By Stephen Downes
July 16, 2004
Making RSS Pretty
For various
reasons I have been playing with XML, XSL and CSS, prompted
partly because of a couple of small projects I'm working
on, and prompted partly because Sean Burke released this
nice guide to how the three work together. In so doing, I
created an RSS 2.0 feed of OLDaily (mainly because
my browser requires a .xml extension on the XML file to
make any of this work). This feed will replace my existing
RSS 0.91 feed - I will keep producing the
0.91 feed, so nobody's headline reader will break, but will
direct my efforts toward the 2.0 feed. Why am I doing this?
Because you should be thinking of this sort of model when
you think about reusable learning resources. More on this
soon. For those of you who are curious to see how I did it,
see my XSL and CSS files, both of which borrow heavily
from Sean Burke's files. By Sean M. Burke, July 10, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Creation of a Learning Landscape: Weblogging
and Social Networking in the Context of
E-Portfolios
The authors are responding to what
appears to be an irresistable trend in learning, the
tendency to want to apply "standards, controls and
criteria" to new learning technology and to fix it firmly
to that bastion of traditional learning, the course. "The
e-portfolio is used as a skills checklist. Once the course
is over, discontinued use; what a waste." Exactly. Much of
this draft covers ground familiar to OLDaily readers -
blogs and blogging, FOAF and social networking. But the
authors' proposal is visionary. "Creation of a learning
landscape where learners engage in the whole process both
academically and socially should increase the opportunity
to build one's learning instead of just being the
recipients of information." If your view of portfolios is
just something akin to a content management system, don't
bother. But if it's the student's personal and continuing
presence in an online community of discourse, then you are
on to something. Thanks, Jeremy, for the link. By David
Tosh and Ben Werdmuller, July 16, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
After IE Is Dead Is The Google Browser
Next?
Robin Good waxes poetic about Google's
desktop search - a little toolbar that sits in your taskbar
and gives you instant access to search without having to
launch your browser. Instead, it launches a Google Browser;
because of this capacity Good notes "the Google browser
appears to me as a significant and insofar unnoticed
competitive weapon in Google's hands." Never one to leave
things alone, I quickly added Edu_RSS and OLDaily to the
custom searches. You can too: once you have the toolbar
installed, click 'Options', then select the 'Customized
Searches' tab. Click 'Add...' Now, here are the URLs for OLDaily and Edu_RSS - right-click on these and paste
them into the 'URL' box in the Custom Search Description
screen. To use, type your search term, then select OLDaily
or Edu_RSS from the list of custom searches. By Luigi
Canali De Rossi, Robin Good, July 3, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Eduforge Wiki
George Siemens links
to a number of useful guides to the use of open source
technology available at this website (and, since it's a
wiki, you can add your own knowledge or information to this
page as well). In particular, see the following tutorials
on open source tools in education:
By Various and sundry authors, Eduforge, July 15,
2004
[
Refer][
Research][
Reflect]
Public Release of Sakai Collaboration and
Learning Environment
From the announcement: "The
Sakai Project today releases its open source Collaboration
and Learning Environment (CLE) software to the public.
Members of the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP)
have been reviewing the beta version of the software since
their highly successful conference with 170 attendees in
June. This release to the public is Sakai Release Candidate
1 (RC1), and it puts the full code in the hands of any
institution that wishes to begin using or understanding the
Sakai software." The website asserts in nummerous locations
that the software is open source, but appears nowhere to
specify whether this means GPL or something else. Moreover,
the front page notice that it is something called
"Community Source' adds confusion. It would be nice to see
a simple declaration somewhere so people could know. Via
Jarche. By Various Authors, July 15, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
SOUPA (Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and
Pervasive Applications)
If you wondered what the
universe looks like, check out this page. OK, well, not
exactly, but this is that kind of high level stuff.
Befining basic representations for such things as events,
persons, policies and space (among others), SOUPA "defines
generic vocabularies that are universal for different
pervasive computing applications. SOUPA Extension defines
additional vocabularies for supporting specific types of
applications and provides examples for the future ontology
extensions." Links to a couple of papers are included,
along with the OWL documents for each entity. By Harry
Chen, July 15, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Developing a University Course For On-line
Delivery Based on Learning Objects: From Ideals to
Compromises
Scott Leslie finally located this item after a search,
and we're glad he took the time. The essay contains
interesting documentation of an instructor and his
assistant's attempt to create an online business course
using learning objects. After a search through repositories
proved fruitless, after scouring the web for free resources
turned up little of value, and after copyright and delivery
issues threw additional roadbloacks, the authors gave up
and bought a prepackaged course with book and online
support. Which, of course, is exactly what publishers want,
but it's not clear whether this is the best result for
students. I suspect it isn't. As Leslie says, "We
desperately need more stories like these, as well as far
more serious work on what a real 'learning object design
approach' to create new curriculum out of existing
materials might look like." More papers from the Learning Objects in
a Box project. By Pierre Wilhelme and Russ Wilde, Athabasca
University, July 16, 2004 8:03 a.m.
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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