Category: Uncategorized

New interesting sounding aggregator – NewsMonster

“Even sites that don’t support RSS can work with NewsMonster… NewsMonster incorporates an advanced reputation system to prevent spam and discover and inform you of important news… Rate your favorite and least-favorite websites and share ratings with the online community – automatically! “

I haven’t tried this so it is in no way an endorsement, but I started thinking more about reputation management and the blogosphere after reading the interview posted below (and after reading the blow by blow of that ‘dialogue’ between Messrs Wiley and Downes) and so this seemed particularly interesting. – SWL

– via [infoanarchy]

30 days to a more accessible weblog [dive into mark]

I wasn’t yet regularly using an aggregator when these pieces were first posted in June 2002, so this was new to me (question – does the blogosphere suffer from collective attention-deficit disorder?) I really like the presentation of these accessibility instructions into 30 bite size chunks, and also how he starts off describing 5 different people with accessibility issues and so frames the whole issue is a more immediately personal context. Well worth the read and good advice, which I will endeavor to follow in a blog re-design sometime in the future. – SWL

hiatus

It must be late as I’ve tried to compose responses to 2 or 3 pieces over the last hour and just can’t get any of them to go.

In any case, I’m in uPortal training all next week, then trying to finish off an RFP for a web-services-based inter-institutional registration facilitation system (try saying that 3 times fast!) and then on holiday until May 19. At the speed things are going, I kind of frightened what I might find when I get back – multi-directional typed hyperlinks? CANCORE metadata showing up in my Radip aggregator? free learning objects and a spiffy new open source CMS to use them in? world peace?

(Apart from the joking, does anyone have any thoughts on how any sort of subject-based community that emerges in the blogosphere looks a lot like an ad hoc cohort in an educational institution, if such a thing existed, and why it can be tough to leave once you there, or even to close your darn aggreagtor sometimes!)

Bye for now, Scott.

Will the “real” community please stand up?

I’ve been thinking about David Wiley’s post all day now, as I ended up laying in bed last evening contemplating the differences I am experience as a blogger compared to being a member of a discussion forum, mailing list, usenet group or any of the various collaborative communications forums I’ve participated in over the years.

In some sense the answer to David’s questions seem straightforward

– yes, the reason the people he mentions on the list are not the same ones in this ‘conversation’ or community is probably largely because they don’t blog

– no, it’s not surprising, at least not to me, that there are so many groups in such a ‘small’ space because a) I don’t think it’s that small a space, b) they all seem to be coming together anyways (I would guess only 2-3 degrees of separation ‘in real life’ and even less online for everyone he lists and everyone on the edubloggers list George published today)

On the other hand, as I think the responses on David’s site by George and Brian are getting at, there are a lot of real subtle differences that a many people have been trying to get at for the past year or two (  

Google Search – blogs vs. usenet or why there’s no one community

It really is funny how these things work – last night I was lying in bed reflecting on the phenomenom I’ve been experiencing as a blogger in relation to other types of discussion or conferencing software I’ve used in the past (usenet, mailing lists, threaded discussions…)  and then this morning I come into work and see this post from David Wiley – (Will the “real” community please stand up?), and this one by George Siemens (Current Edu-bloggers).

Google Search: learning object reference models -SCORM

O.K., so this search is a little bit facetious – the fact that it returns lots of hits but none of them excatly what was intended is not proof that the only learning object reference model going is SCORM or that no other such thing is possible. I did this search in response to the line in David Davies recent reply to Norm Friesen’s paper that “If you have a strong pedagogic model and are serious about learning design then forget SCORM.” I don’t disagree – it seems clear that while SCORM might work for a pure 1 learner-content training model it is unsatisfying.

But, as they say on the ADL site, SCORM does try to “define(s) a Web-based learning ‘Content Aggregation Model’and ‘Run-Time Environment’ for learning objects …[which]… provides a comprehensive suite of e-learning capabilities that enable interoperability, accessibility and reusability of Web-based learning content.”

Maybe I’m misunderstanding hwo this will all unfold, but I kind of assumed that, like the below diagram of how SCORM instantiates various standards and methods into a reference model against which proposed objects can be tested, a similar reference would eventually emerge against which ‘units of learning’ could be compared? Does anyone know is this right?   

(from http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scorm12&cfid=368801&cftoken=17257342)

open-education.org :: open education content

It looks like George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Charles Lowe and a number of others have got their site going to support their emerging work on ‘open education,’ which looks to promote the creation and use of open source content.  I expect we’ll be hearing a lot from this group as it appears to be made up of many of the most active minds in the elearning blogosphere. – SWL