Category: The Rest

Rolling Up Furl and Del.icio.Us Feeds from Edubloggers

http://rollup.org/rollup/rollup.php?id=495

It seems ‘de rigeur’ for the cutting edge edtech blogger to have at the very least a Furl or del.icio.us bookmark account in addition to their blog (let’s not even talk about Flickr for right now).

Some, like Alan, have taken the further step of rolling their blog and Furl feeds together (and in Alan’s case his Flickr feed as well). This makes sense as it keeps the unique individual’s perspective attached to the feed.

But not everyone has taken this step; lots of folks have separate Furl and del.icio.us sites/feeds. I’ve been subscribing to one or two of them in the past, but wanted to get all the ed tech bloggers’ bookmark feeds in one place. So off I went to Rollup.org, where I created a new RSS feed that rolled up the Furl or del.icio.us RSS feeds from Alan, Brian Lamb, James Farmer, Greg Ritter, George Siemens, Trey Martindale, Harold Jarche, Will Richardson, D’Arcy Norman and myself. I would have added more, but these were all I could find.

So the handy thing about this is that I can subscribe to one feed in my bloglines account and see all the URLs collected by all these brainy folks. The downside is that many of these brainy folks read the same things as I do, and the same feeds as each other, and so there ends up being a fair bit of duplication in the feed.

Which leads me on to the idea that another value-added that either Furl or del.icio.us could offer (maybe they do?) is ‘group feeds,’ that is, a feed for a set of Furl’ers, but one that recognizes common URLs and groups them like the main site does.

Anyways, feel free to subscribe to the feed if you are interested. I don’t plan to take it down, though it is still an experiement for me to see how much useful stuff comes out of it. If you want your bookmark feed added to this feed, let me know too. – SWL

Free alternatives to Breeze?

Like Stephen, I was suitably awed by the nifty Breeze presentation on Wikis that Brian Lamb put together, and like Stephen and James, wished I too could do something similar but without the cost of Breeze. (It should be noted, however, that the niftiness of the presentation seems like it was 15% Breeze and 85% Brian’s humour and ingenuity.)

I hunted around for some free options, and didn’t come up with much. But below is a list of possibilities and pointers if you are interested in following up on this:

– OpenOffice’s presentation tool allows you to export as flash presentations; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to do voice narration (yet)
– PowerPoint does actually allow you to do voice narration of your slides, and you may be able to export these in IE-specific formats that preserve the voice narration on the web (though I couldn’t get it to work). You could also investigate one of the many Powerpoint-to-Flash conversion tools that exist and see if any of them preserve the audio narration
– there are quite a few commercial products that offer screen capture and voice narration capabilities. One that I have used is Qarbon’s Viewletbuilder. I seem to think we got it for a couple of hundred bucks. This presentation groups such products under the heading of ‘Demo Software’ (that is, software to create software demos) and lists a bunch of others one could consider, some for as little as $80.

I’m really interested to hear Brian’s own reflections on how big a part Breeze played in this presentation. I get the sense that while one could have produced this using other software, Breeze definitely can help the process along. – SWL

WikiSpam and Passwords

A few fellow edtech bloggers who have taken up wikis have of late been inundated by wiki spam. I too was pelted almost continuously with wikispam from China from around June through to September when I finally screamed enough!

But instead of just chucking my wiki out, I enabled the write password on it. I run my wiki mostly for my own purposes, and for some collaborative editing with a few colleagues. It’s mostly open to the public to read, but ultimately I want it as a real quick and dirty online notepad, webpage builder, URL collector and brainstorming tool.

I run PMWiki, and it has a handy feature that lets you add read, write or administration passwords. Adding a password to the wiki as a whole or a single page is dead simple, and the beauty in my mind is that there can be just a single write password, which works with whatever username you use.

As soon as I enabled this, the wikispam dropped to zero. Clearly, if you want a totally publicly editable wiki, this technique is likely not that useful. But if you’re like me and run one for yourself or a select few folks, or if you are running one in the context of a class, this is maybe something to think about. Consider, start of class a simply announcement like – “if you want to edit the wiki pages, use whatever username you like, and the password is ‘edit’,” or ‘english101’ or ‘speakfriendandenter’ or whatever easily memorable phrase you like.

Some would argue this goes against the original open spirit of wikis. Maybe so. Who cares. I just know that I was unwilling to spend any more of my life deleting wiki spam, and this was a way to eliminate it while retaining many (not all) of the original reasons I took one up, while not also incurring the heavy overhead of username and password maintenance. – SWL

Conflicted about the Edublog Weblog Awards

http://incsub.org/awards/index.php

James Farmer has taken up the challenge and created a site to vote for the Inaugural Edublogs Awards. I fell pretty conflicted about this:

– on the one hand, it’s great to recognize excellence and all of the hard work some folks have put in.

– on the other hand, this feels somewhat antithetical to the sense of collaborative community that some feel is emerging through the blogosphere. I placed a few votes, but as I did so I kept feeling I was highlighting one piece of good work at the expense of another. Also, this feels like it is tapping into a part of the blogosphere I’m really less interested in – people reinforcing their meatspace connections, status and networks through their blogs. Clearly, that’s inevitable, but it rubs me the wrong way, and it feels against the original spirit of ‘meritocracy’ on which the internet was built.

I think I’ve placed all the votes I’m going to place, and have now decided to mostly ignore this. The potential for harm is greater than the potential for good in this sort of thing. There are plenty other ways to indicate what you like in the blogosphere, indeed the ‘blogosphere’ is in some ways simply an emergent conversation that displays an interconnection of p/references. – SWL

RSS Feeds for Educause Resource Centre

http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=11

A few people have noted of late that Educause is sporting some blogs, but news to me was their browseable collection of resources. Of particular interest was the fact that each sub-node in their subject taxonomy had its own RSS feed, making it simple to keep track of new Educause-related resources on ‘open source’ (feed here) or ‘course management systems,’ (feed here) for instance. Not like any of us need any more information sources at this point, but at least it’s RSS.- SWL

D-Lib Article – A Web Service Interface for Creating Concept Browsing Interfaces

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november04/sumner/11sumner.html

Some of you may have run across the VUE concept mapping application before. One of its promises is that it will allow you to create concept map interfaces to Fedora-based repositories.

This recent D-Lib article describes a similar innovation, but in this case it is the introduction of a web service-based interface called “Concept Space Interchange Protocol” to support the deployment of concept browsing interfaces to digital libraries. As the paper concludes “The merit of [the] approach lies in its innovative use of web services technology to provide an educationally relevant visualization service across distributed library sites, as opposed to creating a visualization interface for a single library.”

What’s that sound you hear? Listen carefully, it’s the sound of the train leaving the station, and while the library community all quietly climbed aboard, the ed tech community was still debating the need for a train. – SWL

EDUCAUSE REVIEW – Evolving Technologies 2004

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm04/erm0464.asp

Worth a read as a high level overview – most of the topics will be unsurprising to those working in higher ed institutional settings. Topics include Spam Management, Legal P2Ps, Learning Objects, Convergence of Libraries, Digital Repositories, and Web Content Management, Nomadicity and Regional Networks. – SWL

UThink’s Blog Directory Page

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ (then follow the ‘Blog Directory’ link – for whatever reason, MT is gawking on the actual URL)

You’ve likely seen the UThink site before, the University of Minnesota’s MoveableType-based blogging site. But I wanted to point out the ‘Blog Directory’ sub-page on that site for the little things it does right to direct new readers to existing blogs.

Like almost every ‘directory’ it has an alphabetical list of all the blogs on that site, but really, is that helpful? Sure, if you want to troll through hundreds of pages looking for interesting titles, but typically not. What is helpful, though, is how they highlight “Recent Posts,” “Blogs with the most comments” and “Blogs with most Posts” – yes I know this reinforces so-called ‘power laws,’ and that ‘more’ doesn’t always mean ‘better,’ but as someone coming in from the outside to this server, these provided great starting points to explore this sub-universe within the blogopshere.

This seems to me to be part of the trick in rolling out blogs in academic settings – they have their uses if they are only being read by the instructor and the rest of their class, but blogs have stood out precisely because the network the create and participate in is not formally bounded (as say a CMS-based threaded discussion is.) So you need to (or at least are able to) grow the readership/network; one way to do this individually is to use all of the tricks that existing bloggers do (post on other people’s comments, post links to other people’s posts, blogrolls). But pages like this directory page also serve as an institutional means to grow the community, and are aimed at (but not restricted to) the next grouping ‘up’ from the course level, the institution-wide audience. – SWL

Program in Course Redesign – Round III Results

http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewGrant/Rd3Less.html

You may well see this a few times today – the Program in Course Redesign, a massive project across 30 partnering institutions to demonstrate how colleges and universities can redesign their instructional approaches using technology to achieve cost savings as well as quality enhancements, has released the results of the Round III redesigns.

This round looked at course redesigns in 10 institutions, and similarly to previous rounds found some of the biggest quality improvements through 4 techniques – continuous assessment and feedback, increased interaction among students, online tutorials, and undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs.) In terms of costs reductions, I was pleased to see that both course management systems and ‘shared resources’ were cited as two of the predominant cost-reduction techniques in this round.

I haven’t been able to find any numbers on how they measured changes in quality enhancements (one assumes grades and retention rates at least) but if they are anything like the costs savings they report, an average of 39%, then clearly the findings from this study warrant attention. – SWL