Another interesting xplana article... quoting Laura Gibbs

"Last week I did a quick survey of how the Internet and web publishing can completely change the way students write - the Internet gives students a real audience for their writing, it expands the content of their writing (images!), allowing them to link and be-linked-to, while promoting continual revision throughout the semester. Does Blackboard, a web-based course management system, take advantage of any of these features? It does not."

And therein lies one of the key issues! Great to hear others suffering.... kinda.

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Another quote from the article: "Blackboard uses all the jargon of the Internet, without fundamentally changing anything." You could say that about a LOT of elearning software, systems, and content, unfortunately. And as Laura points out elsewhere, in many cases it seems that software publishers in the elearning realm have never spoken to an actual learner. <sigh>

1:35:48 PM    

Interesting website about collaboration and community. Hmmmm... this links in quite nicely!

Finaly got "Design for community"... looking forward to digging in, I love the way Powazek writes!

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Also for followup (see previous notes).

1:25:37 PM    

Six factors to consider in planning online distance learning programs..... Excellent paper pointed to on Carving Code [James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Posting this for possible followup in The Journal.

1:23:06 PM    

RSS in WebCT. Now, this is really cool! [James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

Excellent! You could also use that RSS feed to place learning objects into WebCT courses. The article explains completely how to do all the steps needed -- and these steps apply to ANY system, not just WebCT! Needed this last week for the *&@! article I am struggling with for The Journal.

1:15:24 PM    

Real Value Real Tme Communication. Via elearningpost a very interesting article looking at the extensive use of IM... but not in education. It's an interesting question - and one that 'aint goig to go away - as to the value of IM in various educational settings. [James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

IM may turn out to be useful in at least two contexts for e-Learning: to enhance collaboration between students, and to facilitate courseware development. We just published an article in the eLearning Developers' Journal that showed how the development teams on a very large project for a US national retailer used text pagers to accomplish the latter. If they had all had WiFi-enabled PDAs, they might have better used IM. (Full disclosure to anyone who may read this: I am the editor of the Journal.)

1:10:06 PM    

Interview.

Interview with James Farmer, posted on Xplana.

"I'd like to see technology enhance education in terms of communication and community. I think that we are now becoming more able to embrace the opportunities the net offers us in terms of communication and community. Perhaps a move away from systems design to design which reflects how people really learn. Earl W. Stevick said it in 1970 but I sometimes feel that we're just catching on... the most important aspect of education is 'what goes on inside and between the people in the room' (or online classroom, chatroom, discussion board, Inter/Intranet etc.). The more we reflect on and learn from this, the better."

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

More evidence of a growing movement in the world of education. Is this another rift, or is it where we are all headed? Why do so many people feel that it is a case of EITHER systems design OR whatever-you-call-this (facilitation? collaborative learning?). I am very uncomfortable with either/or dichotomies. Embracing them leads to dogmatic approaches to teaching and learning, and haven't we had enough of those? (Not to be dogmatic about it or anything.) Not to mention my deeeeep suspicion that many who object to a systems approach are actually objecting being held accountable, or to having to do something besides lecture, lecture, lecture.

1:01:39 PM    

Check out Open-Education.org, which seems to be promoting the exciting old concept of public domain digital content resources for educational resources.

Thanks to Scott Leslie's EdTechPost, 04/15/02003

11:15:11 AM    

Step-by-step primer on RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS is a protocol, an application of XML, that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content. Using RSS files, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from your Web site. Users can have constantly updated content from web sites delivered to them via a news aggregator, a piece of software specifically tailored to receive these types of feeds. RSS is the hottest thing in Web communication. It powers many popular applications such as weblogs, knowledge management networks, and news syndication.

Weblogging, a term coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997, is one of the most popular and fast growing applications of RSS. A blog is someone's personal dated 'log' frequently updated with new information about a particular subject or range of subjects.
[State of Utah Government Information Locator Service]

This is oriented toward weblogging, but it does a good job of explaining how to build an RSS feed.

11:04:42 AM    

XHTML Syndication Module.

Abstract

This document is meant to document the Syndication module for XHTML. This module defines a namespace and arttibutes that live in that namespace that allow an XHTML web page to be syndicated.

Motivation

The motivation for this document is to do away with RSS as a seperate file format. If web publishers and CMSs want to participate in content syndication then they have to produce two versions of their front page, the HTML version and the RSS version. A careful inspection of XHTML and common web practice shows that most of the information need to do syndication already exists in web pages published today. What is needed is a little extra information to make syndication possible.

[Joe Gregorio]

This is from July 2002. More to study. Not everyone likes RSS.

10:58:52 AM    

Userland knows how.

John Robb says Tiernan Ray is all wet. OK, John -- show me how to structure knowledge in weblogs so that I can find something when I need it without having to look through back logs and archives for a half hour.

10:21:14 AM    

Tiernan Ray: Why Blogs Haven't Stormed the Business World. [Scripting News]

This is a great summary of the problems I have been pointing out for the past two years. Weblogs as they are now are just not good knowledge repositories. Without indexing or metadata and no convenient way to find what you're looking for, they remain like my Moleskine notebook - repositories of the moment, collections of ideas and memoranda. I read about one man who actually created a little index on the last few pages of each of his Moleskines, but that is a time-consuming effort that only hits the high points of what is on each page, or indexes pages to dates. In Radio, I have tried to do some organization with Categories and it is a similarly messy way to do the job. After months (over a year, actually) of this, I could no more quickly find a specific citation in my weblogs than I could do handsprings across the office. Plus I have deleted all entries and started over again in frustration at least twice. If there are back archives of what I dropped, I have no idea how to get to them.

So, I love my weblog(s), but as journals and notes and a way to capture what is going on day to day, but not as repositories.

9:43:27 AM