Monthly Archive for March, 2005

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666?ID=MWR0566

Hey, I’m as excited about the potential of service-oriented architectures and the ‘loosely coupled’ appproach as the next guy, but on a regular basis I find myself lamenting the seeming lack of real world working examples one can currently point to.

Yet every time I feel this way, along comes another presentation like this one, in this case describing the use of RSS to display library resource holdings within the Sakai CMTools application, that help me believe the grand vision of diversity and choice with stability and integration may actually come true. So don’t dispair; ‘network economy’ effects to the contrary, slowly cracks are forming in the vendor lockdown and silos we all lament … really … I think. - SWL

http://www.webct.com/service/
ViewContent?contentID=25561480

I’m sure the chattering masses (hey, I don’t exclude myself from this grouping) will have something to say about this one - yea, as the prophets foretold, in the year of the mark of the sign of the beast, the ‘evil empire’ took control, yada yada yada - but from where I’m sitting, if there’s a way that 3rd party learning tools can interoperate with different learning environments that is not based on proprietary APIs, that seems like a good step forward. If, instead, the Tools Interoperability specification becomes ‘Powerlinks for everyone,’ well then clearly the eschaton is near, so praise the lord and pass the hand grenades - SWL

http://tinyurl.com/5nhll

Many of you will have run into Sunguard through one of their fairly recent acquisitions, SCT Banner, the SIS on many higher ed campuses. Not sure entirely what the implications of this acquisition are. but it seems like more and more acquisitions and consolidations are afoot. - SWL

http://www.flong.com/yellowtail/

There’s an essay here about the virtues of ‘bookmark gardening,’ but late on this Friday afternoon I’ll give that a rest and instead just point to this delightful ‘interactive art’ piece found hiding in the dingy corners of my local bookmarks file. Have a good break over Easter if you take one! - SWL

http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/

I know the “professionals” who work on search, taxonomies, the semantic web and the like will all know about this resource, but many who are interested in topics like “folksonomies” could do worse than spend a bit of time reading some of the papers published in the CSDL’s online library of publications. If you are interested in these kinds of topics, be prepared to set aside many hours for what you find, (and also to turn on your ‘academic publications’ bullsh*t filter - god how I detest some of the conventions of academic writing, much as I understand why they exist). - SWL

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search-inside/sipshelp-dp.html

Seems like an interesting idea in regards to generating automatic metadata - generate keyword phrases by analyzing the text and picking out phrases which occur regularly only in that work but not in others. - SWL

http://www.tightvnc.com/doc/java/README.txt

This will likely not come as a surprise to any of you who actually read manuals, but for the rest of us, you may be as surprised as I was to learn that you can share a view of your desktop (and any running applications) with multiple other users simultaneously using the VNC server without your viewers having to install any software. I’d known about VNC for years and already had it running on my machine, but always connected to it using a VNC client and used it as ‘remote control‘ software. The problem, though, was if all you wanted was for other users to simply see your desktop instead of control it (for instance to do a guided tour or walk them through a document over the phone), requiring them to have their own VNC thick client installed seemed a bit onerous.

It was only when I was about to sign up to use the Glance software and serendipitously read their licensing agreement that I noticed that Glance is in fact built on top of VNC. This piqued my interest - and sure enough, when I dug only a little bit into the documentation, I came across the fact that VNC has a built in HTTP daemon as well as a Java-client, and so by simply giving (potentially multiple) users your IP address and the appropriate port number they can view your machine running the VNC server through their Java-enabled web browser. For free. You may have to futz a bit with opening holes for specific ports in your firewall, but it’s about 5 minutes work to get simple desktop broadcasting working. - SWL

http://www.a-hec.org/e-learning_study.html

This report by Rob Abel aims to detail some of the “Common Factors and Best Practices of Institutions that have Been Successful at e-Learning” and serve as a counterpoint to last year’s more negative “Thwarted Innovation” report by Zemsky and Massy.

I’m sure some will take issue with it, but many of its findings seem reasonable enough - institutions that “do well” at elearning see it as critical to their missions and have organized and resourced accordingly. A few suprises too - seemingly contrary to conventional wisdom, the largest portion of ‘elearning’ at these ’successful’ institutions is fully online courses and programs, not ‘blendid’ or ‘hybrid’ courses, which typically are portrayed as the easier half-step. Seen via Jane Knight’s elearning Centre. - SWL

https://network.grandcentral.com/en/home/index.jsp

Via Loosely Coupled - this has got to be significant, a company seems to think it can make a go of “application integration as a hosted service.” The current list of service providers is relatively small but a start - the well-known suspects like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and PayPal but others like gelco, salesforce.com and StrikeIron.

Hey bloggers - TAKE THE WEEKENDS OFF! Seriously, you all are generating just WAY too much interesting stuff to wade through on Mondays! - SWL

http://elated.sourceforge.net/

Seeming to prove out the model of ‘repository as service’ is this front end to the Fedora repository system. And also seeming to provide a good example to back up Charlie Lowe’s recent point on how open source can itself provide learning opportuniites within educational institutions, this was built as part of the Associated Colleges of the South Technology Center’s Software Engineering Internship.

Interestingerrr and interestingerrr… - SWL