Friday, October 15, 2004

Clark Kent Solutions Have Super-Powers - Well Sort Of!. The core of this article looks at an open sourse content manaagement system, Plone, and some of the extensions that have been made to it to create eduPlone and the Harvey project. Underlying the core are observations about the danger of 'open source lock-in' and reflections on the modular approach to developing e-learning technology. Good read. By Derek Morrison, Auricle, October 15, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 5:40:25 PM      Google It!.

The Disseminary. Scott Leslie passes this link along, noting from the site's description: "The Disseminary stands for an approach to education and educational materials apart from the constraints of institutional education: credits, fees, restrictive copyright limitations, grades, and other limitations. The project envisions a variety of educational resources offered at no charge, for no formal credit. Such resources may in the long run include publications, asynchronous seminar discussions (kept available in archives), chats, interviews, audio and video recordings." The model of free and open learning, of course, is the important thing, though it is worth noting in passing the use of the model to provide what might be called alternative education. Thin edge of the wedge. By Various Authors, October, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 5:38:40 PM      Google It!.

OAI-PMH facilities for Python, Zope, Silva, and Railroad. I guess while I'm messing around with Edu_RSS to make it harvest Atom, I should also add the capacity to harvest OAI as wekk. With the release of this suite of tools, we may be seeing many more OAI feeds. By Various Authors, October, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 5:37:16 PM      Google It!.

PowerPointLess: Eric Meyer's Full-On CSS Slide Show. I think I got here via scanning RSS from Roland Tanglao - one of the Gods of Explaining CSS to Mere Mortals, Eric Meyer has rolled out a nifty way to assemble a presentation without any touching and software from Redmond. S5 is a fully web standards compliant XHMTL slide show creator- you can assemble a presentation by merely editing the text of single text file, and design it to your heart's delight via CSS. To see it in action, check out the S5 Introduction. You get next and back buttons (also advances by space bars and arrow keys), and a hidden slide menu in the lower right corner. It plays back in any browser (well fuggedddaboutit if you use NetScape 4, go back to the 1990s ;-) Now this is your basic text and bullet slides (about 85% of what people twiddle their time in PowerPoint doing), as an images that are used must be pre-loaded and thus slow down the initial display. The ability to change your slide show by editing a simple text file is slick, maybe a bit too geeky for some, but it offers some potential for building tools that could generate these slide shows dynamically. People commenting on Eric's blog are already pushing the edges. [cogdogblog] 5:35:15 PM      .

Tutors with infinite patience - KATIE HAFNER, New York Times News Service. Fourteen-year-old Rochelle Brown was close to solving an algebra problem. Yet she stumbled repeatedly on one calculation: -2.3 + .5. As she sat at a computer screen, she kept typing 2.8, an incorrect answer. Eventually a hint popped up: "Think about th [Online Learning Update] 10:17:22 AM      Google It!.

Petite MP3 Player Boots PCs Into Linux [Slashdot:] disruptive technology -- BL 10:15:24 AM      Google It!.

JaWE2Openflow1.0 Released. JaWE2Openflow is a tool to create Openflow workflow in Zope using XPDL file generated by JaWE. [Plone RSS] 10:08:55 AM      Google It!.

Firefox history in Google Desktop Search. As many have now discovered to their disappointment, the first version of Google Desktop Search can troll visited web pages, but only those sitting in the IE cache. Those of us using Firefox or other browsers are out of luck. Well, I couldn't wait, so I dusted off an earlier proxy project and turned it into a local proxy that writes the web pages I view in Firefox out to the filesystem. Once they're exported with .html extensions, Google indexes them. ... [Jon's Radio] 10:07:42 AM      Google It!.

Sharp To Ship New HD-equipped Zaurus In Japan [Slashdot:] this may give the pda market new life -  an information rocket in your pocket  -- (VGA, 4GB, USB) -- BL 10:05:03 AM      Google It!.

IBM Open Sources Object Rexx [Slashdot:] 9:57:33 AM      Google It!.