Monthly Archive for December, 2003

http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/
bib/openbib.html#haystack

Comprehensive collection of pointers to information on open standards and open source software for managing bibliograpies and library metadata. See also oss4lib, the Open Source software for Libraries listing. - SWL

http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/
accessibility-checking-favelets.asp

Large collection of bookmarklets to assist web developers ensuring more accessible sites. Many of these are useful more generally as design tools - for instance the ’show and label divs with IDs’ is a neat trick that re-renders any page with all of the divs on the page named and outlined in red, useful for figuring out what needs to go where. - SWL

http://english.tamucc.edu/pmwiki/pmwiki.php
/Loudermilk3301/Home

Another example of innovative uses of wikis to support online education, this one from Dr. Susan Lodermilk of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. In this particular example she uses the wiki both to post all of the class information and to provide the students each a personal portfolio wiki space; but as can be seen here, she actually uses the wiki for a variety of classes and purposes. I stumbled on to this because the software she uses, PmWiki, is the same PHP-based wiki software I am using to run the EdTechPost wiki. The developer, Patrick Michaud was also previously at TAMUCC, though I think he has moved on. - SWL

http://www.designingwbt.com/content/
madison/objectkeynote.pdf

I’m working on a number of different learning object repository projects at the moment and have been spending the last few days digging through masses of material I’ve bookmarked and blogged over the past few years. All of which brought me back to this presentation given by William Horton at the 18th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning in 2002. I know it’s saying a lot (maybe not) but it gets my vote for the best non-technical presentation on learning objects and related issues that I’ve seen over the last few years. I’d especially highlight the third slide on page 19 - ‘What Needs to be Communicated’ - as the best explanation EVER of what SCORM is meant to facilitate without ever mentioning the acronym itself. If your task involves explaining the value, issues and context of learning objects to faculty, you could do worse than borrow some ideas from this presentation. - SWL

http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/
default.asp#12012200393

Likely to be the only other post before the holidays; another Christmas present, this one from Alan Taylor’s Eintagsfliegen. A bookmarklet (I think now only for IE, but apparently could be done in Mozilla) that “converts all text hyperlinks into footnotes, and lists out their URLs at the bottom of the page.” I can see a number of places where this could come in handy. - SWL

http://www.bloglines.com/about/news

For regular aggregator users this might seem obvious, but the folks at Bloglines have a way of taking such features and implementing them quickly and really well. Bloglines now allows you to setup an email address that will be added to your current list of feeds. You can then use this address to subscribe to mailing lists that don’t provide RSS versions. The one shortcoming I can see so far is that becuase it doesn’t allow you to send email, there might be problems setting up subscriptions for lists that will only act on mail sent from the subscribing account. Still, an awesome hack that will reduce the bulk of email in my inbox and put these ‘news’ related lists in their proper place. An early Christmas present from the Bloglines folks! - SWL

http://conference.merlot.org/projects/technology/

I don’t know if I could tell you exactly *why* MERLOT published all of this - possibly for the greater public good or possibly to maintain a fairly high degree of transparency and formality given so many stakeholders in their development process. In any case, they have shared the policies shaping their development framework as well as a number of other technical background documents, all of which should prove of some use to people developing their own repositories or even just deciding on what strategy to take in implementing one. - SWL

http://www.ipohome.com/ipoplus/press/
usatoday_120403.asp

The same day that the article appeared in the Washington Post speculating on the possibility of Blackboard going public because of repeated meetings with investment bankers, the above article was published, concerning the potential re-kindling of tech IPOs. But as if to dampen down the growing rumours, Michael Chasen, Blackboard’s CEO, is featured in the article downplaying his company’s need to go public (which seems quite likely true, what with their recent earnings reports and an overall climate that meant Blackboard has not had “to worry about other overfunded companies in our space.”) The speculation continues… - SWL

http://www.scirus.com/

New to me was this search engine that focuses solely on sources of scientific information and returns results either from qualified web sites or from only scientific journals. It points to a different strategy for finding learning resources - highly constrained and vetted search catalogs that instead of relying on metadata simply use good search engines on the already qualified catalog. Some might claim that this falls into the same human scalability trap as Yahoo-style directories, but in my mind it is actually the happy medium between such directories and full-scale internet searching that has little or no knowledge of the quality of the information and relies on (falliable, vis a vis the ‘pagerank blog effect‘)algorithmic techniques like ‘pagerank‘ to calculate the relevancy of a resource…
Continue reading ‘Scirus - science-specific search engine’

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/

Via another great article from Wilbert Kraan at CETIS comes mention of this new service, Open Source Software Watch (OSS Watch), aimed at providing “neutral and authoritative guidance about free and open source software” to the U.K.’s higher education community. They are not focusing on a single type of open source application, but rather the gamut that can be found in the open source world, which makes a lot of sense as the issues in adopting any particular piece of open source software share much in common. This is a welcome addition to the service from OpenSector the news service which focuses more broadly on open source as it applies to the public sector.

Take a look, too, at the ’style’ links at the bottom of the page - nicely built standards-compliant website that allows you to view the page in multiple formats at the click of a button (my guess would be by using the Cocoon engine). - SWL