The Rest – Page 16

My search is over – Yahoo Pipe to constrain search to linked to pages

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/zhmqsw_52xG4gUz8e_gC8A/

Wouldn’t you know it, a few seconds after I finish commenting on Tony Hirst’s blog that my personal quest has been a way to dynamically constrain a search to only those pages linked on any webpage, I actually read the entire post and learn that he had already done this! A simultaneous ‘Doh!’ and ‘Hooray!’

From a usability perspective what I’ve always wanted to see was this as a bookmarklet that passes the link the URL from whatever link containing page you’re on, so I’ll look into that, but Tony has demonstrated how this is seemingly quite straightforward with Yahoo Pipes.

Why is this important to me? Think of all of the collections of links out there, people who have painstakingly vetted links on a particular subject, collected only those they felt were important. With one click you can search just those linked sites. It can definitely be argued that this always runs the risk of missing stuff outside of those constrianed sites, but there’s times when limiting the context is useful and important. – SWL

Wikipatterns – Wiki Patterns

http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/

Brilliant idea. Hopefully the cogdog won’t mind me scooping this from his del.icio.us feed, but it was too delectable to pass up. Wikipatterns are exactly that, identified patterns of users and adoption to help guide new wiki builders towards success. Each of the patterns cites numerous illustrations from well known wikis. And…it’s a wiki, so after getting an account you can add to the patterns. I notice wikispammer seems to be missing from the oddly named ‘people anti-patterns.’ – SWL

First Monday – Tragedy of the FOSS commons?

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_2/schweik/

First Monday can be a frustrating read some times, but I find almost every issue has at least one real gem like this.

Charles Schweik and Robert English have published this important look at the role of “institutions” in the sustainability of FOSS projects. It’s critical to note their notion of “institution” which in this context refers to the rules, norms and governance structures of a project. Kind of unsurprisingly, at least to me, they find that they fewer the hurdles to participation, the more contributions you get, but that projects do evolve additional “institutions” as they grow, though not as many as you might suspect.

Another small piece of the study is the report on the size (in developers) of projects hosted on sourceforge (cf. Table 1) whose data presumably came from the FLOSSmole project. Of the 93,702 total projects (as of April 2005) only 224 had greater than 25 developers, and only 1800 or so had more than 10. I say “only” which sounds dismissive but it’s not meant that way. Just that many of the smaller ones might leave you a bit risk exposed if you were to adopt them without one’s own development capabilities already identified. – SWL

Montastic – Free Website Monitoring Service

http://www.montastic.com/

I am responsible for a few web servers in addition to this blog, but in all of these cases they are servers that I don’t own or have root access to (nor any particular pull with the sys admins). For a while we kept having server outtages on one of them that would go unnoticed both by me and the sys admins until it was too late and users would get effected. So I started looking for a site monitoring service that didn’t require a software install nor the cooperation of any sys admins, and a few months ago came across this one, Montastic . It is very straightforward – after creating an account based on your email address, you simply give it a website and address and … that’s it. It will send you notifications either by email, RSS or ‘widget’ if that server stops responding so you can start appropriate actions. Perfect for your average instructor or blogger who does not necessarily have control over their server environment and yet feels responsible for the quality of their users’ experience. In an ideal world this is a service any web host should be able to offer you by default, active notification of server outtages, but until then, this is worth a try. – SWL

Testing Out “Write to my BLog” site

On a tip from Alan, testing out the writetomyblog.com site .
– SWL

Addendum: So I tried out the writetomyblog.com site based on a for:nessman link from the CogDog. My one comment – while it provides a nice editing environment, it does not appear to integrate with my local Ultimate Tag Warrior database for tags, so for now I think I’ll pass.

Website Redesign as a Public Service

http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2007/01/28/
toronto-bloggers-swarm-to-redesign-ttc-website/

OK, a little off topic, but this post from the Wikinomics blog kind of caught my eye because it resonates with a situation I’ve recently come across. The post talks about a group of bloggers getting together in Toronto to redesign the unbearably unusable Toronto Transit Comission’s website. Maybe the TTC will listen and adopt some of the design, maybe not, but creating an alternate (usable) interface to a terrible public service site like the current TTC one strikes me as an example worth emulating.

In my case, the dismally designed site is my local Victoria’s school board website. Now in the pantheons of bad information architecture, this might not rank right at the top, but it’s got to be pretty close. Designed by a bureaucrat, for other bureaucrats, not for parents, students or teachers, the people who actually need to use the site. I work online all day, and consider myself a reasonably savvy web user, yet every time I need information from the School District I am left scratching my head. For instance, this week I’m trying to find out more information about what’s going on, as they just announced 2 days ago that they are closing my son’s school! (oh wait, there’s a PDF of some sort of meeting announcement in the “Media Releases” section of the site titled “School Consultative Process” – oh yeah, that makes sense -?!- and then no times or locations given for the meetings!) I wrote the school board a few weeks back, before the whole business of the school closures, and got a pretty standard response about how they had consulted stakeholders in designing the site, never had any complaints, yada yada. Pretty well “blow it out your ear.”

So, what to do. Well, maybe the above is an example to follow. Any parents from Victoria out there interested in joining forces on this? To start with, how about a real self-interested exercise – identify all of the things as parents we’re looking for, and then design an alternative interface to the site that speaks to those needs, not the school board administration’s.

Indeed, why not take this a step further (and bring it back to ed tech, a bit). Redesigning your college’s website? Your departments? Why not solicit mockups directly from your users, take user-centric design a whole step further to user-designed design (yeah, I know, how passe of me – why not deliver everything as RSS and portlets and let people organize it how they want! Or make everything a wiki! Uh huh?). With tools like Sitekreator, Google Page Creator and Synthasite, to name but a few, this isn’t even really a technical exercise anymore.

End of rant. Back to work. But would love to hear your personal targets for redesign! – SWL

5 things you didn’t know (and were definitely afraid to ask)…

So, Brian wants to know 5 things about me he wouldn’t know…

I used to be an avid hitchhiker. My longest ride ever was from Medicine Hat to Sudbury (over 2,500 kilometers, driven straight through at my behest!) which ironically came the day after my shortest ride, trying to get out of Cowtown (and getting as far as the ‘Hat in 12 rides!)
My first official job title was “Knowledge Carpenter.” It started out as a joke (I worked for a ‘knowledge architect’ and since I was the one who ended up building everything…) but I eventually grew to be quite proud of it, though throught it I learned a valuable lesson – U.S. Immigrations Agents have no sense of humor and are definitely not fond of quirky job titles.
If you look really hard through the photos in this book (which luckily seems out of print, though copies exist in many academic libraries) you might find evidence of my extremely short nude modeling career. ‘Nuff said. If you want to find out any more, it will cost you at least three drinks.
I don’t drink. (Well not much. Except at Brian and Keira’s parties 😉 )
I sent my first email message in 1977, at the age of 8. Whenever I’ve taught internet courses in the past I usually start with this as an icebreaker. So while not classic internet email as we now know it, the message was sent via a dumb terminal in my basement in Montreal that was connected via the phone lines to a VAX server downtown, then over dedicated lines to another VAX server in Kuala Lumpur where my father received it while he was working there for Menenco as a consulting engineer. My dad continued to play a big role in my interest and access to computers, getting us an Apple II for personal use and also having early DEC and IBM machines in our basement.

And now I will continue my tradition of meme muffling. – SWL

On “The Perils of Stargazing” and the NMC Horizon Report

http://connect.educause.edu/blog/catherine/
the_perils_of_stargazing/16706

Catherine Howell writes (and Stephen Downes seconds – still no RSS feed in GReader today, Stephen, and how about some permalinks the rest of the world can understand) of the time lag and conservative nature of this year’s NMC Horizon Report choices for technologies that will have a significant impact on teaching and learning. [Disclosure: I was one of the 30 wannabe prognosticators on this year’s Advisory Board members.]

First off, the assertion that “this years� list have already achieved significant impact” I think belies a bit of a rarefied view of actual technology practices in higher ed. My own expeience is that for every edublogger, for ever teacher using a wiki in their class or sharing podcasts on iTunes or publishing Creative Commons, I meet 30 others who still squint funny at the word wiki or have NEVER heard of the Creative Commons. I wish it were different. I often act like it is. But I know its not.

But don’t get me wrong – I actually agree that the list is small ‘c’ conservative, but that’s because I’m mostly off in left field anticipating the coming revolutions in AI, robotics and 80 Core chips! That’s why I actually found the process we went through quite fascinating, and the fact that NMC documented it, all out in the open on the Horizon Report wiki, to be an exemplary practice.

If you actually want to see where the advisory board started from, check out the answers to the 5 research questions, especially Question 3, where I think you’ll find all of the alternatives suggested by Downes and Howell, and more.

What was fascinating (and maybe a bit frustrating, but in a good way) about the process was how we went from these sprawling lists down to a list of 6 that actually seem to bear some resemblance to conceivable futures, not ‘wished for’ futures, not ‘if only everyone would listen to me’ futures, but ones that bear some resemblance to where these slow moving beasts called post-secondary institutions will get to. Now the frustrating part is how this doesn’t really deal well with discontinuous or disruptive innovations, but hey, that’s kind of their nature, to disrupt and not be so easily assimilated.

So, is this my list? No; mine included amongst other things Intelligent Tutoring, Internet-wide User-centric Identity Systems and Real-Time Language Translation. But is it a list I can get behind. Yeah, definitely; if 5 years from now all of these are significantly adopted in higher ed, that will represent a positive shift from where we are today, and in many cases, however lamentable, a large one. – SWL

So Long Bloglines…

Unlike most of the of the other cool kids, I’ve had a hard time kicking my bloglines habit for newer tools. A case of “if it ain’t broke…”

Well, sad to say, it is broke. It’s probably a familiar refrain to others who’ve made the leap, but after the umpteenth time of Bloglines acting funny, I sent yet another email to their support folks. Only to get a self-referential email from them telling me to refer to the below ‘discussion thread’ for their response, only to see my original email with another message to ‘refer to the discussion thread’ and so on…

So Google Reader, here I come baby! The basics seem pretty straightforward but there are some things I still just don’t grok. Hopefully I will get a chance at Northern Voices to query better minds than mine about this – I lament cogdog’s absence, but my friend Jason Toal (that’s dj draggin to the rest of you punks) seems to have a hnadle on it too. – SWL

BioDieselNow – Informal Learning, Mass Amateurization and Open Science in one tasty package

BioDieselNow – Biodiesel from Algae

It truly is not that remarkable to find examples of informal learning communities online, indeed these are the very genes on which the net has grown so explosively. What’s maybe more remarkable is that people even feel the need to remark on them. So why highlight this one? Well…

– I like the fact that in this one spot you can see the convergence not only of informal learning communities, but also the “mass amatuerization of everything” and “open source science” in one fell swoop. Take a look at the post titled “Biodiesel from Algae Reading List” where a propsective Master’s students solicits feedback from the forum’s members on a proposed reading list as he has no access to local experts on as specific a topic as “generating biodiesel from Algae. What’s even better – he not only gets feedback on specific Thesis topics that could greatly advance the field, someone in the forum actually knows about a researcher at the student’s institution that might be worth hooking up with. Awesome!

– I think it illustrates quite well how discussion forums aren’t going away and can be quite powerful for facilitating community discussion. Sometimes we need to take a step back and realize not everyone has the same problems or goals as us, and that blogs aren’t the only way.

– in writing about this specific forum, I’m outing myself as a closet biodiesel fan. If I’m still writing EdTechPosts 10 years from now, please givem me a kick in the #@@. ‘Cos secretly (well, I guess not so secretly anymore) all I want to do is homebrew! – SWL