Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://www.flong.com/yellowtail/
There’s an essay here about the virtues of ‘bookmark gardening,’ but late on this Friday afternoon I’ll give that a rest and instead just point to this delightful ‘interactive art’ piece found hiding in the dingy corners of my local bookmarks file. Have a good break over Easter if you take one! – SWL
I know the “professionals” who work on search, taxonomies, the semantic web and the like will all know about this resource, but many who are interested in topics like “folksonomies” could do worse than spend a bit of time reading some of the papers published in the CSDL’s online library of publications. If you are interested in these kinds of topics, be prepared to set aside many hours for what you find, (and also to turn on your ‘academic publications’ bullsh*t filter – god how I detest some of the conventions of academic writing, much as I understand why they exist). – SWL
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search-inside/sipshelp-dp.html
Seems like an interesting idea in regards to generating automatic metadata – generate keyword phrases by analyzing the text and picking out phrases which occur regularly only in that work but not in others. – SWL
http://www.tightvnc.com/doc/java/README.txt
This will likely not come as a surprise to any of you who actually read manuals, but for the rest of us, you may be as surprised as I was to learn that you can share a view of your desktop (and any running applications) with multiple other users simultaneously using the VNC server without your viewers having to install any software. I’d known about VNC for years and already had it running on my machine, but always connected to it using a VNC client and used it as ‘remote control‘ software. The problem, though, was if all you wanted was for other users to simply see your desktop instead of control it (for instance to do a guided tour or walk them through a document over the phone), requiring them to have their own VNC thick client installed seemed a bit onerous.
It was only when I was about to sign up to use the Glance software and serendipitously read their licensing agreement that I noticed that Glance is in fact built on top of VNC. This piqued my interest – and sure enough, when I dug only a little bit into the documentation, I came across the fact that VNC has a built in HTTP daemon as well as a Java-client, and so by simply giving (potentially multiple) users your IP address and the appropriate port number they can view your machine running the VNC server through their Java-enabled web browser. For free. You may have to futz a bit with opening holes for specific ports in your firewall, but it’s about 5 minutes work to get simple desktop broadcasting working. – SWL
http://www.a-hec.org/e-learning_study.html
This report by Rob Abel aims to detail some of the “Common Factors and Best Practices of Institutions that have Been Successful at e-Learning” and serve as a counterpoint to last year’s more negative “Thwarted Innovation” report by Zemsky and Massy.
I’m sure some will take issue with it, but many of its findings seem reasonable enough – institutions that “do well” at elearning see it as critical to their missions and have organized and resourced accordingly. A few suprises too – seemingly contrary to conventional wisdom, the largest portion of ‘elearning’ at these ‘successful’ institutions is fully online courses and programs, not ‘blendid’ or ‘hybrid’ courses, which typically are portrayed as the easier half-step. Seen via Jane Knight’s elearning Centre. – SWL
https://network.grandcentral.com/en/home/index.jsp
Via Loosely Coupled – this has got to be significant, a company seems to think it can make a go of “application integration as a hosted service.” The current list of service providers is relatively small but a start – the well-known suspects like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and PayPal but others like gelco, salesforce.com and StrikeIron.
Hey bloggers – TAKE THE WEEKENDS OFF! Seriously, you all are generating just WAY too much interesting stuff to wade through on Mondays! – SWL
I remember having to go look up Mauritius on a map a few years back when I first heard about the learning object repository project that had started there (a PHP-based repository that looks to be steadily growing).
Apparently not content to rest on their laurels for being the smallest (and one of the first) country to have a learning object repository, someone there has decided to innovate further and create Edutech Mauritius, a Drupal-based site offering some free online courses, as well as serving as the hub of a community for “promoting and applying information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the educational experience.” I don’t know at all that these two initiaitves have any conntection, but to see both of them come out of this rather small island nation is amazing and impressive. It’s things like this, plus announcements like these, that make me want to focus on getting back to hacking solutions on my own again. – SWL
There was no way I could pass up attending the Northern Voices blogging conference given that it was only a ferry ride away, and for the most part I came away glad to have made the effort. Here are some reflections, in no particular order.
The High Points
– Dinner with Brian, D’Arcy and other friends the night before. In truth, the whole trip was worth it for me for a few hours of good food and conversation with some old and new friends.
– Stephen’s presentation, nominally titled ‘Community Blogging‘ (in essence the notion that communities are defined by semantic affinity, not network proximity, and that we need to develop systems which help us derive meaning that emerges out of collective/aggregated contexts) was for me the highlight of the conference from the perspective of presentations given. It deserves a post of its own and for me was the most concise synthesis of what Stephen’s been driving at for the last few years I’ve seen.
– UPDATED: I forgot to mention the other highpoint of the conference, a 2 minute description on the use of RSS feeds and wikis for sharing and collaborating on the research at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. The fellow making the point sat patiently with his hand up throughout almost all of the question and answers in the ‘Blogging in Academia’ session, and then in the space of about 2 minutes simply blew most of our minds away with the description of the collaborative knowledge sharing ecosystem they had assembled using syndication technologies and wikis. Worth far more than the price of admission itsself.
– Realizing one’s blogosphere ‘bozo filters’ are incredibly accurate when you finally hear the bozos f2f. The downside – not having f2f bozo filters.
The Low Points
– ItÂ’s probably an unfair criticism, but the format of the presentations/conference (sages on the stage, plebes in the audience gazing longingly) basically replicates a lot of hierarchical structure that seems antithetical to what’s interesting about the blogosphere. Undoubtedly there exist power laws, ‘a-list bloggers’ and the like, but for the vast majority of us, what’s interesting is not a quest to be listened to by everyone else, but to participate in ‘elocutions’ with as few as 2 people (even 1 in ‘blogs as soliloquy’ mode) and can grow as large as the net. So, suggestions for improvement: more coffee breaks/networking time (there are never enough), and less formal presentations. Instead, look to ‘workshops’ or other participatory models as a way to engage everyone and create useful outputs, not just speeches. (To be fair, Tim Bray’s did make some fun efforts at including the audience and seemed quite well received). And sheesh, with that much technology in the room, formally engage with it, not just accidentally through flickr tags and the like.
– Nametags: I guess I must be getting old, but my eyesight can’t handle 8 point type from more than a few feet now. Any really, a blogging conference without the name (not just the URL) of people’s blogs in bold print on their name tags?
Still, much fun was had by this attendee, and the organizers are to be thoroughly lauded for their efforts. Bravo. For any shortcomings, it was still one of the more fun gatherings I’ve been to of late. – SWL
http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=697
It’s been two months now since I started subscribing to an aggregated feed of FURL and del.icio.us feeds from various EdTech bloggers. It’s been a very fruitful experiment, and according to Bloglines at least 9 other subscribers seem to think so as well. For me it is providing a second channel of good resources with just enough context (e.g. the fact that they are all edtech bloggers I respect) to know they are worth considering but without the reading committment that blogs require.
This post is simply another shout out to any EdTech bloggers out there who also maintain a FURL, del.icio.us or other bookmarking site that offers RSS feeds to add their’s to this site – it’s open to anyone to add to. Currently the really active source feeds are from the cogdog, Brian, D’Arcy, Will Richardson, Trey Martindale and Greg Ritter, but there are tons of other folks whose interesting URLs I’d love to see. – SWL
http://www.incommonfederation.org/
I’ve known about Shibboleth for a few years now, but to be honest haven’t followed it that closely, in part because, as important as issues of authentication and authorization are, they typically bore the *!#$ out of me. So I had Shibboleth filed in the back of my mind as ‘hey neat idea, I’ll wait a few years and maybe this will move from idea to testbed implementation.’
Wow, time flies, and folks involved with Shibboleth have clearly not been fooling around – not only is there already this very real production level federation called InCommon, but they have a nifty ‘starter’ program called InQueue which allows organizations just starting with Shibboleth and federated trust to try it out.
For those who are wondering ‘what the heck is he talking about?’, check out the Shibboleth ‘About’ page which has about as short an explanation as you can give, or else this recent Educause presentation by Michael Gettes which also does a nice job of explaning it. Long story short – as more organizations join federations, you’ll likely be able to get access to protected materials you couldn’t before without individually having to arrange that access.- SWL
