Who ever thought the word “repository” was a good idea? C’mon, nearly every one’s connotations go elsewhere and sure, I’m going to be encouraged to go add something (or fond something) I created to something that sounds like something that goes up your butt?

But I digress. I always hated that term.

Last month Stephen Downes wrote in response to some discussions about JISC Repositories a post about his reasoning for running as much of his online resources on his own servers (Not the Institutional Web Server)- in one bullet point he said:

my online work has also outlived most every initiative that has been created to provide a ‘permanent’ home for such work; projects in Canada like CAREO and eduSource are now history. I’m sure people in Britain can create their own list of shuttered initiatives.

I’m rather proud that the one and only “R” like thing I created, the Maricopa Learning eXchange, launched in 2010, is actually still running there at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx.

I think it is less to do that it is anything great, and more the fact that not many people there likely no about it or care, so it just keeps humming along. Actually, it’s more likely to do with the fact that after I left Maricopa in 2006, sometime a year or a half later, they hired back in a full time role, Colen Wilson, who had worked for me as a student program and did much of the back end work for the MLX. So thanks, Colen for keeping the lights on.

The last “What’s New” was 2004…

Probably the best explanation about the MLX came from a presentation we did back in 2004 for the NMC (before I worked there). In building the MLX we purposely steered clear of focusing on metadata and prescriptions for the content -essentially, we created a place to house information about anything someone at Maricopa might have created for learning, from a word template to a full blown program, using the metaphors of a brown shipping package, which could be big or small, and was described by a “packing slip” (our clever cover up for meta data).

So there’s not a huge amount of things there, maybe 1800, and most of the content in the last few years came because we rigged another online system Colen largely built, an internal grants and a faculty professional growth program, so that when people submitted reports online to those systems, we cross listed them in the MLX.

There you go Stephen, not all repositories are shuttered. But more likely cause the MLX is just some old PHP and MySQL code quietly humming on a server directory no one looks at. For some reason, my old code still humming along there makes me smile.

In fact, the big daddy might be MERLOT which seems to be always adding new stuff, but hey, they have funding and staff. Heck MERLOT still list a project I did on the mid 1990s that they added to MERLOT in 2000, and what do you know, old Research Methods still lind of works.

I got nudged to posting this via a post by John Robertson raising the question if reusable learning objects (RLOs) and open educations resources (OERs) are different. It was interesting to read and rummage through some of the past, and honestly while the differences are important to some people like John, it hinges a lot on your definitions, and for me, it seems another toh-MAY-toh TOH-mah-toh argument… I honestly don’t care what you call ‘em, and care more that more people share any way they can.

So cheers to old suppositories, may they continue to rise and…. I better stop.

As is the reports themselves are about 4 clicks in from the main professional growth site to the Examples of Summer projects where likely few web explorers might venture; also the value that the MLX adds over just a response to a handful of questions is the ability to attach relevant web sites and upload supplementary media files which can be attached.

For example, Donna Gaudet’s project on Online Community and Retention Research has a static report on the FPG web site (response to the report form questions) while her MLX package has the same responses plus her three word files that have all the resources she compiled. Or compare Geoff Eroe’s report on his project Complex Modeling and Animation Techniques for Character Studio and 3D Studio Max to the MLX package that includes an AVI file of one of his animation sequences. And Niccole Cerveny’s Rock Art Research in the Field and Laboratory has a basic report but the MLX package includes web links to related web sites such as the local Deer Valley Rock Art Center.

Isn’t that worth something?

So the deadline for filing the online project reports passed on September 30… so we had lots of calls the afternoon of September 30th when the bulk of the reports came in to our database. And we did rather well, out of 110 projects funded, we have 90 reports submitted and electronically approved by our college reps.

Now here another great part- we automatically associate these MLX entries with a common identifier, a system tag if you will, so they can be grouped as a hole into what we call an MLX special collection for Faculty Professional Growth Summer Projects which lists 98 total projects (8 from last year when the online tools were still in beta). This one URL can be used to dynamically link to the most recent sum of all MLX items in this collection plus there is an RSS feed for the newest ones in the collection or a feed for a random selection that could potentially be used on a web page that could highlight random packages within this group.

That seems pretty valuable to have as a collection?

Well today I went into the dusty vault of the MLX code and added a new feature that allows a keyword search within a special collection, e.g. all MLX packages in the Summer Projects collection that contain the word “assessment”.

That should be useful to someone.

So again, if any is interested in helping convince the stubborn ones who think this is not valuable, pick one of these packages, and send a comment. A copy is emailed to the package owner. There is nothing like a little pat on the back, a massaging of an ego, to help people see the value of putting their work in public.

And I am jazzed to get back to some MLX coding. The big project is to streamline the original version from its year vintage 2000 design to the new look of what will be the open source version.

Our office coordinates a faculty professional growth program for Maricopa- the funds and programs are managed by our faculty and reps from the campuses, and MCLI (that’s us) provides logistical support. One of the ways we have done so is to put all the program information online (it used to be in a thick wad of paper for some reason referred to as “The Green Book”. We introduced some new consistency in program applications by converting variously formatted Word documents and even carbon forms to MS Word Forms available online.

One of the long standing problems with the way the program operates is that reports completed by recipients of faculty sabbaticals and Summer Projects were for like 90 years (I exaggerate) submitted to the committee in paper form, and then filed away in a cabinet. They were not readily available to applicants in subsequent years who might get ideas, or even to share with colleagues. This sorts of things drive me crazy when great work is done, and is not shared.

A first step we made two years ago was to create a completely online application and review process for the Summer Projects program — these are things faculty submit proposals to get funding to do things over the summer like attending workshops, getting training, do work experiences, study abroad, etc (see some sample applications). The first year of applications was a seat of the pants programming job, but we got it done, and were able in August 2004 to provide a system for recipients to file online reports. Through an unfortunate communication gap, the committee gave people the option to do an online report or to turn in a Word document, so the returns were light.

Now these reports are basic responses to a few questions, “What did you do”, “What worked well?, “What was your Professional Growth”, and “How will you disseminate?”. The brainstorm we had was to build into this reporting, a following section where recpients could also add relevant media files and web links, and thus through one report form, we are able to file a report in the FPG database, and at the same time, create an MLX entry from the same content. This gives projects a bit more exposure, allows them to include supplemental materials, and ideally would add like 100 new MLX packages a year.

As an example from 2004, a chemistry teacher did one on “Frontiers in Organic Chemistry”, so you can see the snapshot FPG report and the associated MLX package which has the responses to the questions, plus in this case, some relevant resources. You can see a gallery of examples of projects going back to 2001, though before 2004, these are just abstracts we had collected as a static document.

And what’s even better, we are able to automatically associate a new report into an MLX special collection that will house all MLX packages that are Summer Projects.

This year we got the reporting system for Summer Projects tuned up, and we are expecting all 112 or so to have submitted thme online by the September 30 deadlines.

Now, (finally) I come to the reason for this long winded post. I heard from the committee chair that there are some faculty (how many?) who feel like their Summer Project reports do not belong in the MLX. The reasons are fuzzy, something like they do not see them as of value to others, or it is redundant to have it in two places (the FPG gallery is really buried on our site) or maybe they do not want it to be seen they spent a summer traveling in Australia, or just maybe they don’t want to be public. They are asking me for next year to not have the automatic copy to the MLX, though me minimal offer is to make it an option they can choose.

What I am hoping for, dear blog reading audience, is that a few of you, or many of you can peruse some of their project, and post some comments (constructive ones, not silly things, or “Alan asked to to bug you” or “play poker and smoke phentermine”– I am thinking if a number of the faculty who posted summer projects get external feedback (very closely related to “pat on the back”) that they might see some value in their sharing of their work. I am pie in the sky hopeful that a few constructive or positive comments might go a long way.

So if you have time, pick one or two that are relevant or of interest to you from our Summer Projects MLX Special Collections (newest ones are listed first):

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/collection.php?id=111

And see if we might be able to convince some of the curmudgeons that sharing is a Good Thing.

I do see this as one of those learning object paradoxes- the person who creates and shares an “object” (or in this case a project report) is the wrong one to judge the overall value to others– there is no way they can know the wide range of uses others might get out of it who come with a different perspective or set of needs or level of creativity. I am so convinced we need more open sharing, as much as possible, not closed gardens, not locked file cabinets, not “my stuff is not worthy” attitudes.

Thanks in advance.

PS- Speaking of the MLX- it is long due some update and attention in the next few weeks, aiming too yet again for another year end goal to get an open source version ready for usage (ahem, the prototype is mostly working)

Anyhow, I recorded an 11 minute quick attempt at showing wide range of RSS feeds we provide in the Maricopa Learning eXchange, and then how you can copy them over to our Feed2JS site, create a cut and paste JavaScript, and then put them into a site.

I sketched out my topics, figured out which URLs to have open in Firefox (you have to love tabbed browsing, apparently that has not boarded the cluetrain in the MSIE shop), and gave it a go. I am not nearly as smooth as Jn Udell, and one of my demo links was kafloooey (bad), but oh well. It is a go. It ended up as a 16 Mb .wm file. Big.

Since some folks do not like sending their Canadian dollars to Macromedia, I did a quick check out and downloaded a trila versions of SwishVideo to convert the big file to Flash format.. which somehow managed to end up as a 16 Mb .swf (I tried a range of settings to make it smaller, this was as tiny as I could get)

Okay so here that are, but remember, I am an amateur:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/show/ocotillo05/mlx_rss.swf
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/show/ocotillo05/mlx_rss.wmv (does not stream but downloads)

In summary, it was not all that hard to do, and with practice, I can see that it is effective. I need to get a better grip on the software settings and features. Stay tuned to my new category.

He chopped out a lot of stuff, updated some images and links, and created a mini tour of the different kinds of RSS feeds in the MLX as a demo for the May 17 Ocotillo retreat called RSS for Syndicating Maricopa Learning eXchange Content to Other Web Sites:

Over the last few years, we have done much publicity to solicit new content for the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). We have built in a number of features to the MLX that deploy RSS, or Really Simple Syndication (and XML published format of information) that allows other Maricopa web sites to create a dynamic window, displayed in their own web site, to a particular subset of MLX content.

The ahem, mighty wind can be heard via
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/show/ocotillo05/

http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx247/

It is fairly alpha if that right now.

Last year, there was a lofty plan to have it ready for the June New Media Consortium, but I ended up waving my arms at the possibilities. I am rather intent in getting at least a beta available for this year’s NMC conference.

I did have an internal project that has asked for an MLX site- The National Association of Community College Teacher Education Programs, housed in our district office, wanted a “Members Learning eXchange” for their members to post shared resources. At first I thought I’d have it ready in December, than March, and finally, I cooked up a demo version for their meeting last week (nothing like a deadline to move a programmer). While I cannot share a link, a screen shot shows the first variant of an openMLX site:

Notes:

1. Customized header created in CSS. The color scheme was shifted from our regular “browns” to their “blues”
2. Customized tab navigation. A single configuration provides the navigation tabs (for this demo the “collections” and “feed” pages were not available, so they are hidden, and we can add a tab that links to the organizations web site.
3. Colored callout boxes- a style sheet does the formatting, content is read from include files. An admin site will provide editing tools to update the “new” listings.
4. A customized local footer can be used on all pages.

Well there is a lot more work to do, but I am hones on getting some source code to put online by June.

Mea Culpa In the mode of hasty blogging, I neglected to mention that Cheryl Colan did the CSS re-design that you see above, helping us move out of the 1000 vintage table-based HTML layouts. Still fine-tuning the details and trying to structure the CSS to make it easy for local edits.

Today she sent me an e-mail describing what she had created, with an attachment of her assignment. Since she has a good sense of humor, and I am just so tired of people in our system only sharing via e-mail (the syndrome I refer to as “e-mail attachment disorder”), I relied with this message:

WARNING WARNING
This email program has returned the message to you as the owner of the account prefers that all such items be sent as URL links to content in the Maricopa Learning eXchange. Wouldn’t great ideas live longer and wider if they were not confined to e-mail?

She laughed, and sent me the MLX link 10 minutes later.. so, here hot off the press, is MLX Package #1503: Using RSS Feeds in ENG102.

Now id her “bite” can only infect a few more colleagues ;-)

It took about 75 seconds in phpMyAdmin to clean out the spambacks, but I decided as a fun task to build my own web tool to do it even easier. Presenting the Spam Trackback Annihilator:

All I need to do is to fill in the easy to guess typical spam words, and select to wipe out from the Source, URL, Title, or Body fields (or all at once to lower the big boot). In one click I can kill thousands or roachies. You will not find this URL on our server, as I can run it locally from my OSX desktop. Next, I will set up a cron job to clean out the poker jokers once a day. Y’all are now wasting your time, not mine.

I’m also toying with whipping up a similar tool for MovableType blogs. That too would be a snap to zap bad trackbacks.

Out of those 1100, probably 200 are there as direct result of online reports to other electronic systems, maybe 60 are things we have entered in other people’s names so we could populate web sites with content (see how the winners of the Innovation of the Year program are pumped from the MLX to its own site).

The same goes for an ePortfolio platform, developed at one of our colleges, that we have had running for more than a year. The take up for a free system has been, well sluggish, with 45 published titles sitting there (counting one of mine and one by some guy named “Biff”)

So let’s here it for surprises from unexpected places. A few days ago I got an email:

John Arle suggested I contact you. I am an adjunct at Phoenix College and my MGT276/Human Resources course will be fully online this coming Fall. I am interested in building a package for the MLX warehouse. John has indicated that this has many purposes including helping me market the course as it will be searchable on Google.

If you don’t mind, could you reply when you get the chance and let me know what I need to do in order to get this process started? And if I need any approvals from my dept chair I can get that going as well. I’m sure she’ll be supportive.

One last question. I also found something called Maricopa ePortfolio, which appears to be separate from MLX. Is that true? What are the differences, do you know? Should I build both?

I responded with some URLs for our getting started materials in both the MLX and the Maricopa eP, and let her know it was all self service.

In less than 2 days, she had already produced a nicely formed eportfolio for her class materials, and then she listed this as an item in the MLX:

I just wanted to let you know that I set up both my ePortfolio and MLX sites and to compliment you and your team. These sites are very user friendly! I couldn’t believe how easy it was to set these up. And I’m very pleased with the results.

Just wanted to say “thanks” and “kudos” to you. If you have any feedback on what I’ve done, please feel free. I’ve pasted my links below.

http://eport.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/published/j/is/jiskiyan/home/1/
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/mine.php?id=585

I just have to say wow. An adjunct faculty has done more in 2 days than… well a lot of other, full time, experienced faculty.

Wow, and thank you Jill for restoring some of my faith.

Before today, the feeds we generate as fixed static files (updated every hours as a cron script) on the MLX where the 10 newest items over all, the newest items and random items per Maricopa College, newest items in a set of subject areas (Biology, Humanities, …)– and available as both RSS 1.0 links and JavaScript include files (unlike FeedtoJS, these are static files that just echo the output created from the hourly updates, cheap caching).

I just updated that set of “fixed” feeds to include ones that are random selected items in the discipline areas. That was an easy update, and something that just fell off the radar. This is dependent, of course, that our MLX package “creators” provide an academic area when they create their packages. It was un-reasonable (IMHO) to create a “fixed” vocabulary, so it suffers from some of the slop of folksonomy, or user supplied free form tags. But it is not bad, e.g. the MLX items for Nursing, Biology, Humanities, etc. all have new and random feeds.

We had before the ability to generate a URL link and an RSS feed of the 10 newest items form ANY search result, dynamically generating the feed (meaning doing the database query, and returning the results as XML). What I just added today are new options to generate a randomized result of specific queries.

So for an example, a listing of all MLX items containing “critical thinking” and associated with Chandler_Gilbert Community College is linked by a specific URL:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/search_results.php?college=CGCC&scope=5&srt=1&words=critical+thinking

And you can get RSS feeds for the 10 newest in this same query:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/get_rss.php?college=CGCC&words=critical+thinking

As well as a feed for 10 random in the same query:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/get_rss.php?college=CGCC&words=critical+thinking&rand=10

As a bonus for CDB readers, the random number parameter on the end can be any number of desired results (well not any number, it is capped at 20 as there are pranksters out there).

Now that we have these sorts of feeds, one could, in theory, use them with FeedtoJS, but keep in mind, these results follow this path:

* query sent to MLX database
* results parsed to XML output
* XML processed by Feed2JS script
* content echoed to web page as JavaScript

It might be a lot of traffic, so I may explore, someday, a strategy for caching the dynamic generated search results.

Anyhow, it was fun to get my fingers in the MLX code again. Much more work there is coming next month, as well as a new face lift (CSS Design).