• 
  Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010!

  ---

• Search for:

• Pages

  • About
    • Colophon
    • Contact
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Presentations
  • Archives
    • Recent Comments
    • Shared Items
  • Asides
  • Photography
  • WordPress
    • Akismet Credit Inserter
    • Post Revision Display

• Categories

  • aside
  • digital photography sessions
  • fun
  • general
  • photography
  • work

• Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
  

Just added a full blogroll to the right sidebar of my weblog. It’s a massaged dump of my NetNewsWire subscriptions (all 102 of them). I may also add a link to an OPML export of the subscriptions, if anyone wants it.

Please don’t read any relevance into the order of subscribed items… I haven’t prioritized them or anything – they usually stay where they fall in the NNW subscriptions pane.

UPDATE: I posted the OPML file for the subscriptions here (also linked in the title of the Blogroll).

Trying out NetNewsWire Pro as a weblog managing app. I use NNWLite as my aggregator, but thought it would be cool to combine the tools. I currently use KungLog as my weblog manager (post editor, etc…)

If you can read this, then NNWPro has been able to publish an entry to my weblog…

One thing I just noticed: There’s no apparent place for TrackBack URLs… How do I trackback other weblog posts? Is that handled transparently by MovableType?

UPDATE: The Weblog Editor in NNWPro is actually quite nice. At first, I was missing some of the niceties from KungLog, but once you get used to the difference, it’s not bad at all… Now, if only they had an educational license price for NNWPro…

UPDATE 2: It appears to do trackback automatically. Don’t know it that’s “for free” from the MT server, or if NNW is doing the work itself. Same result.

Rumour has it that BlackBoard6 speaks (or at least understands) RSS natively. I’ll be damned if I can find any documentation on it, though… Anyone stumbled across the “official” way to use RSS in BlackBoard? I’ve got the javascript widget filling the gap, but would rather harness the power of a native tool if it’s available…

Just added a widget that will let you subscribe to any Simple Search query in CAREO. On the Search Results page, there is a link to the RSS feed for that query. Copy. Paste. There is no step 3.

This will make it much easier to syndicate any search query for use elsewhere. Just run the search, and grab the link from the results page.

Just took some time to play around with the standalone trackback tool from Ben Trott. Works like a charm (once I upgraded my Perl installation).

Now, objects in CAREO have an associated URL for receiving trackback pings, as well as one for retrieving all trackbacks (if any) for that object.

Log into CAREO, and hit the button for any learning object. At the bottom of that screen will be a trackback URL, as well as a link to the existing trackback items.

This has the potential to be an extremely useful feature. I’d like to make it a little more integrated with the rest of CAREO, but the standalone Trackback works fine to test it out.

NASA took a bunch of photographs from space and stitched them together to make a really cool and powerful global image, without borders or clouds.

Check it out here, in CAREO.

PS. This blog entry is the first one to actually ping an object in CAREO…

Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and myself have been kicking around this idea for a few days now. I think it’s quite cool, and could be an amazing feature to add to a LOR.

Imagine this: “Person A” is searching a LOR and comes across a really cool LO that they want to use. They have some comments that they might be wanting to share with a community outside of the LOR. They publish these comments to their weblog (say a departmental or institutional or even personal LO-related weblog), and include a trackback to a URL provided by the LOR for that specific LO.

Sometime later, “Person B” is searching the LOR for some content, and finds the same object that “Person A” found. They click the “Details” button to learn more about the LO, including the metadata context stored in the LOR, and all trackbacked weblog entries related to this LO. They are able to see “Person A”s comments directly in the LOR, providing some addition outside-of-mandated-metadata-schema context that wouldn’t have been available otherwise.

“Person C” is surfing the LO-related weblogs, and come across the post from “Person A” about a LO. They click the link, and are brought to the LOR’s “Details” page for that LO, where they can see the “official,” centralized metadata, as well as all informal, distributed metadata and comments aggregated by the Trackback feature of the LOR.

This could be quite cool.

Imagine this going one step further… There is no reason for Trackbacks to be restricted to weblogs… They could just as easily be generated by other LORs, or even other completely unrelated software. Imagine a user on CAREO being able to trackback a LOR in MERLOT. Or vice versa. Or a CAREO user being able to trackback and comment on something in the Corbus collection. Or an instructor working on a BlackBoard course being able to search for and add to comments on LOs in LORs all around the world, in the context of their course…

It looks like Alan is going to have some time to play with this before me, so he’ll probably have a working demo of this Real Soon Now. I’ll add Trackback functionality to CAREO as soon as I get a chance. Unfortunately, that’s looking more like next week, though… Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Just got an email from Alan. He’s got it working already. Cool. Have to check that out…
UPDATE 2: I got a chance to implement it in CAREO, too. Any object can now be tracked back. Just check out the “Metadata” page for any LO to get the trackback URL, or to view current trackbacks for that LO.

Surfing the blog world with Feedster, and have come across a few more XML database links:

Berkely XML DB by Sleepycat sounds interesting. Has no mention of XQuery, though, which is a big drawback for our needs… (here’s a development weblog for their xml database)

NeoCore XMS sounds great, but rather pricey (advanced XQuery, integrated XSLT, etc…)

Here’s a thread on Slashdot about Open Source XML Databases… The thread includes this link to a weblog about xml databases, but it seems rather dated (last post was Aug 2002).

Notes from the conference call today.

I published my thoughts on the paper here.

This guy really gets it. Extremely refreshing to hear from someone else who sees through the hype, but stills sees the promise, in learning objects.

Online learning is different than traditional, conventional classroom-based learning. Not necessarily better or worse, but different, and we need to recognize that in order to do it properly. “You can’t just put a course online.” – Exactly. You can move teaching or instruction online, but it’s a different thing than just save-as-online-course.

One caller pointed out that faculty development is a key issue – until people are supported in this endeavor, they can’t be successful. We’re seeing the same thing here at the U of C, and have projects like GALILEO to hopefully start to address it.

caller: students like being passive learners, and may not be ready for online learning. DW: maybe 1 in 10 students is ready for online learning now. Role of teaching able to change into more of moderator, discussion, inquiry… It takes a couple weeks to get the students to realize they have the responsibility to contribute to their learning.

DW: Reusability is the application of external context to a learning object. Add it to a course. Add it to another resource. Etc…

DW: Our traditional use of learning objects can tend to be oppressive – kills dialogue and interaction with the learning – specific world views “handed down” in prepackaged learning objects. How to get around this?

DW: on point 3.1 in the paper, he’s talking about how learning object repositories are ignoring EXISTING learning objects – they all seem to require creation of new objects, new tagging, new formatting, etc… [DN: BUT, how do you get the information you need in order to use/reuse a learning object WITHOUT this additional metadata? standards exist for this. IMS is almost there…]

DW: on 3.2: Content Cartels are blocking the promise of the Learning Object Economy. It won’t work.

DW: On OOP metaphor for LOs: Reuse in the programming world follows an import-common-library model (import java.xml.parser…) rather than the real OOP model.

DW: If all we need is content, Universities would have never evolved from libraries. Universities add context over content, which is valuable. Social context is important and valuable.

DW: Teaching != Direct Instruction. Teaching is more than that. It’s not pouring knowledge, or training, or memorization. It’s about inquiry, discovery, research, problem solving, providing resources… Much less structured than conventionally practiced.

Caller: BUT standardized testing goes completely against this strategy – students are trained to be rote memorization learners, and rebel against anything else.
DW: They DO know how to do this – they just refuse to do that in the context – they freely go online to research tips for Grand Theft Auto or other games, but that doesn’t carry over into the classroom.

David Wiley just posted a link to his “Educational Content Viewer” prototype. Some scary synchronicity here – I’ve been thinking about building a learning object playback utility that could be embedded in CAREO. Wonder how this prototype gets its data? If it’s already reading from CGI somewhere, it should be pretty straightforward to get that working.

← Previous Page — Next Page →