Monthly Archive for January, 2005

(O.k., I promised the one before was my last one today, but you know… procrastination and all that)

For the sake of posterity, here is the email I wrote Bloglines tech support today. I would urge others to do likewise who are experiencing the same problem.

“Hi, I contacted you a few weeks back about this problem, and since then have canvassed a number of other bloggers and learned they too are experiencing this problem. There is a regular, reproducable problem with bloglines correctly updating the feed count ofr a feed but then not displaying the feed content if that feed is selected (unless one forces the ‘last x hours’ of content to be displayed.) This is a SERIOUS problem. I love bloglines. I know it is free. If it doesn’t get fixed, though, I think this would bode very ill for continued user loyalty and adoption. A *detailed* reply would be appreciated, I’ve had the ‘we’re working on it’ responses before. Maybe something in your news feed? People know about this problem. If it is a question of being with specific feeds, let us know and we can tell you which ones it happens with (because it does seem feed specific). thanks, Scott Leslie, Edtechpost (http://www.edtechpost.ca/)”

http://www.freelists.org

(This has GOT to be my last post today! If you’ve ever wondered why my posts are so short, it isn’t because I have nothing to say
Thought this would be interesting to the ’small pieces’crowd - FreeLists.org is a free email listserving service (with no advertising and industrial strength admin controls on your lists). I’ve used it for a number of projects in the past where I didn’t have access to my own mail server and wanted to run a list. It provides users with their own web-based admin as well as web-based archives, and (what prompted this post) just announced the availability of RSS feeds for any of the list archives. They do say the lists must be ‘technology focused’ but in the past I have found them willing to accept ‘educational technology’ as easily fitting that bill. Free. Web-based. RSS. Seems like at least 3 of the magic words these days. - SWL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_learning_environment

EdTech bloggers may be interested to get in on the action over at wikipedia where a number of edtech terms are being defined - the above link points to the already reasonably flushed out artcle on ‘Managed learning environments‘ and there are many other related terms, including ‘learning objects‘ and ‘elearning‘ for example.

I personally didn’t mind any of the entries too much, though was slightly put off by the redirection from Course Management Systems to ‘Managed Learning Environments,’ but the wonderful thing about wiki is to add your two cents if you don’t agree. Wonderful opportunity for those in the field who are interested in wikis to ‘walk the talk’. - SWL

http://www.infrae.com/products/railroad

I am really not sure why I haven’t seen more of this, as the longer I look at the LOR problem the more sense it makes to me that ‘conventional’ repositories can be reasonably easily built on the back of existing (large and relatively stable) open source Content Management Systems. This comes as well with a realization that try as one might, it is likely not feasible to omit the content management of learning objects from one’s solution. This repository system, from a software development company based in the Netherlands, runs on top of Plone or Zope and appears to support OAI harvesting of Dublin Core records out of the box.

In truth there are a couple of repositories I know of that have taken the similar approach - Connexions is built on Plone, and Rob Woodbury’s Avire (though not explicitly an LOR) on top of TikiWiki. And then there is Eduplone, but to be honest I have never quite sussed that one out. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/adeta_blogtalk.ppt

The above points to the powerpoint slides for an online presentation I just gave to the Alberta Distance Education and Training Association (ADETA). Likely nothing new there for the old hands, but I promised James I would post it once it was done. Like everything else on this site it is posted under a Creative Commons license, so reuse as desired.

I tried to build on the work I did a few years back on the ‘Matrix of Uses’ for blogs in education - truth be told I haven’t spent a lot of time since then focusing on the issue, so don’t know if my thinking has progressed that far.

In a nutshell, my messages were
- focus on ‘blogging’ as process and not ‘blog’ as noun
- blogging is important in representing a number of significant ‘firsts’ (easy XML publishing tool, easy personal publishing, networked writing, easy way to create identity online)
- yet important to learn the lessons these ‘firsts’ teach irregardless of the specific manifestations (I know I’ll catch flak for that one)
- represent a move towards bringing our educational life online and are online lives together (for better or worse, you decide)

It’s hard when you don’t know your audience/can’t even see your audience. I ended up with too much background and not enough time for the meat. Maybe someday there will be enough awareness of blogs as a phenomenom that all of us can forsake all the introductory comments, but it still feels fringe enough to me when I talk to educators ‘on the ground,’ so to speak, that I feel compelled to include it in these kinds of talks. - SWL

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20050127043826

This article by Wilbert Kraan of CETIS will undoubtably make the rounds in the next few days, but it seemed too signifcant to not post on myself.

Many of us have heard speechs and read articles by one of the IEEE LOM’s creators, Erik Duval, to the effect that metadata needs to become more invisible to end users, in part through automating its creation. Well Erik and the crew at KU Leuven haven’t just talked about it - as Wilbert describes, they have released an open source ‘framework’ for the automated generation of metadata based on the context of its use. Extremely exciting news. - SWL

http://makeashorterlink.com/?N21E1465A

I know nothing about this system, but it caught my eye as significant as it is the first CMS that I know of coming from a library catalog vendor and being built on top of collection of library materials.

For those who lament the seemingly dominant instructivist bent of current CMS this seems hardly a good thing, likewise the ’small pieces’ crowd. But as my colleague Bruce Landon keeps reminding me in our discussions about learning object repositories, at the end of the day, libraries are the ones with the budget dollars and seemingly more entrenched institutional mandates and may well end up being where many of these systems get located. - SWL

http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/comments/223/

I am a huge fan of Bloglines and use it ever day (some people even claim I have an RSS ‘habit’ and need help). So I have been increasingly concerned with the weird behaviour I have seen over the past weeks in Bloglines. Specifically, I’ve noticed feed counts getting updated but the feed contents not displaying when you go to read them unless you specifically force it to display the last x days. The other problem I’ve reported is that the Bloglines search facility is demonstrably not working on a regular basis.

I’ve emailed Bloglines and got a response on both problems that they were ‘looking into the problem.’ O.k., great; it’s a free service and they replied in under a day, which is pretty impressive.

But then quite by chance today I went back to Michael Feldstein’s e-literate site because in the back of my mind I wondered why I hadn’t seen anything from his blog of late. And there I found the above post which indicates that Bloglines hasn’t been updating his feed for quite some time. I unsubscribed and resubscribed and he’s right - sometime back in October the feed stopped being updated and you can’t get anymore through Bloglines.

I don’t know about you, but if you are a Bloglines user I would suggest this is VERY unsettling news. Anyone else experiencing weirdness like this? (I’ve turned off comments recently as my ISP helpfully broke my MT-blacklist comment spam filter with a PERL upgrade, but please email me or post on your own blog if you are experiencing similar difficulties. The irony being of course that if you read this feed through Bloglines, who knows if you will or won’t see this post). And as Will Richardson recently reminded folks, back up your OPML files. - SWL

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity

O.k., I admit I chuckled when I first saw this, but heck, I regularly turn to Wikipedia now for quick reference info (as does the Gurunet desktop reference app I use to check word definitions) so maybe this is one of the faces of open education to come. Not much there yet, though there is a page with some ideas on what it could become, but you gotta start someplace. - SWL

“If everything you try works, you aren’t trying hard enough.” - Gordon Moore