General educational technology things no longer worthy of their own cateory
Within three hours of writing yesterday about Blogdigger (an RSS feed combiner that returns a group of feeds as a single feed), I got a nice comment from Greg at Bloggdigger who let me know that the filtering tools were still being tinkered. It’s rewarding to get direct responses like that from the folks directly […]
FYI and for self (and colleague Brian Lamb) promotion… if you are attending EDUCAUSE 2004 (October in Denver), sign up now for our pre-conference seminar Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, TrackBack, and Related Technologies: Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access […]
Tom Hoffman, blogther (=”blog+author”, eh?) of Tuttle SVC wrote today about an interest in two-person interfaces:
What occurred to me is that there are lots of jobs in real life where you have two people collaboratively operating one machine or even one set of data on paper, but I can’t think of a single pc-based application, outside of games, where two people are working on two computers on a real-time collaborative task. SubEthaEdit, I suppose, but that’s a relatively simple case. I’m not talking about having a conversation; I’m thinking about some kind of serious data manipulation. More like a pilot/co-pilot relationship. Gunner and loader, that kind of thing. I’m not saying it is a problem, but it is kinda weird if you think about it.
I wanted to share something I worked on a few clicks back, but sadly, his blog lacks comments (?) so maybe someone who knows him can send this.
During my sabbatical in 2000, I spent two months at Northern Arizona University (in summer, Flagstaff is a heavenly escape from the Phoenix desert) working on some experimental multi-user web applications, using an early version of the Shockwave multi-user server (MUS). Maybe Tom would categorize these as “games”, but it was nostalgic to think about them, and rewarding to see that code from 2000 still runs (despite that macromedia no longer even mentions MUS).
Basically, the MUS is a desktop application running on a computer plugged into the net, and is set up to “broker” small messages sent back and forth from remote users using a graphic interface authored in Macromedia Director. This functionality is pretty much totally eclipsed by the server communication layers available to Flash developers, but this was done in the pre-Flash era.
But to get to the good stuff, I created two prototype web applications designed for teaching basic chemistry, and they are environments where more than one person, from different places on the net, can share the same virtual environment.
In the Ideal Gas Law application, the goal is to adjust the temperature, number of gas molecules, and the volume of a chamber to try and achieve a specified pressure (hey, we all remember PV=nRT?). The idea is that in the multiuser environment, if I decide to decrease the volume by moving in the right wall of the chamber, the changes I make are seen in near real time by Tom on his computer. And if he changes the temperature, I see the effect– because we are two people sharing the same interface:
It’s been our belief that it would take time for our Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) to reach that magical tipping point, critical mass- when it contained enough content, resources, objects, ideas that our users could easily find something useful for themselves that they would be self-compelled to add their own stuff. I had MERLOT-ian aspirations. […]
Thanks to six of you who took up my offer to complete a silly survey inside my eportfolio. Well, there is one ringer in there, at least. And someone else got very serious about answering the open ended questions, but helped us clear up a bug. So not only can you create a survey to […]
Audree has been busy…. she is the developer of the ePortfolio tool built first at Chandler-Gilbert Community College and also running in our office as “Maricopa eP” for the rest of our system. Over the last few weeks, she has added new tools and features, based on faculty and student input, especially since at her […]
What is the obsession (paranoia) with trying to define (exegesis) learning objects (no definitions)? It is certainly useful to have understandable definitions for tightly constrained concepts like triskaidekaphobia, but when trying to introduce faculty new to the concept of learning objects, it seems almost unavoidable to stop them from wanting to labor over finding or […]
One of our faculty members taking on leadership of our learning objects action group is getting up to speed on learning about learning objects…. Donna sent this “Cliff Notes” version of SCORM: This is an overview of the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model. It’s hard to make technical standards understandable (much less interesting). Nonetheless, here’s […]
Somewhere in the aggregator today came a pointer to a new blog search tool, BlogPulse
BlogPulse is an “automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs… It is a one-stop portal for finding out what bloggers are saying on topics of interest to you or on your beat…. Perhaps you want to find out the latest, greatest memes and trends in the blogosphere—you’ve come to the right place. Check out our daily Analysis and Trends.
And it seems to support Google-like searches, well at least putting quotes around words for a phrase search, for example, my own BlogPulse on “learning objects”.
But wait a minute- when you search from BlogPulse, you are not provided a savable URL like Google, which allows you to create your own “Google Links” ( that links to an MLX package “how to”). The reason is on the techie side, but it boils down to how the FORM tags are set up- a method=”POST” option does not return the query appeneded to the search URL (like BlogPulse), while the GET method supplied by Google will return the results with a full URL that allows you to regenerate the results.
This is an incredible feat that Google provides, whether it was their intent to do so or not. Any search result from Google can be repeated by the URL of the search results page. Copy / Paste and you have a new Google Link
This is a small trick I have used for years, but as a Happy Friday bonus, I present my strategy for going from a POST to a GET…
I mentioned recently how one of our faculty members had created an electronic portfolio for his faculty evaluation process. Well something funny happened in a very short time span. John was contacted by the link in his eportfolio by two students on the east coast who had searched Google for “online anatomy physiology course” and […]
