Edu_RSS
Alumni Award Nominations
I am pleased to invite you to nominate successful alumni for the University of Saskatchewan Alumni Association Awards. The purpose of these awards is to acknowledge successful U of S alumni and to recognize their outstanding contributions as professionals, humanitarians,... From
Rick's Café Canadien on March 17, 2005 at 10:53 p.m..
Links from Day 3 of ETech
This is a dump of lnks of interest to me that come up during talks during the third day at Etech. Newest at top. An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin Matt Webb says this is one of his favorite books from 2004. From
megnut on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 p.m..
EdNA Groups
A great initiative: EdNA has launched EdNA Groups: "EdNA Groups provides free collaborative workspaces to support teaching, learning and research for all sectors of education and training. Each Group receives a space in which they can choose from a range of tools to facilitate communication and collaboration." The service has already seen a good take-up among educators. It is (interestingly) based on Moodle. By Various Authors, EdNA, March, 2005 [
Refer][
OLDaily on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 p.m..
JotSpot
JotSpot is an online wiki application (currently in beta) that can be used by anyone to set up their own wiki. There are some very nice features: a nice WYSIWYG page editor, the capacity to email content to a page, and a set of applications that can be plugged in to pages. Great stuff. As an example of JotSpot in action, see Lawrence Lessig's communal rewriting of
Code and Other Laws on a JotSpot wiki. I have created
my own version of a JotSpot wiki and set the permisions to allow anybody to edit pages, add From
OLDaily on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 p.m..
DfES publishes new e-Strategy
Link and analysis of a new strategy paper in Britain, DfES's
Harnessing Technology: Transforming learning and children's services. "The aim in five years time, by using a more strategic approach, is to build the common ground that brings all our education and children's services to the critical baseline of being able to use the technology effectively. In ten years, building on the newfound capabilities of our workforces, our newly skilled graduates, and our new appetite for innovation, we could be anywhere - if we ha From
OLDaily on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 p.m..
winning through worst practices
OK, I've never published a book, not one that you can find in the discard bin at least, and I don't know anything about Chinese subs in San Francisco, but it seems to me that Highbeam Research deserves props for actually getting blogging and I sort of wish I had a job like RageBoy's. I say 'sort of' because I sort of already have a job like RageBoy's - nobody at NRC has ever told me what to write or not write in this space (though they've commented about some of my talks). But there are still some who feel I would be more productive if I were 'man From
OLDaily on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 p.m..
Electronic Portfolios and Dimensions of Learning
The article is pretty superficial, but it makes a point work repeating here: "Give students the academic freedom to help develop what makes a good portfolio." Now if you think about that, the concept of academic freedom for students, especially younger students, is a novel one. Since when have students ever had the freedom to define for themselves what counts as good? But it seems to me that in an age of ubiquitous multimedia, the development of such a capacity may be a critical skill. The rest of the article builds on this idea, so though the treatment is light it deserves a rea From
OLDaily on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 p.m..
OpenSearch
I had a quick look at this because George Siemens linked to it - A9 has been all the rage for the last few weeks in the blogosphere - and I want to take a deeper look because of what I saw. Forget the article for a second -
check out this search first, and note especially the buttons to the right. Try some. Now that's pretty nifty - but now
check here nd look at all the other possible search sources. Now Edu_RSS could be added to this list with a one-line change, which I&apos From
OLDaily on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 p.m..
My Sentence is 2 Days of Hard Labor
This week is our system's Spring Break, and even us administrative grunts get Thursday and Friday off. I tacked on a day off Wednesday, and how am I and Mrs. CogDogBlog relaxing? We are re-landscaping the back yard, hauling sand, rock, and brick, moving hard desert earth, yanking out of control cacti, extending a brick patio. Our self-imposed sentence is 2 days of back busting labor. Actually we enjoy the hard work, and it is a great mental break from the office chair. Get outside, get dirty, and build something with your own hands. Priceless. The delayed grati From
cogdogblog on March 17, 2005 at 9:47 p.m..
Internal Microdrives. The end of video tape?
JVC has been showing off the world's smallest 3CCD Camcorder, the GZ-MC500E. Part of the reason the camcorder is so small is because it lacks of an internal video tape mechanism. The camera records MPEG2 video directly onto tiny 4GB Microdrives (For an idea how much video this is, 4GB is roughly the capacity of a DVD-R). These drives can easily be upgraded to larger capacity as they become available. The advantages of direct-to-hard disk recording are numerous. The cameras themselves become smaller, more reliable, and use less battery power. The video files they generate can From
Alpha Channel: The Studio @ Hodges Library on March 17, 2005 at 8:59 p.m..
why sxsw? part 2 (danah boyd)
I also attended SXSW and not Etech and i wrote an extensive post about why and what needs to be done. In short, i believe that you can’t acquire diversity at SXSW or Etech simply through a CFP. These are... From
Corante: Social Software on March 17, 2005 at 8:49 p.m..
[ Psst...OTR ]
Making its way down to the rest of the world from the Great White North of Toronto, Canada, comes Off the Record, a new encryption/authentication schema for IM that also offers deniability and perfect forward secrecy features. Explains one of... From
futureStep | net.tech, academia, society & culture on March 17, 2005 at 8:01 p.m..
The Next Marketplace
Perhaps the winter weather here in Colorado was getting to me, but in some of my recent posts I've been pessimistic about the ability of the newspaper industry to respond adequately to the community-classifieds movement (
Craigslist, et al). Some of the comments accompanying my items have been pointed, with one correspondent even
suggesting that my arguments that newspapers need to think more seriously about the free-ad model are "intellectually ban From
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on March 17, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
Wikis for Publishers
Lawrence Lessig first published
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. With constant changes in law and technology, it was time for an update. Lessig just launched a
wiki-based version of the book, so that anyone interested can assist in bringing the publication up to date. Lessig then will take the contents of this wiki and edit the final publication. It's a method that probably will work well with the well-informed community that reads his work. Would your readers be able to help you out this way? From
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on March 17, 2005 at 6:54 p.m..
The Invisible Spot in the Middle of the Page
Last fall, after Poynter released its
Eyetrack III study, I gave a bunch of talks about the results. I often opened my presentation with a quick summary of an old experiment by
Eyetools (which ran the Eyetrack III testing) that showed how powerful eyetracking can be. Greg Edwards of Eyetools has just written an
item on his blog about this, and it's entertaining (and enlightening).In a test with E-Trade&apo From
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on March 17, 2005 at 5:54 p.m..
BT introduces anti-auto-dialler measures
BT Modem Protection is a free software download that will stop a customer’s computer dialling higher-cost premium rate or international numbers, even if dialler software is present. Customers will be warned if their modem begins to dial any number other than a list of ‘approved numbers’, such as the national call and free-phone numbers used by internet service providers. From
Digital Media Europe - digital media news from across Europe on March 17, 2005 at 4:54 p.m..
John Edwards Debuts Podcast
According to the Democratic site and weblog One America Committee, next week former US Senator and VP candidate John Edwards will launch his very own podcast next week. I'm happy about this development. I think podcasting could definitely benefit political discourse at all levels, complementing traditional media and political journalism/commentary. And I'm glad they realized that, in order to podcast, you need a feed... From
Contentious Weblog on March 17, 2005 at 4:54 p.m..
Grab Your Zinc Oxide, It's Sunshine Week
Don't forget: This week (March 13-19) is "Sunshine Week." Read all about it at the
SEJ Watchdog Tipsheet (a great resource from the Society of Environmental Journalists for breaking information-access news).Watchdog reports, "This national campaign by newspapers, radio and TV stations and networks, online media, and journalism groups assembles a coalition of unprecedented breadth. It is based on the 'Sunshine Sunday' concep From
Poynter E-Media Tidbits on March 17, 2005 at 4:53 p.m..
Study to examine how the blind use digital resources
A Baltimore project is
examining how blind people use digital resources. A
Towson University scholar is tracking 100 or so users in Baltimore and elsewhere as they perform everyday functions online: buying additional cell phone minutes, checking e-mail, browsing CNN.com, downloading music, researching medical problems, looking for Delta Air Lines tickets - basically, stuff that everyone else do From
NITLE Tech News on March 17, 2005 at 3:57 p.m..
[etech] Programme Information Pages
Another BBC talk. Gavin Bell, Matt Biddulph, and Tom Coates. How can you make media objects — i.e., all the programs 'n' stuff the BBC has — addressable? And then what could you do with them? To make a program addressable, they say, you give it an identifier. (Their first ever identifier was kr7rm.) All BBC and radio programming will be addressable. 40,000 hours of national tv broadcast across 8 tv stations every year. 76,000 hours of national radio across ten networks. They say: "This is what we might be doing after we get bored of broadcast." The content they... From
Joho the Blog on March 17, 2005 at 2:48 p.m..
Fine-grained mistakes
RageBoy, everyone's Chief Blogging Officer, has a good example (involving something I wrote) of how errors creep into the media: The humor was missed, the main point was ignored in favor of the inflammatory one, and the nesting of the quote was flattened. The point isn't that the media sometimes make mistakes. We all know that. For me, the point is that it was too small an error for the medium to acknowledge. I suppose I could have written a letter and they would have run it in their corrections box. But that would have been so long after the... From
Joho the Blog on March 17, 2005 at 2:48 p.m..
Two papers, me in between
Yesterday I wrote a story. It's a blend of reflections on my PhD methodology, reading notes and narcissi in the sun. It was inspired by reading a chapter in the
handbook of qualitative research: Auto-ethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject by
Mathemagenic on March 17, 2005 at 1:51 p.m..
The Female Genome
Rowan Hooper reports in Wired that researchers at Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy are concluding the human genome is actually two different genomes, one male and one female: Women (and all female mammals) have two copies of the X chromosome, but the extra ... From
Gardner Writes on March 17, 2005 at 12:59 p.m..
Microsoft Rolls Out Test RSS Collector
Microsoft's MSN division has started testing a Web-based RSS aggregator, a move it's making to keep up with rivals like Ask Jeeves, and Google, Yahoo. Microsoft's MSN division has started testing a Web-based RSS aggregator, a move it's making to stay with rivals like Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. The new Start.com page is clean and advertising-free, includes categories of pre-set RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds, and lets users enter both RSS- and Atom-formatted feeds to customize the aggregate. The Web aggregator is tied to MSN Search, and also From
RSS Blog on March 17, 2005 at 12:58 p.m..
Los blogs de Informativos Telecinco
Están en marcha los Blogs de Informativos Telecinco: La Crispación: Un blog sobre los comentarios, invectivas, puyas y maldiciones con los que polÃticos y periodistas nos revelan que la vida no tiene por qué ser aburrida. Atención: La lectura de... From
eCuaderno v.2.0 on March 17, 2005 at 11:51 a.m..
Why X Marks the Gender
Recent revelations about the genetic makeup and peculiarities of the X chromosome promise to illuminate some of the differences between the sexes. By Rowan Hooper. From
Wired News on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
Playing With Frozen Fire
Vast untapped reserves of frozen natural gas lie beneath the oceans. Trapped in ice, which literally burns, the gas deposits could provide energy for decades, and scientists are starting to figure out how to mine it. By Stephen Leahy. From
Wired News on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
Search Rank Easy to Manipulate
An entire industry is built around search engine optimization -- the art of making sites rank high in search results. Much of the business consists of manipulating weaknesses in Google's site-ranking technology. Commentary by Adam L. Penenberg. From
Wired News on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
It Takes Money to Feed Your Head
Psychedelic books, guitars and artwork go up for auction on eBay. The proceeds will help cover the costs of clinical research into psychoactive drugs like ecstasy and marijuana. By Kristen Philipkoski. From
Wired News on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
Hey, Don't Toss Those Fishy Chips
Chip manufacturing is very wasteful -- microprocessor manufacturers throw out millions of defective chips each year. But half of those could still be good, according to new research. By Amit Asaravala. From
Wired News on March 17, 2005 at 10:45 a.m..
(My) 7 guidelines for effective corporate e Learning
Eine lesenswerte Zusammenfassung von Dingen, die wirklich zählen, wenn man über Corporate e-Learning spricht und die den Unterschied ausmachen! Einige Stichworte haben mir besonders gut gefallen, wie z.B. "First collaboration, then learning", wo die Autorin schreibt: "Since we were little,... From
www.weiterbildungsblog.de on March 17, 2005 at 7:51 a.m..
eLearning Producer
At the eLearning Producer show this week, speaker after speaker identified workflow leanring as the next big thing. A fellow at a session about what comes after eLearning pointed out that five years ago, few people talked about Workflow Learning. We pointed out that we coined the term less than two years ago.... From
The Workflow Institute Blog on March 17, 2005 at 6:52 a.m..
Common Base Events
IBM anounced today that it is working to align and integrate Common Base Events concepts into its business process management capabilities. "Customers had a problem of common determination and isolation where a major issue is that different pieces of software wrote to logs in different forms. Some information was very brief, and also the style was very inconsistent," said Kevin McAuliffe, IBM's director of application integration software and strategy, and chief technology officer of Business Performance Management. "The idea with CBE is to get a common way of representing log information From
The Workflow Institute Blog on March 17, 2005 at 6:52 a.m..
More Goodies: My Podcast Links
Here's another new addition to CONTENTIOUS. Look over in the right-hand column of any page on this site. See the Other Goodies heading? Look at the bottom of that section. I've added some links for easy access to some interesting podcast-related links... Podcasts I subscribe to is the current lists of audio shows I've subscribed to in my podcatcher software (basically, it's just a special feed reader that automatically grabs new audio show files as soon as they're posted online). If you click on that link, you'll probably see a very ugly page of computer code b From
Contentious Weblog on March 17, 2005 at 3:54 a.m..
IDT Futures Group in Florida
I'm in transit to sunny Tallahassee, Florida HYPHEN home of Florida State University--to meet with the IDT Futures Group. We're an informal clustering of academics in instructional design and technology who get together regularly to fuss about issues in our... From
Rick's Café Canadien on March 17, 2005 at 1:52 a.m..
Dear Mr. Real Man: Should I Still Snuggle My Mom?
**With semi-sincere apologies to the famous columnist who had
a real letter along these same lines in today's paper. Dear Mr. Real Man-- I am a 15 year-old boy who still likes to snuggle with my Mom. Sometime we sit on the couch together and I like putting my head on her shoulder and even telling her I love her. I don't do this when my friends are around, and we're not doing anything weird. I just really love my... From
Brain Frieze on March 17, 2005 at 12:55 a.m..
[etech] Clay Shirky: Ontologies and Tags
Clay talks about how taxonomies always have values built in. Even the periodic table's "noble gases" division reflects an assumption about the "essential" state of elements. He points to the Dewey Decimal System's skewed religion category. [Yikes! I've been doing that, too! I probably heard it from Clay first. I will attribute it from now on. Ack!] Even the Library of Congress puts the Balkan Peninsula and African on equal footing because it's measuring the number of books on the shelves. The categorization reflects not the ideas but the physical storage. He points out, tha From
Joho the Blog on March 17, 2005 at 12:48 a.m..
Thin-Client Desktop Viewing with VNC
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 &apos From
EdTechPost on March 16, 2005 at 11:50 p.m..
Take It Easy. You're Making us Look Bad
The caution to 'walk before you can run' is usually uttered by those who can't, or won't, run. "'We' don't run because those who can grant permission--encourage the running--prefer to walk. Walking is a higher percentage endeavor in their eyes. A lower exertion one, too. Running is not their ambition, exposure makes them anxious. Horizons make them squint." Interesting observations from
∞Fouroboros, via
McGee's Musings. By From
OLDaily on March 16, 2005 at 11:45 p.m..
Achieving Success in Internet-Supported Learning in Higher Education
The findings of this report may appear obvious, but count the number of institutions that do not meet these criteria for success and you have a good account of the widely reported 'failure' of online learning. What are the lessons? That successful online institutions have a motivation to offer learning online, either as part of their mission or as a strategy for survival, that they adopt a programmatic approach with a commitment to fully online programs, that they measure quality rather than quantity, that they adopt successful technologies that are constantly being improved, and tha From
OLDaily on March 16, 2005 at 11:45 p.m..
Emerging Perceptions
"Those who wish to put serious content on their blogs," writes David Miller, "must trust that it will be recognized as such." And those who wish to see meaningful content in blogs can do little more than to subscribe to it. "There is little we can do to encourage bloggers to post meaningful content because it is their own content. That is the beauty of blogs. We control only what we subscribe to." But what should be added, too, is that this -- rather than any content control mechanism -- is how we recognize and reward what should be considered 'academic' content and what, well, shoul From
OLDaily on March 16, 2005 at 11:45 p.m..
A Learning Blogosphere
Discussion in two parts.
Part 1 follows up on a project to build a distributed learning blogging community in a class last fall, including an interesting series of attempts to actually follow the conversation.
Part 2 looks at the long tail phenomenon in class blog posts and looks at ways of improving the balance of participation. "I had to participate but also wanted to keep my role to a minimum so that the conversation From
OLDaily on March 16, 2005 at 11:45 p.m..
