Tag: mashups

El Guapo’s EdTech Trading Card

I’m feeling kind of silly today, so… via a chock-a-block wiki page from the always fabulous Jenny Levine came a link to the great community building exercise, the Librarian Trading Cards flickr pool (collect them all!), which in turn led to the amazing set of flickr toys and specifically the trading card maker that’s been used to create all these nifty cards (you know, my english profs used to just slam me for run on sentences, but I don’t care, it’s more fun this way!) And I just couldn’t help myself,, so here’s El Guapo‘s card (the photo for which was taken by my 6 year old son, it’s amazing how few photos of myself I actually have on my computer, oh yeah, those run on sentences again…) – SWL

Wayfinding at UBC

http://tinyurl.com/dac35

I’m lucky to be invited out to UBC tomorrow to give a little talk and meet with a few folks. I’ve been there maybe a half-dozen times but I really don’t know my way around the campus that well – it is truly immense! I was about to email my contact there to ask for direction, but then thought to check the university’s own website for maps.

Wow! Was I gald I did. I would have felt foolish to be asking after what I found at the Wayfinding at UBC site. The link above points to the final map I produced and printed – what I loved was the ability to plot not one but at least two distinct locations (and get directions between them if need be) and to add or subtract information to my final printout page (like closest parking, local details) if I wanted. I also loved they way they tied into Google where needed or where more appropriate.

Perhaps I don’t get on to enough campuses and the quality represented by this site is commonplace elsewhere and I just don’t realize it. But I think not – apparently the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education were also impressed enough to award it the 2004 Gold Prix d’Excellence for ‘Best Department or Program Site on the World Wide Web.’ And well deserved at that; the gold standard as far as I am concerned for helping people find their way around campus. (Have I just inevitably damned myself to be driving around downtown Surrey while my talk is going on though, I wonder 😉 – SWL

Edubloggers Links Feed – Join In!

http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=697

It’s been two months now since I started subscribing to an aggregated feed of FURL and del.icio.us feeds from various EdTech bloggers. It’s been a very fruitful experiment, and according to Bloglines at least 9 other subscribers seem to think so as well. For me it is providing a second channel of good resources with just enough context (e.g. the fact that they are all edtech bloggers I respect) to know they are worth considering but without the reading committment that blogs require.

This post is simply another shout out to any EdTech bloggers out there who also maintain a FURL, del.icio.us or other bookmarking site that offers RSS feeds to add their’s to this site – it’s open to anyone to add to. Currently the really active source feeds are from the cogdog, Brian, D’Arcy, Will Richardson, Trey Martindale and Greg Ritter, but there are tons of other folks whose interesting URLs I’d love to see. – SWL

New URL for Combined Edubloggers Links Feed

http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=697

A few weeks back I posted about a feed I had created using Rollup.org that rolled together the RSS feeds from such Edublogging luminaries as Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and Will Richardson.

No sooner did this get started then Rollup.org announces that it is closing its doors (lending some real credibility to Derek Morrison’s recent musings about aggregator business models).

No worries though. The same feed has been recreated and is now available through Blogdigger at the above URL (the RSS feed is http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?id=697). Truth be told Blogdigger is the nicer of the two services in any case – I left the settings on this group as ‘Unmoderated’ meaning people can add their feeds here too if they choose, something unavailable through Rollup.org. I noticed about a dozen folks had subscribed in Bloglines to this feed, and possibly more elsewhere, so be forewarned. I will leave the original feed as is but at some point I expect RollUp.org will just pull the plug.

So far this has proven a fruitful experiment, leading to a dozen or so really valuable references that fellow edubloggers Furl’d but did not post to their blogs. – SWL

Rolling Up Furl and Del.icio.Us Feeds from Edubloggers

http://rollup.org/rollup/rollup.php?id=495

It seems ‘de rigeur’ for the cutting edge edtech blogger to have at the very least a Furl or del.icio.us bookmark account in addition to their blog (let’s not even talk about Flickr for right now).

Some, like Alan, have taken the further step of rolling their blog and Furl feeds together (and in Alan’s case his Flickr feed as well). This makes sense as it keeps the unique individual’s perspective attached to the feed.

But not everyone has taken this step; lots of folks have separate Furl and del.icio.us sites/feeds. I’ve been subscribing to one or two of them in the past, but wanted to get all the ed tech bloggers’ bookmark feeds in one place. So off I went to Rollup.org, where I created a new RSS feed that rolled up the Furl or del.icio.us RSS feeds from Alan, Brian Lamb, James Farmer, Greg Ritter, George Siemens, Trey Martindale, Harold Jarche, Will Richardson, D’Arcy Norman and myself. I would have added more, but these were all I could find.

So the handy thing about this is that I can subscribe to one feed in my bloglines account and see all the URLs collected by all these brainy folks. The downside is that many of these brainy folks read the same things as I do, and the same feeds as each other, and so there ends up being a fair bit of duplication in the feed.

Which leads me on to the idea that another value-added that either Furl or del.icio.us could offer (maybe they do?) is ‘group feeds,’ that is, a feed for a set of Furl’ers, but one that recognizes common URLs and groups them like the main site does.

Anyways, feel free to subscribe to the feed if you are interested. I don’t plan to take it down, though it is still an experiement for me to see how much useful stuff comes out of it. If you want your bookmark feed added to this feed, let me know too. – SWL

More RSS feeds from Repositories

It seems like the idea of using RSS as a means to syndicate new items in learning object repositories is steadily catching on. The page I’ve set up to aggregate a number of these feeds now has three more, two of them thanks to Ian Winship from Northumbria University.

The new feeds are:
– latest additions to the EEVL repository, a UK-based guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing
– latest additions to the Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Economics’ collection of resources
– a ‘by subject’ feed from Chalkface, a UK-based publisher of K-12 online courses and photocopy-master lesson plans

RSS Feeds from Repository Projects

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?
folder=621267&since=9&Display=Display

Note what I mean here are the LOR projects (not the repositories themselves, which you can find over here) that are producing RSS feeds as a way to communicate about their projects or otherwise coordinate their efforts. These include:

– D’Arcy Norman’s Learning Commons Weblog (for the CAREO/APOLLO projects)
– The Resource Pool, a Eduspecs-funded test pilot of a CAREO implmentation
– R2R: Learning Design – a new initiative out of University of Calgary to implement a Learning Design tool

– APOLLO-DEV, the proper technical blog for the Apollo project at U of Calgary
– Stòr Cùram, a blog from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland on their LOR initiative, apparently employing Intrallect’s Intralibrary

I haven’t listed CogDogBlog in here, as Alan posts on so many other things beside the Maricopa Learning Exchange, but it’s certainly not because it doesn’t deserve attention. I expect I missed other’s as well, or maybe have you filed somewhere else in Bloglines but still cover your feed. If you are working on an LOR implementation or development project and running a blog, I’d love to hear about it, include it on this list and follow along.

And what, you ask, about my own project… embarassingly, I am so swamped trying to meet our initial project requirements phase deadlines that we haven’t created anything public to date, except this space here, which is not an official ‘organ’ of the project. Stay tuned for more news, though… – SWL

New page for ‘RSS feeds from learning object repositories’

I just noticed today that people still refer to the old page I built illustrating RSS feeds from known Repositories. That page was built on my old Radio site using a simple Radio macro that rendered RSS as HTML. Since then I’ve moved the site into MoveableType and onto another host, but I have only recently got around to recreating this page. This time, though, I did it using a public Bloglines page (one of the beauties of a web-based aggregator that lets you share!)

The new page illustrating the results of these feeds is at http://www.bloglines.com/public_display?username=EdTechPost&folder=322938. It’s actually pretty interesting to have them in one’s aggregator as you get a better sense of how regularly materials are being added (not that regularly). As before, the page includes feeds from:

  • Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO, http://www.careo.org/)
  • Maricopa Learning Exchange (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/index.php)
  • The MedWeb Testbank Search (http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/databases/interop/mcqs)
  • Humbul database (http://www.humbul.ac.uk/help/rss.html)
  • UK Centre for Materials Education (http://www.materials.ac.uk/index.asp)
  • Edna Online (http://www.edna.edu.au)
  • Merlot (http://www.merlot.org/)

Originally when I built this it was mostly to try and illustrate for myself the results and the utility of such feeds. The page is still fairly referenced, though, and so I have tried to add new ones as I find them. If you know of other Repositories that offer RSS feeds please let me know and I will add it to the list. Eventually I will decomission the old site, and will probably do something to re-direct this particular page.