Edu_RSS
The Potential of Social Softwares
Sometimes it takes me a little while to get my brain wrapped around all these new ideas, and the one I've been struggling with a bit lately is the concept of tagging and folksonomies and the like. I love that f-word, the idea that we can create our own taxonomies for the information we find relevant. We're creating our own personal libraries with our own personal filing systems. I can tag
Flickr posts and
del.icio.us links not only to give them relevance for me but to associate them with what other like-minded folks From
weblogged News on January 21, 2005 at 10:47 p.m..
[bjc] Friday afternoon - First ten minutes
[Links to the participants] [Conference blog aggregator] [IRC channel: #webcred at freenode.net] Topic: How can institutional journalists adopt what's good about blogging? And what happens to bloggers? Bill Mitchell of Poynter Online was commissioned to write a paper about transparency. He raises three questions for discussion: 1) What kinds of promises might be made to create the relationships we want between readers and writers. 2) If transparency isn't enough to create trust, what will? 3) What's the coolest tool we could create that would help us get at better representation From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 9:48 p.m..
Blogs as Online Learning Environments
James Farmer has an interesting post about how students might use blogs to manage their learning. Here's a snippet: However, if that learner has their own blog ‘outside’ of the central, managed environment then things can start to look a bit different. Let’s say that in this case they are studying four units and they can simply create categories for each one (so postings relevant to that unit can go there and to their main blog if appropriate), that that category is then aggregated into the ‘central’ area (where unit guides, copy From
weblogged News on January 21, 2005 at 9:48 p.m..
Forever Access vs. Archiving Courses: Practical Limitations of LMS Storage
What do you do with an online course after the course has finished? Archive it, obviously, but for how long? And with what sort of access? Online course providers are now facing these sorts of issues and storage space fills up, content licenses expire and the usefulness of the course itself diminishes. This presentation (PowerPoint slides) looks at some of these issues and how they were handled at Penn State University. Via
EDUCAUSE. By Allan Gyorke, January, 2005 [
OLDaily on January 21, 2005 at 9:45 p.m..
Games That Make Leaders
More from james Paul Gee, who with two other professors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, extolled the virtues of games in learning at a seminar on Wednesday (video of the event is available on the site). "Video games let their players step into new personas and explore alternatives. Not only that, but people can try to solve problems they're not good at yet, get immediate feedback on the consequences and try again immediately." The author of the
Slashdot post where I found this comments, "My workplace is alrea From
OLDaily on January 21, 2005 at 9:45 p.m..
Spam Slams E-Mail and Even Web Use
Statistical support for an intuition I
wrote about at the end of last year. "44 percent of computer users have reduced their use of e-mail and the Internet in the last 12 months." By Rob McGann, ClickZ, January 20, 2005 [
Refer][
Research][
OLDaily on January 21, 2005 at 9:45 p.m..
Encouraging Creativity in Online Courses
Overview of the concept of creativity, the relation between creativity and pedagogy, and suggestions for increasing creativity in online courses. By Stephanie Clemons, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, January, 2005 [
Refer][
Research][
Reflect< From OLDaily on January 21, 2005 at 9:45 p.m..
Assessing Student Needs in Web-Based Distance Education
This paper details a six-step process for assessing student needs in online courses: define the purpose, choose the assessment methods, develop a timeline, conduct the needs assessment, analyze the data, and match the needs with the learning environment. By Pamela A. Dupin-Bryant and Barbara A. DuCharme-Hansen, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, January, 2005 [
Refer][
OLDaily on January 21, 2005 at 9:45 p.m..
Reconceptualisation of the Teaching and Learning Process through Computer-Mediated Frameworks
If you have ever wondered how online learning is being approached in Mauritius, this is the paper to read. The paper describes the University of Mauritius's work with the Virtual-U e-learning platform and the development of their
learning object repository containing dozens of resources. Couldn't find a way to harvest metadata, though metadata is vailable for individual objects. The authors also describe the "educational ecology concept" adopted by the university. By Mohammad Issack Santally and Alain Senteni, International Journal of Inst From
OLDaily on January 21, 2005 at 9:45 p.m..
Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age
The January edition of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning is out; I link to four articles, beginning with this offering from George Siemens, which was covered in these pages a few weeks ago. The theory proposed - which you should read if you haven't seen it yet - "combines relevant elements of many learning theories, social structures, and technology to create a powerful theoretical construct for learning in the digital age." By George Siemens, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, January, 2005 [
OLDaily on January 21, 2005 at 9:45 p.m..
Wikipedia breaks news
Jimmy Wales, at the BJC conference's backchannel, has pointed out that Wikipedia has broken news that has not yet been picked up by the media: Unrest in Belize. Fascinating.... From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 8:48 p.m..
toDo
So much to do, so little time. If you develop and roll out a web-based software tool there are two things you need least. users company firewall From
thomas n. burg | randgänge on January 21, 2005 at 8:47 p.m..
Halley interviews Dan
Dan Gillmor, who I think we ought to start calling The Dan, is interviewed by Halley at IT Conversations. (I haven't heard it yet because I'm at a conference, but how could it be bad?)... From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 7:48 p.m..
[bjc] Judith Donath
Judith Donath Look at credibility in terms of signals that occur even among animals where if the signal is costly, it's more likely to be honest. E.g., a moose with big antlers actually is strong. There's also reputation among animals. Sparrows have pecking orders based on having a black mark on their chest that doesn't signal any real property. A scientist painted a black mark on one. It gained in status. When the sparrows figured out that it was painted on [how?], the other sparrows pecked it to death. What do the webs of links among bloggers mean? How do... From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 7:48 p.m..
Degrees of belief
One of the differences between the journalists and the rest of us: Journalists have a tiny vocabulary for expressing incredulity: "alleged," "reportedly," "claimed," "suspected." The rest of us have a rich rhetoric of semi-belief, starting with a simple "I think that..." and going all the way to "I find it really hard to believe anything that lying fathead says, but..." Part of the value of traditional journalists is that they only tell us what they know. But that's a more fragile credibility. And it forces uncertainty out of stories, or, worse, allows it only in what isn't said.... From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 7:48 p.m..
Spanish Speaking Bloggers Blogging in English: An Aggregator
Gracias a VÃctor Ruiz está en marcha, en versión beta, la vieja idea de un agregador que recogiera feeds de bloggers hispanohablantes que publicaran también weblogs en inglés: Spanish Speaking Bloggers Blogging in English: An Aggregator (feed RSS). Relacionado: What... From
eCuaderno v.2.0 on January 21, 2005 at 6:52 p.m..
Please, Please, Please Write Informative Headlines
Lately, I have been using
RSS feeds a lot. And I've set up my system to give me the latest headlines every hour.That means I get a list of headlines to view, and I click the ones that are interesting. Most of the time, I find that bloggers and experienced Web editors do a pretty good job of writing headlines so that I can decide whether I am interested or not.Take a typical Wired headline like "
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on January 21, 2005 at 5:54 p.m..
RSS in a News Ticker
This is cool.
My Yahoo! has
debuted an
RSS news ticker (free beta version). Select your favorite RSS feeds (a.k.a., webfeeds), and get a custom ticker for your computer.I'm just now trying this out, though I'm skeptical about how much I'll use it. Enabling a live ticker is annoying when I'm trying to do other work on my computer.However, I'm also mindful of how news tickers seem to attract From
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on January 21, 2005 at 5:54 p.m..
[bjc] Friday morning
[Links to the participants] Conference blog aggregator IRC channel: #webcred at freenode.net] Jan Schaffer, Jimmy Wales, Faye Anderson jon Bonne, Kathy Im, Alex Jones Jay Rosen leads off with a brief talk about the paper commissioned for this conference, "Bloggers cs. Journalists Is Over." [I like the idea of conferences commissioning papers. Also maybe next time: music.] He sees the paper as a "peace-making" document that's also "trouble-making." Peace: The war and the cartoon dialogue should be over. It doesn't mean that the discussion is over. The tension is inevitable. But look a From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 5:48 p.m..
Puzzles!
My officemates and I have taken to occasionally trading mind benders. While math graduate students might tend to such recreations more than others, we also like to believe that they have, or should have, universal appeal. Besides, I've heard a few from programmers also. Here are a few of my favorites. The difficulty is of course rather subjective. Do you have a favorite puzzle? From
kuro5hin.org on January 21, 2005 at 5:45 p.m..
[bjc] First (and last?) photos
I'm at the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference, sponsored by Berkman, Shorenstein and the ALA. Here are the first two photos I've taken, and quite possibly the last just because the conf looks like it will be pretty intense. Lovely meeting room. The South Vietnamese will be on the left, the North Vietnamese on the right, and Henry Kissinger will be in the middle Dan Gillmor, chief citizen journalist, and John Hinderaker of Powerline... From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 3:48 p.m..
Turning Wi-Fi Into a Must-Have - Business Week
Not so long ago, nurses at the surgical unit of Rhode Island Hospital ran marathons on their daily shifts. If one of them needed help to administer a treatment, he or she would have to leave a patient's bedside and trek through the corridors to look f From
Techno-News Blog on January 21, 2005 at 12:49 p.m..
Cornell
To many people, technology and reÂligion are very different animals. Technology, after all, grows out of science and hard evidence; religion is based on faith. Yet in W. Kent Fuchs, dean of Cornell University From
Techno-News Blog on January 21, 2005 at 12:49 p.m..
Berkman Web of Ideas: Everything Is Miscellaneous
This coming Wednesday I'm holding another in a series of open sessions on, well, ideas I'm interested in. This time will be a little different because I want to try out a presentation I'm giving at the TTI Vanguard meeting in SF in a few weeks. The title is "Everything Is Miscellaneous," and I'm really not yet settled on what I'm actually going to say. But here's the blurb: For 2,500 years, knowledge was shaped like a tree. It had a root, branches and leaves. Now that we're digitizing all the information we can lay our mitts on, it's becoming... From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 12:48 p.m..
Why RSS News Feeds
Outfront has written a really great piece about RSS feeds and the benefits of RSS over email as a communication medium. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a wonderfully uncomplicated way to get information from a publisher to the subscribers who want that information. it's a very promising way to bypass the drawbacks of email as a delivery system for newsletters and similar content. There are 2 major drawbacks of email as a delivery system. One is spam filters. My newsletter is very likely to go direc From
RSS Blog on January 21, 2005 at 11:56 a.m..
Tsunami Earthquake Disaster Causes: Facts And Speculations
Is it reasonable to question possible alternative causes for the tsunami earthquake disaster? Are you really so sure that earthquakes cannot be easily triggered by either planned or careless human action? Types and locations of earthquakes induced by man - Click on the map to enlarge it - Source: Oilfield Review Summer 2000 If you are someone who loves to get news from TV, while getting some of the rest from a major newspaper, this article is not for you. Here you will only get pissed, frustrated and angry at me, as what is written here below shows how little... From
Robin Good' Sharewood Tidings on January 21, 2005 at 11:48 a.m..
An alliance between MSN Music and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings will make tens of thousand of hist ...
An alliance between MSN Music and
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings will make tens of thousand of historic songs from legendary performers of folk, blues, jazz and world music available online for the first time, allowing music fans to discover a diverse world of music and sound. The Smithsonian Folkways catalog of nearly 35,000 tracks, which is only available for download through MSN Music in the United States, features legendary artists Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lucinda Williams, Big Bill From
Peter Scott's Library Blog on January 21, 2005 at 11:46 a.m..
Meteor Impact Theory Takes a Hit
A second team of scientists says it cannot find evidence to support the hypothesis that a meteorite slammed into Earth 250 million years ago, wiping out the majority of life. But proponents of the impact theory aren't budging. By Amit Asaravala. From
Wired News on January 21, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
Desperately Seeking Cybersex
A documentary about online sex addiction makes one former chat-room diva wonder: Where has all the good cybersex gone? Commentary by Regina Lynn. From
Wired News on January 21, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
Shall We Do the Tech Sundance?
As more indie filmmakers take advantage of cheaper, more powerful video technologies, plenty of high-tech companies scramble to latch on to some Sundance buzz. By Jason Silverman. From
Wired News on January 21, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
Solving the Enigma of Kryptos
The novel The Da Vinci Code is renewing interest in solving the puzzle of a cryptographic sculpture located at CIA headquarters. Only three people know the solution, but the sculptor now says two of them only think they know it. By Kim Zetter. From
Wired News on January 21, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
Media Lab Europe to close
After four years of operation,
Media Lab Europe announced it would
close due to lack of funds. Last year the Lab advised its main stakeholders that the levels of external funding being raised were insufficient to sustain it into the future. Subsequently, in May, it presented a Strategic Plan to the Government and MIT seeking additional funding... principal st From
NITLE Tech News on January 21, 2005 at 8:58 a.m..
David Berlind has the same Fan noise problem in his podcasts
I am having the same fan problem. I thought it was the disk drive. I have tried running no software other than Garageband but that doesn't help. So I don't think it has anything to do with the number of programs or does it? Does Garageband use a lot of resources on its own that causes the fan to spin? Perhaps. I'd love to get Audacity working but I can't get it to work (need more sleep and I need to try it again!). From
Berlind&rsquo;s PodTop.: QUOTEThe iMic is cool, From
Roland Tanglao's Weblog on January 21, 2005 at 7:46 a.m..
Understanding USB Flash Drives as Portable Infrastructure
The purpose of this white paper is to briefly discuss seven important topics everyone in business needs to know about USB flash drives. More importantly, this white paper is meant to challenge current business thinking that treats small portable devices as big security problems disguised as toys or high-tech gadgets. USB flash drives provide many valuable and productive functions in business. Managers need to look beyond short term concerns, rollup their sleeves, and make USB flash drives apart of their IT landscape. Just like wireless networking, managers must consider USB flash drives as t From
Infosec Writers Latest Security Papers on January 21, 2005 at 5:55 a.m..
Blogs as a moral presence
A few days ago, I got an email from a reader outraged that I hadn't commented on Harvard President Lawrence Summers' discouraging remarks. I replied to her that I hadn't had anything interesting to say and I don't feel obligated to comment on every issue of note. From her point of view, because I'm paid (a little bit) by Harvard, my failure to blog was a failure of courage. (I eventually did blog about it, but my affiliation with Harvard is temporary and so far below Summers' radar that it took 0.0 pounds of courage.) Then Jay Rosen blogged about... From
Joho the Blog on January 21, 2005 at 5:48 a.m..
Wanted: Innovative thinkers with new ideas
The 2005 Australian Flexible Learning Framework (2005 Framework) will provide innovative teaching and training groups with funding of up to $70,000 each through its New Practices in Flexible Learning Project. If you have an innovative 'new practice' idea that you'd like to make a reality and apply at a national level, then we invite you to apply for funding now! New Practices in Flexible Learning aims to stimulate training providers to develop original and diverse practices focused on e-learning, e-business, online student support and self-service. The 2005 Framework will provid From
Australian Flexible Learning Framework News Headlines on January 21, 2005 at 4:58 a.m..
CELEBRATE Evaluation Report now available
This report provides an evaluation of the extent to which new, more flexible forms of content development and distribution (based on reusable LOs) had an impact upon the learning process and supported new pedagogy for eLearning in schools. From
eLearnopedia on January 21, 2005 at 4:52 a.m..
You're not studying, you're just...
Ravi Purushotma on how games can help in
teaching languages. Check out this related
BBC article too. "This commentary examines how content originally designed for entertainment purposes can be modified to provide natural and context rich language learning environments, without sacrificing its entertainment value. First, I examine a modification to the number one selling video game The Simsthat intelligently combines game data from the English ed From
elearningpost on January 21, 2005 at 2:46 a.m..
How to write summaries for web and intranet pages, and why
Here's a nice list of the
different types of summaries that one can write: The executive summary - summary: This is an executive summary, similar to the first sentence in a news story. The key message - summary: This type of summary conveys the single most important message on the page. The description - summary: The page description is probably the easiest option for the writer, if slightly dull for the reader. It faintly resembles the abstr From
elearningpost on January 21, 2005 at 2:46 a.m..
Web Conferencing Review: WebInterpoint
WebInterpoint is a Java-based web conferencing tool from WebDialogs in Billerica, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The company has a business model that is geared around private label branding and product customization, so I actually tried the WebInterpoint service provided by a U.K.... From
Kolabora.com on January 21, 2005 at 12:54 a.m..
Navigation blindness
This article by Henrik Olsen suggests to design navigation seystems in webiste to be much more prominent: Most web development projects put a lot of effort into the design of navigation tools. But fact is that people tend to ignore these tools. They are fixated on getting what they came for and simply click on links or hit the back button to get there. From
owrede_log on January 21, 2005 at 12:47 a.m..
Virtual street teams
Yesterday's Blog described how some "inadvertent" pre-release P2P filesharing might have contributed to the No. 1 Billboard debut of U2's new album: Critics suggest that the theft of How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and its subsequent pre-release to the peer-to-peer sites might have been done for promotional purposes. That quote is from
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:55 p.m..
Macintosh now legal
As a Mac user, I'm always on the alert for conversion stories, tales of people who've seen the light and come over from the Dark Side. There are common places where you find these: Graphic artists, musicians, even engineers and architects. And, nowadays, kids, especially after they get their first iPod. And then there are places where you don't expect to hear about conversions: Doctor's offices, accounting firms, government agencies. And law offices. Especially law offices, From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:55 p.m..
Is there a dongle in your future?
There are three general ways to identify yourself: Something you know. Something you have. Something you are. Item 1, something you know, is the basis for the PINs and passwords we're all familiar with. Item 3, something you are, is the category for fingerprints and retinal scans, technologies still too expensive and complex for everyday use. And so item 2, something you have, is the best short-term hope for com From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:55 p.m..
Take this at face value
On Christmas day, this AP report appeared in a number of papers (for the full text, try
this Google search): LA Police Dept. Studies Facial Recognition SoftwareSaturday, December 25, 2004 The Los Angeles Police Department is experimenting with facial-recognition software it says will help identify suspects, but civil liberties advocates say the technology rais From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:55 p.m..
Government identity standards
Last August 27, President Bush issued
Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, or HSPD-12 for short. Titled "Policy for a Common Identification Standard for Federal Employees and Contractors", it's neatly summarized in the first paragraph: Wide variations in the quality and security of forms of identification used to gain access to secure Federal and other facil From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:54 p.m..
How many calories in a gigabyte?
By now you've heard all about the cool new iPod shuffle. Maybe you even watched the announcement during
Steve Jobs' keynote presentation from Macworld. Cheaper than the competitors. Fabulous sound. Yet another triumph of product design. And the slogans: "Life is random.""Enjoy uncertainty.""Random is the new order.""240 songs. A million different ways.&qu From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:54 p.m..
IPac
Jason Schultz is an attorney with
EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property law.
He was my guest last October on
EDUCAUSE Live!, speaking about Acacia Media Technologies and other examples of abusive patents. (See
my blog for more background on th From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:54 p.m..
Watch for them on eBay
It wasn't a good weekend for FBI computer systems. Report #1, Carnivore scrapped:
FBI retires CarnivoreSaturday, January 15, 2005
The Register FBI surveillance experts have put their once-controversial Carnivore Internet surveillance tool out to pasture, preferring instead to u From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:54 p.m..
The Open Park Project
Here's how the
Open Park Project describes itself: The Open Park Project (Open Park) is a Washington D.C. based non-profit organization and recognized tax exempt charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Our mission is to provide: A 21st century community service - offering public Internet access on the National Mall, as well as more From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:54 p.m..
iPod iFad? iDontThinkSo!
Kevin Rollins has been CEO of Dell Computer for about six months. A couple of days ago he gave a lengthy interview to CNET, reported under this headline:
Dell's Rollins dismisses iPod as a 'fad'. A fad??? Why would he say that? "It's interesting the iPod has been out for three years and it's only this past year it's become a raging success. Well, tho From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:54 p.m..
Social Bookmarking using del.icio.us
Are you curious about '
social software' but unsure about how to benefit from a 'social'application? One of the best ways to learn about social software is the hands on approach. Get your hands dirty and play with delicious!
Del.icio.us is an online bookmark manager that bills itself as a social bookmarking tool. Del.icio.us combines the best of referrals, public bookmarks, shared information and descriptive tags. From
EDUCAUSE Blogs - on January 20, 2005 at 11:54 p.m..