CogBlogged from ‘February, 2005’

With podcasting going from zero to tech trend in 6 months, some are hedging bets that videocasting is already accelerating. So here is the CogDogBlog evolution. We go from reading my typos in a blog to listening to me say “ummm” as a podcast to watching me say “ummm” as a videocast to a 3D real-time hologram of…. Be very scared of the future. It’s already here, Gibson readers.

Look out fellow bloggers, Leon Lighips a.k.a Guru of the Obvious is going after your Technorati ratings and is planning on becoming king of the Long Tail, the A-List of all A-Lists….

The week of February 28, 2005 through March 4 , our Ocotillo Hybrid Course Structures group is hosting an asynchronous discussion board activity. We are pleased and fortunate to have Bob Kaleta and staff from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Learning Technology Center (LTC) as our guests, and they will be checking the board to ask/answer questions and hopefully provoke some good discussion. The UWM Hybrid web site is one of the must have bookmarks in the field, and the LTC has some of the most valuable experience and wisdom to share. While our primary goal is to engage our own Maricopa faculty and staff, we welcome others interested in hybrid/blended learning to join in. The discussion board is open to anyone to read, but to post there you need to register and create an account. This is part of our goal to not only talk about hybrid formats, but to [...]

This Friday, the self-proclaimed “Grandmother of Electronic Portfolios”, Helen Barrett is coming to town as our guest for our event “ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty”, where we are expecting an audience of 90+ faculty and staff. The day’s agenda is split-starting with a morning focus on student ePortfolios, with Helen presenting on her recent work connecting digital storytelling and eports, but the highlight (sorry Helen) hopefully will be a student panel we are assembling with 5 Maricopa students who are now or recently have been building ePortfolios. We are planning on capturing the audio of this discussion to be able to post online. Over lunch we are planning on setting up computer stations with a collection of Maricopa ePortfolios available for viewing, as well as having the student panel members and other faculty present be on hand to share their experiences. The afternoon [...]

I’ve done a number of workshops demo-ing how to search various learning object “repositories” and invariably deal with the question, “Why don’t we just do a Google search?”. Strangely, having built one sort of similar system myself, I am asking the same question. Stephen Downes today shared the announcement of the Commonwealth of Learning’s Learning Object Repository being released, “An online database of learning content that provides software to Commonweath countries free of charge” and the software was being made available as well.. sounds interesting enough to click around. Hitting the technical documentation, you get alphabet soup explanations: The COL Learning Object Repository (or in short COL LOR) integrates eRIB and pakXchange such that the local repository of eRIB is disabled and replaced with pakXchange, and pakXchange is modified to act as an EduSource node for the purpose of searching. Easy for you to say… what the heck is all [...]

Despite our best intentions, the cart named technology seems to often get ahead of the horse. In a recent meeting, one of our groups looking at new technologies made the usual strong case for looking at video conference technologies- better use of time, people not having enough time to come to development events, people not wanting to drive across town for face to face meetings, reducing pollution etc. All well and good. We agreed that to help our folks better understand the technology is to give them experiences with it. More well and good. Nodding heads. But the suggestion on how just seemed sideways to me- “setting up demos with different systems to best evaluate them”. The monumental sized problem with this is the content- in a demo, the content is always contrived, is not relevant to the work we do, and thus never gives the technology the appropriate field [...]

I cannot claim this was an Urgent/Important task, but my curiosity got the better of me… I made a new bookmarklet tool that allows me to run a search against my furl-ed sites either by entering the search terms or by highlighting the words in any web mouse-selectable content. This avoids having to load a search interface , and may save me seconds of precious time ;-) Like I said, it was just a fun little programming task. See the new Furl Search Maker: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/furl_search_maker.php to create your own, another in the set including the Multi-Site Submission Tool Maker, and the MovableType Search Bookmarklet. This one is just out of the hatch, and not widely tested beyond my own browser(s).

With exceptions of newer systems (yes, Drupal fans, that is you), many blog software packages are designed from the perspective of single author weblogs, but with some digging you can expand their functionality for multi-author sites. We’ve recently released the Low Threshold Applications (LTA) site, recast as a blog from a once manually edited HTML site. To make the index of LTAs by author work, we had to assign the blog entries to accounts for the people that wrote the content (we are doing all the blog posting from content written by others). One limitation of MovableType is I can give author credit to only one person, so posts with multiple authors needed some under the hood tinkering to add new database tables and use PHP/mySQl query to pull out entries by “co-authors”. This also means that comments posted to an entry go to the actual author (a good thing), [...]

Interesting- fac.etio.us is a rip, mix, and refeed of del.icio.us. Found by way of John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software (“navigation for the digital universe”), a maker of corporate tools that offer: …intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the relevant documents, products, and web pages that you need to find…. Our customers have slashed the time wasted by traditional text-based search methods, dramatically improving the quality and timeliness of their decisions. Seamark integrates gracefully with your existing information infrastructure, providing the results you want, when you want them. Our facet-based navigation explores the content using intuitive categories and keywords that match the way you think about your business. Navigation is so intuitive that new users can achieve superior results without any formal training. You likely do not see news of fac.etio.us on the Siderean [...]

A commenter suggested I add Linkroll to the bookmarklet marklet maker collection, and that was an easy one to roll into the tool, which puts it up to a choice of 8 different web site submission tools that can be addressed with a click on a bookmark link. Linkroll is another “social bookmarks” site, though instead of tags there are categories, 6 of one versus half a dozen donuts of another. It looks like it has some finer filters possible to put on links, and ways to collapse collections to RSS. Interesting, but I find having 3 primary sites to post links to is more than enough work. Furl is still my main dumping ground. But keep the other sites coming- I can add them as long as the site offers some sort of JavaScript bookmarklet code.