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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!.

Magpie - a tool for Semantic Web:Software:WebAI SemanticWeb: [SurfMind]
11:08:50 PM      Google It!.

Gyroscopic Wireless Mouse [Slashdot]
11:07:34 PM      Google It!.

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!.

Memories light up the corners of our minds [Science Blog]
9:24:56 AM      Google It!.

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!.

DRM Technology To Be Added To MP3 Format [Slashdot]
9:21:30 AM      Google It!.

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!.

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!.

Schools, Facing Tight Budgets, Leave Gifted Programs Behind. Struggling with shrinking revenues, many school districts across the country have cut programs for their most promising students. By Diana Jean Schemo. [New York Times: Education]
9:15:35 AM      Google It!.

What happens when kids from laptop high schools show up on your campus? - Sally M. Johnstone, Syllabus. In Henrico County, Va., an area that includes Richmond and its suburbs, all the kids graduating from high school next year will have spent four years in laptop schools.... How does all this relate to distance learning? Rather profoundly. As the schools [Online Learning Update]
9:14:03 AM      Google It!.

Dialogic Learning Objects: Inviting the Student Into the Instructional Process - Lanny Arvan. Syllabus. Arvan argues that properly employed, course management systems can change the model for teaching and learning in ways that engage students more and increase their learning. He offers the "dialogic approach" to using a question-answer-feedback cycle to [Online Learning Update]
9:12:45 AM      Google It!.

Ringtones are 10% of the global music market?. So says UK research firm ARC Group. Evidently this is what will replace the revenues bleeding out of CD sales.
[Werblog]
9:11:27 AM      Google It!.

Living Life in Virtual Reality. Almost Real takes a documentary look at how online connections can supplant flesh-and-blood ones. It debuts Monday night on TechTV. By Jason Silverman. [Wired News]
9:10:41 AM      Google It!.

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!.

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 ______

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!.

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.)

_____ 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!.

Scientists unlock chicken code. The chicken is the latest living creature to have its genetic sequence read by researchers. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition]
9:05:06 AM      Google It!.

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!.

PARC's New Networking Architecture [Slashdot]
9:02:34 AM      Google It!.

© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
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