Just saw this at the NMC 2004 5 minutes of Fame- a nifty app for creation of interactive timelines- presentation is via Flash (of course), but data driven by XML. Created by the Center for Educational Resources at Johns Hopkins, the Timeline Creator is a freebie for downloading and provides what looks like a simple […]
It’s been more than a day since our Small Technologies Loosely Joined session and Brian, D’Arcy and I are pleasantly amazed that 35+ turned out for the last session of the day, put up with a small cramped room with not enough electrical outlets, and a zany activity of task work in 3 contrived groups. […]
Sigh, the dog has been a lazy conference blogger, too much scenery in Vancouver, good food and drink, to have enough energy to continually blog the sessions, Fortunately, others are feverishly at it, see the blog aggregator created by Stephen Downes. NMC continues to he my favorite confence for the people who come, for the […]
James Farmer has shared an interesting idea of building a collection of audio “readings” of articles, and Stephen Downes has taken the idea and ran it as an online audio jukebox. I’m not much of an avid reader of academic articles, so I let is slide into the “neat idea but no time to bother” […]
Holy _____! Over at Open Artifact, Randy Brown has neatly sewn together a neat package: phpWiki inside and integrated with his new WordPress blog, so it more or less operates as a cohesive site and sharing the WP database. It addresses some of the issues of trying to tie into wikis which typically have their […]
No, it is not Potted Meat Food Product, just down the shelf… Wikis: The Next Frontier for Spammers? Wiki maintainers can expect an increase in spam after a webmaster newsletter highlighted the effectiveness of Wiki spam in raising a site’s Google ranking. WebProNews described how a webmaster improved his rank in a search engine optimization […]
We’re closely watching the NMC 2004 presentation on “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” wiki, checking the changes.. but beyond a few individuals, it is a pretty quiet place. Okay, so I wrote a bit harshly on Martin for his own thoughts on the Pieces, but hey, I was bored! I fessed up and then commented a […]
Got the call today from our Legal Department and they approve our plan for GPL licensing of an open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (good thing cause we have been doing it anyhow). In fact, our legal counsel was impressed with “how clearly and humanly understandable the license was written” (that is the […]
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 (raise your hand if you know what “diff” means). It is no great mystery- the software is generally written to be as small as possible, usually in obfuscated perl, and by folks like actually enjoying curling up to read a good Unix manual.
read on…
