Category: Uncategorized

The Defense Acquisition University Road Map for e-Learning

Fascinating document by an organization that evidently takes its planning very seriously. Like it or not, the American military is heavily involved with online training and one of the few organizations with the size to be a true market maker. This report is as interesting for its picture of the how the field will develop over the next 5-10 years as it is for how they plan to respond to those changes. I especially liked the two charts on pages 30 and 31 on “e-learning convergence ‘lagging inidcators’.” – SWL

– from a list of reports at [The Masie Centre]

AltaVista Releases Toolbar

This isn’t directly an educational technology issue, but the Google toolbar has become such a major part of many web searchers interfaces that this might be generally of interest. In addition to many of the now expected search features (constrained catalogues, multimedia searches) the toolbar also allows you to search zip codes, area codes and use the babelfish translation service). – SWL

– via [ResourceShelf]

CADE 2003 Photos and Proceedings now online

Very quietly both the proceedings and some images from the last conference for the Canadian Association of Distance Educators (CADE) have been posted to their site. At least it was quiet to me as I had to find out about it by finding a copy of my own paper whilst googling for a good K-12 course management site (anyone??). Luckily, now that I’ve found this I can forever cherish this photo of me talking to the elearning guru 😉

(Michelle, you thought we were joking about getting groupie shots at Merlot eh?)

Reading blogs on your Palm

As I noted in an earlier post, I bought myself a Palm M130 as a present to myself in starting my new life as an independant consultant. It’s my first PDA and I went for the cheapest model I could afford that was still expandable and offered a decent colour screen. I had resisted getting one for a long time, but finally broke down and got one, not least of which was because I’ve been involved with discussions about website accessibility for too long not to actually try and access websites through an alterrnate device. I’ve used Jaws and other screen readers, but never a PDA or cell phone, and I like to walk the talk when I can.

So given that I blog pretty regularly one of my early experiments has been to figure out how I can read my RSS subscriptions on my PDA, and further on down the road how I can also write to my blog as well. I had actually investigated the reading issue a bit before for my old Director at C2T2 as I thought that getting him the ability to read blogs through a handheld aggreagtor might help him grok the whole issue a little better. That investigation didn’t yield a lot, but I thought it was just because of the prefunctory effort I had put into it.

Well, it turns out it wasn’t my lack of effort that led to such scant findings. Unlike the world of desktop RSS aggregators, it’s a different story on the Palm OS.  So far the majority of solutions I have found have been built upon an offline page reader engine for the Palm called Plucker. One solution would be to simply point plucked at the homepages of the blogs one reads and suck these on to your handheld on schedule every day. I tried this and as a hack it worked adequately, though one has to fiddle with some of the settings to make the pages more lightweight (turning the graphics off) and you still have to muddle through extraneous site navigation.

Better than this approach was Blogpluck, a blog-specific Plucker page builder developed with the jpluck engine, itself a java-based plucker page builder. This comes much closer to the experience of reading one’s feeds on a desktop-based aggregator. The software understands the RSS format and so can present you with an index view of each of your feeds with just the titles, which act as links to the full article. The bad news is the current blogpluck client is no longer supported – the good news is that it is no longer supported because it’s functionality is being rolled into the larger jpluck 2.0 client, current in its 14th pre-release.

Finally, all this searching for a good PDA-based RSS reader also led me to find a very nice front-end tool for creating Plucker pages called FlingIt. Essentially a ‘bookmarklet’ type application for sending pages from your web browser to your PDA, FlingIt was built by and for educators and students by the good folks at the Hi-CE (Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education at the University of Michigan), itself well worth a detailed look for all of the resources it collects together on the use of handhelds to support education. – SWL

Beer with the MERLOT edutech_bloggers

Although I had to leave early to catch the ferry back to the island, in truth meeting up with all of these folks was one of my main reasons for heading to the conference yesterday. Partly to put faces to urls, and partly to help foster the burgeoning sense of community in the way that only face to face communication can.

I love the fact that everyone there came at educational technology from such different backgrounds; between us we had 1 psychologist, 2 geologists, 2 english majors, a zoologist a philosopher, and a critical theorist. 

And surprise surprise, these edutech bloggers are sure a gregarious bunch! I’m glad the bar was otherwise empty/noisy as I’m sure we would have caused some head-scratching as the conversations flew from learning obects and blogs to the more important topics of the phenomenom of American college football crowds and hockey as a Canadian religious experience.

We almost had a grand slam – if we had managed to get Bernie Dodge and Jim Sibley there, the only two other edutechblogger names I recognized from the attendee list. If there were more I missed, come out and play!

So for me, definitely the highlight of the day. It would be great if somehow we could figure out another way to get all those folks who we missed together face to face, I’m certain the synergies would be unbelievable. Still, to get 8 together from the one conference was simply great! – SWL

Reflections on Thursday’s MERLOT sessions – Part 3

Merlot Federated Search

This one was well attended by the edublogging crowd, and you can see much more comprehensive notes over at D’arcy’s, Alan’s or Brian’s site.

This was an important topic for me as we’ve been looking into a wildly federated solution to try and accomplish a single portal to access distance ed in BC. So what was interesting to me was to compare that problem with this one for similarities and differences.

I guess mostly differences – in this model (quite rightly) they don’t worry about lack of response from any of the federated catalogues – if, for whatever reason, the catalogue’s not responding in time for one particular query session, it is just left out of those results. This seems fair enough, though the decision on MERLOT’s part not to indicate this lack of responsiveness back to the user seems strange. Their answer was that it was confusing to the user, but it seems to me a little ‘Catalogues not responding to this query’ link or list is simple enough.

They’ve made a bunch of decisions that seem pretty sensible:

  • limit responses to 25 per service, partly to limit harvesting and partly I assume to assure better overall responsiveness (and probably only that many are needed in any case);
  • model their service partly around the google API (I think I’m getting this right) which I assume is in part because this is one people are now becoming acquainted with and thus can repurpose interfaces/learning;
  • offer an intermediary page between query and results to deal with response-time waits, keep user informed of status.

They seemed to think that network latencies weren’t a problem (one of the first federated partners is in Australia) and that this would scale very easily, which againbecause of the lack of requirement that all catalogues MUST respond is probably quite true.

All and all seemed quite promising – SWL