CogBlogged from ‘September, 2003’

This is the first glance at a new part of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), what we are calling MLX Special Collections: An MLX special collection is a set of packages associated with a specific project or program. We created this functionality to provide unique MLX URLs that would generate a listing as well as to provide a search functionality in the project web sites. As prototypes, we have created a few collections for projects such as Systemic Reform In Science (SyRIS) modules and an internal Learning Grants program. This is all part of our tireless campaign to build in services and value to different programs and groups within our organization. Bascially, all items added to the MLX now have a field in the creation form. If the item is to be associated with a special collection, the person entering it inserts a 4 character code (just like the discount [...]

Thank Jeremy Hiebert for sharing via his blog Old-School Adminstration of Online Learning’ÄÝ . Jeremy is very favorable of his online learning experience at Memorial University, which is a miracle considering the administrative hurdles placed before him. It is amazing students manage to learn online despite that our institutions are still operating in the wrong century. Within the program, which is all online, specific courses tend to be run reasonably well, but the administration of the overall program is almost hilariously out of touch. They don’t seem to understand that students learning online require a different way of operating. Jeremy goes on to describe unapplicable fees for recreational facilities he will never use, and a deans approval required at almost every step of the way. I’m feeling locked-in now, but if I found out that UBC or another university offered a similar program at a similar price with better service, [...]

Just came across the nifty MT Plugin: OtherBlog. This allows MovableTyple blogs to be able to include content on the same server. Plugin based way of including posts/info from other blogs on the same installation. I’ve yet to even try it, but I can already think about our BlogShop a way to provide a “super-blog” that would assemble content from the blogs of participants in the workshop (assuming they actually continue posting content after the workshop;-) But there could be other uses, but need to let it distill a bit on my brain. If you are hosting more than one blog on a server, it has potential for bridging content. <tiphat>tip of the blog hat to IDBlog </tiphat>

This looks rather useful for weblogers who are still mired in the out of the box templates: Firdamatic: the Design Tool for the Uninspired Webloggers “is an online tableless HTML layout generator that allows you to create and customise layouts easily only by completing forms, making creating skins for your Firdamatic-based layout a breeze.” Not too sure what the “Fird” part means and the URL is kind of funny, but this is by the same person who did the Book of Styles site (now temporarily offline) a worthy design site indeed. You simply edit information about your blog in a web form, make some selections for colors and fonts, the name of your blog tool (Blogger, MovabltType) and Shazam! the Firdamatic creates a fully XHTML compliant, table-less template for your blog. It can make two column or three column layouts for you in a jiffy. In about 5 minutes time, [...]

Awesome, this is a step up in usefulness for Bloglinesthe online RSS aggregator. You can now make the collections of feeds you post on BlogLines public, and thus collections of feeds can be shared via a simple URL. Actually I had submitted this as a suggested feature when I looked at the site a few clicks ago. It is nice to know they take ideas seriously! <tiphat>tip of the bloghat to Will Richardson<\tiphat> This creates some interesting potential for ways to have individuals or groups share RSS resources, or as Will iimplied, a way to build a gateway to a collection of feeds for say a group of classes or projects. For example, here are Bloglines | cogdog’s Blogs– I had imported my OPML exported from NetNewsWire, but Bloglines got a few feeds declared wrong as folders, and I did not want to spend too much time re-arranging. I added [...]

Okay, this dog is going to anger management. After our recent barking on Sipping MERLOT’s RSS Feeds: Is this Boone’s Farm or Dom Perignon?, we enjoyed some good discussion with some MERLOT insiders. The bottom line is that MERLOT still has a fabulous wealth of intstructional resources, and should be on the Bookmark list of every faculty and on the Frequently referred list of all technology folks that work with teachers. All of us should be contributing the MERLOT. It is the “Big Daddy” of “learning object repositories” and a prime example of how it can grow once the number of items inside reaches a useful tipping point. (1) MERLOT finally has a good number of useful RSS feeds that will soon be integrated into the main site. (2) They are considering creating a developer’s weblog that will better communicate what is brewing in the back of the wine lab. [...]

This dog is angry. Spam is a reality, some 40% of email traffic. But there is absolutely no reason for the email scanning systems put in place to be sending reject emails back to accounts when the viruses generating them are spoofing (forging) the emails. I cannot be the only person wasting work time deleting messages from “Network Associates Webshield”, “MAILER-DAEMON”. “postmaster-smtp”, “McAfee” etc telling me that some message I did not send was rejected, e,g: From: “PERNOTES” Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 7:40:17 AM America/Phoenix Subject: Report to Sender Incident Information:- The file attachment your_details.pif you sent to the recipients listed above was infected with the W32/Sobig.f@MM virus and was not successfully cleaned. From: postmaster-smtp-am Date: Tue Sep 9, 2003 6:38:03 AM America/Phoenix To: xxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx Subject: Delivery Report (failure) for RM186061@xxxxx.com Attachments: There is 1 attachment This report relates to your message: Subject: Re: Details, Message-ID: <200309091216.HAA20040@mailgate1.xxxxx.com>, To: <RM186061@xxxxxx.com> [...]

Dynamic RSS feeds are available now from searches performed at my.OAI, the tool for digging through a series of idatabases available as Open Archives. my.OAI is a full-featured search engine to a selected list of metadata databases from the Open Archives Initiative project. All searches performed at my.OAI, even is guest mode are returned with your favorite orange XML icon (un-MERLOT like! ;-) making them available for syndication and retrieval in your favorite RSS aggregator. <tiphat to a friend in Melbourne!>

I’ve been tinkering a bit with the site here- getting into adding new MovableType templates and moving commonly used code pieces into modules, but more or less, this is mild hacking away until it works. The additions include some new categories: * MLX – about the Maricopa Learning eXchange) * RSS – all the stuff posted about using RSS and the experiments we have done around here * Using MovableType tips and other things we learn along the way. All categories, of course, have their own RSS feeds. This was in tandem with moving the top navigation from a series of horizontally spreading links, to a drop down menu navigation for going to the categories. This in turn led to adding more pieces, and some of these in turn caused even more dribbles of changes…

Still getting used to my new iSight, a nifty fireware camera for Apple OSX computers coupled with iChat AV allows beautifully clear, sharp, audio/video chat via broadband connections. Not only is it well-designed in typical Apple fashion (oops, there goes my bias), but what I also enjoyed was the cleverness of the package it came in and a refreshingly small but clear instruction guide which unlike 90% of other computer manuals, makes sense to most humans without leafing thorugh 90 pages of gibberish in 18 languages. Let’s open up the box…