Tuesday, August 24, 2004

RSS Feeds for Maricopa ePortfolio. Today I cleaned my desk of paper piles, revamped the "todo" list that overflows from my whiteboard, and finished up a little experiment I had started on our ePortfolio site. Audree Thurman, the clever programmer of this nifty system, had developed a nifty approach for RSS feeds. There is a web page version (human readable) for changes among all the portfolios, there is the geeky, orange icon labeled RSS version, and you can also sign up to get notifications by email when a specific eportfolio has changed (e.g. so a teacher can monitor a number of student eports). See the details under her posted "enhancements" summary. Anyhow, I had plotted to put the RSS feed on the front page, and forgot about actually doing it. So I was able to rather quickly use the Feed2JS version that generates the content via a PHP include. I will likely end up making this a cron (timed) job that runs it every 15 minnutes, so the include is just a static file. But I was also interested in creating part that would pick a published eportfolio and random and insert a link on any page I needed. I wrote Audree this morning and asked if she could write a script that would update a text file with a tab delimited format for each eportfolio's Owner name, their college, and its URL. With this, I can easily have a PHP include that sucks the data into an array, counts' em, and picks one at random. She wrote back in about 15 minutes and said it was done. So now, the new and improved Maricopa eP site has both of these dynamic features: http://eport.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ We are expecting this site to bust out of the seams as our Ocotillo ePortfolio Action Group ramps up this year. There ought to be much better ePortfolios than that one by Biff Cantrell. [cogdogblog] 11:19:57 PM      Google It!.

Americans for Taxpayer Access. A large number of public-interest groups today launched the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. The coalition formed to support the NIH open-access plan and these three principles: American taxpayers are entitled to open access to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Open access to these reports will lead to usage by millions of physicians, public health professionals, patients, students, teachers, scientists, and others, and will deliver an accelerated return on the taxpayers' investment in NIH. Widespread dissemination of these reports is an essential, inseparable component of our nation’s investment in science. The members of the ATA include patient advocacy organizations, libraries, library associations, universities, and university departments. Membership is open and all stakeholder groups that support open access to taxpayer-funded research are strongly encouraged to join. For more details, see the ATA web site or press release. [Open Access News] 12:40:19 PM      Google It!.

University Tests Legal File Downloading System [Slashdot:] 9:47:36 AM      Google It!.

Boring Game? Outsource It. It's not just work that's being outsourced from wealthy nations to poorer ones. These days, online gamers in developing countries are being paid to earn virtual goods that wealthier players are too lazy or unskilled to win on their own. By Laila Weir. [Wired News] 9:44:59 AM      Google It!.

Breakthrough eLearning Method Integrates McGraw-Hill Content to Improve Student Performance in Math. The Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training (PCATT), a consortium of the University of Hawaii Community Colleges, today announced the expansion of its e-Learning math pilot to include leading math content from McGraw-Hill Higher Education. The [Online Learning Update] 9:43:06 AM      Google It!.