Sunday, January 25, 2004

New page for 'RSS feeds from learning object repositories'. I just noticed today that people still refer to the old page I built illustrating RSS feeds from known Repositories. That page was built on my old Radio site using a simple Radio macro that rendered RSS as HTML. Since then I've moved the site into MoveableType and onto another host, but I have only recently got around to recreating this page. This time, though, I did it using a public Bloglines page (one of the beauties of a web-based aggregator that lets you share!) The new page illustrating the results of these feeds is at http://www.bloglines.com/public_display?username=EdTechPost&;folder=322938. It's actually pretty interesting to have them in one's aggregator as you get a better sense of how regularly materials are being added (not that regularly). As before, the page includes feeds from: Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO, http://www.careo.org/) Maricopa Learning Exchange (http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/index.php) The MedWeb Testbank Search (http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/databases/interop/mcqs) Humbul database (http://www.humbul.ac.uk/help/rss.html) UK Centre for Materials Education (http://www.materials.ac.uk/index.asp) Edna Online (http://www.edna.edu.au) Merlot (http://www.merlot.org/) Originally when I built this it was mostly to try and illustrate for myself the results and the utility of such feeds. The page is still fairly referenced, though, and so I have tried to add new ones as I find them. If you know of other Repositories that offer RSS feeds please let me know and I will add it to the list. Eventually I will decomission the old site, and will probably do something to re-direct this particular page. [EdTechPost] 4:42:17 PM      Google It!.

Academic ADL Co-Lab's Database of Repositories. http://projects.aadlcolab.org/repository-directory/ New from the Academic ADL Co-Lab is this searchable database of existing learning object repositories. Most of these are not software you could download to run your 'own' repository but instead existing institutional or subject-based repositories in which you *might* be able to participate (which raises the entirely sticky issue of 'how many repositories do we actually need?' but that's for another post!) In particular pay attention to the 'Advanced Search' feature - it seems to confirm the same set of repositories that support RSS as I have previously discovered, but also lets you do some neat things like find out which repository projects support the OAI Harvesting Protocol, or which ones support Global Unique Identifiers (GUIDs). - SWL [EdTechPost] 4:40:18 PM      Google It!.

What's a Wiki?. Brian Lamb provides a good introduction to Wikis in this month's e-Strategy article: "What’s a Wiki? Tap Into the Quickest,... [Michelle's Online Learning Freakout Party Zone] 4:37:06 PM      Google It!.

Announcing Cooperative Linux [Slashdot] this is truly disruptive technology to insert linux into windowsXP 4:29:17 PM      Google It!.

Online games to generate real and academic riches - Will Knight, NewScientist.com. Multiplayer online computer games are expected to generate more than $1 billion in revenue for the first time in 2004, according to a new prediction. But as well as providing financial riches, some researchers believe the virtual communities built wi [Online Learning Update] 4:25:42 PM      Google It!.

Fakes slip through the net, so take a degree of care - Jennifer Sharples, the Telegraph. Although the internet has opened up unparalleled opportunities for learning by distance, it has also created a multi-million dollar fraud industry, with hundreds of fake "universities" springing up selling instant degrees that are not worth the paper t [Online Learning Update] 4:23:33 PM      Google It!.

PBS Joins With Five Higher Education Institutions to Offer "PBS Campus". PBS joined five of the nation's leading institutions of higher education to announce that, for the first time, every course available in the wide ranging "PBS Campus" service (www.pbs.org/campus) will be available for any student to take for college cr [Online Learning Update] 4:21:38 PM      Google It!.

What are the conditions for and characteristics of effective online learning communities? - Australian National Training Authority. This guide is premised on the notion that ‘online communities’ are an increasingly important part of the way we will operate, as teachers, learners, and citizens of a networked world, and, the benefits we accept from these new ways of working. This gui [Online Learning Update] 4:20:11 PM      .

Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration:Article:CMC Collaborative: [SurfMind] 4:18:09 PM      Google It!.

Dan Gillmor: Wikipedia Shows Power of Cooperation. [Scripting News] 4:14:42 PM      Google It!.

Tomalak's Realm- 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World [Newsability] 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World Universal Translation Synthetic Biology Nanowires Bayesian Machine Learning T-Rays Distributed Storage RNA Interference Power Grid Control Microfluidic Optical Fibers Personal Genomics 4:10:46 PM      Google It!.

How dynamic categories work. In the spirit of the lightweight browser-based solution, I decided to create an equally lightweight server-based version based on Python and libxml2/libxslt. (I'm also working on a slightly heftier, but more powerful variation based on Berkeley DB XML; we'll explore that one next time.) [O'Reilly Network] ... [Jon's Radio] 3:56:39 PM      Google It!.

Open source lock-in. With the release of MySQL 4.0, the licensing policy of the wildly popular open source database underwent a subtle change. The code libraries that client programs use to access the native MySQL API, formerly licensed under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), were converted to the GPL. The LGPL was designed to exempt "nonfree" programs that link against open source libraries from the GPL's strong requirement to release source code. The purpose of the LGPL, according to the Free Software Foundation, is "to encourage the widest possible use of a certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard." And indeed, MySQL has become the database pillar of the so-called LAMP platform, whose acronym expands to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and the trio of Perl, Python, and PHP. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] Here's an interesting bit of backstory. As originally filed, my use of the terms LGPL and GPL in the lead paragraph was backwards. Not because I don't know the difference, but because it's so darned easy to get yourself mixed up when talking about this stuff. The error got past my own proofreading, and got by several editorial checks as well, but was fortunately caught before it went to print. I'm tempted to say that the complexity of open source licensing can make your eyes bleed, and that's true, but I guess it applies to all software licensing. Oracle, for example, is apparently now offering licensing seminars where you go to learn, not how to use Oracle, but how to pay for it. ... [Jon's Radio] 3:55:07 PM      Google It!.

The Tyranny of Copyright?. Is copyright law curbing our freedoms and making it harder to create anything new? This could be the first new social movement of the century. By Robert S. Boynton. [New York Times: Technology] 3:51:50 PM      Google It!.

Artificial Life and Extempo to Co-operate. Hong Kong based Artificial Life, Inc. (OTC: ALIF), and Extempo Systems, Inc. of Redwood City, CA, both providers of intelligent agent based software solutions announced the signing of a co-operation agreement in the area of e-learning. Of particular interest, Artificial Life, Inc. is preparing the launch of "an e-learning portal based on its proprietary intelligent agent and smart bot (TM) technology. The portal will use new and non-standard paradigms for teaching students such as: intelligent agents as online teachers, role play scenarios, user specific content delivery and auto-adaptive skill assessment." Sounds interesting... yet I'm unclear what the revenue model for the portal will be, or who they are targetting as clients for this service... Press Release [e-Learning Eclectic] 3:49:20 PM      Google It!.