CogBlogged from ‘May, 2004’

The URL declares what RSS stands for? http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/ peeked open just recently, Dave Winer’s effort (I llike the initial tone) to have a place to talk more about what RSS can do rather than what it stands for or the intracacies of XML. The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available. RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. It’s big. A lot bigger than a format. This is the inaugural post for a new website devoted to the community of people who create and use RSS. It’s just a beginning. Good. But wait. Yikes, but look at the banner and tagline: Really Simple Syndication Everything a non-tech [...]

From some previous visits with excellent learning leaders in Australia and continued contacts with colleagues there, I was asked to be audio interviewed online June 2 (here) via the LearningTimes site “Live Session: RSS, Blogging and What it Means for Teaching and Learning” (It is free, but you need to join LearningTimes): Participate in this international live interview on “RSS, Blogging and What it Means for Teaching and Learning” with Alan Levine of Maricopa Community College and Garry Putland of EdNA Online (Australia). Michael Chalk (Australia) will conduct the interview, supported by LearningTimes member Michael Coghlan. This event coincides with the launch of Edition 5 (June 2004) of the Knowledge Tree e-Journal of Flexible Learning in Vocational Education and Training where Michael Coghlan’s eagerly awaited article ‘Finding Your Voice Online’ is available for download. I am quite humbled to be billed as such (just to show that the reality distortion [...]

Thanks to a friend inside Blackboard, I got a peek a few weeks ago at a Building Block (plug-ins for Blackboard) that provides a wiki functionality inside the Blackboard environment. I’d put up some screen shots, but the Bb Showcase site seems to be offline right now. What was interesting was the shying away from even the use of “wiki” and they software had created a WYSIWYG interface for doing the wiki editing- no need for remembering the various arcane wiki editing protocols (which make sense only to the people who use one particular wiki on a regular basis) or the funky variations on linking method. rather than dealing with CamelCase, you just click a button to create a new wiki page. Also, from what I understand, you can have a separate wiki-space for student groups you create as a Bb instructor, and the view history functionality essentially is a [...]

One of our faculty members taking on leadership of our learning objects action group is getting up to speed on learning about learning objects…. Donna sent this “Cliff Notes” version of SCORM: This is an overview of the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model.  It’s hard to make technical standards understandable (much less interesting).  Nonetheless, here’s the cliff notes version of what  you need to know about SCORM. SCORM is a suite of technical standards that enable web-based learning systems to find, import, share, reuse, and export learning content in a standardized way.  (See ADL Background for how SCORM came to be.)  Note that SCORM is written primarily for vendors and toolmakers who build Learning Management Systems and learning content authoring tools so they know what they need to do to their products to conform with SCORM technically.  A “Designer’s Guide” for implementing SCORM is in the works.  Stay tuned. It [...]

It’s been nice getting wide and praising notes, comments, trackbask about the new Feed2RSS– I must admit being eager to rush it out and while the MagpieRSS seems to be running smoothly, I had a few minor goofs that others have nicely pointed out. If you started using the new version or have downloaded it, you may want to get a fresh copy especially for the build.php and the feed2js.php files. I did find that I had a goof where some of the build scripts were generating “html=1” for the NOSCRIPT option when really it needs to be html=y. I wavered between using “y”/”n” for vairable values versus 1/0 and forgot to get all of them in synch. Check any of your newly applied NOSCRIPT script calls to make sure it ends in html=y. Gerry Paille kindly noted that there was a better way to deal with PHP sites where [...]

Colen is hard at work on re-coding the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) for the proposed open-source version we hope to make available as an alpha soon. There is a good deal of restructuring of the code libraries, yanking some code logic from individual PHP files and putting them in the libraries, outlining some functionality needed for some basic admin tools. But we have the database and a crude version sort of running on a test box (don’t ask for a URL… yet). One of the interesting things to be changed is how we organize the packages in the Maricopa MLX- the main organizing unit is by colleges, so searches and RSS feeds can be filtered within a specific college’s contributions. In a sense, every person who creates an account in the MLX has an affiliation with one of our colleges, so that any packages that create are automatically associated with [...]

Just in a few hours of announcing yesterday our new version of the Feed2JS (RSS to JavaScript service/code), David Carter-Tod zoomed out the gate, downloaded the code, and had it up and running in Virginia. As well, he found a minor bug (pesky missing semi-colon) and reminded me to deal with the server parameters for the build.php script for sites where register globals is off. Anyhow, I set up a little form where you can share a web site name and URL where the new version is being used/hosted, that gets added to the list of examples. In addition, I had wavered back and forth about including a list of RSS resources, as there are already piles of lists out there. It was not there yesterday, but today a starting one is available as I realized I wanted to include a collection of other sites that offer the same sort [...]

As hinted, I have just posted an updated version of the RSS to JavaScript service/code we created in April 2003. The new one is now called Feed2JS and features a number of enhancements- primarily an adoption of the open-source Magpie RSS parser, to replace the unsupported OnysRSS parser previously used. Magpie allows us to provide this support for Atom feeds. We have also added options to allow you to truncate the item descriptions by a specified number of characters as well as a new parameter to set links from the feeds to open in either a new browser window or the same window. Also, to make things simpler, we can generate the HTML version form the same script (for noscript tags, so we do not leave the JavaScript-less out in the cold). For anyone using the older version, now archived at http://feed2js.org/rss2js2003.html, it will continue to run and the code [...]

This dog will not blog… for the next 4 days. I’m off for some backpack time around the edge of the Mogollon Rim, in the Coconino National Forest. Given drought conditions of the last several years, a rather dry winter, it will only be maybe a week or two before fire restrictions and closures shut off the forest areas. So this is the time to hit the trail…

Mena at SixApart is fishing for trackbacks to share how MovableType is being used. Here’s another one for the education realm. My initial foray with this CogDogBlog has been to document our instructional technology projects that support the 10 colleges of the Maricopa Community College systems, as well as commentary on technology. This server supports 10 blogs with about 14 authors, many whom are colleagues at our colleges tghat I am trying to get exposed to the educational potential for blogs. Three are from our college centers for teaching and learning, including Mesa Community College’s CTL, Chandler-Gilbert Community College’s TLC, and South Mountain Community College’s TLC. Another is an art faculty member who is describing how he has been using Photoblogs with his students. In June 2003, I created an online workshop, or “BlogShop for teachers at one of our colleges to introduce MovableType as a potential electronic portfolio tool, [...]