CogBlogged from ‘February, 2004’

According to Amy Gahran, RSS needs a better name. These are suggestions for a new colloquial name for RSS, since acronyms are inherently geeky and tend to alienate nontechnical people. The intention of this contest is to come up with a common-usage term that will help make RSS more accessible to a mass audience – similar to how the term “World Wide Web” fosters greater popular interest than “HTML.” Huh? How exactly does one equate ‘World Wide Web’ to ‘HTML’? Oh yes, I always get mixed up and say “I will SMTP this to you” rather than “I am e-mailing you”! Anyhow, Amy has created a contest to bless the new name. How about a sampling: Fread, Freshware, gates, gen, GetFeed, g-info, Glue, Grapevine, grate, Headline Broadcast Format, Headline Synch Service, Heads&Tales, Hotlink, ReadyHeads, Real News, Real Syndication System, Relay, Remote Headline Feed, ReSScue, Resurrective Realtime, Channel2U, CheckPost, Chum, Cindycation, [...]

I’ve just taken a brief look at PubSub following some mentions at the RSS Winterfest. This service takes a different angle on aggregating feeds, almost “Downse-ian” like EduRSS in that you can track among thousands (they say) of RSS feeds for particular keyword searches. And the results are presented to you via RSS! PubSub lets you filter over one million weblogs and information streams to find the content you’re looking for, in real time. It’s like searching the future. “Searching the future” is a stretch (maybe it is “RSS is here just not evenly distributed”??) but it does some to be looking at RSS sideways- rather than tracking down the sites for the sources of RSS feeds, you end of setting up custom feeds for keyword searches (curious to know if it picks up things not found in Feedster). For example, I created an account to track the matches on [...]

Previously on CDB, on the doubts of “Learning object repositories”… “The folly is that educators will give up some time to share information about resources they have created or used”. Now a different slant. I had lunch recently with a colleague working on a new grant funded project– creating discipline-specific “learning objects” and yes, their project was also going to build Yet Another Repository. The definition of “learning objects” was so vague, it was almost white text on white paper. “Online instructional learning modules that are innovative and engaging” was pretty much it. And while this person did say they had considered my suggestion of just using MERLOT to deposit the so-called objects, that was discarded were going to spend time building a new database. There is nothing wrong with building a collection. Heck, I thought it was worth it. Maybe someday we might need a “repository of repositories” but [...]

Just took a quick at Furl, a new web site for organizing bookmarks centrally (tip of the blog hat to Seb). The concept is not new at all, but I have found most of these sorts (e.g. BackFlip) too tedious to maintain. It’s gotta be simple. Bookmarks/favorites in web browsers have hardly evolved since Mosaic. Even when organized into folders, once past a few hundred, they are unwieldy. And I cannot tell you how many times I was looking for a web site only to realize I had marked it on the home computer. I have resorted to emailing myself URLs on my IMAP account. But Furl stores them centrally, with flexible topic names, and…. (drum roll please) RSS feeds for my own “Furls”, even feeds for topics within. Now that is different. Adding a new site to one’s Furl’ed collection is matter of a click of a link on [...]

On its own, blogging is nicely permeating among some of our faculty. At this Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting, we have 4 demos of different ways weblogs are currently in use at Maricopa. A brief preview for those who cannot be at Phoenix College Friday…

One of my procrastinated pending projects was updating our Learning English Electronically (LEE) CD-ROM software, a still well-used English Grammar coded with Macromedia Director 5.0 in 1998 and updated last in 2000. I had read some time ago that Director Apps needed to be authored in at least version 8.5.1 to run in Windows XP environment, which is the main platform at our college that uses LEE the most. In November, I had done some quick dusting off of this really old code, and found about 12 places in each lesson (out of 110 lessons) that needed to be changed.With luck, I may have been able to write a script to walk through and update. Maybe. As luck would have it, I kept putting this one off. I had not heard any problems reported so, why not procrastinate? For some reason (I think it was lack of an XP test [...]

Trying another “new aiming to be regular” CDB feature, highlighting an interesting “”package” from the Maricopa Learning eXchange. This is is special because it is not a “reusable learning object” (RLO) but a ‘reusable idea object” (RIO?) Maybe we can breed a whole raft of meaningless acronyms, like RCA (re-usable classroom activity), RCS (reusable communication strategy), RCP (reusable class project), etc. But again I digress. This one is also special because it comes from a long time veteran teacher, both a passionate teacher in class and online, someone with an uncanny knack to truly reach and touch her students, and someone who excels and doing effective things with rather simple but effective strategies. I recall these computer workshops Donna and I did back in the mid 1990s, typically in those computer classrooms where the participants were more or less huddled behind monitors- she brought out a classroom technique she called [...]