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…
A few weeks ago, the faculty developer at one of our colleges asked if we could create an MLX Special Collection for an upcoming summer institute on “Wwriting Across the Curriculum”, so that participants could create a “starter” package for a project they would complete over the summer (I call it “assembling the box’ like folding from a cardboard flat.).
The answer was of course, “yes”, and the effort took about 20 seconds to create a place for the collection.
She got the idea from how we had done a similar collection for “Civic Engagement” for an April 2004 Dialogue Day on Civic Engagement (ultimately 33 packages are in that one).
Sharon just sent some great feedback:
The MLX worked a treat in our Writing Across the Curriculum institute. There are only a few up at the moment, but our participants have gone away to refine their projects and will not only be uploading their ideas, but have been charged with using the MLX as a visual in their final presentations on August 13th.
I cannot tell you how excited I am about the role of MLX in some faculty development events like ours …. I am sold! Not only does it add to MLX, but it actually helps faculty think through an idea by having to concretely define and describe it. Way cool!
This experience did factor into some interface changes we made to the MLX loading Dock, the place where packages are created….
Martin was a bit peeved at not getting an RSS Feed for the “NMC Continuing Coverage” blog aggregator provided by Stephen Downes (and he gets the concept). Then Martin still was not satisfied when we provided him a URL for an RSS feed for Stephan’s tool, found with a few minutes of rummaging around EDU_RSS. […]
