Category: Uncategorized

NetFuture #147 – Aphorisms on Computers in Classrooms

If you are not already familiar with Stephen Talbott’s newsletter NetFuture, I highly recommend it for anyone interested in thought-provoking commentary on the interaction of human beings and technology. The latest issue contains a set of ‘aphorisms’ on the use of computers in the (in this case primarily K-12) classroom. You may disagree with much that he has to say, but I think his point of view well worth considering. – SWL

Word of the day: Wunderkammer

Wunderkammer is a german word for what was known in English as the ‘Cabinet of curiosities.’ The word came to my attention recently from an article in an old Brill’s Content (cf. links below) using it as a metaphor for links-oriented blogs/’personal portals.’ As far as I can tell that reference was picking up on an earlier on in Feed magazine, which itself cites an earlier unknown source.

I just found it delightful to be reminded of that history and of the impulse to collect, categorize and display.

Continue reading “Word of the day: Wunderkammer”

Is it Really RSS that all The Fuss should be about?

I’m being pretty facetious here. I know the people leading this discussion well enough now, and have even talked with them about this, to know that they all already get this. In fact the notes on the wiki have Brian making this very point in –  

“Cheap, simple, existing tools and standards point to an approach that…foster communities of practice (if COP = group of people who form based on shared a set of goals, use a common set of resources), and integrate the “product” with the process. Why? Because the tools, techniques and standards emerge from existing and growing use of “social software.” COP’s working with this model are not a theoretical construct… they are a reality. “

But apparently I feel the need to flog a flogged horse. RSS *is* important as a lightweight application of XML that can enable LOs to show up in different places, be found and aggregated from various closed off sources and is accompanied by an ever-expanding set of tools that make it easy to produce and consume. So for all these reasons, it’s important, exciting and worth making a fuss about.

But for me, ‘blogging’ (and more importantly participating in the ‘blogosphere’) and RSS are not synonymous. Maybe you couldn’t have had the phenomenon of the blogosphere without RSS. But the phenomenon I see Brian describing above, the one that excites me, is in my mind occuring not just because of RSS, but because of the conventions, many of them not always particularly well supported by the tools or the protocols, that are arising surrounding blogging – blogrolling, people following up on their referrer logs and then reading that person’s blog, people citing a fellow blogger as the source for just spotting something (not just the authors) ….  One could argue that many of these couldn’t exist without RSS or something similar. But one can publish a blog without a blogroll, and re-post items that one has read in another’s blog without citing the source or adding to it.

Web Design for the Elderly

The latest newsletter from Human Factors International contains what was for me a thought-provoking piece on designing usable web sites for the elderly. Seems like potentially a large issue/market opportunity for online learning folks looking for markets to expand into and seeing the retiring baby-boomers as one of these. – SWL

GuruNet Free

I have kind of mixed feelings about this next one – up until 2 days ago one of my absolute favourite system tray apps was called Atomica. Atomica returned results of an online dictionary lookup from a word clicked in absolutely any open application. In addition it offered you other suggested words in a thesaurus pane, as well as an encyclopedia definition and technical definitions for tech terms. You could get any of these from specific online sources, but the beauty of this was the one-click feature. It really was a beautiful little application.

Then two days ago, I ‘one clicked’ a term in a document I’d just received and got hit with a message telling me that the service I’ve long enjoyed for free is now being replaced by something called ‘GuruNet’ and that I’m going to have to pay $39 bucks a year for it! After looking into it further, it turns out there is still a free version of the product (linked to above). And it mostly works like the old one, except now I have to put up with ads, an ugly interface and a diminished set of resources to refer against, issues I can dispose of for $39 bucks a year. Oh well, I guess it was naive of me to think it could last for free, at least in its relatively unadulterated form. Time will tell if I keep the new ad-ware supported version installed. So not necessarily a ringing endorsement, but functionaly still worth checking out. – SWL

RSS feed of Archive of All Low Threshold Applications

I’m heading home ‘cos my Crohn’s is acting up, but I wanted to post something today so… as a follow up to a post last week where I commented that ‘wouldn’t it be nice to get the archive of ‘Low Threshold Applications’ from the TLTR group as an RSS feed. Well, here it is – http://myrss.com/f/u/n/unlArchiveMzxune3.rss91. The page pointed to in the link of this article is just an HTML rendering of the feed using Adam Curry’s javascript RSS displayer.

I’m not sure exactly why I did this other than because I could, and I suppose this violates all sorts of copyright issues…not to worry I’ll take it down soon enough, but maybe if someone knows these guys better than I you could stick a bug in their ear? – SWL