Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Rip. Mix. Feed. Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies. Absolutely outstanding presentation prepared by Brian Lamb and Alan Levine for EDUCAUSE (in the form of a wiki, so if you don't like it you can change it). The key message: "There's been too much focus on schemas and models for cataloging objects and precious little attention to building meaningful content. Thankfully, there are some signs of change." And the change is coming at the speed of a freight train, which will leave a lot of vendors in the dust if they're not careful. The article talks about using RSS to find objects, using track-back to record the context of use, ripping and mixing objects of various types, and what activity happening beyond objects. Read this presentation carefully, follow the links, and read them too. By Alan Levine and Brian Lamb, October 20, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 8:49:30 PM      .

EDUCAUSE: "Electronic Portfolios in Higher Education: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?". From the folks at the University of Denver Portfolio Community: The University of Denver Portfolio Community is a comprehensive electronic portfolio system that supports individual, course, and community portfolios and curriculum assessment. This session will discuss the DUPC's development and lessons learned during its implementation and compare it to other electronic portfolio systems.. Began work in mid 1990s in school of communication. No commercial products then, so they did a home grown system. Note to presenters- Nearly all presentations wade through word slides of background info, etc before getting to a rushed and hurried demo. Always start with the demo, give us a visual. grab our attention.... then wade through the bullet points. [cogdogblog] 8:48:27 PM      Google It!.

For an Inventor, IM Opens a Window to a World of Games. A California software developer turns instant message windows into a platform for video games. By By MARC WEINGARTEN. [The New York Times > Technology] 8:46:53 PM      Google It!.

EDUCAUSE: "At the End of the Day We Will Have Given it All Away: The Convergence of Open-Source CMS and Open Courseware". Free content for community colleges (well and everybody else)! Free! Developing content based on model of MIT Open CourseWare success, but for community college level courses. Foothill-De Anza approached by Hewlett Foundation to lead effort for more general education level courses, community college level curriculum. Based on success with FHDA success in ETUDES (Easy To Use Distance Education Software), home grown course management system, Project name: Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets (SOFIA) open content initiative http://sofia.fhda.edu/ Sofia - the wisdom and intellectual virtue achieved when striving after the best ends and using the best means" - Aristotle Alan's cheap, half-baked summary: The goals of the project are lofty, admirable, well planned, et . Everything looks like it should. What is not clear is how the content will be shared, is it the course as a bundle, is it unbundled, can one use pieces?? It also begs the questions others have asked about MIT's Open CourseWare project- isn't there more to the course than then content? Regardless, I'll be curious to see how these free courses are rolled out and received. [cogdogblog] 8:45:52 PM      Google It!.

For Missing Web Pages, a Department of Lost and Found. Could this be an end to broken links? New software replaces and updates links on Web pages. By By ANNE EISENBERG. [The New York Times > Technology] 8:44:10 PM      Google It!.

Google Takes On Your Desktop. Google has just introduced its latest invention: software that applies its search technology to what is on your own hard drive. By By DAVID POGUE. [The New York Times > Technology] 8:42:22 PM      Google It!.

SBC and Microsoft to Provide HDTV Over IP [Slashdot:] 8:41:04 PM      Google It!.

Coming Soon to Your Pocket: High-Definition TV Phones. Miniature mobile phones, which already double as cameras, Internet devices and music players, are poised to merge with the largest of home appliances, the television. By By MATT RICHTEL. [The New York Times > Technology] 8:32:05 PM      Google It!.

EDUCAUSE: "Universal Design and the Web: Strategies and Techniques". A solid session by Terry Thompson with University of Washington's National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education on the concept if Universal Design for web content. (excuse the post-blogging-- the wireless in the session room is not there or off the map). The materials and the resources on the AccessIT site are worth a bookmark or furl. Interesting that the concept started with design of buildings and has moved into web design. This is not just about addressing the needs of people with disabilities, but now embraces the various types of devices now used for getting web content- dealing with small screens (phones, PDAs), speech/audio interfaces (voice recognition in autos/telephone systems), devices lacking mouse capability (cannot hover with a stylus) noisy environments (where audio cannot be heard), and noiseless environments (where audio should not be heard, Shhhhhh). A core is the separation of content and formatting, a core principle. Close captioning of audio/video content provides fullt ext retreival of content, and key word searching to say, find specific frames of video. Some more general stuff in Guidelines, W3 Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, newer guidelines for XML accessibility (never even thouight of that, but it makes sens as more content is stuffed inside XML), and a Draft for the version 2 of the W3 Guidelines which are broken into 4 areas: Perceivable - getting to the content Operable - dealing with the different devices for interacting with content Understandble - bridging into usability Robust - it works? Then terry provided some brief examples of how to address issues in HTML, PDF, Flash. [cogdogblog] 8:30:21 PM      Google It!.

NEC Strikes Back With SX-8 Supercomputer [Slashdot:] 1:10:02 PM      Google It!.

High Performance MySQL [Slashdot:] 1:06:24 PM      Google It!.

Mice Thrive Without Chapters of the Book of Life. LONDON (Reuters) - It's called the book of life but mice, and perhaps humans, can still thrive even when chapters are missing, scientists said Wednesday. [Reuters: Science] - junk dna was removed -- BL 1:04:42 PM      Google It!.

Human gene number slashed. Human genome researchers have said we have about 10,000 or 20,000 fewer genes than they originally estimated. [BBC News | Science/Nature | UK Edition]-- big unknowns on the control and regulations  -  the  gaps  aka junk dna - may be critically important -- BL 1:01:45 PM      Google It!.

Rip. Mix. Feed. Objects? EDUCAUSE 2004 Seminar. Today, Brian Lamb and I pulled of another rollercoaster wild ride presentation, one that more or less emerged and arose from the primordial soup of our minds 2 weeks ago, The long scrolling title for today's pre-conference Seminar was "Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies" where we initially planned to focus on using RSS, Trackback, etc to connect learning objects (someone done before). It has been under wraps because, well it was infested with typos and half baked ideas, but now we release the presentation in its wiki-form: http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/wiki?ObjectsEducause04 We spun it around recently to more of a take on the Rip Mix. Feed concept for collecting information from numerous sources (via RSS?), using social filtering tools or RSS to "mix" them into new forms, and then Feed the, back as new content or re-syndicated content. It began with some playful fun at the mysterious, mythincal, PeskyObjects where we shared some of our frustrations with the mammoth Learning Object Repository projects (heads were nodding). Into the mix, we had participants find objects with RSS, load them in shared Bloglines accounts, and blog their results, demo-ed using Feed2JS to convert RSS to usable output in any web page, A quick overview of Trackback and how it (should) work in the MLX. But the more exciting part was introducing them to the tagging phenomena of social bookmarking with del.icio.us and then the similar approach for tagging photos in flickr (and adding hotspots to images). It was utterly ambitious, but we had an eager group, and much to our amazement, we covered it all. Check out a few snapshots in a flickr set. One of our fun elements was that we randomly had assigned them to two different "teams" where each team could post to a different MovableType weblog, a bloglines account, a del.icio.us account, and a flickr account. Being from different parts of the Northern Hemisphere, one group's blog hosted at UBC as the Canadian "Objects, Eh?" team while the other blog, hosted at Maricopa, was the Arizona Western theme of "Howdy Objects". All of the above mentioned tools are incestuously RSS fed back to the blogs. To make it even more freaky, we "dressed" up in our respective uniforms. You can peek at the outcomes of what people did via: Weblogs http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/objects/ http://realgar.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/objects/ Shared Feeds (Bloglines) http://www.bloglines.com/public/objectseh http://www.bloglines.com/public/howdyobjects Shared Bookmarks (del.icio.us) http://del.icio.us/objectseh http://del.icio.us/howdyobjects Tagged for "learningobject" http://del.icio.us/tag/learningobject/ Shared Photos and "Objects" (Flickr) http://www.flickr.com/photos/objectseh http://www.flickr.com/photos/howdyobjects EDUCAUSE04 Flickr Group http://www.flickr.com/groups/educause04/ Tagged for "educause04" http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/educause04/ If anything, we exposed people to some new tools to consider. There is much more appreciation for the role and potential of RSS for channeling information, but it is still an on the edge technology for many out there, even in the IT basecamps. Well, it was fun, but draining. Now I can relax for the rest of the conference, or cynically blog from the back of the room. [cogdogblog] 10:22:10 AM      Google It!.

Top Colleges, Rated by Those Who Chose Them. A group of economists has compiled a new college ratings system that is based on where America's best and brightest decide to go to school. By By ERIC DASH. [The New York Times > Education] 10:20:17 AM      Google It!.

Review Of Linux-based Motorola A768i [Slashdot:] 10:19:17 AM      Google It!.

UW-MADISON Makes Next Generation Computing Environment Available as Open Source. The Croquet Project, a joint software development effort among the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Division of Information Technology (DoIT), the University of Minnesota and Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc. of Glendale California, has announced th [Online Learning Update] -- brain child of Alan Kay http://croquetproject.org -- BL 10:00:49 AM      Google It!.

Microsoft, Swatch Offer New Wireless Watches. NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O and watch maker Swatch UHR.VX are offering wireless data watches with faster information updates at lower prices than earlier models, the companies said on Wednesday. [Reuters: Technology] 9:51:34 AM      Google It!.

Big Day For Browser Vulnerabilities [Slashdot:] 9:49:12 AM      Google It!.

Nobel Laureate's Courses Available at OCW. Here's an excerpt from the latest update about the MIT OpenCourseWare site. This information item underscores what I believe is one of the most important advances that course repositories make to higher education; viewing course materials from other institutions can certainly enhance instruction and learning. The opportunity for instructors and students to peruse the course materials of a Nobel Laureate is priceless. JH ____ The MIT OpenCourseWare Update: October 2004 A Monthly E-mail Newsletter for Users and Friends of MIT OpenCourseWare ---------------------------------------------------------------- The October 2004 MIT OpenCourseWare Update Contains: 1. Nobelist Publishes Two Courses 2. How Big is the MIT OCW Web Site? 3. Digging Deeper: Unified Engineering 4. A Frequently Asked Question 5. Comments 6. Newsletter Available Online at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/newsletter.htm 1. Nobelist Publishes Two Courses ---------------------------------------------------------------- MIT Professor Frank Wilczek has won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for a "colorful" discovery in the world of quarks, the building blocks of the atomic nucleus. Wilczek's work, which involves the dominant -- or "color," force between quarks -- is key to several major problems in particle physics and beyond. Wilczek, 53, shares the prize of about $1.3 million with David J. Gross of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and H. David Politzer of the California Institute of Technology. Check out his two courses published on MIT OCW: Course 8.325 -- Relativistic Quantum Field Theory III, which directly reflects on the work that won Wilczek the Nobel Prize, and Course 8.012 -- Physics I, an introductory physics course which presents elementary mechanics, Newton's laws, concepts of momentum, energy, angular momentum, rigid body motion, and non-inertial systems. 2. How Big is the MIT OCW Web Site? ---------------------------------------------------------------- The MIT OCW Web site now offers free and open access to 914 courses, ranging from 33 academic disciplines and all five of MIT schools -- Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Science, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Sloan School of Management. With more than 900 courses available, users frequently ask, "Just how much educational content is really available on the MIT OCW Web site?" MIT OCW is a content-rich Web site that is 48 gigabytes in size; offering courses that contain 14,717 HTML pages, 15,640 unique PDF documents, and 16,078 images -- overall 55,171 total files for use by MIT's global audience. All of this is made available through the generosity of 536 MIT faculty, with many more signed on for future publication cycles. [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online] 9:46:47 AM      Google It!.