reason that is both an attraction and detraction to the site – they record all of their podcasts in their local coffee shop. As I longtime coffee shop afficiando this immediately attracted me, and the ambiance on the recordings *can* give them a nice feel, but for the most part really they just make them a bit harder to understand. Anyways, fun site, and once in a while you gotta give a little google love when someone asks. – SWL

Giunti Labs acquires HarvestRoad

http://www.giuntilabs.com/info.php?vvu=15&pud=450

Increasingly I am focusing on things other than repositories (Amen!) but it still occupies some of my attention, so this news (even 3 months after the fact) still caught my eye. Apparently Harvest Road, an Australian learning object repository/learning content management system vendor, has been acquired by the Italian-based elearning product vendor Giunti Labs.

Harvest Road was a publicly listed company on the Australian exchange that has now been de-listed (presumably because of this acquisition.) They were extremely aggressive in trying to market their product around the world over the past 4-5 years. You can draw your own conclusions, both about what this says about Harvest Road and what it says about that market. From where I’m sitting, though, it would be hard to spin this in a positive way. – SWL

Dare2BDigital – An Online ‘Gameshow’ to Showcase eLearning in BC

http://event.dare2bdigital.ca/

The folks at BCcampus (and this may be logrolling but let me be clear up front, while I work for the folks who have produced Dare2bdigital, I had nothing to do with the project) have come up with an interesting experiment to promote online learning in the province.

Dare2BDigital is a six-week “event” in which student teams compete for prizes by performing various challenges around existing online learing resources in the province, documenting their experience in team blogs that allow the “audience” to follow along, “root” for them, and also participate through blogs and forums (and end up eligible for their own prizes.)

So for instance, the first challenge involves the students interacting with the Tatla Online Observatory and conceiving a “game” that would take place in zero-gravity.

This is definitely not traditional marketing. It really is an experiment to try and expose more people to the really wide range of possibilities for (admittedly, but that’s our bailiwick) formal online education in British Columbia. It has just started, so we will see how it goes. Check it out. Depending on how well it does they may make it a regular thing, but it is definitely worth a least a look as an experiment in alternative marketing. – SWL

MegaTrends in E-Learning Provision

http://nettskolen.nki.no/in_english/megatrends/

Via the sporadic but often interesting e-learning reviews site comes a note about this large-scale study of, well, large-scale European e-learning providers (or “megaproviders” as the report calls them.)

Of most interest is perhaps the “Analyses of European megaproviders of e-learning” and the “Recommendations for robust and sustainable large-scale e-learning”.

Me, I’m not so sure I’m even keen on the notion of “megaproviders” any more, if I ever was. Some of the recommendations seem a bit obvious (“Recommendation 13: Robust, sustainable and large-scale e-learning initiatives should make sure to receive support from their top management” – uh huh) while others (“Recommendation 6: Use standard and widely-used technologies; widely-used technologies enable students to apply the software and hardware they have at their
disposal with little need to buy and install additional equipment.”) don’t seem to me to go far enough in decrying errors we continue to make.

Still, the report authors and funders are to be commended for having the courage to examine the host of failed projects to date and try to learn from these. There is a lot of material here and much good stuff to be digested over the next week as I dig through it. Enjoy! – SWL

Google Reader – Where is your support for authenticated feeds?

The main organization I work with uses Confluence as its internal wiki platform (and possibly for blogs too, we’ll see how that progresses). I have never been in love with it as a platform but on the principle that with social software, who is using it is often more important than what they are using, I’m trying to get behind it.

But it is frustrating the heck out of me for a number of reasons. We’ve CAS‘ified Confluence, which is great for single sign-on, but it means that any ‘protected’ space now requires authentication to get the RSS feed. And honestly, a wiki without RSS feeds is a non-starter for me.

Enter Google Reader. I made the switch about a year ago and now it is fairly entrenched in my workflow. Except…Google Reader doesn’t do authenticated feeds. So now I’m faced with either switching RSS readers again (ugh) or getting daily wiki updates via email (are you serious? At least Greader could support the email-to-RSS feature like Bloglines used to, and no, the Gmail to RSS hack wouldn’t work in this case).

Frustrating. Added to that, Confluence as a blogging platform leaves a bit to be desired, and to deal it’s inelegant posting workflow (10 clicks compared to my 1 or 2 now) I am trying out some XML-RPC based clients (because it does, at least, support that through a plugin). Hence, really, the reason for this post, to see if the ScribeFire (formally Performancing) plugin for Firefox will do the trick and provide a simply, free way of posting between both my WP blog and Confluence. Wish me luck. So far the experience hasn’t been stellar, with a memory leak and other bugs plaguing what should be a simple process. – SWL

Horizon Project “Metatrends”

http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Metatrends

As you may have heard, this year’s Horizon Report has been published. I was again privileged to be part of the advisory board that helped create it.

During the course of the small foofraw that emerged last year around it’s publication I mused how it would be interesting to have some analysis looking back over the past projections. Well, it looks like someone was listening – I stumbled across this page on the project wiki (there is a corresponding page in the report, but it seems not the nice graphic) in which someone has identified the following 7 “meta-trends” extending across the 5 years of reports:

communication between humans and machines
the collective sharing and generation of knowledge
games as pedagogical platforms
computing in three dimensions
connecting people via the network
the shifting of content production to users
the evolution of a ubiquitous platform

What do you think? These strike me as broadly capturing many of the dynamics and innovations we are experiencing. – SWL

Where can I meet you? How are you telling people the conferences you are attending?

Last year was a banner year for my conference attendance; on top of the always fun Northern Voice, I was able to attend the (not so fun, for me) IMS Alt-i-lab sessions in Vancouver, the mind opening Open Education convergence in Logan, Utah, the WCET conference in Atlanta, SREB’s Online Learning Task Group Meetings (again, back to Atlanta), and closer to home, the BC Ed Tech User’s Group session in Kamloops and Camosun College’s Distributed Education days.

As enjoyable as many of the programs were, the highlight is always the people, the hallway and barroom conversations where new ideas are spawned, plots hatched and connections made. Indeed, this year’s crop was spectacular in this regard; as much as I am in almost daily contact with my online network, the opportunity to see Chris Lott and Jim Groom twice in one year, and Brian and D’Arcy more times than was seemly was a great boon to my thinking, growth and personal well being.

I typically canvas my network of close friends and edublogger buddies about what events they are thinking about attending, as I know this will factor into my own planning. But this got me wondering (which I did aloud on Twitter) if there wasn’t a better “web 2.0” way to find out this information, especially a way that would allow me connect with people who I read and am interested in but don’t already have strong ties with.

As usual, Twitter yielded at least one good suggestion, upcoming.org, a site purpose-built for this. So I dutifully reactivated my account there, but I have some concerns. Not uncommon with any social software, the big one is “who else is there.” As much as I want to connect with new folks, the whole exercise began in an effort to more easily (less intrusively) find out where people I already know and like to talk to are going. The second issue is the lack of uptake of upcoming.org, epsecially amongst the educational technology conferences. A number of biggies weren’t in there (before I added them, a feature I quite like) which makes me suspicious of how useful it will be.

So, my question for you to start off 2008: where are you telling people (and how can I best find out) what physical meetings you are planning on attending in 2008? upcoming.org? Your blog? Facebook?

For myself, I will endeavor to use upcoming.org for now (cf. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/syndicate/v2/my_events/201841), but I am absolutely willing to be convinced of the merits of some other method. – SWL

Happy Solstice, Year End Reflections

(I have a half-dozen posts to write that don’t seem to be getting done, so this will have to suffice for now. Maybe over the holidays – oh yeah, right, “holidays.” Time *off*.)

Tonight (and tomorrow, we don’t discriminate) is one of our biggest celebrations of the year, Winter Solstice. I hope you have a great one too and drive away any winter doldrums as you welcome the rebirth of the light.

And being in a relfective mood I thought I’d note some things I am grateful for from the past year, and things I am wishing for in 2008

What I am grateful for in 2007

My family, and both mine and their continued good healths.
Being able to work in my chosen field and live where I live. Any gripeing you hear me do throughout the year is unfounded. I am truly fortunate.
The fellowship of the Unitarian Universalist community we are a part of in Victoria. Their ability to embrace difference and diversity while also standing up for social justice is an example I always hope to emulate.
Twitter, for all its failings. Or rather, for the people who I get to hang with in Twitter. Their support, conversation and everyday companionship means so much to me.
Being able to see so many good friends at different events this year. I “see” them everyday online, but the amount of cool ideas and projects that come out of even 10 minutes jamming over lunch or between sessions in a hallway just can’t be beat
Brother Leon and The Whoremonks, for saving my soul, getting me to play music and jamming with me no matter how bad it sounds to anyone else
To The Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Amon Tobin, The White Stripes, Beethoven, Beck, Blockhead, and M.I.A. for all doing their part to make joyous raucous music that lifts me up

And my wishes for 2008?

More time (and more focus) to get more skills, do some development work
For Dr. Bruce Landon’s continued and speedy recovery.
That my proposal for a new “social and web 2.0” Edutools site is accepted and supported
That Gardner Campbell will come out West and I get some time to hang with him

Blessed Be.