CogBlogged in ‘2005’

Wow, and some people think I have an edgy tone in this here blog, especially towards the sacred cow of reusable learning objects, which frankly after several years of looking at, thinking at, I just still do not buy. Yes, RLOs are R.I.P and I have questions lke If All The Learning Objects Are Web Pages Who Needs a Repository? Then yesterday, I stumbled across the Artichoke blog, where a posts on Mr Ed the talking horse on those Digital Learning Objects and Dear Horse God, about those Digital Learning Objects, the Artichoke takes some nice big bites: You cannot earjack a conversation between card-carrying members of the MoE digerati “A-list” at the moment without picking up terms like Learning Management Systems and Digital Learning Object. These terms are tossed like Brassica sprouts into the (e) conversations of the digerati with a facility and confidence that belies the fact that [...]

If anything seems an underlying techno theme of 2005, for me it is a subtle, unlabeled series of tools, services, that are breaking content apart, and re-assembling it into new. Rather than coining a jargon, it seems to becoming more of a broader mindset of looking at information differently. I’ve enough suggested this under the RipMixLearn nom de plume. But it’s nice to see things appear that actually manifest itself, as mine was totaly made up. Ironically, I found about RenaissanceU from one of those almost spam like emails I get asking me to put links on our web site. But what it does sounds interesting: RenaissanceU, an organization dedicated to uniting technology and education to offer increasingly effective learning at a lower cost, announces the release of its customized textbook product line. The product, made possible by an exclusive partnership between RenaissanceU and SafariU, allows an educator to select [...]

After I made up the terms “inward/outward aggregating”, Tim Lauer expounded on possibilities for his school to use Google Personalized Home page. After looking at the ever-expanding collection of Google Modules, seeing they are just little (or not so little) chunks of XML, I began getting the urge to tinker, to see how complicated it would be to write my own GM. I started with a scan of Google’s thorough Homepage API – Developer Docs, which showed that a Hello World example was easy, and things grew incrementally, then geometrically more complex form there. But not so bad. So thinking about what might be semi-useful, I aimed for a module that would allow me to quickly do a keyword search on any WordPress blog, but most likely my own. This is pretty easy to do, and I have already created a tool for doing this via a browser bookmarklet. The [...]

I’ve finally caught up with my other colleagues in getting into relaxed, holiday, not-at-the-office for a while mode. One of the nice side perks of working in education is getting their holiday schedule, so I am away from the building until January 3, hibernating up in our comfy cabin in Strawberry, in frequently sipping the internet through a 28 kbs dial-up straw. We’re wondering where winter is, as high pressure over the southwest has our temps in the mid 60s in the day, and barely below 50 at night, maybe 20 degrees warmer than it ought to be. And there has not been significant precipitation here in Arizona since October. We want snow, but there nearest moisture must be 1000 miles away. Even the last week at Maricopa, the internal email dropped off to almost nil as most made an early exit, and my major accomplishment on my last day [...]

I’ve been wondering about an interesting orange icon I have seen on the right hand side of the URL display in Firefox, which seemed to always be there for WordPress sites. Thanks to Tom at TuttleSVC, I know it is now implemented in Mozilla and Microoft browsers to indicate a site has an RSS feed available. For example, opening our (ahem) recently mentioned site for the MCLI iForum, you see it: If you click the icon (in FireFox) you get the dialog box seen when you select to bookmark a page. This adds a Live BookMark that updates the links when the RSS feed changes, providing a handy way to follow important sites, or having your browser bookmarks act like an RSS title aggregator: From poking around, the browser is determining if a site has a feed by looking at the LINK tags in the source HEAD, e.g. <link rel="alternate" [...]

I’ve been eyeballing an ever increasing amount of web-based platforms for bringing together content (or microcontent, or nanocontent) from multiple sources, the echo again of Small Technologies (Pieces) Loosely Joined (note- if the content there is replaces by a wiki spam link, just wait until the bot resets the mess. Brian- you may want to lock this wiki??). Previously mentioning SuprGlu and how I was somewhat Hooked On Glu. What the Glu does is allow you to create a public page that aggregates content you select from multiple sources (as long as the sources provide RSS feeds) into one nicely presented web page view. the “tools” for doing this are wonderfully simple, and it took literally minutes for me to create my first Glu’d site. This is pretty much a tool for creating public views of aggregated content, what here I am calling “Outward” Aggregating. Bloglines sort of straddles this [...]

It’s been 2 few weeks since we released the first online version of our MCLI iForum publication (see the background info blogged nearby). We are hoping to push the publication envelope to go completely online (the print button is in the reader’s hands) and using WordPress as a publishing platform. Our timing was not optimal as it was during the ramp up to finals week here. However, even with the blatant red “i”, and what we thought were obvious invitations to respond to articles via the comments field, the response has been… well… not much. A major justification we prepared for this move to online publishing was the ability for readers to connect with authors (all comment notifications are sent to all credited authors, and we offer per-article email subscriptions to comment updates). So I wonder… is it a fear of commenting? of making the first comment? Maybe the articles [...]

With the end of the year coming soon (in academia; our system has been slowing to a halt as the semester ends, faculty leave, e-mail volume plummets, and parking spaces become abundant), I am trying to avoid end of the year wrap=up or next year prognostication. However, I do feel some urge to think a bit more about interesting uses of audio technology, obviously including, but not only, podcasting. Audio seems to be becoming prime time, and not because it seems like the iPod to earth citizen ratio is approaching 1.0 (that is a bad joke, and skewed to Western countries, hopefully tongue in cheek, and obviously so). Over the last few months, without too much extreme effort, I’ve been able to increase the availability of information presented at meetings, demos, etc via a podcast set up (more on details of the how to on Podcast Setup With MovableType). My [...]

Over the weekend our server light went dark. For most of the weekend, our whole Maricopa network was offline. There was no information actually communicated by our IT department, even after the fact. I only knew since our email server was not reachable, not our primary web server. Even after that, it took longer for the XServe that hosts this blog to re-appear, despite several attempts to do a remote re-boot. So my apologies to the person or two who was for some bizarre reason trying to access this site rather than being out gift shopping, or those who’s sites were hung out due to Feed2JS being offline. In the next few weeks, I am looking at some alternatives, most likely moving this blog entirely to my domain (htto://cogdogblog.com/ ) which is now a mere forwarding domain. I may move Feed2JS as well. I’d almost rather let some commercial entity [...]

New reference for web design CSS junkies, and a nice example to demonstrate web pages need not be collections of boxes: The Elements of Typographic Style Apple to the Web: Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field… In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, I have structured this website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS. The future is considered with coverage of CSS3, and practicality is ever present with workarounds, alternatives and compromises for less able browsers. It’s a work under progress, and as a nice touch, the author is providing an RSS feed for updates. But it has an air or elegance, and a look of “this is not your typical web page”. Now [...]