Whatever your views on what David Blaine is doing or trying to prove there's no denying that the stunt itself is a spectacle and is pulling in the crowds. I thought I'd stop by as I was in London for the day and was amazed at how many people were here just gazing up at this guy in his box. They wave and he waves back. Meanwhile, somewhere else in the world, another person dies of starvation. I expect that nobody was there to wave them off.

Berners-Lee talks to the BBC Go Digital programme on his ideas for a more "intelligent" web. He's actually talking about the semantic web.

The article strays down a controversial road with this statement from the Go Digital interviewer...

"If you had an entire web that worked on this [semantic web] principle, you could have a digital organism that had a phenomenal amount of information and you have written that you're moving more in the direction then of an internet that can reason."

although TBL's response is cautious...

"[...] I think philosophically you can argue about it and spiritually you can argue about it, and I think in fact that may be true that you can make something as powerful as the brain, really whether you can make the algorithms to make it work like a brain is something else. "

Too right. Computing power + mass storage ≠ brain. This kind of "internet as brain" is reminsicent of Cohen & Stewart's extelligence in their book Figments of Reality.

Fave TBL quote, right at the end of the interview: "All I'm looking for now is just interoperability for data."

The innovative Fastap keypad looks like a real improvement on the fiddly keypads you get on mobile phones and some PDAs. This great invention squeezes a full set of alpha-numeric keys into a space not much bigger than existing keypads. The clever key layout means that even the most hamfisted of users can type quickly and accurately without mis-pressed keys. There are some great interactive demos on the web site showing just how cool the Fastap is. Just the job for the busy moblogger. Might also make mobile computing a whole lot easier, too. Now if only someone could invent a way of squeezing a usefully sized monitor into a mobile phone or PDA screen then we'd be smoking!

An often overlooked trick that my assetManager tool has up its sleeve is a search interface to Radio UserLand's built-in RSS aggregator.

Back in the good ol' days when web services were trendy I created a web services interface to Radio's aggregator. Passing it a keyword returned a formatted list of all RSS items containing the keyword. This neat trick is invoked using a simple macro:

<%["xmlrpc://127.0.0.1:5335/RPC2"].assetManager.rssSearch ("keyword")%>

where "keyword" is what you want to search for. Add this macro to any weblog post or your weblog template to include a list of found items. You can even use this service to search other people's aggregators (if they allow it). All you need is the IP address of the remote Radio aggregator.

Try adding:

<%["xmlrpc://147.188.66.137:5335/RPC2"].assetManager.rssSearch ("rss")%>

to a new post in your weblog. You should get a list of RSS items from my aggregator matching "rss".

Here's a similar trick using Manila as a front-end to Radio's searchable aggregator.

As a postscript to my post last week, it's not that I don't think reusable learning objects have a lot to teach us about how e-learning might work. I do. Much of my effort over the last few years has been in some way related to RLOs. It's just that I have a dawning realization that what educational technologists think of when they talk about learning objects is not the same as what lecturers and teachers think. And I don't just mean the old debate about whether a picture is an RLO or whether a course is. I mean something much deeper, about the way people interact with RLOs, what they're for and how they work for us. What works in the real world of teaching and learning, and what doesn't. At some point I think both communities needs to start interoperating.

I've just added a couple of long overdue features to the assetManager tool. You can now add titles to your mobile weblog posts when posting via email from your mobile phone, laptop or whatever. A secret subject word in the subject line of your post routes the post to a category in your weblog (yes, the assetManger tool has allowed post to categories for a while). Simply add the title you want for your post after this secret subject in your mobile post email. Once the secret subject is recognized it's automatically stripped from the email subject line and whatever is left becomes the title of your post. Simple. And straightforward when posting from something fiddly like a mobile phone.

The other feature is one I should have had in the tool since the start. Attached photos are now added to a date-ordered directory hierarchy. This not only makes it easier to organize your uploaded pictures but also prevents you overwriting pictures with the same file name uploaded on different days.

To get these latest features just refresh the code in your copy of the tool. Please only refresh if you're happy working with beta software. I'm changing quite a few things in the tool's scripts and don't want to be responsible for breaking your system. The latest version is stable and works on my machine so there's no obvious bugs. I've also tested it with a number of email clients on PCs and Macs as well as mobile phones but not exhaustively. If you have a configuration that doesn't work for whatever reason please let me know. Confirmed working clients are PC Outlook (Win 98 and 2000), Mac Outlook Express (OS 9 and X), Apple Mail (OS X), Nokia 7650 and Sony Ericsson T68i.

Coming soon. Cross platform thumbnails. Yes, it is possible ;-)

Happy moblogging!

I learnt many things while at a conference in Bern earlier this month. Apart from the finding that Bern is a beautiful city and was where Einstein developed his Special Theory of Relativity (I was fortunate to be able to visit his flat, now a museum at 49, Kramgasse), I also learnt much about reusable learning objects (RLOs) or more precisely, what other people thought about RLOs.

What I learnt was that despite the many exciting advances we've made in working with these instructional quanta, the concept of RLOs is still light years (no pun on Einstein) from most teacher's every day lives (and I expect those of learners though it was primarily a conference for teachers). Exactly what an RLO is, why they're important, more importantly exactly how you might use them, and even more fundamentally, what tools you might use to do these things were issues about as far away from everyday teaching as you could imagine, at least for most people. There was a tangible feeling of 'so what' about much of the RLO discussion, at least amongst the non-techies. As an aside the techie discussions about RLOs was very constructive but more about that in a later post.

The biggest issue is I think the lack of inexpensive, easily available, easy to use desktop tools, for without such tools people can't experiment, try out for themselves, and get their hands dirty with RLOs. Sure, there are some great tools out there but many are either development projects or are sophisticated systems yet to make a big impact on campuses. Also true, many of the popular VLE vendors sell products that claim to use learning objects, but often these are not low-level or low aggregation RLOs, the systems are not proper content management systems nor do they offer the kinds of authoring tools that authors need.

What we are going to need before working with RLOs becomes as familiar as word processing or at a stretch web page creation are studies on the ergonomics of RLOs, human computer interaction studies, and a deeper analysis of how educators can use RLOs to built teaching packages and more importantly how RLOs are going to benefit the learning process. We need a tool for RLOs just as familiar a word processor is for words. Though please not like Microsoft Word ;-)

I'm at the AMEE medical education conference in Bern this week. My presentation on 'Reusable learning objects, content syndication and resource discovery'was this morning. I'll put my presentation on the web when I get back for anyone who's interested though elements of it are scattered around this weblog already, in particular RSS autodiscovery for reusable learning objects.