Edu_RSS
Citizens Pony Up for Green Energy
Some utility customers feel that if the government won't put muscle into renewable energy, they'll pay a little more to make utility companies deliver it. Utilities in 36 states offer some form of green pricing. From
Wired News on July 29, 2006 at 3:46 p.m..
Study: AIDS Virus Hides in Gut
New research from the University of California shows the AIDS virus does much of its damage to the immune system inside the intestines right after viral infection. Anti-inflammatories may help treatment. From
Wired News on July 29, 2006 at 2:45 p.m..
Blackboard’s LMS Patent
Blackboard has patented “technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods”. Frankly, they should be ashamed. It’s a tissue of fabrication. Full text here and more reaction here. From
Serious Instructional Technology on July 29, 2006 at 11:45 a.m..
Fetish: Retro Italian Motorcycle
This month's batch of sexy tech includes a yellow-jacket Ducati bike with rumbling twin engines, a wi-hi-fi speaker and a smart HEPA vac. From Wired magazine. From
Wired News on July 29, 2006 at 6:45 a.m..
New stuff from Socialtext and Technorati
From the press release: Socialtext, the first Wiki company, releases Socialtext Open at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). Available for immediate download, Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance. Based on the same great product, Socialtext Open is released under a standard open source license, and contains all of Socialtext's enterprise grade code aside from enterprise management and enterprise integration tools. Socialtext From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Sending a text mail in Thunderbird
Aha! So, if you have Thunderbird set to compose and send HTML messages, but you want to send a single plain text message, you don't have to redo your entire configuration. You can just hold down the shift key when you press the Write, Respond or Respond All button. Details here. And, by the way, if you do want to change the default from HTML to text or vice versa, the switch is in Tools > Account Settings, not in Tools > Options, for reasons that I'm sure make 100% sense to very smart people. On the Composition & Addressing... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Jay Rosen's hybrid
Jay has started NewAssignment.net, a response (but not The Answer) to the question "Where's the money going to come from to support real reporting in this brave new media world we're building? " At NewAssignment, story ideas will come from the Web. The idea will be developed initially on line. A budget will be created. Then a reporter will be contracted - for honest-to-goodness money. She'll work in public, with any of us who care to contribute, in what Jeff Jarvis felicitously calls networked journalism. Initially, the money is coming from Craig. (Thank you, Craig.) Jay writes: From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
New from Brad Sucks
Brad Sucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, has some new demos out, here and here. Plus, his band, Brad Sucks Live — just about inescapably pornographic in its implication — will be making a genuinely rare appearance at Riverpalooza August 12 in Ottawa. [Tags: bradsucks music mp3]... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
New issue of Joho
I just published a new issue of my increasingly intermittent newsletter, JOHO: Why believe Wikipedia?:Wikipedia is credible. Not always. Not in every detail. But nothing passes that bar except perhaps for some stuff scratched into stone tablets. What is the source of Wikipedia's credibility? Oddly, it has something to do with its willingness to admit fallibility. Simply appearing in the Encyclopedia Britannica confers authority on an article. Simply appearing in Wikipedia does not, because you might hit the 90 second stretch before some loon's rewriting of history or science is found From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
The morality of entropy, and next summer's blockbuster
I passingly daydreamed this morning about winning a new Hummer in a contest advertised on one of the items in our refrigerator. After paying the tax, what the hell would I do with a Hummer? Selling itwould just pass its demonic demand for fuel on to someone else. No, the only moral option would be to dismantle it and bury its parts in graveyards scattered across multiple continents. But then, one day in the not so distant future, a call might be issued via SkyNet, and the pieces of all the buried Hummers would claw their way out of their... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Other than plain old stupidity, how do you explain this?
From Salon: According to a new Harris Poll, 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion. That's a sharp and rather inexplicable increase from February 2005, when just 36 percent of the public held on to that belief. Ready for more? Sixty-four percent of the public still thinks that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al-Qaida. [Tags: politics]... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Colbert : Morning news :: Stewart : Crossfire
Stephen Colbert brilliantly plays the media. It gets hilarious when he starts showing quick clips of the morning shows. (Here's Stewart on Crossfire.) [Tags: stephen_colbert jon_stewart media]... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
The identity continuum isn't a continuum
I don't know that anyone needs correcting on this point, but that won't stop me... Identity isn't a continuum with anonymity at one end and documented, certified, authenticated ID on the other. It probably never was and it certainly isn't online. There's a third vertex: Pseudonymity. Pseudonyms online are not midway between anonymity and ID. They're different in kind, but enough on the same plane that any discussion of anonymity and ID that does not include pseudonyms is likely to go wrong. It's hard to find an exact analog to this in the real world. Social r From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Fear and trembling about my Wikimania presentation
I'm doing the final keynote at Wikimania, the Wikipedia conference. This has me a tad nervous since in my experience Wikipedians tend to be knowledgeable, forthright, and have a low tolerance for the sort of BS that is my stock in trade. I've posted my in-progress notes about what I plan on saying, although I also expect to modify it based on what's discussed at the conference itself. I'm open to comments, suggestions, snorts of derision and prognostications of doom... [Tags: wikipedia wikimania everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge]... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Getting an ISBN through Lulu - second try
I've now been through the process of publishing a book at Lulu and getting an ISBN from them. The process is necessarily convoluted and their wizards are unncessarily confusing. But it can be done. Getting an ISBN from Lulu requires paying them $99 for the optional Global Distribution package. You can only do that after you've stepped through their publishing process. Only then are you given the ISBN. You then have to assign the ISBN to a new edition. Then you upload the updated materials for the new edition, including a cover and front page with the ISBN number on... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Downloading Firefox for Linux
Look, I know this is only hard for me because I'm a flipping Linux moron, but it took me 45 minutes tonight to find an address of a Linux version of Firefox that I could download using the wget command. The other addresses work fine if you already have a browser, but I couldn't find one in my MythTV installation other than the minimalist one that comes with it; that one displayed the Firefox binary as a spray of numbers on my screen and the Myth web browser has no apparent "save to file" command. But this address works, at... From
Joho the Blog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
The Survivor View
Summary: I like Survivor but should I? I remind myself of it's ups and downs and what keeps me coming back. I then try to translate to the human issues involved in connected joint survival. In our present Survivor it looks like Terry's downright excellence at competitions plus a decent strategic sense will have him winning the competition. He could lose, however, if Cerie's superior strategic sense can get someone other than someone jury members detest opposite him in the final two. It's been the same since the show began: good competitive skills, good strat From
Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
Deuterolearning in Context of Home, School and Society
Summary: We need to focus on the person from the inside out. On skills relating to being in charge of self and one's projects. This requires time. Time from the developing person, time from the parents, time from the school. We need to back off a good distance from the idea of someone being a "good worker" in order to see the supersets of "good person" and "integrated" and "satisfied". This entry will focus on the possibilities created by time and focus. First off -- I'm not From
Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog on July 29, 2006 at 1:48 a.m..
School 2.0
So I got a chance to spend half a day with Chris Lehmann and his full staff at the Franklin Institute in Philly yesterday talking about how the Read/Write Web might work at their new school, the Science Leadership Academy which opens in about six weeks. It was the last day of an 8-day intensive [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Blogs at Their Best
Yesterday, I exchanged a few e-mails with a former student of mine who just graduated college, and I was surprised and happy that he’d taken up blogging. He’s turned out to be a very good writer, and just the few minutes I spent reading his latest posts gave me this kind of weird pride-like feeling, [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Building Learning Communities 06
Just a quick post about the 7th Annual Building Learning Communities conference that starts today with pre-conference sessions here in Boston. I’ve got 32 captive (and hopefully captivated) educators for the day to do some evangelizing and teaching. Go, Blogs! Go! But what I’m really looking forward to is meeting/seeing some folks from our edblogging community, [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Of BLC and Books
Some assorted reflections on a busy first full workshop day in Boston where giving two presentations in three sessions left little time for blogging. I’ve had to resort to reading the HitchHikr feed to catch up on what’s been going on at a conference I’m attending. Sad, I know. The keynote by Marco Torres was phenomenal [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Taking a Break
Building Learning Communities has been a great conference that I feel like I’ve missed a great deal of for a variety of reasons. Connectivity (or lack thereof) has been a small part of it, but mostly it’s just trying to keep up with all of the events and people and good conversation. It’s overwhelming. That [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
The Time Thing
So this is just a brain dump of frustration and flailing at trying to figure out how to balance everything that’s going on right now…Last week at the Building Learning Communities conference was great, but as an indicator of how crazed things have become, I would have had a better chance of talking to Darren [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
So, This is a Good Way to Teach Kids
Here’s the lead from a New York Post article today titled MySpace Invaders for City Students: City public-school students better beware what they blog when classes resume in September. A revised draft version of the city Department of Education discipline code calls for harsh punishments - including expulsion - forstudents who post “libelous or defamatory material [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
How Blogging Connects
Kim is writing powerfully about her practice, and a few days ago she posted this: HereTMs the amazing thing about blogging for me. When I go home to my family or talk to friends, noone really wants to talk about education, or my ideas, or drop out prevention, or student achievement. Mystandard response to oehow was [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
DOPA ALERT!
Via Dave Warlick, I’m just going to reprint this here and the start making calls: ALAWON: American Library Association Washington Office Newsline Volume 15, Number 73 July 25, 2006 In This Issue: URGENT ACTION ALERT: Call Representatives TODAY and ask them to oppose DOPA URGENT Action Needed: The Washington Office has learned that the House may try to expedite passage of H.R. [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
DOPA Passes…
So the dopey House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed DOPA, and we’ve got to get our acts together to make sure Senators have more of a clue about what’s happening with technology out here in the “real” world. I wonder how many of them come even close to “getting” everything that’s shifting and changing, the way [...] From
weblogged News on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Back from holidays in Vietnam
The lack of posts over the last two weeks is a direct result of being on holidays. As a spur of the moment thing, I had an opportunity to spend two weeks travelling through Vietnam, which I jumped at without... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
User focused language for intranets and websites
Nick Besseling has written an article on writing for users. To quote: Despite the growing awareness of content quality and usability, there is still many organisations and online content producers that can’t get out of their headspace and silos. (See... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Why do we share knowledge?
Patrick Lambe has written an entry exploring why we share knowledge, providing a simple but useful model. To quote: There's another common assumption in the knowledge sharing literature that I think needs to be challenged, and that is that knowledge... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Do links need underlines?
Jared Spool revists the age-old question: do links need underlines? To quote: During our recent Virtual Seminar on home page design, several people asked about whether it makes a difference if links are underlined or not. It’s a good question... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Enterprise expertise management systems and organizational reality
Dennis D. McDonald has written an article on enterprise expertise management systems. To quote: In my research I'm trying to understand the characteristics of organizations that will impact their adoption of expertise management systems. The purpose of this article is... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Productive dashboards
Michael Andrews has written an entry on enterprise dashboards. To quote: New generation dashboards are now presenting data more relevant to front-line employees, particularly their KPIs (key performance indicators). The seamless corporation created by enterprise software is allowing a multitude... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Scott Berkun is coming to Australia!
Why do so many design intensive projects go so wrong? Scott Berkun will be presenting a one day masterclass titled Leading successful web and software projects, designed to teach you the best practices and leadership tactics for starting, managing... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Sydney CM Pros Meeting (Sydney, July 26)
We will be running a moderated panel on Content Management Workflow and Capturing Processes in line with recent discussion threads on the Australian CM Pros List. In order to fit in with Open Publish, the meeting is being moved from... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Guide to remote usability testing
Nate Bolt has written an article on remote usability testing. To quote: If you'd like to get started with remote testing, you have three easy steps. First, choose a recruiting method, then decide on a screen-sharing tool, and third, figure... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Taming your "target" content
Maish Nichani has written an article on taming your "target" content. To quote: When it comes to the design of intranets and large websites, the limelight is firmly on issues of taxonomy and navigation (info-seeking) and not so much on... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Folksonomies: a user-driven approach to organising content
Joshua Porter has written an overview of folksonomies. To quote: Although taxonomies are common, it can be difficult for design teams to implement them. For one thing, taxonomies are very expensive to create and maintain, often involving month-long projects by... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Spring rolls for lunch
Spring rolls for lunch As previously blogged, I've just come back from two weeks of holiday in Vietnam. Many (way too many!) photos were taken, and I'm slowly uploading them to Flickr. This photo comes from the now-completed set... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
CMS simplicity
Michael Angeles explores the topic of CMS simplicity, and the impact it has on the long-term success of content management solutions. To quote: In the end, it's about money. If you believe that ease of use leads to making more... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Brand experience in user experience design
Steve Baty has written an article on brand experience, in the context of user-centred design. To quote: This article attempts to identify the appropriate role for brand values as one project objective within the broader framework of user-centered design. If... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Q and A about the ECM marketplace, circa 2006
Tony Byrne has written an article about the state of the ECM marketplace, as it currently stands. To quote: First, there remains a fairly wide gap between customer expectations and what these products can really do. Outside of document imaging... From
Column Two on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Open Access Books by Cal Tech Authors
Peter Suber provides a link to the new OA book resource at Cal Tech. I agree with Peter that it would be highly desirable for other institutions to establish similar sites. There are some OA textbooks nested within MIT's OpenCourseWare Project and at other OCW sites but they are hard to find. The Cal Tech site is searchable and browseable. The books are available in both pdf and html formats. _____JH_________
OA books by Caltech authors. The California Institute of Technology (
C From EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Flash webGeology Resources
These excellent flash resources can be used as instructional supplements in the teaching of Geology. They are made available from Norway's University of Tromso. Take a look at these resources even if you are not teaching Geology or Earth Sciences; they are interesting to view and illustrate what can be accomplished with flash tools. Resource listings are in English, Norwegian, and Russian. ______JH From
EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
From Digital Divide to Digital Dividend by John Daniel and Paul West
This article from the June/July 2006 issue of Innovate puts forth an important vision of world education and provides informative statistics about current conditions. ____JH ______ "The most promising innovation in higher education is the concept—and the developing reality—of open educational resources (OERs). The term refers to open course content as well as open source software and tools. Essentially OERs apply to teaching and learning the basic principle that underpins academic research: sharing. Distance educators have talked for years about sharing cou From
EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science
I've been a fan of case study teaching in psychology for many years. This site at the University of Buffalo provides access to a fine selection of resources for case study teaching in science, including links to other case study websites. (Thanks to Ray Schroeder's
Educational Technology for this reference.) ____JH ______ "The aim of the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science is to promote the development and dissemination of innovative materials and sound educat From
EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
LOLA Exchange--Learning Objects and Learning Activities
LOLA is an abbreviation for "Learning Objects and Learning Activities." The site has a fine collection of materials for use in instruction. "LoLa is an exchange for facilitating the sharing of high-quality learning objects. It contains materials for use across the curriculum, with a particular focus on modules for Information Literacy." The site is maintained by Wesleyan University. Use the video introduction and Help to orient to the features available at LOLA. ____JH ______ "LOLA is not a replacement for MERLOT or other national learning object repositories. We are adhe From
EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Flickr facelift
I just noticed that Flickr.com recieved a slight facelift. They added dynamic HTML pulldowns and revamped the structure. The new Organizer is excellent.Related: From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Switching this site to a CSS-based layout
I am not working offline for that and I am also not doing it in one single step. So there will be pages broken and/or looking odd. Sorry. This change is a preparation for easier future design updates. I also want to make the page more standards compliant.Related: From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Spry framework for AJAX
Adobe Labs (former Macromedia Labs) offers a
framework called »Spry«. It is a JavaScript library that offers easier construction of AJAX applications. Drew McLellan from the Web Standards Project reviews the framework and concludes: As it currently stands, the framework is certainly not ready for prime-time, and if it’s the sort of framework you’d otherwise find useful, we’d encourage you to investigate it and offer constructive feedback. From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
The JavaScript Accessibility Problem
James Edwards from Sitepoint.com
looks at AJAX and Screenreaders: There doesn't appear to be any reliable way to notify screen readers of an update in the DOM. There are piecemeal approaches that work for one or more devices, but no overall approach or combination that would cover them all. The Mozilla Developer Center offers some information on the work IBM is doing in this area:
Accessible DHTML. Also the From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
New Webmontag events...
Tonight there are two
Webmontag events in Berlin and Bielefeld. Next week there will be one in Cologne (which I will attend), Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. There is already a bunch of interesting presentations in the pipeline — as always. And interesting people too: Tim Bruysten, Tobias Jordans, Mario Sixtus, Oliver Lauer. A very good way to spent a monday evening with such bright people. I don't like at Webmontag events are the lurkers: people that go there just to listen to the presentations and do not tune in the socializing part of it. I From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Design switch
This weblog has changed under the hood: the code is cleaner. Everything is CSS based. It doesn't validate yet, but it will. There have been only a few minor tweaks to the design itself. It pushed most of the templating away from Tinderbox and up to the server. The next step will be to circumvent the HTML export of Tinderbox completely and publish everything directly from a database (by converting the XML file into RDBMS tables). It will also reduce the number of agents (like the ones that collect the weblog posts for each category). Update 5/29/2006: Some From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Pavel
This is very interesting: a multi-user note-taking web-application. Click on this screenshot to get to the 5 minute screencast:
I'd describe Pavel as some kind of "JotSpot Live with tinderbox-ish Notes" (see
JotSpot Live and
Tinderbox< From owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Flickr/Ajax application with Ruby on Rails
If there is one word, that could describe what happens in the Ruby on Rails context then it is »elegance«. Just click on the image below to see an elegant screencast of an elegant development framework (
Ruby on Rails) with an elegant text editor (
TextMate) using an elegant JavaScript technology (AJAX) on an elegant service API of an elegant web application (
Flickr):
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Learning vocabulary? ProVoc!
ProVoc is a free application that allows to learn vocabulary. You can download user generated learning files from the website. It is also possible to store sound files or even videos with words. For a free software this is a very well designed and useful tool. Related: From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
Alahup CMS
The CMS
Alahup! seems to endorse a lot of the interaction design techniques of Web 2.0 applications (blind ups & downs, yellow flashes, spinning activity icons, etc) even though it appears to be a desktop application. The website states that the interface is based on Flash. So this application may well be an example what can happen when you pair Flash with the standard GUI and AJAX approaches.
From owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
An inconvenient truth
After Al Gore didn't make it to presidency in 2000 he now fights for public awareness of global warming. There is a movie coming that covers this topic.Related: From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:47 a.m..
»Ladies and gentlemen, Flock is on fire!«
Paul Stamatiou
wrote a long review of the first Beta release of the »social web browser«
Flock. I have tested the prior releases (up to 0.5.X) and decided these versions are not ready for daily use yet. The 0.7.0 release (the first Beta) seems to be much better, but it still consumes a lot of RAM. Flock provides integrated tools for online-bookmarking (like del.icio.us), photo sharing (like
Flickr), support From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:46 a.m..
Mnemomap
Tim and
Simon from
send|recieve presented a verly early alpha version of
Mnemomap one week ago on the
Webmontag event in Cologne (which happened to be the first one in Cologne I couldn't attend). I am sure they'd love anyone to try Mnemomap and drop some feedback about it.
From owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:46 a.m..
ScoutPress
Tobias Jordans finally finished his diploma thesis:
ScoutPress. It's a system based on weblog software (WordPress) that allows foundations and fragmented organisations to effectively communicate and organize the scattered and distributed information. Tobias used the German Scout Association (DPSG) as a live example (therefore the project name) but it is in no way limited to this interest group. He really did go beyond setting up a weblog system and remain waiting what emerges. Her identified drivin From
owrede_log on July 29, 2006 at 1:46 a.m..
School tech and politics
For most of yesterday morning our school internet connection offered us 78 kbps, a download speed of about 10 KB/sec. It's nice that, in New York at least,
Eliot Spitzer gets it: While New York has a vast transportation infrastructure to move people and goods, we don't have the broadband infrastructure to move ideas and information. If you're a kid growing up in South Korea, your Internet access is ten times faster at half the price than a kid growing up in the S From
homoLudens III on July 29, 2006 at 1:45 a.m..
Net losses; netSquared
The weekend approaches, the last long weekend before the long summer. Everything that could go wrong with tech integration at Galileo has gone wrong this year. Final straw is the departure of our three most tech-savvy teachers. Well, it is urban public education. In hopes of reviving flagging spirits, I'm off next week to
NetSquared, where I'm to From
homoLudens III on July 29, 2006 at 1:45 a.m..
The canker
A 15 year old kid, never in the library that I noticed.
And I complain like bandwidth and tech-shy teachers are the real problems with public urban education? Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes: The canker galls the infants of From
homoLudens III on July 29, 2006 at 1:45 a.m..