And not to be outdone by a mere earth science teacher, our Humanities Blogger, Boris, has also latched onto the new RSS Feeds from About.com (see boris blog…) and quickly drills down to some useful Art History ideas for “approaching art”
This is pushing beyond the bounds of mere learning objects, but again gets out the nortion of using RSS to network together useful (to Prof Boris) sorts of content he can peruse and pontificate upon.
After a bit of summer vacation (actually field work in Montana), Lora the Geologist (who is blogging about learning obejcts in geology) has found the news that About.com is now syndicating their content via RSS, and very quickly she has added a feed for their Geology collection to her site.
Each May we organize a year-end “Ocotillo” retreat for faculty and staff in our system to spend some focused time on instructional technology issues. This year, the theme was “Guess Who’s Coming To Learn?”:
What do we know about our students and their motivations for learning? Are our planning activities based on our own assumptions and experiences? There is plenty of literature about the various Gen-X, Gen-Y characteristics, but are we paying attention?
To better understand the attributes, desires, expectations of our current and future students, we have invited an expert in organizational and social demographics to help us figure out Who is Coming to Learn at Maricopa.
To help set the stage, we created the word Association activity. This was a quick and simple survey a number of faculty collected from their students, where we collected their first responses to some common educational and technical terms.
The results were fascinating.
Actually, we have some ventures going on Electronic Portfolios at Maricopa.
A new mcli site (for now) chronicles three project/efforts.
Now, I wish our work with electornic portfolios was buzzing enough for someone in the organization to force me to attend ePorfolio 2003, the “first international conference on the digital portfolio, 9-10 Octobre 2003, Poitiers France”
Can you say “buzzword”? This year’s “portal”??
ePortfolios might be the biggest thing in technology innovation on campus
For our new CDB readers, we have been experimenting a few months with adding Trackback records to all items in our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). This allows a way for each item to potentially record an entry everyitm someone describes an MLX item in a weblog. And we also have included a TrackBack summary tool for our entire collection.
But still we new, and were reminded by David Carter-Tod (and also noted by Randy at CarvingCode) that there is still not much of a pool of people who can easily send those TrackBack messages or pings (Limited now to MovableType users although Dave says it is coming soon to Manila and Radio) .
So, as one first crude cut, we have a new feature of every MLX item that provides a web form for registering a new ping. It is still not nearly as elegant as a tool that can autodetect the Trackback record and automatically send a ping.
In fact since SiT’s Manila site lacks a TrackBack function, I used a new feature in the MLX to post a TrackBack ping to the item he blogged about as if David had done it himself.
But here it goes, along with a recap of the TrackBack features we have added to the MLX.
The highly touted (well maybe in my mind) right side feature of the CDB site, Google of the Week is actually a poor person’s RSS feed, probably one of the easiest ways to syndicate content is to link to a search that produces a customized query result.
This week, just to highlight the silliness of definitions, we feature a google on learning object definition. What do 4700+ results tell us?
Not much. Or too much?
Scott at EdTechPost recently blogged about a desire for an RSS feed from the Low Threshold Applications site, a collection of how-tos for teachers, designed to be powerful tasks they can do with a minimum of fuss.
The LTA site is one of those ideal for RSS-ifying: there is a regular format of content, updated over time and can be farther reaching if there were some quick ways to scan the content.
Scott took a cut at doing the “myrss” approach, a site that takes any web URL and tries to turn it into RSS. This is a shotgun approach, beacuse it more or less grabs the links it can, lacks description fields, and often gets links that are not really the content you want in a feed. Ugh.
Anyhow, I just wrote the LTA folks a quick guide for them to create and edit an RSS feed using an online tool. They should have it on their site soon, but I did a test version them as a starting point.
No one should ever, ever, be writing RSS by hand! The XML format is very picky (for good reasons), but WebReference does have a spiffy online tool to make it easy to edit your own RSS files, and modify them once you have them online.
For those that have beeing following (or not) the Learning Object experiment’s here (see Back to TrackBack), we have applied the MovableType Trackback concept to every item in the Maricopa Learning eXchange.
With some time to tinker today, I cooked up a new trackback summary tool that allows one to check out the trackbacks across our site. It is ugly, ugly code, a very un-elegant hack, but it is a concept that can illustrate (maybe) what the potnetial is for TrackBack and Learning Objects.
So what?
The more you click around the web, the more you see information rich sites that could do a little bit more good by adding RSS feeds to their content. It’s even worse when you scan the URLs and sense that the content is idling away in a database. Like Clara Peller’s inquiry for beef, we are wondering, “Where’s the Feed?”
Both myself and D’Arcy Norman implemented it into our learning object collection sites in a matter of a few hours. Here is just a scoop of sites that should be adding the little orange link box.. 
Judging from the content structure and top links. I think these are all from the same folks, the Arts & Letters Daily, Business Daily Review, SciTech Daily – all of these sites feature RSS like headinlines on the fron page- a blurb a link that lead to a full story. Where’s the feed?
