CogBlogged from ‘January, 2004’

This year marks a number of ten year anniversaries for the web site we created in December 1993 for my office, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI). This ran on a humble Macintosh SE/30 sitting on a table in the hallway– the very first web server in our organization, running what was then the free MacHTTP server software. As a former geologist, all of our machines in our office had domain names chosen after minerals or rocks, and the original URL for our server was http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ (which still works). For those unfortunate enough not to have trained in geology, we have an explanation for what “hakatai” means. It was 10 years ago tomorrow (January 15) that we submitted our site to the NCSA What’s New Page– this was at that time the one and only place to go to check out new web sites that were sprouting up [...]

Another squirrely thing about MovableType right out of the box is that the category archive templates it create is more or less a never-ending appending of your posts to a long scrolling archive. It hardly seems useful once you have blogged say 10, 20 entries in a category, much less if you have written long pieces and/or embedded images. Previously I wrote about my funky strategy for creating two sets of category archives, the recent 20 linked to “all the rest”, but I have modified the output templates to produce more or less a title/abstract view (example) rather than a mimic of the original post, with a link to the full post (the individual archive, old example)…

More changes I forgot in the MovableType structure of CDB. Previously, when I had a poor grasp on MT templates, I had separate index templates for each of my category RSS feeds, thinking there was not a way to generalize that. This was sloppy, requiring new templates for every category I decided to add, and the more index rebuilds you ask MT to do, it seems to get a bit clunkier. Here is how I created generalized RSS feeds (okay, they are still RSS 1.0, but I’ve yet to figure out why I need 2.0 or pie or Atom or whatever else it is called these days. I am open to having my paw slapped)…

This rightfully belongs with the recent barking on Repository Follies– a few weeks back Scott Leslie made reference to “Best Faculty-level presentation on Learning Objects from the last 18 months”– a vintage 2002 keynote by William Horton titled “Don’t Bother Me With Learning Objects! I’ve Got a Course to Teach!, a worthwhile 4.3 Mb PDF: http://www.designingwbt.com/content/madison/objectkeynote.pdf As usual, Scott is right on target. I doubly agree with Scott that this is a must read for anyone involved with or scheming about learning objects. This is of course a series of slides and we are missing what is likely much more in the presentation, but among the gems: Lego Analogy Requirement “… all speeches, presentations, or documents on learning objects, or content objects, whether in person, on paper, or online, must contain at least one picture or three verbal mentions of Lego blocks as a metaphor for objects.” There are the [...]

A new year. Time to look around the house and tidy up. I had grandiose plans for some new weblog features here at CDB, but like many year-end resolutions, fell a bit short. One thing I did (and partially messed up) was to change the URL and location of the individual archives created by MovableType. Out of the box, you typically end of with your blog postings having URLs such as: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/000379.html e.g. creating sequentially numbered URLs which are nice if you are a database and like references such as “000379″, but the URL itself says nothing about the content at all. I decided to make some changes, with the resulting same post now residing at: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/2003/12/22/rss_winterfest.html Which lets you know by looking at the URL (with some guessing) that this post is was made December 22, 2003 and has something to do with RSS and a winter festival (maybe). [...]

As a brighter followup to the repository folly, I am excited by an event planned next week by a lead faculty member in the Nutrition area at one of our colleges. As she explained, there are not a large number of faculty in this discipline across of colleges and many of the classroom teachers are adjunct faculty, so as a group, they were interested in creating a collection of sharable teaching resources they could all draw from as needed. “Wow maybe we should build….. nahhh, it already exists!” Luckily, Maureen actually reads the emails I blitz about the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). and she was willing and interested to arrange a discipline focused effort to build a collection that would be useful in her field..

By rule, I usually avoid use of the “R-word” (repository, too close to the “S-word”), but wanted to launch, here just a few notches into a new calendar, my pessimism on the aspirations of those creating these magical collections of “learning objects.” The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used. They pay lip service to the concept but the action is not there. A bigger folly is that they would have the gumption to complete a “meta-data” form on top of that. I am more convinced is that the loop is far from closed as we lack anything that can easily build meaningful things from these R-places. We have piles of meta-data on top of objects… and that is about all. But following the pessimism is maybe a small ray of sunshine (next post). This is fueled largely [...]

Ahhh, there is nothing like literate, thoughtful email feedback… if only it happened more often than Arizona blizzards. For more than 9 years, we have gotten a stream of emails via our free, online Writing HTML Tutorial, most coming from lesson 12 where we teach you how to write a hyperlink that triggers an email. At the time, I had the naively bright idea to provide a test link that opens a blank email message that is sent to me, so for the past 9 years, I get almost daily feedback from almost every internet domain you can think of. We have organized the more than 3300 responses in a place that generates 10 randomly at a time many of them small vignettes of what people can do with a little bit of self-inflicted knowledge. But back to today’s inbox, comes this coherent message from a youth at a local [...]

I spent too much of today fiddling around with setting up a wiki on our new Jade server. This was at the request of one of our most intrpeid and adventurous faculty members, one I hooked on HTML in 1994, roped into blogs last year, and he’s already to push the envelope out past Mars. The obliqure reference in the post title is that I am about 150 miles southeast of the aptly named small Arizona town of “Wikieup” on the wild highway between Phoenix and Las Vegas. There are about 1000 various wiki systems to choose from, and it is hard to know one from another, and today I played with OddMuse, a descendent of UseMod– it seemed to be one that had some flexibility for features like RSS and rolling as a weblog. Most of it was fiddling with a new style sheet for formatting, and going back [...]

Dave‘s got an interesting round-up at the OPML corral, “Share your OMPL”.. Yikes, another acronym! If you dig a bit deeper it comes up as Outline Processer Markup Language , now that is much more clear! Huh? Think of of it as a way to use XML to represent outline forms of content, which if you are like me, rushes back memories of tedious grade school grammar exercises on proper formats for outlines, roman numerals and such nonsense. But there is a very strong tie to our other favorite acronym, RSS. Software can use the OPML format to represent a collection of RSS feeds. Most of the more decent RSS aggregator software programs allow you to export and import your collections of RSS sites as an OPML file. For example, I use NetNewsWire to store my regularly read feeds at: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/cdb.opml It makes it easy to transport my feed list [...]