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Tuesday, March 02, 2004 |
WebFolio: A TOOL FOR VISUALIZING LEARNERS' BEHAVIORS. http://www.formatex.org/jdc/219.pdf
From the latest Journal of Digital Contents
in its Special issue on "Digital Learning-Teaching Environments and
Contents" comes this fascinating article on a tool developed in Japan.
"Webfolio's" purpose is to "collect, store and visualize learners'
behaviors in Web-based learning." In the myriad debates about the
effects (and effectiveness) of various media on learning, I am
surprised by how often aspect of computers/web-based learning is
overlooked. To me one of the critical attributes that differentiates it
as a medium is the fact that every action within that environment can
be recorded (tracked/played back) as it is performed, providing a vast
store of data on which people can base future design decisions or in
fact which can serve as data for the system to alter its own course. To
me, it's this kind of use that actually starts to employ computers for
what they are good at instead of using them as hugely expensive
textbooks or lecture rooms. Adding visualization of this data is a
natural - if you have ever looked at the usage stats produced by most
course management systems, you'll know that they are fairly limited in
use, and typically fall far below what even a low end web stats
analysis package can provide concerning generic website usage. It's not
that the data's not there, its just not a feature that has been much
capitalized on. Which is maybe not surprising - even in the world of
'enterprise' web site development, there seems to me to be a surprising
reluctance to dig deeply into what usage analysis tells us about how
people are using the materials and how it correlates (if at all) with
desired behaviours. And that's in cases where there is often a tangible
financial incentive and ability to do so. - SWL [EdTechPost]
11:16:51 PM Google It!.
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Pathfinder Research on Web-based Repositories - FINAL REPORT. Extremely Long URL
(My ISP connection dropped on my first attempt to post this, so here is a much briefer summary.)
Useful report from Mark Ware for the Publisher and Library/Learning
Solutions (PALS) group in the U.K. which surveys the current field of
'institutional repositories.' It's nice to see that Ware doesn't hedge
at all in defining his target:
"An institutional repository (IR) is defined to be a web-based
database (repository) of scholarly material which is institutionally
defined (as opposed to a subject-based repository); cumulative and
perpetual (a collection of record); open and interoperable (e.g. using
OAI-compliant software); and thus collects, stores and disseminates (is
part of the process of scholarly communication). In addition, most
would include long-term preservation of digital materials as a key
function of IRs."
The report gives good summaries of the available software, some
numbers to fill out the picture of the current state of adoption, and
section 4 has a good overview of the issues facing institutional
repository projects. - SWL [EdTechPost]
9:38:38 AM Google It!.
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NY Times:
"Students who tracked their lies for a week reported telling lies in 15
percent of e-mail messages, compared with more than a third of phone
calls, 25 percent of face-to-face conversations and about 20 percent of
instant messaging chats." [Scripting News]
9:23:15 AM Google It!.
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Another Perfect Use for RSS. RSS for RFPs
"Utah's Division of Purchasing has an RSS feed of current solicitations. This is an RSS version of the current bids page.
Of course, the good news is that if you're interested in following Utah
RFPs and know how to use an aggregator, they'll just show up on your
desktop without having to remember to go and check the page. I wish
they had a 'what's this?' link next to the RSS link to tell people
about how to use RSS. If more states had RSS feeds of their
solicitations, you could do some nice work with a filtering aggregator
to deliver customized solicitation notices for multiple jurisdictions.
Since solicitations frequently have addendums and updates, there's a
need for extensions that consistently render the solicitation number or
some other correlating information so that addendums can be linked to
the original solicitations." [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] [The Shifted Librarian]
9:19:30 AM Google It!.
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Cool Tool Alert. Cogitum Co-Citer
" 'There's a stone cold freebie (no ads, spyware, etc) called 'Cogitum Co-Citer', available for download here.
Once installed, when you're at a site where you want to save some
text, you simply highlight the desired text, right-click to get the
pop-up context menu, then select 'Grab the selected text'. Co-Citer
then auto-opens its screen, allowing you to add comments, organize by
selecting/creating a category, etc. To get to the info later, you hit
the start menu and choose Co-Citer, which includes print, find and
other goodies.
This app is incredibly feature-packed, and an absolute stable/smooth
joy to use. Sure has cut back substantially on the 'paper-notes'
syndrome which used to surround my laptop!...' " [PDA 24/7]
Nice freebie that could help with personal knowledge management.
Unfortunately, it only runs on Windows and requires Internet Explorer
5+. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:18:32 AM Google It!.
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The Masters of Memory Lane.
Think memorizing your driver's license number is tough? Try memorizing
the contents of a shuffled deck of cards or a string of thousands of 1s
and 0s. Michelle Delio reports from New York. [Wired News]
9:09:26 AM Google It!.
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P2P Networking in HE.
I'm reposting this XPLANA white paper by C. B. Crawford that I first
noticed in the elearnspace blog. Crawford explores this theme, "P2P, in
the opinion of many, will be the next paradigm shifting innovation in
the IT world.... Clearly, P2P networking has the potential to provide
substantial change that will impact higher education in ways that may
be hard to imagine today, but will definitely be impacting us
tomorrow." JH
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P2P Networking in Higher Education:
"Educational institutions must take serious notice of the implications
of the inevitable P2P network activities taking place on our
computers." [elearnspace blog] [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
9:07:51 AM Google It!.
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Fastbuzz. I'm continuing to
search for free weblogging tools and news readers/aggregators to use
with instructors and students. So far I like Movable Type the best as a
blogging tool and Bloglines as a news reader, but Fastbuzz has some
straightforward features: it's easy to sign on for a free account and
easy to use the reader/subsciption functions. (I first noticed Fastbuzz
in Dan Gilmor's eJournal.)
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JH
New Browser Based RSS Aggregator. I'm playing with the beta of Fastbuzz, an aggregator that runs in the browser. Not sure what separates it from... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
9:06:47 AM Google It!.
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Big publishers testify in the UK inquiry. David Hencke, Science journal publishers defend profits, The Guardian, March 2, 2004. On the first session of oral testimony before the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.
This session heard from the large commercial publishers. Next week, the
supporters of OA will have their chance. Excerpt: "The biggest
publishers of scientific journals last night defended their huge
profits, in front of MPs, against the rising challenge of new 'open
access' internet publishing....They were facing critical questions from
the Commons science and technology committee under Dr Ian Gibson,
Labour MP for Norwich North, about overcharging for journals and having
a monopoly over publications. MPs were also pressing them about the
challenge from free articles available on the internet - which are paid
for by the authors....All the publishers warned that if the system
changed it would mean lower standards, the end of peer review and
scientists having to rely on patronage from their universities - since
it could cost up to £30,000 to publish each paper. Mr Campbell [of
Blackwell] and Mr Davies [of Elsevier] said that institutions such as
Oxford, Yale, Stanford and Imperial College, London, would be faced
with huge bills to subsidise their staff so they could publish their
work." (PS: Did they really say £30,000 per paper? Do they think this
obvious exaggeration will be more credible to the committee than the
testimony next week from PLoS and BMC on the actual costs? On the peer
review smear, see my detailed response.) [Open Access News]
9:03:28 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
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