Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
February 27, 2009

Semantic Aware Apps Rising
OK, this article is a lot of fun, matching as it does Myers-Briggs types to various bloggers. I covered this before. Vicki Davis runs the diagrams for a number of us (I see I have a unique role in the world). Fun, but the really good point comes at the end of the article: "The fact is that the semantic web will somehow do JUST WHAT WE'RE seeing here -- use your words or use other things to categorize and share who and what we are." Vicki A. Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Ontologies, Semantic Web, Web Logs] [Comment]

How to for Workplace E'learning Released
This report is based on data that have come in "from businesses that have received funding support under the [Australian] national training system's e-learning strategy." It would be useful [read: essential, but not done] to have some idea of the size and representativeness of that data. Based on the results (which are at least representative as significant) the author offers a three part model to help businesses design and support workplace e-learning. Clint Smith, Australian Flexible Learning Framework, February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Australia] [Comment]

Facebook Nation?
Facebook has responded to its critics by promoting something like a charter of rights, which you can read summarized on this post. Fair enough. But from all corners is coming the same objection as is stated here: "There is nothing in here about 2-way data sharing though. That is, where the People are allowed to gain access to all of the data that The Facebook compiles and shares." Oh, and a nice neat XML listing of all of my Facebook friends would be useful too, something I can export automatically and use in, say, my own website. Charlene Croft, Community. Identity. Stability., February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Books, XML, Metadata] [Comment]

Wookie Meets Shindig: OpenSocial and W3C Widgets in Moodle
From the Wookie website: "Wookie Engine is a server application that allows you to upload and deploy widgets for your applications. It also lets widgets make calls to other sites, APIs and feeds via HTTP a proxy." The widgets are based on the W3C widget specification. This is pretty cool, and so is the work Scott Wilson reports on his website about the work of the CETIS Widget Working Group (more). Wookie plug-ins have been created for Moodle, WordPress and Elgg. Scott Wilson, Scott's Workblog, February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Cool] [Comment]

Orchestrating the Media Collage
This is a good article focusing on one of (what I call) the "three Ls": Language. The central theme here is that language is evolving beyond text and that teachers, in order to promote literacy, need to move beyond text-centrism. The article offers eight practical steps to inform this process. (The other two Ls, by the way, are 'Logic' and 'Learning', and these form the foundations of information age learning). Jason Ohler, Educational Leadership, February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning] [Comment]

Exe-Lente Project Was Approved
SourceForge project has approved a space for educational software. "Anyone interested in sharing .elp, common cartridges, scorm or ims packages via exe are welcome to help out. Just please make sure all your materials included in the file and the file itself are licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution 3.0 or GNUFDL or GNU GPL." In a related initiative, a class at the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) had been creating video tutorials on eXe. The eXe project is also available on SourceForge. Roel Cantada, Eduforge, February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Video, Project Based Learning, Metadata] [Comment]

The PaaS Era
PaaS stands for "Platform as a Service" and is the next instantiation of the service-based (or Software as a Service (SaaS)) architecture. E-Commerce Times has a two-part article (Part One, Part Two) on the concept and its application in business. The net effect, in my view, of PaaS, is that it allows much smaller enterprises to access software support previously available only to larger organizations. "Oracle on demand" is a great example of this. Erika Morphy, E-Commerce Times, February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: RSS] [Comment]

CanadaHelps
I support sites I feel are providing a service, such as Rabble, and this week, for the first time, I made a donation to the Media Awareness Network. The site has faded from prominence since its halcyon days of plentiful government funding and NAWeb Awards, but it continues on and fills a key role in the Canadian internet. What prompted me to donate was a link to this page at the bottom of its email newsletter. The CanadaHelps donation page makes giving to the site very easy, and is itself a charity, not a commercial operation. You can use the service to donate to any of Canada's 68,000 registered charities (you search for the charity on the site, the list of which is obtained from the government database) and it collects your donation and issues your tax receipt. Various Authors, Website, February 27, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Newsletters, Canada] [Comment]

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