Home-Based Entrepreneur

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

DrupalEd and Usability.. Marc points out that usablity is coming to Drupal, adding to that there is also an active usablity and theming design dialog going on at DrupalEd. Educators interested in seeing drupal improved for educational uses should get involved.Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement Marc's Voice: Usability comes to Drupal [ClinedbloG - Elearning from the trenches.]
11:09:23 PM

DrupalEd Launchs New Distro of Drupal for Education.. A new community has recently launched for the creation of a Drupal distribution for education. Ideas are being tossed around and there's some interesting stuff going on, get engaged!
What is DrupalED?

DrupalED is a distribution that combines core Drupal.org
with a selection of modules optimized for use in educational settings.
These range from K-12 to university, as well as per-class,
per-department, and per-institution scenarios. [ClinedbloG - Elearning from the trenches.]
11:09:07 PM

The Road To Powerful Instant Vertical Communities: Personal Media Aggregators. Robin talks here about P2P for E-learning "For example, can you imagine a P2P network devoted only to
learning and educational materials? Imagine if a major academic
organization created a PMA that allowed access, not only to the
selected educational feeds that it originated or selected to provide,
but also to the opportunity to meet and interact with others in this
like-minded virtual club."And i just wanted to point out that they are doing just that over at Pen State with Lionshare "The Lionshare P2P project is an innovative effort to facilitate
legitimate file-sharing among individuals and educational institutions
around the world. By using Peer to Peer (P2P) technology and
incorporating features such as authentication, directory servers, and
owner controlled sharing of files, Lionshare promises secure
file-sharing capabilities for the easy exchange of image collections,
video archives, large data collections, and other types of academic
information. In addition to authenticated file-sharing capabilities,
the developing Lionshare technology will also provide users with
resources for organizing, storing, and retrieving digital files." [ClinedbloG - Elearning from the trenches.]
11:08:50 PM

Drupal for educational sites: quiz module. I'm re-broadcasting this message because it fits rather well with the focus of this site. Not much to add here except it looks like allot of good work has already been done in this direction, please follow the link for a more n'fo.Drupal for educational sites: quiz module - I am interested in spearheading the development of a module that allows the creation of quizzes, administers them and keeps records of users' performance. This module would be aimed at educational sites where users come to test thier skills and understanding. I would like initial feedback from the community to guage interest and to find out if anybody has already begun work in this direction. [drupal] [ClinedbloG - Elearning from the trenches.]
11:08:11 PM

Four ways to use wikis for project management. Both of these postsÂ make some excellent suggestions, lets all take note!Four ways to use wikis for project management - Following hard on the heels of 10 ways to use blogs for project management, here's some thoughts on how we've been using wikis in a project management environment.

Planning meeting agendas

The task of planning agendas normally falls to one unfortunate, who's then bombarded by emails from all quarters. Rather than stand underneath the deluge, why not plan the agenda on a wiki page? Anyone who needs to add an agenda point can do it themselves, adding notes and background information as required -- and once the organiser decides that the agenda is set, the page can be locked to prevent further changes. [ClinedbloG - Elearning from the trenches.]
11:07:55 PM

Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata. A meme worth touching on here...
Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication
Through Shared Metadata

Adam Mathes

December 2004
This paper examines user-âАНgenerated metadata
as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share [ClinedbloG - Elearning from the trenches.]
11:07:27 PM

What is needed in a Learning Environment?. I have been giving some thought as to what exactly we are
trying to accomplish with deployment of an LMS. Our learners and our
organization has a set of very unique needs and meeting those is a
pre-qualification of deployment. So it seems that we are in the predicament of
removing much of the functionality of our LMS and possibly lessening the
environment for learning. So i ask myself:

What is needed in a Learning Environment?
Pulled from the excellent article

Learning Management Systems:
The wrong place to start learning
located at http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/lms.htm [ClinedbloG - Elearning from the trenches.]
11:06:47 PM

Jeremy Asks: How Do You Learn to Search?.

Last night at a book event at Books Inc in Mountain View, a fellow asked me a question that made me think - in short, he asked why there was so much useless information on the web. Put another way, he was expressing frustration with search results - so often we can't find what we are looking for. I responded that - while it's possible he might not like this answer - we as users of search need to get better at searching. And by that I don't mean smarter about how to use advanced features, or how to find the perfect query, but rather at critical thinking, at reviewing and critiquing a set of results, learning from what is and is not there, and refining our searches as a result. And that the only way that is going to happen is if our educational system values critical thinking skills over rote testing.

Today as I was waiting between interminable radio interviews (yes, I am being a cranky author now, after all, I got up at 3.30 am, I'm allowed), I read this post from Jeremy. From it:

....I wished that someone could have been watching the query stream and stopped the user to say "hey, I see what you're trying to find.... try this instead." I felt like there was a missing link.
I think education and training are that missing link.
We search engines try to make the world look all simple, uniform, and tidy. There's a little text box you type into and a button you can hit to get what you want back. Except that it doesn't always work that way. Many times people don't find what they need on the first try or two. But they don't know where to go next, how to refine a query, or what their options are. There's no librarian to help. Few of them will ever see our Advanced Search page or realize they can restrict searches to a subset of languages.
The question I started this ramble with is largely rhetorical, since I know that the vast majority of folks have never been "trained" to search in any way. But I suspect many would benefit from even 10-15 minutes of education.
Are schools handling this yet? Or do they mostly assume that the search box is self-explanatory?
It made me think - perhaps it is just a matter of some simple training. Or maybe it's a bit of both, as the more one learns how to search, the more pointers one gets, the more one might develop critical thinking skills essential to good searching. I wonder, is there an opportunity there somewhere?
In any case, it sure would be cool to watch as master searchers went on journeys of discovery and explorations. I wrote about this in the book, referencing V. Bush's Memex as the basic principle. ... OK, back to the radio now...

Gary on this....

[John Battelle's Searchblog]
11:06:21 PM

Barking up the wrong tree. Newspapers turn to podcasting to shore up readership among younger demos. The logic goes like this: kids are way into iPods; podcasting is related to iPods; therefore podcasting is the ticket to the young audience. I've seen the general idea quoted by expert after expert including the big tech analysts, and it never feels quite right to me. I don't think it's a youth phenomenon. For one thing, there's a recent survey saying it's not the case. And anecdotally, I'm around a lot... [learnandteachonline.com]
11:05:49 PM

Numbers Show Economic Lag Before Storm. WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 (AP) - Hurricane Katrina is eating into the economy, leading to concern that consumers will lose confidence and curtail spending. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. [NYT > Business]
11:05:22 PM

Google Blog Search.

Google Blog . Name your topic and Google will find you all the weblogs that address it. Thanx and a hat tip to George Siemens at [elearnspace]

Google's Blog Search is NOT Blog Search, Opinions. From: Nick W / Threadwatch.org
Direct link to item

tech.memeorandum permalink

12:37:16 PM

A pair of articles every e-Learning producer should read.

Web 2.0 for Designers.

What is this "Web 2.0" business we keep seeing referenced lately? This article introduces the concept and is vital reading for developers and managers as well as for designers.

"Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into УmicrocontentФ units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now weТre looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.

The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now weТre looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.