Category: The Rest

New EdTech blog – Tim Wang’s Education Blog

http://blog.loaz.com/timwang/index.php

A warm welcome to the blogosphere for a new Ed Tech blogger from B.C. Tim Wang is a Flash developer with the Arts Computing group at U.B.C. For those of you not familar with their work, these are the folks behind a set of Flash-based learning tools they call ‘Learning Object Template Tools,’ including the flash-based Timeline Tool that made the rounds a few months back.

I am really looking forward to reading Tim’s blog, both for the ideas he brings to the field but also the connections he brings. In addition to being a great Flash developer, Tim also speaks Chinese and has of late been making more and more connections with educational technologists in China. I often find backlinks to EdTechPost from Chinese blogs only to find I can’t make heads or tails, so it will be great to have a guide to new happenings over there. – SWL

Fangs: The Screen Reader Emulator Plugin for Mozilla

http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?show/fangs

A few years back now my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon brought a blind student with him to one of our BC Ed Tech gatherings to have him demonstrate accessing a course within a CMS via the screen reader JAWS. JAWS is, as far as I know, a market leader and often held up as a de jure standard for accessibility.

What the demonstration showed me and others was that, even though on a technical level the CMS (in this case WebCT) was accessible through JAWS (e.g. JAWS could read it and the student could access different parts of the course) it was absolutely UN-USABLE – a streamingly long scream of text and navigation links one after another that even for the student, who was used to both JAWS and WebCT, presented difficulties. (To be fair, this isn’t an anti-WebCT screed, and from what I know they have made improvements in this regard).

The point is, meeting accessbility standards is a bare minimum, but it doesn’t make the content usable for those using assistive technolgoies.

And here’s where this plug-in comes in. The free, open source ‘Fangs’ plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox avoids one of the challneges designers have with creating accessibly usable pages, which is that JAWS has a license cost associated with it and so many people simply assume that if it conforms to W3C WCAG or Section 508 guidelines, that’s enough. It’s not, and it’s a case where ‘seeing’ (actually ‘hearing’) is believing. ‘Fangs’ allows you to read web pages more like how the users of an assistive reader will hear them. And trust me, usually it ain’t pretty. – SWL

Network EducationWare – Open Source Synchronous A/V Conferencing Software

http://netlab.gmu.edu/NEW/

O.k., maybe I’m missing something here. This Java-based software, developed by Dr. Mark Pullen and others at George Mason University, provides synchronous audio and video conferencing capabilities, along with an annotatable whiteboard and slide upload. It also permits you record your sessions for future playback.

It’s open source.

It’s been around since 2002.

I tried out the demo and it seemed to work flawlessly. I remember when the ‘open education’ group initially met all of us getting together virtually via Elluminate, and many wondering if there wasn’t some open source alternative. Apparently there was and is. You might question this kind of technology as simply replicating existing F2F classroom models, but if you or your institution already uses something like Ellumiunate, WebEx, Centra, etc, then this would seem like worth checking out.

Found via a hit from my bloglines saved search feed on a posting from the Moodle discussion boards, which in my mind continues to be *the* most vibrant open source app/community in education I’ve yet to see. – SWL

Distributed Tagging and Auto-Complete – an example

http://www.dwelle.org/avar.cgi

From a somewhat hysterical slashdot thread examining the user generated tagging systems in Flickr, del.icio.us and the like came a reference to this little experiment to introduce auto-completion and suggestion of del.icio.us tags based on a user’s previous tags. This is a step in the right direction – if it can start to pick up tags from the overall site, then maybe one of the issues with this overall approach, lack of synonym support and inconsistency applying tags, maybe isn’t as bad as it first appears. – SWL

Happy …. Oh just have a good break ;-)

That’s me done until December 29th! Thanks to folks out there for their feedback and support throughout what has been a rather challenging year for me. I am so thoroughly looking forward to 2005.

For those of you who don’t know, I work out of a home office in my basement, and so the people I meet online and through this blog form an absolutely HUGE part of my professional support network, friends and set of mentors. I am grateful to you all and look forward to an exciting new year of learning and being inspired and regularly humbled by you and your works.

Cheers, Scott

IT Conversations: David Brin – Evaluating Horizons

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail358.html

Via the IT Conversations RSS feed came news of this talk by one of my all-time favourite Science Fiction writers, David Brin. Many people are unfortunately only familiar with Brin through the film adaption of one of his novels, The Postman (remember Kevin Costner as post-apocalyptic delivery guy on horseback). I’m with Stephen in thinking it actually was pretty good, but if that’s your only exposure to this writer you are missing out. Far more relevant to the fans of the net/blogosphere is his novel ‘Earth‘ which presaged both Usenet and presents one of the more inspiring visions (to me at least) of network-based democracies. In many ways this talk is a continuation of some of the thinking laid out in that book, looking at our ability to respond collectively to global challenges, especially in light of accelerating change. Perfect listening for humanists feeling left out of the season’s festivities. – SWL

From Boat Anchor to Windows-Slayer in an afternoon

No, this isn’t a ‘how to’ posting, more a short account of how I spent my weekend turning my clunky old laptop into a shiny new Linux box.

I bought my laptop, a Compaq Presario 1246 (don’t ask, it was all I could afford at the time) back in 1999. It served me o.k. for a number of years as my primamry machine at home, though it always had problems with its sound card and PCMCIA slot, and it ran an OEM version of Windows 98 that seemed impossible to upgrade.

I’ve wanted to either upgrade the Windows install or better yet do something completely different for months now, but always had something else to do. Then an email from a colleague at BCcampus seeking an old laptop to convert to a linux machine for his daughter spurred me to action – either I should get off my duff and do this myself, or donate the box to someone else who would.

So after a bit of pondering about which flavour of Linux might work best (and some quality time spent at the invaluable Linux for Laptops site) I settled on Mandrake 10.1 as my flavour of choice.

I downloaded the disk images and burnt some CDs. After changing the boot sequence on my laptop, I rebooted with the first disk inserted and … well that was pretty well all I had to do. Simply amazing! The installer found all the peripherals on my system and picked out drivers for both the screen and audio card, two things I had been led to believe could be a real hassle. Within about an hour and a half I had a fully functioning laptop running both KDE and Gnome on top of Mandrake 10.1. And after 3 years without any sound, I could listen to a CD on my laptop while simultaneously surfing the net. I know, doesn’t seem like much, but the current manufacturer was never able to get even that to work for me, even after acknowleging and trying to fix faulty Win98 drivers for the PCMCIA slot.

I first started working with Linux in 1997 as a sys admin. Even on reasonably homogenous boxes, the install procedure back then was “a bit involved.” I remember teaching Apache systems administration to folks and having them do a fresh Linux install as part of the process – my list of instructions to them was at the time 2 full pages long. Clearly, Linux as a whole has come a long way – I might not get my Mom to try this, but we are finally seeing it emerge as a possibility for more than just developers and systems administrators. Based on my experience this past weekend, on what I was led to believe was a pretty wonky hardware configuration, I’d warrant that the installer for Mandrake was easily as friendly as any install I’ve done of Windows, quite possibly more so.

So all that’s left for me to do is convince some folks at BCcampus that I need a cheapo iMac to do video conferences with all the Mac geeks I have to work with and I’ll have the perfect Trifecta. Michael, in case you are reading this, sorry dude, but I ain’t giving up the old boat anchor anytime soon. Good luck finding a box for your daughter, hopefully your experiences getting it going turn out to be as pleasurable as mine. – SWL

New URL for Combined Edubloggers Links Feed

http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=697

A few weeks back I posted about a feed I had created using Rollup.org that rolled together the RSS feeds from such Edublogging luminaries as Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and Will Richardson.

No sooner did this get started then Rollup.org announces that it is closing its doors (lending some real credibility to Derek Morrison’s recent musings about aggregator business models).

No worries though. The same feed has been recreated and is now available through Blogdigger at the above URL (the RSS feed is http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?id=697). Truth be told Blogdigger is the nicer of the two services in any case – I left the settings on this group as ‘Unmoderated’ meaning people can add their feeds here too if they choose, something unavailable through Rollup.org. I noticed about a dozen folks had subscribed in Bloglines to this feed, and possibly more elsewhere, so be forewarned. I will leave the original feed as is but at some point I expect RollUp.org will just pull the plug.

So far this has proven a fruitful experiment, leading to a dozen or so really valuable references that fellow edubloggers Furl’d but did not post to their blogs. – SWL

Will design courses for food!

http://tinyurl.com/5wp5b

I couldn’t resist passing this on – one of the local universities is offering to create an online course using their own course development software if the recipient makes a largish donation to one of the Christmas chariities. Great way for Roger to promote the costs savings of using his tool, and hopefully they will get someone to take them up on it. – SWL