Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Survey/Quiz Tool inside ePortfolio ("Desert and a Floor Wax?"). Audree has been busy.... she is the developer of the ePortfolio tool built first at Chandler-Gilbert Community College and also running in our office as "Maricopa eP" for the rest of our system. Over the last few weeks, she has added new tools and features, based on faculty and student input, especially since at her college, the use of it has grown wider into a personal publishing system as well. The first new thing is the ability to create an item type that is a survey or quiz. At first I scratched my head trying to figure out why such a thing would be embedded into an eP, but one could use it as a way of collecting feedback from peers or teachers, or it could be used as a course tool by faculty, or .... So I quickly added a 3 item survey on "What is an ePortfolio?" to my eP play pen- if some of you readers out there would be so kind to respond to its deep probing questions, I can later share you what you can do with the results. The other enhancement is a method to build a hierarchy of portfolio pages, again at the request of a faculty member at another one of our colleges. This makes sense as the tool more or less lodges all portfolio items into one drop down menu, and that could become unwieldy over time. So the new feature is an ability to have one item in that menu actually link to a whole collection of other portfolio pages. A neat new example from our South Mountain Community College is an eP that describes their Storytelling Institute. The menu link for Storytelling Faculty brings up one of the "Collection" pages, but this time rather than a collection of files or documents, each item there is a link to another ePortfolio item (that then does not have to hang in the main menu). It is not easy to describe, but Audree has listed some examples in her ePortfolio Enhancements collection whihc includes other minor new features- an ability to automatically have all changes published (previously, one made changes or added content, and then had to manually clicka button to make the changes visible), and to assign a password to individual pages... again at the request of faculty Have you tracked a theme yet? The features in this tool are not dreamt up by programmers or academic theorists, but in the trenches teaching faculty, and they are being nicely integrated into the system as needed. Does your expensive enterprise CMS do that for you? [cogdogblog] -- this leads back to the conumdrum of presonalization and personal profiles as a necessary part of the big picture of educational computing resources and the management of complexity at the personal level.  One notable attempt at a standard approach is the novice vs expert view.  There is also a histroy of individual configuaration files as a model of individual program profiles that enable at some cost the tailoring of resources to personal preferences. -- BL 12:51:02 PM      Google It!.

Clever Caller ID Tricks With VoIP [Slashdot] 12:39:59 PM      Google It!.

Microsoft's Encarta Adds Search Bar, Homework Help. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday unveiled a new version of its Encarta encyclopedia software with such features as a search bar and online math homework help. [Reuters: Technology] 12:38:03 PM      Google It!.

Talking Tombstones Bear a Message from the Grave. LONDON (Reuters) - The dead could soon be speaking from the grave if an American inventor's plan becomes reality. [Reuters: Science] this is a very old idea but now it can be a multimedia experience -- BL 12:35:00 PM      Google It!.

EDUCAUSE Review, July /August Issue. The recent issue of the Review contains several valuable and interesting articles. Brad Wheeler discusses open source software, " Institutions are in search of a new model to fund application software. Community source projects--based on open source philosophy and licensing--offer promise for developing sustainable economics and for advancing the frontiers of innovation." Gary Greenberg focuses on digital portfolios, "The digital convergence of text, graphics, sound, and video is extending the portfolio model--a system of organizing and sharing work and engaging mentors, peers, colleagues, friends, and family in ongoing discussions and feedback--to many disciplines and programs." All articles are available as html and pdf files. JH [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 9:13:23 AM      Google It!.

Feeding the RSS Hunger. (interesting model of an informaiton service provider --BL) Accepting Feed Requests "...I've been asked a number of times by now whether I could produce a custom news feed for site XYZ, and until now I've declined most of the times. But today I thought 'heck, why not'. :) Now, I've thought about the how. Hosting feeds costs money, scraping feeds is taking time, and maintaining a feed can take some time as well. So, I'm offering you the following service. First read the list of things you get, then see whether you'd be willing to shell out a small one-time fee of €2." [feedpalooza journal, via Boing Boing] I submitted two requests for my local newspapers (hop a cluetrain, newspaper guys!), but I have to wait for a PayPal transfer to go through before getting the URLs. Joe Hall, on the other hand, was much faster at this and he had Carlo create a feed for Dave Farber's Interesting People mailing list! Some good stuff should come out of this offer, and hopefully it will further illuminate the demand in order to increase the supply. [The Shifted Librarian] 9:09:19 AM      .

HP Markets Cheap 4-User PCs To African Schools [Slashdot] 9:04:14 AM      Google It!.

Tiny Improvement for Feed2JS and New Site Features. Just for fun, I added a rather small feature to the Feed2JS script/service; Curt Whittaker had emailed requesting: It would be nice if the script could have alternate text if there are no items in the current feed. For example, we are looking to use this for our Calendar of Events - see http://test.sou.edu. Some days there are no events, and I want to say so rather than have just a blank box. It is actually quite easy thing to toss in the mix (just spit out "no items for this feed" if the Magpie parser returns a zero count item array), so it is now there- you can verify by tossing in the URL for the an empty item feed I made. Also, since we do get a handful of "how do I make it do X?" type requests that are too specialized to make it into the final, I created a list of "mods" small script changes that have been requested. How much is Feed2JS being used since released May 24, 2004? Well the examples page lists 19 sites that have bothered to share their use of this free service. We know there is more out there... so step up and sign up, eh? To show, I added code to the examples page that counts the number of cached feeds sitting on our server- as of today, there are 15990! which at least suggests parsing and spitting back that many feeds. That was much more than I expected. Note that some time down the road when I am house cleaning, I'll likely dump the cache directory to reset it. Wow. That is a lot of action. We'll have some more data soon when we finish setting up AWstats to analyse the web server log. [cogdogblog] -- a step along the way to a better personalized (profiled) experience --BL 9:02:55 AM      Google It!.

America's War With Blogistan. The blog represents free speech in excelsis. Or does it? If the blog accepts advertising or maintains ties to institutions -- like, say, the Democratic Party -- then the freedom to say whatever you like can be sharply curtailed. Commentary by Adam L. Penenberg. [Wired News] 8:59:31 AM      Google It!.

Wikipedia Hits 300,000 Articles [Slashdot] 8:52:38 AM      Google It!.

Distance Learning Is Critical in Emergency, Disaster Management College Programs. American Public University System professors, speaking recently at a federal conference in Washington, D.C., said that flexibility and real-world relevant courses are key reasons universities should incorporate distance education in emergency and disas [Online Learning Update] 8:51:43 AM      Google It!.

Access, Retention and Course Choice in Online, Open and Distance Learning - Ormond Simpson, EURODL. Abstract: Course choice is an important part of the progression of transforming a potential student into a successful undergraduate. Yet the processes and materials of course choice have attracted little attention, it being assumed that the activity wi [Online Learning Update] 8:50:47 AM      Google It!.

Rocky Mountain Sakai: First SEPP Meeting in Denver - Syllabus. This past week marked the first inaugural meeting of the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP) in Denver. More than 175 representatives from 45 member institutions met to review the status of Sakai and plan for the future. The conference, which coi [Online Learning Update] 8:49:33 AM      Google It!.

GIF Slips Away From Unisys; Your Move, IBM [Slashdot] The effect of software pattent can be seen somewhat clearly in this case - a initial idea on the way to a better approach -- BL 8:45:27 AM      Google It!.

Is The 6-Month Product Cycle Upon Us? [Slashdot] signs of the increasing the pace of change which while uncomfortable is inevitable -- BL 8:38:56 AM      Google It!.