Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
(Clearly of only limited interest to anyone not on Vancouver Island, but hey, it’s my blog!)
The Northern Voices blogging conference is fast approaching – I am driving over from Victoria the night before, catching the 3pm ferry and have room for 2-3 others. I am returning the next day likely on the 7 or 9pm ferry. Love to have company and hate to drive to the mainland with empty seats in my car, so let me know if you could use a ride. – SWL
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/
2005/top10.html
This isn’t an educational technology post, but if it has any relevance in that regard it is to keep things in perspective. Click on the past years’ reports only makes it worse to realize how ongoing some of these issues have been. And count the number in Africa. – SWL
Looks like my earlier post may have been an overreaction (won’t be the first time), but not without productive results. The reason I posted my email to bloglines publicy was because I had heard from a few folks I asked that they had experienced similar problems, and also that they felt they were getting stock ‘we’re looking into it’ responses.
But luckily it also drew the attention of one-time fellow blogger Greg Ritter (Greg, come back, we miss you 😉 who cannily diagnosed the problem as likely being caused by extensions to Firefox that were messing with how Javascript was behaving. A quick google indicated this was entirely likely, and sure enough, disabling most of the extensions and upgrading a few others seems to have fixed the problem. I now have to go back and figure out systematically *which* extension caused the problem, but this test (along with checking Bloglines in a few other browsers) confirmed Greg’s hunch. My bad. So a tentative hurray that Bloglines seems to be working o.k. Note this is a different problem then the one that Michale Feldstein’s feed has been suffering, and I continue to be concerned that other feeds are similarly affected. – SWL
(O.k., I promised the one before was my last one today, but you know… procrastination and all that)
For the sake of posterity, here is the email I wrote Bloglines tech support today. I would urge others to do likewise who are experiencing the same problem.
“Hi, I contacted you a few weeks back about this problem, and since then have canvassed a number of other bloggers and learned they too are experiencing this problem. There is a regular, reproducable problem with bloglines correctly updating the feed count ofr a feed but then not displaying the feed content if that feed is selected (unless one forces the ‘last x hours’ of content to be displayed.) This is a SERIOUS problem. I love bloglines. I know it is free. If it doesn’t get fixed, though, I think this would bode very ill for continued user loyalty and adoption. A *detailed* reply would be appreciated, I’ve had the ‘we’re working on it’ responses before. Maybe something in your news feed? People know about this problem. If it is a question of being with specific feeds, let us know and we can tell you which ones it happens with (because it does seem feed specific). thanks, Scott Leslie, Edtechpost (http://www.edtechpost.ca/)”
(This has GOT to be my last post today! If you’ve ever wondered why my posts are so short, it isn’t because I have nothing to say 😉
Thought this would be interesting to the ‘small pieces’crowd – FreeLists.org is a free email listserving service (with no advertising and industrial strength admin controls on your lists). I’ve used it for a number of projects in the past where I didn’t have access to my own mail server and wanted to run a list. It provides users with their own web-based admin as well as web-based archives, and (what prompted this post) just announced the availability of RSS feeds for any of the list archives. They do say the lists must be ‘technology focused’ but in the past I have found them willing to accept ‘educational technology’ as easily fitting that bill. Free. Web-based. RSS. Seems like at least 3 of the magic words these days. – SWL
http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/adeta_blogtalk.ppt
The above points to the powerpoint slides for an online presentation I just gave to the Alberta Distance Education and Training Association (ADETA). Likely nothing new there for the old hands, but I promised James I would post it once it was done. Like everything else on this site it is posted under a Creative Commons license, so reuse as desired.
I tried to build on the work I did a few years back on the ‘Matrix of Uses’ for blogs in education – truth be told I haven’t spent a lot of time since then focusing on the issue, so don’t know if my thinking has progressed that far.
In a nutshell, my messages were
– focus on ‘blogging’ as process and not ‘blog’ as noun
– blogging is important in representing a number of significant ‘firsts’ (easy XML publishing tool, easy personal publishing, networked writing, easy way to create identity online)
– yet important to learn the lessons these ‘firsts’ teach irregardless of the specific manifestations (I know I’ll catch flak for that one)
– represent a move towards bringing our educational life online and are online lives together (for better or worse, you decide)
It’s hard when you don’t know your audience/can’t even see your audience. I ended up with too much background and not enough time for the meat. Maybe someday there will be enough awareness of blogs as a phenomenom that all of us can forsake all the introductory comments, but it still feels fringe enough to me when I talk to educators ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, that I feel compelled to include it in these kinds of talks. – SWL
http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/comments/223/
I am a huge fan of Bloglines and use it ever day (some people even claim I have an RSS ‘habit’ and need help). So I have been increasingly concerned with the weird behaviour I have seen over the past weeks in Bloglines. Specifically, I’ve noticed feed counts getting updated but the feed contents not displaying when you go to read them unless you specifically force it to display the last x days. The other problem I’ve reported is that the Bloglines search facility is demonstrably not working on a regular basis.
I’ve emailed Bloglines and got a response on both problems that they were ‘looking into the problem.’ O.k., great; it’s a free service and they replied in under a day, which is pretty impressive.
But then quite by chance today I went back to Michael Feldstein’s e-literate site because in the back of my mind I wondered why I hadn’t seen anything from his blog of late. And there I found the above post which indicates that Bloglines hasn’t been updating his feed for quite some time. I unsubscribed and resubscribed and he’s right – sometime back in October the feed stopped being updated and you can’t get anymore through Bloglines.
I don’t know about you, but if you are a Bloglines user I would suggest this is VERY unsettling news. Anyone else experiencing weirdness like this? (I’ve turned off comments recently as my ISP helpfully broke my MT-blacklist comment spam filter with a PERL upgrade, but please email me or post on your own blog if you are experiencing similar difficulties. The irony being of course that if you read this feed through Bloglines, who knows if you will or won’t see this post). And as Will Richardson recently reminded folks, back up your OPML files. – SWL
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity
O.k., I admit I chuckled when I first saw this, but heck, I regularly turn to Wikipedia now for quick reference info (as does the Gurunet desktop reference app I use to check word definitions) so maybe this is one of the faces of open education to come. Not much there yet, though there is a page with some ideas on what it could become, but you gotta start someplace. – SWL
“If everything you try works, you aren’t trying hard enough.” – Gordon Moore
http://www-serl.cs.colorado.edu/metis/index.html
One of a number of interesting services and tools funded by the NSDL, Metis is “a workflow system designed to support the workflow needs of digital libraries.” This Java-based application seems ot only work against its own internal store of users, but different events and roles can be configured to perform actions such as file compression, mvoing files, creating timers and new users and email notification. There is an API published, and you seem to get the source code in the download though no indication I could find of the license status. – SWL