Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://www.imd.macewan.ca/imd/content.php?contentid=26
From Clayton R. Wright at Grant MacEwan College comes this handy list of Ed Tech related conferences for 2004. I found it helpful because as someone also located in Western Canada, Clayton has noted some conferences (like the May 20-22 Distance Education Technologies Symposium sponsored by Athabasca University in Banff, Alberta) that might not always make some of the other US-focused or international lists. – SWL
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/
webfeatures_snapshots_archive_03172004
This isn’t an ‘edtech’ related item, but it was so striking I couldn’t pass up on posting it. The first graph is sheer number of unemployed, and shows that in the U.S. there are now more of them with college degrees than are high school drop outs. This in itself is not that shocking – as the report says, “There are, however, far more college graduates than high-school dropouts in our current labour force.” The graph shown in figure two should be more alarming, though its trends be not so steep – it depicts unemployed as a percentage of those two populations, and actually shows a decrease in unemployment for high school drop outs, but a steady increase for college graduates. I saw this referred to in an interesting article in Salon magazine about globalization and off-shoring software jobs to India, and as someone who works in both ‘high tech’ and ‘high ed’ it’s hard not to be worried about the implications. – SWL
I recently came across these folks because of a project I’m working on ‘down’ in the States (yes, that’s how we Canadians say it) and wanted to highlight it because what they have accomplished here is really pretty impressive. From the site – “The Utah Education Network (UEN) is consortium of public education partners, including the Utah System of Higher Education and its ten universities and colleges and Utah Electronic College; the Utah State Office of Education, local school districts and the Utah Electronic High School; and the state’s Library system.” That is a truly broad constituency. There are some useful resources here too – both the Lesson Plan tool and the Rubric Tool are worth a look (they are k-12 focused) and I always wish there were ways for guests to take a look at people’s portals, as this looks like it could be good too. – SWL
pingConfigurations – Technorati Developers Site
Do you ever check out the technorati site to see who is linking to you and vice versa? Ever notice ‘gaps’ in the coverage, sites you know that have linked to you or you have linked to that don’t appear in the list. Here’s one small tip you might be interested in – simple instructions on how to add manually add Technorati’s XML-RPC interface to your list of automatically pinged sites in your blogging tool, so that when you post, your blog will get placed in their high priority queue for faster indexing. – SWL
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/magpie/
One for those of us for whom the semantic web has seemed just a little bit, well, vague – the demo movies for this browser plugin nicely illustrate one possible scenario for browsing the Semantic web once we all start producing well structured metatagged documents. – SWL
(My ISP connection dropped on my first attempt to post this, so here is a much briefer summary.)
Useful report from Mark Ware for the Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) group in the U.K. which surveys the current field of ‘institutional repositories.’ It’s nice to see that Ware doesn’t hedge at all in defining his target:
“An institutional repository (IR) is defined to be a web-based database (repository) of scholarly material which is institutionally defined (as opposed to a subject-based repository); cumulative and perpetual (a collection of record); open and interoperable (e.g. using OAI-compliant software); and thus collects, stores and disseminates (is part of the process of scholarly communication). In addition, most would include long-term preservation of digital materials as a key function of IRs.”
The report gives good summaries of the available software, some numbers to fill out the picture of the current state of adoption, and section 4 has a good overview of the issues facing institutional repository projects. – SWL
This isn’t really an ‘ed tech’ related post, more a public service to anyone who has had to suffer through one of my personal pet bugaboos – phone calls and meetings to schedule future meetings. Yes, you read that right – the amount of time I spend trying to schedule meetings is simply ridiculous. So if you are charged with setting up a meeting for busy folks (and who isn’t these days) and these people don’t all work for the same organization (and thus already have access to a common calendaring system) I have a simple URL for you – meetingwizard.com!
I’m sure there are other such systems out there; this isn’t necessarily an endorsement of this particular one, it’s simply one that I’ve used with success and that is free! So look around if you don’t like this one and find another – but please pay attention to the idea.
To book a meeting simply 1)enter in up to 12 proposed meeting times 2)enter in the email addresses of the invitees 3)send the invites out. The site then allows each of the invitees to check off which of the times could work for them and the ones they absolutely can’t make. It tallies the results and lets you see which dates are likely to work best. You can indicate specific participants as ‘critical’ whose absence would derail a meeting, and the software can ‘autoconfirm’ when an appropriate date is found or lets you manually notify people of the details.
Sounds simple? It is. And free. So why do I keep getting these calls to try and schedule more calls? – SWL
Two weeks without a post deserves some explanation, and the reasons for my recent absence are both not so good and really great. First the not so good news – I just got out of hospital after another bout with Crohn’s Disease. I luckily managed to escape the surgeon’s knife for now (having had the good fortune of meeting a surgeon reluctant to operate!) and we’re hoping that a new course of medication and a new diet will help things in the long term. I am almost back up to speed now, so here’s keeping my fingers crossed!
But the other reason for the lack of posts is that I’ve been extremely busy with what I’ll call the “great news” – at the start of February I embarked on a brand new project with the folks at BCcampus, Open School BC and a group dedicated to Telelearning-in-Health across the 5 BC Universities. I am project managing the implementation (and I stress that word) of a learning object repository infrastructure that will serve the needs of these varied communities in B.C. It’s been in the works for a little while now, but I wanted to wait until it was firmly under way before announcing it. We’ve got a fairly aggressive timeline (project is scheduled to end September 2004) and so we are ramping up right now to identify key requirements and assess the existing open source options. It is a hugely exciting opportunity both in the work I’ll get to do and in the people I’ll get to work with – the various partners involved end up touching most of the educational institutions in BC in one way or other, and there is just a ton of great experience across this province to tap into.
I am fortunate that these folks agreed to a 4-day-a-week-deal which will allow me to keep working with my friends and colleagues at Edutools – we continue to add new reviews of Course Management Systems there, and are also looking to some exciting new projects in the near future, so I’m really pleased to be able to work on both projects.
So hopefully you’ll start to see more posts again, though at the current pace of things will likely still be a bit sporadic. I expect I’ll end up publishing a project-based blog for the LOR implementation, if only for my own tracking purposes, and when I do I’ll share that URL as well. – SWL
http://www.opensector.org/1075490138
From OpenSector comes news of the U.N. report, “E-Commerce and Development Report 2003” which contains a chapter that supports many of the canonical arguments for why open source projects produce better software than proprietary projects. Another good URL to have in your pocket when the boss asks you why you decided to deploy Linux (or some other FOSS choice in the myriad of applications now available) over some of the other alternatives. – SWL
http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&
lid=1&sid=54598&adBanner=eGovernment
Article from ITBusiness.ca that seems to accurately capture the current state of affairs at the National level in Canada when it comes to funding elearning initiatives, likely no surprise to attendees of the CANARIE/Industry Canada meetings a few weeks back in Vancouver as summarized by Paul Stacey’s recent article. – SWL