Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been using Radio8 since last August, and if I have any complaint about the tool it’s the fact that you end up spending more time searching for documentation than you do actually using it. It desperately needs one central place in which links to all relevant documents, and links to all 3rd party tools, can be found. This post is simply just a breadcrumb that I am dropping so that one day I may find my way back to this collection of community developed tools. – SWL

http://www.blogstreet.com/blogsqlbin/visualneighborhood.pl?
url=http://www.island.net/~leslies/blog/&first=2

Apparently this is my ‘visual neighborhood’ according to BlogStreet. While some of these seem right on, a few leave me puzzled. – SWL

http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse/default.htm

This is “an information resource website for e-learning aimed at educators and training professionals.” I love finding sites like this from other countries – this one is from the U.K. – as they do truly have a different perspective on this field and you find all sorts of interesting links and products in here that are simply not on the radar screen here in North America (at least not on mine). Large collection of annotated pointers to a wide variety of elearning resources, from tools to implementation guidelines and more – SWL

http://www.newsisfree.com/click/-1,15394656,2572/

I probably would have missed this post and this blog, even though I can now see about 4 points of possible intersection, were it not for the ever-valuable elearningpost (I love this feed, just wish that the descriptions came through with the titles and URLS in the RSS feeds as seen in the Radio aggregator).

There were at least a half-dozen ‘social networking’ or community building softwares that were new to me on this list. Some definitely worth checking out. There seems a real opportunity for someone to create a taxonomy of collaboration software and an associated list of features, and maybe start doing some comparative analysis of these packages? Or maybe someone is already doing this? – SWL

– from [Unbound Spiral] via [elearningpost]

http://www.alpern.org/weblog/php/blogsearch/writeup.html

If you haven’t seen this yet, it is sooo cool. Micah Alpern has put together a script that lets you do a search of only those sites whose RSS feed your subscribe to using the Google search API. It uses your mysubscriptions.opml file, which contains all of the RSS feeds that you subscribe to, to set the scope of the sites to search. And in a brillant turn of usability, he added one’s own blog and the web in general as the other two ‘collections’ to search through the same search box. Plus he’s built a little form on his site that will generate all the code for you. All you need to do is go get a free account at google in order to get an API key, and away you go.

You can try it out on the right hand menu. This is great both as a personal knowledge tool, but also to allow you to look deeper through other people’s prisms on the world. – SWL

http://segue.middlebury.edu/

Segue – CMS from Middlebury College which uses a blog model.

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/
open_demonstrators/hp-requirements-specification.html#APECKS

I’m not sure my brain can quite contain this. If you were looking for a starting place in which to see the collision of the semantic web and blogging (and, indeed, other collaborative environments) you could do much worse than this. Extensive citations leading to rich and rewarding places, including things like Kaon, an “ontology management environment” at http://kaon.semanticweb.org/. – SWL

http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/
WCE/archives/labmgmt.html

I spend so much of my life focusing on online education, and have been located off-campus now for too long, that I end up forgetting the importance of classroom-based computing. Having a lab setup that works reliably and is also flexible can be a real challenge, and those of us who have worked in institutions where it works often take it for granted. Once you start to travel to different campuses, you get a real appreciation for how difficult it is to find people who can balance the need for control with the need for flexibility that is the challenge of lab computing. – SWL

– via [Educational Technology]

http://www.newsgator.com/

I seem to be pretty happy using the Radio aggregator over http from my home machine (although it sucks when it goes down) and I’ve dabbled with both amphetadesk and netnewswire, but I just had to download this one when I came across it via Chris Pirillo’s blog. It adds an aggregator into outloook, which for better or worse is the email environment we have here at work and where I end up spending a good portion of my day. So along the lines of anything that allows me to do more things in fewer different application environments, I had to check it out. We’ll see how it works with the ‘publish’ side of publish-and-subscribe, though. –SWL

http://www.affero.org/

The architecture seems simple enough within the mailing list context – links with unique identifiers are generated for the footers of each message sent through the list that link to the sender. By clicking on the link you can add comments to a central database about that sender, and over time create a ‘reputation’ based on ones contributions. I haven’t really played around with some of the blog-related tools that seem to do similar things, so I don’t know if in fact they do similar things. Do they?

Plus I just love the Albert Einstein quote they have on their site: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” – SWL