Monthly Archive for July, 2003

“A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day.

And then a description of what’s needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation.”

I agree with Sebastien Paquet, this post is well worth reading. Pollard’s diagram captures what I think a lot of the previous efforts to define ‘what is a blog’ miss out; we should be focusing on the entire activity ‘blogging,’ with its many surrounding phenomenom, and not just the end product, a ‘blog’.

But where I think I depart from Pollard is that I’m actually pretty happy with the ’conversations’ that the blogosphere is currently enabling. Actually, to be fair, I think a lot of the developments he’s talking about (e.g. taking blog-spawned discussions into a proper threaded space) make some sense. But I don’t necessarily agree that the effect of meeting fellow bloggers in a different medium shouldn’t be ‘jarring’ - I believe the medium has its own effect on our communications and *how* we communicate, and in the case of blog-based ‘communication’ I think some of these effects are very desireable. Blogs allow *my* words to show up in *your* space (your aggregator) without any confusion that they are *your* words. And unlike email, I can choose who I am listening to (you can of course choose not to open emails, but less and less it seems can you choose whom you receive them from). There’s more, there’s always more, but home I must go…

- via [Seb's Open Research]

You’ve probably seen the software before - Hot Potatoes from Half-Baked Software (a local Victoria, B.C. company), but have you ever read the fine print of the licensing?

“Hot Potatoes is free for use by individuals or educational institutions which are non-profit making, on the condition that the material you produce using the program is freely available to anyone via the WWW.” (emphasis mine)

So not free as in ‘freedom,’ but still a pretty decent kind of free. - SWL

A fairly technical article on how the University of East Anglia dealt with the problem of generating IMS-compliant XML files describing student profile information from multiple data sources (the purpose of which would be to use them within their course management system, or ‘virtual/managed learning environment’ as the Brits say).  By adopting this type of middleware architecture, they have also developed a more generic solution which can generate other types of files and deal with other types of data sources. - SWL

Via the TLTR mailing list came notice of this excerpt regarding the “Psychological Sense of Community” - an attempt to identify the psychological factors that determine whether an individual will feel they are a part of a community.  The four major factors he identifies are Membership, Influence, Integration, and the Fulfillment of Needs. This struck me as relevant to recent musings by Charlie Lowe over at Kairosnews on  why communities don’t form out of online classes even though the conditions seem otherwise ripe. - SWL

In this paper, Robert Tinker (President of The Concord Consortium, itself worth a detailed look) describes the evolution of educational technology with an analogy to how steam first augmented, then replaced, wind-powered sails.

He details some of the future’s driving forces (Moore’s Law, open source) and some of the general classes of applications on the horizon (literacy tools, design tools and tools to work with concepts). One comment struck me as odd - “Why is there so little open source software for education?” I guess from where I’m sitting there doesn;t appear to be such a dearth. But then reading on it becomes clearer why one might think this - it is perhaps more the case that there is a lack of widely adopted *good* software, software that is usuable by non-technical users. - SWL 

- via [Distance-Educator] and [elearnspace blog]

http://www.rlg.org/events/metadata2003/summary.html

Nice, shortish summary of a recent (May 2003) forum held in New York concerning metadata standards from the Museum/Library/heritage collections world. Worth a look for those ed tech folks dealing with learning object metadata issues, if only to become introduced to some evolving metadata standards in a different field from which we might learn something. - SWL

Recent article by Tim Bray on some issues with collecting and using metadata. One seemingly obvious piece of advice that is constantly overlooked -

“If You Collect Metadata By Hand The most important lesson I’ve learned, is: Don’t try to collect too much”

- via [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs]

This months ‘The Learning Marketspace’ newsletter from the Center for Academic Transformation contains a provocative article by Carol Twigg challenging LO projects that see the problem simply as one of scarcity of online resources. Twigg says this is simply not enough; in addition to the issue of access and availability, we should be focusing on issues of quality (providing ‘research-based’ materials that have been demonstrated to improve student learning) and strategies to foster faculty uptake and student usage. - SWL

An older article, but still interesting. I had thought that aggregators would mostly be using XSLT (maybe they do?) but this article seems to imply that this is an exception, not a rule. In any case, given how straightforward RSS is as an XML format (at least 0.92 and the barebones needed for feeds in 1.0 and 2.0), and given that most aggregator users already kind of know what they’d like a feed to look like, it’s a perfect place to try out your hand at XSL transformations. - SWL

“In order to be able to encapsulate RSS payloads into other XML applications, it will be necessary to explicitly place RSS into its own namespace. It’s been speculated that you can do that without causing any breakage. This posting tests that theory. “

So far there’s been a lot of talk in the edtech blogging space about using RSS to deliver different kinds of content (e.g. learning object meta-data.) What this post and test from Jon Udell reminds us is that RSS is just XML and should thus be capable of encapsulation in other XML documents or applications.

- from [Jon's Radio] via [Bruce Landon's Weblog for Students]