Un nouveau fil de nouvelles  qui me permettra de suivre à même mon agrégateur, les communiqués paraissant sur la page nommée 'Fil de presse', sur le site Arrondissement.com. À défaut d'obtenir de ce portail qu'il produise un fil RSS, j'en ai tricoté un ! Pour ceux que ce qui se passe dans l'Est de Montréal intéresse !

Une conférence, le 9 décembre prochain:

L'enfant roi Le Mardi 26 novembre 2002 (Hochelaga-Maisonneuve)
Centre de la petite enfance La Ruche
Le Cpe La Ruche présente "Le grand jeu de l'enfant-roi" une conférence de Germain Duclos qui s'adresse aux parents et intervenantes auprès de la petit ...Lire le communiqué »   [Avenue]

et les Francouvertes sont chaudes !

Francouvertes : Palmarès après la 5e soirée
Le Mercredi 4 décembre 2002 (Hochelaga-Maisonneuve)
Faites de la Musique !
3 décembre 2002 Palmarès après la 5e soirée des Francouvertes 1re position : Syncope (Mtl) 2e position : Luc Sasseville (St-Eustache) 3e pos ...Lire le communiqué »   [Avenue]

11:42:43 PM    

So which of the many blogging tools that you've tried would you be willing to inflict on your mother, Alwin?

Mom Is Back
Actually, she never really left. She's started posting in the comments section since she got her nifty new cable modem. I expect she'll have her own site before long...

Actually, that could be a reasonable measure for software rating -- Would you feel comfortable recommending its use to your own mother (presuming you harbor no ill will toward the woman, of course...)? [Greg Hanek]

Actually, my Mum is testing out Manila... no kidding... [Sebastian Fiedler]

11:42:34 PM    

This is exactly what journalists should be worried about. In a few years, millions of people will have mobile phones with high-quality integrated digital cameras. Whenever something happens anywhere in the world, pictures and eyewitness accounts will be up there on the web for everyone to see in no time. Of course, journalists will still rush to the scene to get the scoop - but the scoop will already be long gone, and journalists will almost never be the first on the scene anymore. It might not be good spelling or reporting, and it might not be objective, but it will be diverse, real and full of emotions. That's the new way of spreading the news fast - so welcome the wireless blog, everyone. [via blogroots]

11:42:34 PM    

Education Week reports on a study of links on education websites by two Nebraska professors concludes that ...the links had a half-life of 58 months... The web is littered with sites for educators with compilations of links on every imaginable topic. Recently, I sat through a conference presentation where someone showed us page after page of links as an example of innovative use of the web. Sure they can continually be updated, but is it worth it?

One of the researchers concludes, "If I were teaching in a K-12 setting," he said, "I'd be more likely to use a commercial site that provides stable material and material that has walls around it, rather than open, distributed resources." So much for constructivist learning. Why not make your own?

I think we're just starting to see the possibilities with ideas like a reader's guide, student newspaper, guest bloggers or guest historians. In my mind, the power of these ideas lies in collaboration and in creating something you couldn't do on your own. (See Pat's comments on partnering.) Lots to talk about at Blogvention next year. [Joe Luft]

Joe reminds us of the numerous opportunities for "collaboration and in creating something you couldn't do on your own." I would add to his list of ideas shared hosting, template development, and cross-cultural projects. Joe is right... we sure have enough topics for a Blogvention in 2003. [Sebastian Fiedler]

10:42:47 PM    

Le Conseil de la culture et des communications des Laurentides est fier de son nouveau portail, avec raison. J'ai découvert ce site grâce à mon Agent Copernic qui parcourre le Web à la recherche des documents portant sur le développement social, local, communautaire.

Il me rapportait ce matin la Fiche des actions locales développées par le CRD Laurentides.

« L’objectif visé par cette cueillette d’information consiste à identifier et à mieux connaître, par MRC, les intervenants actifs en développement social et leurs actions. Avec l’aide de ce portrait, il sera possible d’identifier les ressources existantes par rapport aux ressources manquantes et ainsi déterminer, dans un premier temps, des priorités par MRC et dans un deuxième temps des priorités régionales. »

Et c'est là que j'ai découvert le site du CCCL, en remontant à la 'racine' de cette fiche d'action locale.

De là je me suis rendu au Portail des Laurentides du gouvernement québécois, qui m'apprenait, en nouvelle du jour, la publication d'un Guide pour aider les familles ayant un enfant handicapé à identifier leurs besoins. J'apprenais, aussi, honte à moi, qu'hier c'était la Journée internationale des personnes handicapées, à l'occasion de laquelle ce guide était publié.

Mais là je donne une mauvaise note au portail des Laurentides ! Pas un seul hyperlien sur cette annonce ! Comment je fais pour me procurer ce guide ? Il doit bien en avoir une copie en ligne ? Ayant tout de même appris que le Guide originait d'un travail de la Table de concertation sur le soutien aux familles de la région de Montréal, je lancai une recherche Google sur ce terme. Bingo ! Le premier résultat s'intitule : Guide pour les familles ayant un enfant handicapé - OPHQ Mais, dé-bingo ! Le lien est mort ! 404 Object Not Found !

C'est donc en remontant à l'origine, au site racine de ce lien, c'est à dire à la page d'accueil du site de l'OPHQ que je trouvai finalement le Guide des besoins en soutien à la famille (Attention, format Word).

En conclusion ? J'ai appris en quelques minutes qu'un guide important existait; qu'une démarche de portrait des acteurs de développement social était en cours dans les Laurentides et que leur fiche descriptive pourrait peut-être être utile ailleurs... Que c'était hier la journée des personnes handicapées... Que les Agents dits Intelligents peuvent impulser une démarche mais qu'il faut encore bien souvent utiliser la bonne vielle méthode de 'remonter à la source' ou à la racine.

5:42:15 PM    

Les difficultés légales et réglementaires de la retraite progressive...

Legal and Institutional Impediments to Partial Retirement and Part-Time Work by Older Workers
Author(s): Rudolph G. Penner , Pamela Perun , C. Eugene Steuerle
Publication Date: November 20, 2002 The paper describes the huge loss of skills and experience that will accompany the retirement of the baby boom generation. The problem can be mitigated by making longer work more attractive through offers of part-time employment and longer vacations. Unfortunately, a number of private practices and public policies have evolved over the years that encourage early retirement and make it challenging for employers and employees to negotiate flexible, partial retirement arrangements. Private and civil service defined benefit pension plans often penalize working beyond the late 50s even though they specify an official retirement age of 65. High health insurance costs for older workers also curb employment opportunities. The combination of tax law, IRS regulations, ERISA, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act create complex barriers to partial retirement that are not insurmountable, but can only be overcome with great effort and the risk of litigation. The authors make a number of suggestions for changing regulations and for new legislation. Availability: HTML | PDF | Order Online   [urbanInstitute]

J'en profite pour annoncer ce nouveau fil RSS  tiré de la page 'nouvelles des recherches' d'un site riche d'études sur les politiques sociales Urban Institute

3:43:25 PM    

[ 2002-12-03 ] La vérificatrice générale, Sheila Fraser, a déposé le Rapport de la vérificatrice générale du Canada de décembre 2002 à la Chambre des communes. [GouvCanada]

Deux des chapitres du dernier rapport de la vérificatrice générale du Canada pourraient intéresser les intervenants sociaux et communautaires :

• La gestion de la qualité des statistiques sur la santé
• La modernisation de la reddition de comptes dans le secteur public

3:43:25 PM    

Après la mort de John Rawls, il y a quelques jours, mourait lundi Ivan Illich. Jacques Dufresne signait un billet sensible, quelques heures après que cette lumière se soit éteinte.

Le dossier Ivan Illich, sur l'encyclopédie de l'Agora vous mènera vers plusieurs sites et textes de ce penseur, rebelle comme le qualifie Le Monde. Plusieurs de ses livres sont disponibles in extenso

• Deschooling Society
• Tools for Conviviality
• Energy and Equity et une série d'articles
• Vernacular Values   

Illich n'écrira plus. Heureusement pour nous, on peut encore le lire.

2:42:47 PM    

Carol Tucker brought up an interesting scenario (see below for a quote). A similar thing happened to Jim McGee at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management recently:

http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/mcgee/htm/blog/

Luckily Jim was using a desktop K-Log tool. That allowed him to keep posting even when the publishing conduit (the University's network) was down due to an attack. When it went back up he could publish everything that he had entered into the system while disconnected in one easy step. BTW, Jim is a pioneer in the use of K-Logs, having taught a course at Kellogg this spring (Kellogg is often ranked the #1 business school in the nation by Business Week) on knowledge management with Radio on each student desktop.

This scenario could also become a disaster if you are using a K-Logging service and it either suddenly goes out of business (as we have seen with many Web companies) or has a catastrophic failure. While the site itself may be saved if it is published to a third party or safe location, the fact that the data and logic used to build your K-Log is stored in a database that is now unavailable would make your work a stranded artifact. The solution is either to publish from the desktop and keep a back-up of the files on CD, tape, or back-up drive -- or -- to set up your own hosted solution on a server you own in order to make sure the database is back-up (this is easy to do). Keep it in a place you can control.

This also brings up another note I saw recently from Dody Gunawinata. He is running a K-Logging vertical community for AIESEC (an organization of 50,000 members devoted to cultural exchange through global internships). He is using a mix of Manila hosted sites -- and -- Radio sites published from the desktop. This allows people to select the type of tool they feel most comfortable with. You can see his community here:

http://www.aiesec.ws/

Dody brought up the fact that for 80% of the world, per minute Internet access is too expensive for extended time online. That means that if you are working with individuals in countries were cost of Internet connections are expensive relative to income, the best way to extend K-Log publishing to them is through an online/offline publishing. This will allow them to keep costs down (I know there are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there that are looking at this, this info may help). For example: a person working in the Philippines can work for hours on several K-Log posts offline and then connect for a couple of minutes to publish them and collect news items from subscriptions. Dody expands on this with:

"Any software that allows offline-online usage will do well in this type of environment. That's why the rest of the world can afford to use email (POP). Radio will do well."
[John Robb]

I agree with most of the things that are said in this post. John Robb only fails to mention that downloading an entire Manila database is rather quick and simple, thus making it possible to save locally the "data and logic" of your site. What I don't understand is the lack of integration of Manila and Radio. Why can't we really use Radio to feed posts to a Manila site? The Radio tool that was presented a couple of months never got beyond beta and simply didn't do the trick in my point of view. My dream scenario would be a Manila site with all its power of shared content management and design for the more static parts, and Radio managed news feeds where posts can be categorized using shared Manila departments... or something like Matt Mower's liveTopics. [Sebastian Fiedler]

1:42:40 PM    

One of the members of the Ryze Blog & Bloggers tribe asked for advice on the message board on how to manage the time to start and run a blog.  Lots of good feedback was posted, here was mine:

They say you play soccer the way you are. I think blogging is similar to this self-organizing sport. You blog the way you are.

When confronted with the chronological format of a blog, the pressure to post is at first extreme. How do I start? What if I don't keep it up? Does this go on my permanent record? But the reality is there is no shame in an empty calendar. Post daily, weekly, monthly or occassionally. You blog when you can.

The question that is most personal is what to blog. As one blogger said, "Find a topic and own it." Finding focus is a sure time saver, but it also contributes to the medium, as its one of specialized voices. The more you post on your domain the better. You blog what you are.

The other part, indeed what this tribe is about, is community. When you have others reading, others you know, their feedback and their own posts spark your own. You don't blog alone.

Make a little plan on how you will start, just begin and you will find your rhythm.

The calendar and chronological format of weblogs is threatening to potential bloggers.  For readers its a great structure, akin to timeshifting with your Tivo (or other PVR device).  Readers can view posts from anytime at anytime.  And as news aggregator functions progress, consumption will be less of a burden.

Manila and other content management systems (CMS) offer the ability to schedule posts.  If this feature was offered to Radio and other weblog applications, it would decrease the pressure to publish by letting bloggers timeshift.  This isn't a presence medium, at least not yet, and such a feature as well as cultural acceptance of occassional bloggers would grow the medium. [Ross Mayfield]

12:42:28 PM    

Publish Your Heart Out with Easy-To-Use Web Tools from Reuters: "...grass-roots publishing tools are putting the power of authorship in the hands of millions -- although ease of use often comes at the expense of creative control. There's still a lot of hype in the idea that 'anyone can publish a Web site.' "

The article doesn't focus on weblogs, but rather explores the gamut of web-publishing tools, from GeoCities to Tripod, weblogs to Dreamweaver. Seems like an interesting framework in which to contextualize weblogs, especially when looking to emphasize weblogs as a technology. [Sarah Lohnes]

5:57:35 AM    

You know how some blogs have "guest bloggers", like Boing Boing, which has a column down the right side (scroll down to see it) with different guest bloggers every week or so. Now wouldn't it be cool for say a university department or a unit like Intermedia or HUMlab - places which would regularly host guest lecturers - to also have a (continuous or occassional) guest blogger column on their website? Not just blogging somewhere else with a link from the front page of the host, but on the front page, clearly as part of the main content, yet also as themselves. Either you could arrange for visiting speakers to also blog for the duration of their stay, or you could hire people simply to blog for a week, even if they were a completely different place. If you valued guest bloggers as being equally important as physical visitors, you'd be able to pay reasonably, given you were saving on flying them in and paying for their hotel and food. Put on the main page of an institution's website would give a great sense of their being "present" in the institution's "web presence", and with a prominent or creative guest would be brilliant global branding and marketing of your institution. It could also be a good way of getting non-blogging experts to do "just a little" blogging. I'd invite Henry Jenkins to be a guest blogger, if I had the chance - I'd love to see what he'd actually blog. On the other hand I can easily imagine non-bloggers being very sceptical to suddenly blogging, and perhaps especially to suddenly blogging that prominently. After all, there's a reason they don't already blog, right? Pitched right (and paid appropriately and with total technical support), I reckon you could talk quite a few people into it, though.

How cool to have that on your CV. Visiting Researcher at X, Y and Z. Guest Lecturer at Q and P, and Guest Blogger at S and T. Cool.

Hey, tell me if you've seen something like this, OK? [Jill Walker]

Jill Walker's notion of guest bloggers could also be used on a course or project basis. In fact, Joe Luft's history project already points into this direction. [Sebastian Fiedler]

5:57:35 AM    

Will mentions writing up documentation on what posting is and what it is supposed to accomplish for those new to using weblogs at his school. As a few more class weblogs (including some poetry sites) get started at my school this week, teachers and students at my school are in need of something along these lines.

After almost exclusively posting to students' own weblogs, I'm trying some group posting on my Spanish-American War site. Charlie Lowe's course blogging procedure proved useful as I drew up my own. As usual time plays a critical factor here. As a group product, these posts will take longer to produce though the writing should be better. Nothing will really get done outside of class so I'm really pushing them along this week to do research, draft and edit their posts, and publish. I'm assigning commenting as homework for the week instead of posting to their own sites.

Our project took a step forward today as our guest historian joined us in her first post. [Joe Luft]

It is great to read more about the integration of outside experts via a course Weblog. And from what I have gathered... the students like the idea, too. [Sebastian Fiedler]

5:57:35 AM    

Paring It Down with RSS Distiller

"We have over 130 people (teachers and students) posting on our various pMachine weblogs, I've been struggling to find a useful way to get individual RSS feeds from my class weblogs. The one xml file our blogs spit out is daunting to filter through since it shows posts from all our sites. I tried the Radio Tools RSS Distiller Pat mentioned. I managed to create separate feeds from my project site and my class sites. I don't have to skim through a mile long list of posts." [Brooklyn BloggEd]

Most interesting! I need to find out more about this project. Be sure to visit Joe's Spanish-American War: Historical Weblog Project to see a fascinating use of blogging in a classroom environment (including extra credit and student responses via the comments).

I'm familiar with SchoolBlogs (especially their examples of Best Practices), but does anyone know if there's a write-up somewhere (online or in print) listing or summarizing these types of blogging projects in education?

Update: Will Richardson is "collecting teacher and education related examples of Weblog use," with many listed under the "Best Practices" section in the gutter on his site. An excellent resource - LOTS of good stuff there.

And as I'd hoped he would do, Pat Delaney left a comment with some pointers, particularly to Sebastian Fiedler.

I wish I had time to track this better, because I think this is a potentially valuable space for collaboration between teachers, school librarians, and public librarians. [Jenny Levine]

Good to hear that Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian) is "thinking about edublogging again"...

5:57:34 AM    

[ 2002-12-03 ] La ministre du Développement des ressources humaines, Jane Stewart, a rendu public le premier rapport exhaustif sur l'invalidité au Canada intitulé Vers l'intégration des personnes handicapées. ( en format PDF) [GouvCanada]

Un document de 80 pages. 40% des personnes de 65 ans et plus, 10 % des 15 à 64 ans et 3,3 % des 0 èa 14 ans ont des incapacités. 72 % de ces incapacités sont liées à la mobilité, 30 % à l'audition, 17% à la vision...

5:57:15 AM    

• 17 % des références du mois de novembre viennent du répertoire de la Toile du Québec
• Je ne savais pas qu'un tel site existait (Avenir en santé) et que l'organisation y était décrite, avec un lien vers le site du RQIIAC ! (16 % des références proviennent de ce site !)
• Plusieurs sites de psychologie ou travail social
• http://www.optsq-07.org/liens.htm
• http://www.chez.com/brunofortin/sme1020/16.html
• http://www.psychologue.levillage.org/b.html

Mais toutes ces références ne rassemblent que 13% des visites au sites. Le reste provenant de 'favoris' ou bookmarks, ou encore de liens contenus dans un courriel !

5:57:15 AM    

Lancement du programme « Ça bouge après l'école », lequel vise à doubler d'ici 2006 le nombre d'élèves inscrits à des activités parascolaires dans les écoles secondaires publiques. Communiqué de presse Ça bouge après l'école [Gouv Qc]

Enfin !

5:57:15 AM    

C'est le temps de changer de sujet ! Pour ceux-celles qui aiment les bandes dessinées, les histoires fantastiques...  

Il s'agit d'une histoire en 24 chapitres dont 21 ont déjà été livrés sur ce site. Des chapitres qui font de 15 à 40 minutes chacun... en format Flash.

Faut que je répare ma carte de son, stie !

5:57:15 AM    

Je viens d'ajouter un autre fil RSS (ou XML) à la liste des fils générés par ma copie Radio, il s'agit de la page des communiqués de la Santé publique de Montréal.

O peut s'y abonner, si vous avez un agrégateur de nouvelles (Radio en comprend un mais d'autres logiciels existent aussi) en copiant le lien suivant dans votre page d'abonnements. Pour voir les différents abonnements que je suis avec mon agrégateur, consultez la liste à la gauche de cette page. En passant votre curseur au dessus des petits carrés rouges marqués XML , vous remarquerez ceux qui sont hébergés ici, sur mon site. C'est dire que vous ne pourrez vous y abonner ailleurs qu'ici !

Si vous ne comprenez pas ce que je dis, c'est que ça ne vous concerne pas !

5:57:15 AM    

Un nouveau fil RSS, tiré celui-là de la page de communiqués de l'Institut national de santé publique du Québec.

20 novembre 2002 - Communiqué de presse
La croissance de moisissures en milieu intérieur présente un risque pour la santé Un milieu intérieur contaminé par les moisissures présente un risque pour la santé des occupants et doit être nettoyé et décontaminé rapidement, affirme l'Institut national de santé publique du Québec dans un rapport scientifique intitulé « Les risques à la santé associés à la présence de moisissures en milieu intérieur », diffusé aujourd'hui à Québec dans le cadre des Journées annuelles de santé publique. Lire la suite | PDF - HTML |        [INSPQ]

En plus de la poussière, de la fumée du tabac plus fréquentes dans les quartiers pauvres, maintenant les moisissures ?

5:57:14 AM