Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://raymondyee.net/wiki/
CanadianElearningWorkshop2004
Well, I can’t be there myself, but reading Raymond’s notes in his wiki is the next best thing. He is involved in the hugely intriguing Scholars Box project, part of the Interactive Univeristy Project at UC Berkeley, and brings his own great context to these notes. Thanks for sharing these, Raymond! – SWL
You may have noticed that EdTechPost has been a bit quiet of late. Apart from the regular seasonal break (which should have been over by now) I just found out on the weekend that I have chickenpox! Somehow I managed not to get it as a kid (thanks Mom!) so I have the pleasure of suffering through it now as an adult. Mostly it’s just freaking inconvenient – I was all set to start the new year with a bang, and was really looking forward to attending the Pan-Canadian Elearning Workshop in Vancouver next week hosted by CANARIE. Now it seems highly unlikely that I will be able to go. I know there will be a number of other bloggers there – any session notes you folks can share will be much appreciated. But what I will miss obviously even more is the chance to see folks face to face. Oh well, next time I guess. – SWL
http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/
accessibility-checking-favelets.asp
Large collection of bookmarklets to assist web developers ensuring more accessible sites. Many of these are useful more generally as design tools – for instance the ‘show and label divs with IDs’ is a neat trick that re-renders any page with all of the divs on the page named and outlined in red, useful for figuring out what needs to go where. – SWL
http://english.tamucc.edu/pmwiki/pmwiki.php
/Loudermilk3301/Home
Another example of innovative uses of wikis to support online education, this one from Dr. Susan Lodermilk of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. In this particular example she uses the wiki both to post all of the class information and to provide the students each a personal portfolio wiki space; but as can be seen here, she actually uses the wiki for a variety of classes and purposes. I stumbled on to this because the software she uses, PmWiki, is the same PHP-based wiki software I am using to run the EdTechPost wiki. The developer, Patrick Michaud was also previously at TAMUCC, though I think he has moved on. – SWL
http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/
default.asp#12012200393
Likely to be the only other post before the holidays; another Christmas present, this one from Alan Taylor’s Eintagsfliegen. A bookmarklet (I think now only for IE, but apparently could be done in Mozilla) that “converts all text hyperlinks into footnotes, and lists out their URLs at the bottom of the page.” I can see a number of places where this could come in handy. – SWL
http://www.bloglines.com/about/news
For regular aggregator users this might seem obvious, but the folks at Bloglines have a way of taking such features and implementing them quickly and really well. Bloglines now allows you to setup an email address that will be added to your current list of feeds. You can then use this address to subscribe to mailing lists that don’t provide RSS versions. The one shortcoming I can see so far is that becuase it doesn’t allow you to send email, there might be problems setting up subscriptions for lists that will only act on mail sent from the subscribing account. Still, an awesome hack that will reduce the bulk of email in my inbox and put these ‘news’ related lists in their proper place. An early Christmas present from the Bloglines folks! – SWL
Reading Jay Cross’ recent post about military simulations at the 25th annual Interservice/Industry Training Simulation & Education Conference, I was immediately reminded of a favourite critical theorist of mine from days gone by, Paul Virilio. I seem to remember always feeling like I was in a fugue state while reading Virilio, only ever half comprehending, never certain if it was all just highly verbose malarky or true prophecy, or both. But as I get older and the world gets inexorably stranger, concepts like his Pure War seem less like theoretical conceits, and more like a statement of affairs. What does this have to do with educational technologies? Lots, unfortunately … – SWL
http://aera-cr.asu.edu/links.html
Just in case you missed it in the editor’s introduction to the recently launched Pitch journal, David Wiley and Brent Lambert point to this very extensive list of ‘open access journals on education’ put together by the Communication of Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association. – SWL
http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/
etug_roundtable/roundtable_discussion_topics.htm
Tomorrow the B.C. Ed Tech Users Group gets together for its bi-annual face to face sessions. I’m hosting a short half-hour discussion on blogs in education, in part as a follow up to the online ‘blogtalk’ we did back in October. The roundtables are just supposed to be loose discussions but I threw together two possible topics, as well as pointers to a few examples of higher ed class blogs that I like. If anyone has comments on pointers to where these discussions have already taken place online (specifically the ‘inside or outside the firewall’ one) I’d love to hear them.
The only problem with doing this roundtable is that I’m going to miss the other ones that are going on at the same time, most notably Brian’s on wikis in education. As always, feel free to re-use if there’s anything useful here.- SWL
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/michelle/
archives/000545.html
Michelle Lamberson has a note about two really interesting tools recently released by the instructional technology support folks at UBC’s Faculty of Arts. The first is a forms-based Flash Timelines builder. The second a tool to extract and then re-import distinct pieces of threaded discussions from inside WebCT. – SWL