CogBlogged from ‘August, 2004’

Todd has done something cool. He published a search plugin for Mozilla/Firefox web browsers that provides a direct keyword search into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). I don’t do a lot of browser hopping beyond testing on the major brands. I’ve taken the cues from the Zeldmans out there to develop and test for on the more compliant web browsers (Safari), then test, hack, and fix for the oddities of Internet Explorer, etc. Netscape 4? Fuggedaboudit. Anyhow I keep a copy of Mozilla or Firefox around since sometimes there are web sites (like a lot of our Maricopa system apps) that are finicky on browsers. The long amble is that I have not spent much time in looking into this search engine add on, but it is pretty slick, and opens the mind to creating more browser tools. Likie Safari, Firefox comes out of the box with a built in [...]

Completely irrelevant to technology… but I am in a 3 week physical ramp up in preparation for a Grand Canyon backpack, 3 days, 2 nights down the Hermit Trail. I’m getting my 2-3 day a week bike commute, some good weekend climbs, like Camelback Mountain. The park service issues lots of dire warnings about people who have died on this trail. Sounds enticing ;-) From experience, they tend to err on the side of rabid conservatism in dealing with under prepared hikers. For canyon hiking, the biggest gap is between one’s over-estimation of their abilities and under-estimation of the terrain. By the way, here in Arizona we refer to it just as “The Canyon”, not to be confused with any of the other hundreds of spectacular canyons I’ve walked – Aravaipa, West Clear Creek, East Clear Creek, Fossil Creek, Oak Creek, Secret, Walnut, Sycamore (at least 3 of ‘em), Paria, [...]

Today I cleaned my desk of paper piles, revamped the “todo” list that overflows from my whiteboard, and finished up a little experiment I had started on our ePortfolio site. Audree Thurman, the clever programmer of this nifty system, had developed a nifty approach for RSS feeds. There is a web page version (human readable) for changes among all the portfolios, there is the geeky, orange icon labeled RSS version, and you can also sign up to get notifications by email when a specific eportfolio has changed (e.g. so a teacher can monitor a number of student eports). See the details under her posted “enhancements” summary. Anyhow, I had plotted to put the RSS feed on the front page, and forgot about actually doing it. So I was able to rather quickly use the Feed2JS version that generates the content via a PHP include. I will likely end up making [...]

Who needs Broadway? Last night we were at the “theater” in Pine Arizona (that is the town community hall, an old school gym that still has the wooden basketball court floor), with $7 tickets to see the one performance by Wyatt Earp – that is his name and he is the great nephew of the Earp that was made famous for the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone. Earp had been doing a show in a tent at an old mining camp north of Scottsdale Wyatt Earp: A Life on the Frontier on his great uncle… this show he performed (written by his wife Terry) was The Gentleman Doc Holliday– a recanting of his famous escapades from his jail cell in Colorado. Earp noted with irony in remarks after the show for playing that part. There was a second performance by Terry Earp of Kate: The Woman of Many [...]

Friday was our first meeting for this upcoming academic with the faculty co-chairs of our Ocotillo Action Groups. Part of this was planning, part of it catch up in the research they did over the summer, but the first bit was me trying to get them up to speed on the blog/wiki/discussion board tools we are using (blogged previously here as the “small pieces”). We have pairs of faculty leading activities, projects, research, in Learning Objects, Hybrid Course Structures, ePortfolios, end Emerging Learning Technologies. I’ve had to remind myself numerous times that I am a full time technology person who has been immersed in blogs and such for 2 years, and these are new fish in the pond, and as busy faculty are going to not jump in head first like I do. I’d been sharing information, instructions, etc over the summer, but the traffic had been, ahem, light. In [...]

I cannot remember why I started down this MT template path, but it was a fun journey. Somehow I stumbled into Phil Ringnalda’s explanation on how to create RSS feeds for individual entries and comments. This seemed interesting- often when you write a comment to someone else’s blog, there is no way to follow a discussion unless you remember to return to the comment (some blogs have email notifiers). Comments end up being tossed like darts with no followup. I began addressing this on CDB by including a link to the RSS feed for all comments from this blog. Not good enough. With a bit of wrangling and quite a bit of modifications from Phil’s original template, I got it going. Every individual entry on this blog has its own RSS feed that includes as items: The entry “excerpt” (a short summary. Phil’s script stuck the entire entry in there, [...]

Within three hours of writing yesterday about Blogdigger (an RSS feed combiner that returns a group of feeds as a single feed), I got a nice comment from Greg at Bloggdigger who let me know that the filtering tools were still being tinkered. It’s rewarding to get direct responses like that from the folks directly involved with a trechnology. Okay, I created a quick and dirty Bloggdigger Group on feeds from known Learning Object Repositories in about 2 minutes with maybe 5 feeds. The cool thing about Blogdigger Groups is that others can add feeds to the group. So if you have more RSS feeds from learning object repositories, you can toss ‘em in the mix, the password is the name for those little plastic blocks that are bad metaphors for learning objects. I’d like to keep it to general feeds, such as the overall one from MERLOT, rather than [...]

FYI and for self (and colleague Brian Lamb) promotion… if you are attending EDUCAUSE 2004 (October in Denver), sign up now for our pre-conference seminar Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, TrackBack, and Related Technologies: Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack. This is going to be just about a completely hands-on (computer!) session where you will learn how to find objects via RSS, build your own dynamic feed collections, use weblogs to describe found objects, use Trackback to connect uses of objects to other resources, wax poetically on the social network that the blog community generates (and how that might be a lesson for learning [...]

It helps to have a little operation named “Google” behind you. The free blogs from Blogger.com have trashed those big fat ad banners and replaced it with a svelte navigation bar. As reported by the designer Douglas Bowman of stopdesign, there are 4 flavors to choose from, and the bar adds a blog search function (way overdue), a BlogThis button that helps other bloggers blog your blog (get it?), and a button that jumps to another random blog. Okay, it is not earth shattering, but added to the new mature templates, it makes Blogger blogs look and act less like cheesy free sites. Note the Blogger bloggers- you need to use the Template tools to select which navbar to apply, and then republish your blog. You may also need to reload in your browser to clear the cached version. See the help pages for details, another thing they are doing [...]

Apple had the perhaps now ill-fated “Rip, Mix, Burn” concept for music– I am looking for something similar (less lawyer intensive) for RSS feeds. It is taking feeds breaking them apart, and rebuilding them into something new. We can rebuild ‘em. Stronger. Faster. The Six Million Dollar Feed…. So it goes: Rip a few RSS URLs from where ever you find ‘em these days. Mix them together into a pile. Feed them back as a brand new RSS. During an ichat yesterday with Brian when he asked for tools that would take a list of RSS Feed URLs and be able to combine them into one “uber” feed with its own RSS feed. I suggested that they could create their own Bloglines site, but Brian mentioned people wanting a new RSS feed to deploy elsewhere. I can see programmatically how it would go. You can take each RSS, parse it [...]