CogBlogged from ‘June, 2004’

Wikis are the buzz. Like Amy Gahran (Learning with (and from) Wiki), I have been quietly ‘intrigued” by wikis, while trying to get past the mind-bending thought of creating a web site that anyone, anywhere can change on you. And I agree completely with Amy’s issue: In my opinion , the biggest stumbling block with wikis is that most of them have absolutely terrible user interfaces. They expose the user to far too much of the software’s inner workings. (For example, see this wiki’s category list.) They’re not very intuitive or usable. And they’re almost exclusively text-based, not very visual. Yes, you can get used to them without too much difficulty, but most non-geeks would have to push past considerable initial revulsion and awkwardness to get to that point. That’s a tall order. Yup, wikis work great, but they are generally U-G-L-Y and outside of us geeks, hard to navigate [...]

A few weeks ago, the faculty developer at one of our colleges asked if we could create an MLX Special Collection for an upcoming summer institute on “Wwriting Across the Curriculum”, so that participants could create a “starter” package for a project they would complete over the summer (I call it “assembling the box’ like folding from a cardboard flat.). The answer was of course, “yes”, and the effort took about 20 seconds to create a place for the collection. She got the idea from how we had done a similar collection for “Civic Engagement” for an April 2004 Dialogue Day on Civic Engagement (ultimately 33 packages are in that one). Sharon just sent some great feedback: The MLX worked a treat in our Writing Across the Curriculum institute. There are only a few up at the moment, but our participants have gone away to refine their projects and will [...]

Martin was a bit peeved at not getting an RSS Feed for the “NMC Continuing Coverage” blog aggregator provided by Stephen Downes (and he gets the concept). Then Martin still was not satisfied when we provided him a URL for an RSS feed for Stephan’s tool, found with a few minutes of rummaging around EDU_RSS. Martin also missed the concept that Stephan’s tool was out of our realm of control (though he created it on request)– that we are “loosely” joined to it. Martin wants things wide open a.k.a. DeCentralists (he wants the weblogs open to the world to edit, a behavior of wikis but rather rare in blogs) but he seems to want all information for our session provided in a comprehensive single site, tailored just for him, an almost rather ironic Centralist concept. I am not writing to ridicule Martin but to help provide an example what the [...]

What is the obsession (paranoia) with trying to define (exegesis) learning objects (no definitions)? It is certainly useful to have understandable definitions for tightly constrained concepts like triskaidekaphobia, but when trying to introduce faculty new to the concept of learning objects, it seems almost unavoidable to stop them from wanting to labor over finding or writing yet another definition. Can’t we just move on to doing things with objects? Last month’s Syllabus column by Philip Long, “Learning Object Repositories, Digital Repositories, and the Reusable Life of Course Content” (I will not elaborate on how I loathe the “R”-word) features a sidebar of “Learning Object Definitions” worth lobbing a few tomatoes at: “…a learning object is defined as any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education, or training.” From IEEE P1484.12.1/D6.4, “Draft Standard for Learning Object Metadata.” http://ltsc.ieee.org/doc/wg12/LOM_WD6_4.pdf That helps- so this means that anything and everything [...]

There are people, likely those trying to make a buck off of RSS, who would like to measure how much “hit” there is from information syndicated as RSS Feeds, consumed, and hopefully clicked at. Checking your web server log for access of the RSS URL do not mean much, as they are continually hit by aggregators, and give no indication if the content is accessed. Not being a server dude, I have no idea to the answer to this question, but I was just wondering what the web server logs indicate fora referrer when a link is generated from a desktop aggregator? (the web server log records every server request, and is able to record the URL a visitor was before they clicked a link to end of on your site). I believe there is something recorded when a refer comes from a browser bookmark, but what does a click [...]

Xplana.com is rotting in my aggregator- they used to have a series of education technology blog articles; I cannot say I was a frequent reader, but I monitored them on my regular rounds. But there is a foul, dead skunk smell coming from the aggregator coming from http://www.xplana.com/, and that is the odor of Linkrot, a scourge of the internet that is not as annoying as spam, but has more of an impact: it is the stench of lost knowledge and the ignorance of web designers. Countless times web sites do a re-design, housecleaning, move things around, change their system so that all URLS that had ended in *.html end in *.asp, or just delete content. They commit the cardinal sin of thinking that they are the only audience, forgetting that they have left a trail of now dead, 404 URLs in web user bookmarks, and reams of bad links [...]

Philosophical question: If a presentation falls in the woods, and there is no one there, does it make a sound? Or for that matter, if you miss a conference presentation, does an abstract, a paper, or even the PowerPoint itself really provide information (worth the weight, er… wait, of the download?) Like Jay Cross’s recently posted audio narrated ASTD presentation, we had done the same for a keynote presentation by Diana Oblinger at our May 18, 2004 Ocotillo Retreat — it is part of my compulsion to make sure we have materials from our events that can be useful afterward, and for those who were not there. First of all, it certainly helps to have a compelling speaker, and Oblinger has done that again on a second visit in 2 years to Maricopa (see Into the Future: What is IT?, Feb 2002). Recently named as a Vice President of EDUCAUSE, [...]

Back in 1997, 1998 I created a old collection of digital photos from places I’ve been to in the southwest, More Than Just Four Corners. Like Meteor Crater, Havasupai, Chaco Canyon… Every now and then someone emails me asking for permission to use one of them (Google to the rescue), and I always do, unless they have a sleazy return email address like “thor@thunder-porn.com”. Teachers want to use the Sonoran Desert photos, a band in Germany wanted a Death Valley shot for a CD cover… I do not care- they mostly are not even of high quality, and the older ones are merely scanned from 35mm prints, and if I was that worried they would not be sitting on a web server where Google walks. But to what lengths are people being cornered to create mounds of paper in terms of releases, for stuff I am willing to give away? [...]

Serendipity strikes again. Curiosity link from the footer of some forgotten blog landed me here. Give Credit Where Credit is Due apparently began in the lat 1990s as a effort to promote “link back” credits to the sources of images that are used on someone’s web site. It is now a nice set of general, but useful suggestions for providing credit for just about anything used in your web page (images, code fragments, blog publishing software)… In summary, Giving Credit Where Credit is Due is in essence common courtesy and a small price to pay for the use of free items to create your webpages. Not every creator requires a linkback, but if you have some room on your webpage, why don’t you provide a little acknowledgment for their hard work. Guideline 1 covers finding images on the web; number 2 is a suggestion for writing a “link back” credit [...]