Wednesday, October 22, 2003|
Dan Mitchell: Frontier is *not* dying. (SOURCE:teachnology : news)- I hope Frontier is not dying! QUOTE I beg to differ. Frontier (at least in the context of its Manila tool) is entirely adaptable to "enterprise integration." In fact, in many ways it is easier to leverage its power in that sort of environment than in a single-user situation. it is fairly easy to customize Frontier/Manila installations, yet allow the users easy control over their content. It is also very scalable: new users can do useful work with a minimum of training, while advanced users can make use of features that the beginners may avoid - html, css, javascript, discussions, "includes" from multiple pages and even other web sites.We selected Frontier/Manila for enterprise use at Foothill-De Anza Community College District because it was adaptable and powerful in this situation. The link in the previous paragraph goes to a Frontier/Manila server, and the various departments at the site are actually separate Manila sites maintained by their respective owners, but unified by a common design and interface. If Frontier is "dying" ( and that is a big "if") it is not because it cannot be scaled and adapted to enterprise use. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao: WebCMS]6:29:55 PM 
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Frontier is a Dying Platform. Tom Hoffman, who is doing some really cool things with open source CMS type programs up in Providence, has a far better understanding of all this technology than I do. He's demonstrating COREBlog which is a Web log interface for Zope, which I don't have any clue about. He may be right when he says "Regular weblog tools aren't designed for the kind of enterprise integration and complex roles needed for large scale deployments in schools" (though I hope he's wrong about Frontier...at least in the short term.) But it's eventually all going to come down to the same issues: ease of use, ease of installation, tech support, time, etc. At least open source is reasonably priced, but as I've said before, I know there's not going to be a lot of support for it here for quite a while simply because it's too unknown and there is safety in what you know. I wish I had a developer like Tom at my school, but... UPDATE: Read Dan Mitchell's response. [Weblogg-ed News] 11:41:47 AM
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Evolving the Curriculum. I start teaching a journalism class again in a few weeks and I've been putting together a mental list of how it's going to be different from the way I did it last spring. It's no secret that I think Web logs and the act of journalism are a natural fit, but I'm even more of an evangelist for teaching journalism with Web logs. That I've been doing now for over two years. It's getting time to start seriously thinking about some changes I'm hoping to implement this quarter: 11:40:33 AM
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Feedster less hype more filling!. (SOURCE:The Story of Feedster)- Feedster doesn't get the press, but it rocks much more than Technorati. I use Technorati once or twice a week (for the Link Cosmos thing; I bet Feedster has a similar feature!) but I couldn't live without Feedster which I use daily because I find it more reliable and useful. QUOTE I've looked at using Technorati in a more detailed fashion, but when it comes down to it, Feedster's just a lot more reliable in the search part of things, and definitely belongs in the same category as Technorati and Google.UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao: WebCMS]11:39:17 AM
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Why are blogs different than regular websites? (or A Brief Introduction to Accessing Blogs through RSS). (SOURCE:Reading Blogs through RSS or Why blogs are different than websites)- Great intro from some BC guys to RSS and using an RSS reader to make the web more useful to you by stopping aimless, pointless, repetitive web surfing. Complete with Bloglines (a server based RSS reader) screenshots. QUOTE But if you poke around blog sites long enough, you'll start to see words like "Syndicate this Site (XML)" or "RSS 1.0" or little orange graphics like Yikes! What the heck was that? Well that was XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and more specifically something called RSS or a 'feed' (which, depending on who you believe, stands for "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication" or possibly for nothing at all!) In essence RSS is a way to serve up the content from your blog site as structured data without any of the surrounding HTML formatting. So the title of your postings are clearly defined as the titles, the main bodies of the posts defined as the 'descriptions' and the links that you point to as the 'links', but with no instructions to your web browser as to how to display them, which is what HTML typically handles. But why in heavens name would I want to do that? I just spent the last 6 weeks tweaking the design of my site to work in every web browser known to mankind, and now I'm supposed to server up a version with no formatting at all?!? RSS makes no sense until you see the other side of the equation, the application you use to read it, called variously an 'RSS Aggregator,' 'News Aggregator' or 'RSS Reader.' RSS Aggregators are perhaps best seen to be understood, so talk a look at all of the facilitators blogs in a web-based aggregator called Bloglines. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao: WebCMS]11:37:51 AM
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. (Take a look at the front page of this site, at the bottom of the right-hand column, for an example). Try clicking on one of |
Random Bytes :: When blogs become popular. (SOURCE:Random Bytes :: When blogs become popular)- I agree with everybody; when blogs become really popular, they won't be blogs. They will simply be websites that are owned by the people (and not somebody else). And they won't be exclusively the "mostly-free-form text-with-lots-of links" websites that you see on blogs today. Because it's hard to get people to write mostly text blogs using today's tools. There will be pictures, there will be audio, there will video, there will be recipes, restaurant reviews, blogs like today, all of it co-existing seamlessly and easily using any device that's convenient. And all of it will have permalinks, (a unique URL) that we can (if we choose to) link to and riff on. QUOTE When blogs get really popular they will be properly called websites again - personal homepages probably. Blogs only got traction because the toolmakers failed to design something that the average smarty-pants could use. Now, we have a bunch of blogging tools that cater to smarty-pants but completely fail to provide real-value to people like my mom (who really could take advantage of a lot of features that the blogging world has to offer). Blogging is really nothing more than an out-of-band innovation that moves personal home pages from being exclusively unidirectional to being optionally bidirectional. When blogging becomes really popular, all of this will be completely obvious - looking back on it. Let's take some baby steps first though - let's stop thinking about blogging tools as blogging tools and start thinking of them as client applications. Along with that, let's also start thinking of these client apps as multi-point to multi-point in their construction. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao: WebCMS]11:36:56 AM
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RSS and weblogs.com ping distinguish blogging from GeoCities and Tripod. (SOURCE:Blog on |CNET.com)- Blogging isn't just Tripod and GeoCities all over again! It's more. Why? It's not only the obvious stuff: which is that the tools are better because they archive automatically by time and topic and FTP is no longer required. Most importantly, it's the instant meme flow through the web all enabled by 2 innovations: RSS and pinging weblogs.com or other central servers like blo.gs when you update. These two innovations pioneered by Dave Winer enable Blogdex, Feedster, Technorati and a whole host of community building tools which build communication, conversations, expertise and relationships. QUOTE Q: Isn't blogging just creating Yahoo's GeoCities all over again, for which people have their own home page and post whatever they like, including links and their personal thoughts? If someone had a GeoCities home page now, they'd likely be looked at as silly. A: It's a lot like those home pages. While GeoCities isn't cool, it isn't a bad thing. It did a great thing--enabled great people to instantly publish to the Web. This is the next evolution of that. Publishing was harder with some of the earlier tools, but it fits with personal expression. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao: WebCMS] 11:35:53 AM
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Appropriate Blog Use. "On the applications of blogs to education, there seemed to be a few glimmers but then there were just as many issues that arose... I'd say that blogging tools in general do not replicate (nor should they be expected to) the kind of focused or threaded discussion that can (sometimes) happen in discussion forums or mailing lists." Scott Leslie [via OLDaily - although, I'll see it in my aggregator under Scott soon so is thi sreally a 'via'.... well, it is, hmmmmm...] [incorporated subversion]11:34:31 AM
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Coup de pedagogue. Ahhh, nothing better than using terrible French! More to le point :o) Have just published my third (and last) bit on the potential of personal publishing in education over at Xplana... Basic Summary: It's the pedagogy, stupid ;o) It might seem glaringly obvious but it's an understanding that I've come to fairly slowly, but I do reckon I'm right! I guess what PP really needs is for someone to subversilvely incorporate it into the mainstream... win them over from within... heh, that could be fun ;o) Here are the three articles: The Potential of Personal Publishing in Education I: What’s doing & who’s doing it? I've learnt a hellofa lot along the way, thanks for all the thoughts! [incorporated subversion]11:33:16 AM
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Fame vs. fortune, again. Greg Gershman on full-content RSS feeds brings up an interesting point: having a full syndication feed might decrease your HTML page views while increasing your readership. For an ad-less blog this is great; however if you get paid by the page you might lose out - unless you throw ads into your feed. But then you'll lose subscribers. Sorry, my attention is too precious! [Seb's Open Research] 11:31:43 AM
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Mob outsmarts expert. Many2Many: The Critics Are The First To Go. Brilliant. A manifestation of what many of us have been believing for a long time. [...] the most important restaurant reviewer in the country was called to revisit an opinion because his earlier work was so at odds with the judgment of an anonymous and distributed group; he had to admit that yes, on sober reflection “The Grocery deserves a nearly perfect score”; and having made that admission, it is obvious to anyone who cares about food that the NY Times is now an also-ran compared to Zagat’s in terms of tracking quality over time. JD Lasica sums it up thusly: "the professional elite no longer has a monopoly on cultural criticism." As the tools of collective intelligence improve and spread out, individual critics on matters of popular appeal - food, movies, music, websites, games, etc., will find it increasingly hard to hold a candle to the aggregated opinion of mobs. (Another post on M2M illustrates how collective intelligence impacts the ability to solve puzzles.) It seems likely that the monopoly of expertise will progressively be relegated to those topics that few people care about. As soon as something gets big enough, opinion aggregators will be more reliable than J. Random Expert. (With the exception of cases where you have enough prior personal experience with the expert to know you agree with him most of the time.) [Seb's Open Research] 11:30:54 AM
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Communication is content. Richard MacManus is not resigned to describing C-list blogging (i.e., one-to-few, by far the most prevalent mode in the blogosphere) as mere "communication": I think there is a comparison between some C-List bloggers and student radio stations, or pirate radio stations. We have a limited audience, perhaps even no audience. But we're broadcasting because we believe that our ideas have some inherent value. Which is more reminiscent of the attitude of 19th-century pamphleteers than of that of a bunch of teens in the food court. There is indeed a qualitative difference between blogging and conversing among friends as we are used to doing it: the conversation is persistent and strangers may peek in, sometimes in the middle of the conversation, sometimes months later, following some obscure link or a lucky Google query. Linkable conversations enable new interested parties to connect the way ordinary conversation simply doesn't. So how should we frame the activity? By considering the audience, or the author? If we take the intent of the author as the starting point, "broadcast" may be the appropriate term - even given a nano-audience. [Seb's Open Research] 11:29:06 AM
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Google gaffe on blogging tools - old style marketing collides with web reality?.
I'm inclined here to view this as a case in point of "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's Razor). Now the stupidity in question may likely be that of some techno-challenged marketing type who still insists on viewing the universe through a lens of "customer as couch potato," where this sort of tweak could and would work because anybody who might catch the "error" would have no effective way to communicate to the masses of other couch potatos out there. Ironic that the error is about the very tools that are continuing the shift in power from organizations to people. It will be interesting to see how quickly this mistake gets corrected and whether the explanation will be rooted in a classic couch potato marketing mindset or something else. [McGee's Musings]11:27:05 AM
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Peter Merholz is taking some interesting notes at .... Peter Merholz is taking some interesting notes at the HITS Conference (Humans | Interaction | Technology | Strategy) this week. The conference is focused on interaction design and business strategy, but much of what he's learning could be translated into e-learning terms without losing any value. In Part 1, he's got a great diagram showing how the needs of stakeholders in a project should be interrelated, and compares it with how it usually works, using Technologist, Client, Customer and User. In e-learning, you could translate those to Technologist/Designer, School, Teacher, and Student. Ideally, there would be lots of communication and between all stakeholders to ensure the best learning experience:  But in reality, projects or purchases get done in waterfall fashion, pulled out of the classic venn diagram into a chain. As Peter points out, this "resembles the child's game 'telephone,' where the fidelity of the message degrades as it passes from person to person."  If the designer isn't in contact with the end user, how can the learning environment/software/course/resource be designed to optimize their experience? [Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology] 11:25:19 AM
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More thoughts on 'Surviving Course Development Wars'. http://www.xplana.com/articles/archives/course_dev_wars This piece by Susan Smith Nash on Xplana made me laugh. I wonder if anyone working in online instructional development in post-secondary *hasn't* experienced this kind of situation... 11:23:22 AM
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June Lester on the 'SME's Viewpoint'. http://thejuniverse.blogs.com/afterhours/ June Lester is a mathematician and an educator, and one of the people brave enough to help facilitate the 'blogtalk' we tried over the last few weeks. She's posted a great piece on the frustration a 'SME' can feel in the so-called 'course-development wars.' She's right of course - subject matter experts in education have also often taught the material before and understand quite well how to communicate it's intricacies, and treating them solely as providers of content will almost certainly produce a lesser learning experience (as well as antagonize them.) ... [EdTechPost]11:22:25 AM
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"The proper way to become an instructional technologist". http://www.listserv.uga.edu/cgi-bin/wa? Digging back through the ITFORUM mailing list archives for that last post brought me across this gem by Lloyd Rieber of The University of Georgia. It was originally delivered as the 1998 Peter Dean Lecture, but I'm linking to this version because of all of the interesting discussion on the mailing list it generated. - SWL [EdTechPost]11:21:04 AM
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Last update: 11/19/2005; 4:41:41 PM .
