Just wrapping up from today's event "ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty" with our excellent guest Helen Barrett, and it was a rousing success. Wish I could have been blogging it all, but other duties called. Helen gave an outstanding overview of the eportfolio landscape, and hammering the not so subltu or semantic differences between assessment for learning versus assessment of learning, and where eportfolios sit.
One of the two major highlights, beyond Helen's expertise and storytelling weaving, was our panel discussion with 5 Maricopa students eportfolio experiences to share. Rather than summarizing, I am noting that by early next week, I will have the 50+ minute audio available as an mp3 cast (it is processing now in Audcacity). Okay, that was too easy-- here is a 12Mb audio mp3 stream of the panel:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/eport05/student_panel.mp3
I also have lots of pictures, and the progress might have been better but one of my digital camera media cards got corrupted as there were only 34 images out of 100+ I knew I took. Ouch... I knew something funky had happened when I switched out my batteries.
But a little googl-ing got me to PhotoRescue software, where the downloadable demo showed me that it could read the missing images, so after ordering it ($20), I was able to resurrect the lost images.
Another highlight was our 10 station demo session over lunch, where the 5 students plus 4 Maricopa faculty/staff and Helen gave informal demos to small groups. It was an extremely active session and we had a hard time getting folks to sit back down.
The afternoon covered the process fort faculty eport development, and we closed with a nice visioning discussion on the possible, probable, and preferable futures of eportfolios. I know this is vague, but Helen promises to soon post her presentation, and we will soon add some of the supplemental materials she provided us.
Bottom line is we have a bunch of new people energized to try their hands at eport-ing.
Whew!
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:11:"eportfolios";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-25T18:07:37-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:2523:"Just wrapping up from today's event "ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty" with our excellent guest Helen Barrett, and it was a rousing success. Wish I could have been blogging it all, but other duties called. Helen gave an outstanding overview of the eportfolio landscape, and hammering the not so subltu or semantic differences between assessment for learning versus assessment of learning, and where eportfolios sit.
One of the two major highlights, beyond Helen's expertise and storytelling weaving, was our panel discussion with 5 Maricopa students eportfolio experiences to share. Rather than summarizing, I am noting that by early next week, I will have the 50+ minute audio available as an mp3 cast (it is processing now in Audcacity). Okay, that was too easy-- here is a 12Mb audio mp3 stream of the panel:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/eport05/student_panel.mp3
I also have lots of pictures, and the progress might have been better but one of my digital camera media cards got corrupted as there were only 34 images out of 100+ I knew I took. Ouch... I knew something funky had happened when I switched out my batteries.
But a little googl-ing got me to PhotoRescue software, where the downloadable demo showed me that it could read the missing images, so after ordering it ($20), I was able to resurrect the lost images.
Another highlight was our 10 station demo session over lunch, where the 5 students plus 4 Maricopa faculty/staff and Helen gave informal demos to small groups. It was an extremely active session and we had a hard time getting folks to sit back down.
The afternoon covered the process fort faculty eport development, and we closed with a nice visioning discussion on the possible, probable, and preferable futures of eportfolios. I know this is vague, but Helen promises to soon post her presentation, and we will soon add some of the supplemental materials she provided us.
Bottom line is we have a bunch of new people energized to try their hands at eport-ing.
Whew!
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109380020;}i:1;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:69:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/25/sofia.php";s:5:"title";s:43:"SoFIA Releases First 8 Open Content Courses";s:4:"link";s:69:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/25/sofia.php";s:11:"description";s:1806:"Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) intends to do for the community college level what MIT's Open Courseware offers for upper division courses- free, open content courses you can use in whole or part. Free with Creative Commons licensing. The first 8 courses are available from their gallery:
The pilot grant open content initiative, Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets), was initiated in March of 2004 under the leadership of Vivian 'Vivie' Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning at Foothill College. "Open" content refers to material that is freely available for use by faculty, students, and self-learners.The Sofia finalists include the following content contributed by faculty from five California Community Colleges: Creative Typography, by Carolyn Brown, Foothill College; Introduction to Java Programming, Steven Gilbert, Orange Coast College; Elementary Statistics, by Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, De Anza College; Physical Geography, by Allison Lenkeit, Foothill College; Musicianship, by Don Megill and Dave Megill, Mira Costa College; Enterprise Network Security, by Sukhjit Singh, De Anza College and Mike Murphy, Foothill College; Web Page Authoring, Jo Anne Howell, Gavilan College; and Macromedia Flash, by Marcia Ganeles, Foothill College.
I just skimmed Web Page Authoring and found it clean, comprehensive, with not just content, but assignments, exams, and discussion areas.
Are these "learning objects"? "course objects?" Who cares what you call it, it's good stuff... and it is free.
Keep an eye on SoFIA, she's a looking gooooooood...
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:7:"objects";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-25T07:09:32-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:1806:"Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) intends to do for the community college level what MIT's Open Courseware offers for upper division courses- free, open content courses you can use in whole or part. Free with Creative Commons licensing. The first 8 courses are available from their gallery:
The pilot grant open content initiative, Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets), was initiated in March of 2004 under the leadership of Vivian 'Vivie' Sinou, Dean of Distance & Mediated Learning at Foothill College. "Open" content refers to material that is freely available for use by faculty, students, and self-learners.The Sofia finalists include the following content contributed by faculty from five California Community Colleges: Creative Typography, by Carolyn Brown, Foothill College; Introduction to Java Programming, Steven Gilbert, Orange Coast College; Elementary Statistics, by Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, De Anza College; Physical Geography, by Allison Lenkeit, Foothill College; Musicianship, by Don Megill and Dave Megill, Mira Costa College; Enterprise Network Security, by Sukhjit Singh, De Anza College and Mike Murphy, Foothill College; Web Page Authoring, Jo Anne Howell, Gavilan College; and Macromedia Flash, by Marcia Ganeles, Foothill College.
I just skimmed Web Page Authoring and found it clean, comprehensive, with not just content, but assignments, exams, and discussion areas.
Are these "learning objects"? "course objects?" Who cares what you call it, it's good stuff... and it is free.
Keep an eye on SoFIA, she's a looking gooooooood...
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109340540;}i:2;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/24/videocast.php";s:5:"title";s:51:"The Grand VideoCasting Future: Watching Me Say Ummm";s:4:"link";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/24/videocast.php";s:11:"description";s:682:"With podcasting going from zero to tech trend in 6 months, some are hedging bets that videocasting is already accelerating.
So here is the CogDogBlog evolution.
We go from reading my typos in a blog to listening to me say "ummm" as a podcast to watching me say "ummm" as a videocast to a 3D real-time hologram of....
Be very scared of the future. It's already here, Gibson readers.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:4:"pile";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-24T07:05:26-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:682:"With podcasting going from zero to tech trend in 6 months, some are hedging bets that videocasting is already accelerating.
So here is the CogDogBlog evolution.
We go from reading my typos in a blog to listening to me say "ummm" as a podcast to watching me say "ummm" as a videocast to a 3D real-time hologram of....
Be very scared of the future. It's already here, Gibson readers.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109253900;}i:3;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:68:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/23/leon.php";s:5:"title";s:18:"Watch Out for Leon";s:4:"link";s:68:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/23/leon.php";s:11:"description";s:239:"Look out fellow bloggers, Leon Lighips a.k.a Guru of the Obvious is going after your Technorati ratings and is planning on becoming king of the Long Tail, the A-List of all A-Lists....
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:12:"web good dog";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-23T13:27:00-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:239:"
Look out fellow bloggers, Leon Lighips a.k.a Guru of the Obvious is going after your Technorati ratings and is planning on becoming king of the Long Tail, the A-List of all A-Lists....
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109190420;}i:4;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:70:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/23/hybrid.php";s:5:"title";s:50:"Join Our Ocotillo Hybrid Courses Guest Discussions";s:4:"link";s:70:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/23/hybrid.php";s:11:"description";s:1382:"
The week of February 28, 2005 through March 4 , our Ocotillo Hybrid Course Structures group is hosting an asynchronous discussion board activity. We are pleased and fortunate to have Bob Kaleta and staff from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Learning Technology Center (LTC) as our guests, and they will be checking the board to ask/answer questions and hopefully provoke some good discussion. The UWM Hybrid web site is one of the must have bookmarks in the field, and the LTC has some of the most valuable experience and wisdom to share.
While our primary goal is to engage our own Maricopa faculty and staff, we welcome others interested in hybrid/blended learning to join in. The discussion board is open to anyone to read, but to post there you need to register and create an account.
This is part of our goal to not only talk about hybrid formats, but to engage in hybrid format activities.
See more on the event details and how to register.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:12:"teach online";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-23T11:02:48-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:1382:"The week of February 28, 2005 through March 4 , our Ocotillo Hybrid Course Structures group is hosting an asynchronous discussion board activity. We are pleased and fortunate to have Bob Kaleta and staff from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Learning Technology Center (LTC) as our guests, and they will be checking the board to ask/answer questions and hopefully provoke some good discussion. The UWM Hybrid web site is one of the must have bookmarks in the field, and the LTC has some of the most valuable experience and wisdom to share.
While our primary goal is to engage our own Maricopa faculty and staff, we welcome others interested in hybrid/blended learning to join in. The discussion board is open to anyone to read, but to post there you need to register and create an account.
This is part of our goal to not only talk about hybrid formats, but to engage in hybrid format activities.
See more on the event details and how to register.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109181720;}i:5;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:69:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/23/helen.php";s:5:"title";s:24:"Helen is Coming To Town!";s:4:"link";s:69:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/23/helen.php";s:11:"description";s:1841:"This Friday, the self-proclaimed "Grandmother of Electronic Portfolios", Helen Barrett is coming to town as our guest for our event "ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty", where we are expecting an audience of 90+ faculty and staff.
The day's agenda is split-starting with a morning focus on student ePortfolios, with Helen presenting on her recent work connecting digital storytelling and eports, but the highlight (sorry Helen) hopefully will be a student panel we are assembling with 5 Maricopa students who are now or recently have been building ePortfolios. We are planning on capturing the audio of this discussion to be able to post online.
Over lunch we are planning on setting up computer stations with a collection of Maricopa ePortfolios available for viewing, as well as having the student panel members and other faculty present be on hand to share their experiences.
The afternoon shifts to discussions of faculty portfolios, with another session led by Helen plus some group activity. We are planning a followup event in mid April where those who are eager to get started can have a hands on experience with an ePortfolio system, and hopefully between now and then they will be accumulating or reflecting on what they want to bring as artifacts.
Mostly we are eager and pleased that Helen was willing to travel to Arizona in the middle of winter (!), seriously, we are fortunate to have an expert of her caliber coming here, and I know she is a dynamic speaker for faculty and students.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:11:"eportfolios";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-23T10:01:37-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:1841:"This Friday, the self-proclaimed "Grandmother of Electronic Portfolios", Helen Barrett is coming to town as our guest for our event "ePortfolio Dialogue Day: Digital Stories of Deep Learning for Students and Faculty", where we are expecting an audience of 90+ faculty and staff.
The day's agenda is split-starting with a morning focus on student ePortfolios, with Helen presenting on her recent work connecting digital storytelling and eports, but the highlight (sorry Helen) hopefully will be a student panel we are assembling with 5 Maricopa students who are now or recently have been building ePortfolios. We are planning on capturing the audio of this discussion to be able to post online.
Over lunch we are planning on setting up computer stations with a collection of Maricopa ePortfolios available for viewing, as well as having the student panel members and other faculty present be on hand to share their experiences.
The afternoon shifts to discussions of faculty portfolios, with another session led by Helen plus some group activity. We are planning a followup event in mid April where those who are eager to get started can have a hands on experience with an ePortfolio system, and hopefully between now and then they will be accumulating or reflecting on what they want to bring as artifacts.
Mostly we are eager and pleased that Helen was willing to travel to Arizona in the middle of winter (!), seriously, we are fortunate to have an expert of her caliber coming here, and I know she is a dynamic speaker for faculty and students.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109178060;}i:6;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:71:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/22/objects.php";s:5:"title";s:65:"If All The Learning Objects Are Web Pages Who Needs a Repository?";s:4:"link";s:71:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/22/objects.php";s:11:"description";s:3380:"I've done a number of workshops demo-ing how to search various learning object "repositories" and invariably deal with the question, "Why don't we just do a Google search?".
Strangely, having built one sort of similar system myself, I am asking the same question.
Stephen Downes today shared the announcement of the Commonwealth of Learning's Learning Object Repository being released, "An online database of learning content that provides software to Commonweath countries free of charge" and the software was being made available as well.. sounds interesting enough to click around.
Hitting the technical documentation, you get alphabet soup explanations:
The COL Learning Object Repository (or in short COL LOR) integrates eRIB and pakXchange such that the local repository of eRIB is disabled and replaced with pakXchange, and pakXchange is modified to act as an EduSource node for the purpose of searching.
Easy for you to say... what the heck is all that?
So then I thought, give the thing a whirl and see what I can figure this does. Now I am looking at the eRIB "eduSource Repository-In-A-Box" (Yikes, hope that fares better then the long gone "Web Course In a Box!").
But apparently it lets you do "federated" searches, or searches for learning objects across multiple sites. I tried some real simple queries to generates lots of results. Unfortunately, not taking the cue from Google in that search results produce retrievable URLs, I cannot easily link you to what I saw. But I ran three searches on:
* volcano
* economics
* heart
Hoping to see some learning objects, what I found is that 95% of the results are simply links to web pages, many of them course syllabi [1] [2], in some cases images [1], pages not found [1] [2] [3], this page has moved [1] [2], a thesaurus [1]
Yes, an unscientific sampling, and perhaps I misunderstand the purpose of this site is more to demonstrate the search technology than the content.
But if these are the learning objects that are meant be "reusable" chunks of content, I am totally mystified as to what this giant piece of technology has created- a keyword search engine that finds web sites, and pretty meta data for web sites (many of which do not exist any more).
If that is the case, we ought to just use Google, eh?
I've done a number of workshops demo-ing how to search various learning object "repositories" and invariably deal with the question, "Why don't we just do a Google search?".
Strangely, having built one sort of similar system myself, I am asking the same question.
Stephen Downes today shared the announcement of the Commonwealth of Learning's Learning Object Repository being released, "An online database of learning content that provides software to Commonweath countries free of charge" and the software was being made available as well.. sounds interesting enough to click around.
Hitting the technical documentation, you get alphabet soup explanations:
The COL Learning Object Repository (or in short COL LOR) integrates eRIB and pakXchange such that the local repository of eRIB is disabled and replaced with pakXchange, and pakXchange is modified to act as an EduSource node for the purpose of searching.
Easy for you to say... what the heck is all that?
So then I thought, give the thing a whirl and see what I can figure this does. Now I am looking at the eRIB "eduSource Repository-In-A-Box" (Yikes, hope that fares better then the long gone "Web Course In a Box!").
But apparently it lets you do "federated" searches, or searches for learning objects across multiple sites. I tried some real simple queries to generates lots of results. Unfortunately, not taking the cue from Google in that search results produce retrievable URLs, I cannot easily link you to what I saw. But I ran three searches on:
* volcano
* economics
* heart
Hoping to see some learning objects, what I found is that 95% of the results are simply links to web pages, many of them course syllabi [1] [2], in some cases images [1], pages not found [1] [2] [3], this page has moved [1] [2], a thesaurus [1]
Yes, an unscientific sampling, and perhaps I misunderstand the purpose of this site is more to demonstrate the search technology than the content.
But if these are the learning objects that are meant be "reusable" chunks of content, I am totally mystified as to what this giant piece of technology has created- a keyword search engine that finds web sites, and pretty meta data for web sites (many of which do not exist any more).
If that is the case, we ought to just use Google, eh?
Despite our best intentions, the cart named technology seems to often get ahead of the horse.
In a recent meeting, one of our groups looking at new technologies made the usual strong case for looking at video conference technologies- better use of time, people not having enough time to come to development events, people not wanting to drive across town for face to face meetings, reducing pollution etc. All well and good. We agreed that to help our folks better understand the technology is to give them experiences with it. More well and good. Nodding heads.
But the suggestion on how just seemed sideways to me- "setting up demos with different systems to best evaluate them". The monumental sized problem with this is the content- in a demo, the content is always contrived, is not relevant to the work we do, and thus never gives the technology the appropriate field test. It puts the technology first.
Video conferencing is not so new or novel- I recall playing with CUseeMe way back in the pre web era. Tiny video, bad audio synch, but exciting. I recall doing some demos in 1998 with cross-platform iVisit software (ironically, I could not recall that URL, and was a case where it was faster to Google to find something on my own web site than rummage through my site). Just last month we got iChat A/V to work flawlessly (well it did not remove my "umms") to do a live video chat from my office to the NLII conference in New Orleans.
To me, it would make sense to engage people in current, available uses of web conferencing technology that have real content. There is a huge amount of opportunity to experience it for free,
To name just a few, there are the weekly HorizoWimba Desktop lecture series, Innovate monthly webcasts. There is great stuff available in live format from LearningTimes -- and we provide a free Maricopa wide registration every April for the TCC Online Conference. There are free webcasts available all over the net. As members, we at Maricopa have access to a lot of video material and live feeds from the League for Innovation iStream. One of our colleges has their own BreezeLive conferenncing system. Another is experimenting with Wimba voice conferencing.
My suggestion was that it would be more beneficial to organize "virtual" field trips to experience real, educational content delivered in these different technologies, and to base their impressions on that, rather than a canned or contrived demo (I would rather endure torture than sit through those).
I fear we do not have a clear idea what kind of activities, outcomes we want to emerge from web conferencing technologies. What is the value of seeing other talking heads (point to point or multi-point video conferencing) versus the audio content over presentations or demo screens?
Anyhow, it seems like our purchases are based more on "feature" lists than real applicability.
It remains to be seen what our group will do since they are in charge, not me. But blogging about it at least gets it out of my mind, for now.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:4:"pile";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-22T09:35:05-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:3784:"Despite our best intentions, the cart named technology seems to often get ahead of the horse.
In a recent meeting, one of our groups looking at new technologies made the usual strong case for looking at video conference technologies- better use of time, people not having enough time to come to development events, people not wanting to drive across town for face to face meetings, reducing pollution etc. All well and good. We agreed that to help our folks better understand the technology is to give them experiences with it. More well and good. Nodding heads.
But the suggestion on how just seemed sideways to me- "setting up demos with different systems to best evaluate them". The monumental sized problem with this is the content- in a demo, the content is always contrived, is not relevant to the work we do, and thus never gives the technology the appropriate field test. It puts the technology first.
Video conferencing is not so new or novel- I recall playing with CUseeMe way back in the pre web era. Tiny video, bad audio synch, but exciting. I recall doing some demos in 1998 with cross-platform iVisit software (ironically, I could not recall that URL, and was a case where it was faster to Google to find something on my own web site than rummage through my site). Just last month we got iChat A/V to work flawlessly (well it did not remove my "umms") to do a live video chat from my office to the NLII conference in New Orleans.
To me, it would make sense to engage people in current, available uses of web conferencing technology that have real content. There is a huge amount of opportunity to experience it for free,
To name just a few, there are the weekly HorizoWimba Desktop lecture series, Innovate monthly webcasts. There is great stuff available in live format from LearningTimes -- and we provide a free Maricopa wide registration every April for the TCC Online Conference. There are free webcasts available all over the net. As members, we at Maricopa have access to a lot of video material and live feeds from the League for Innovation iStream. One of our colleges has their own BreezeLive conferenncing system. Another is experimenting with Wimba voice conferencing.
My suggestion was that it would be more beneficial to organize "virtual" field trips to experience real, educational content delivered in these different technologies, and to base their impressions on that, rather than a canned or contrived demo (I would rather endure torture than sit through those).
I fear we do not have a clear idea what kind of activities, outcomes we want to emerge from web conferencing technologies. What is the value of seeing other talking heads (point to point or multi-point video conferencing) versus the audio content over presentations or demo screens?
Anyhow, it seems like our purchases are based more on "feature" lists than real applicability.
It remains to be seen what our group will do since they are in charge, not me. But blogging about it at least gets it out of my mind, for now.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109090100;}i:8;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:70:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/21/furlet.php";s:5:"title";s:43:"Another Bookmarklet Tool- Quick Furl Search";s:4:"link";s:70:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/21/furlet.php";s:11:"description";s:1010:"I cannot claim this was an Urgent/Important task, but my curiosity got the better of me... I made a new bookmarklet tool that allows me to run a search against my furl-ed sites either by entering the search terms or by highlighting the words in any web mouse-selectable content. This avoids having to load a search interface , and may save me seconds of precious time ;-)
Like I said, it was just a fun little programming task. See the new Furl Search Maker:
to create your own, another in the set including the Multi-Site Submission Tool Maker, and the MovableType Search Bookmarklet.
This one is just out of the hatch, and not widely tested beyond my own browser(s).
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:4:"pile";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-21T18:42:13-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:1010:"I cannot claim this was an Urgent/Important task, but my curiosity got the better of me... I made a new bookmarklet tool that allows me to run a search against my furl-ed sites either by entering the search terms or by highlighting the words in any web mouse-selectable content. This avoids having to load a search interface , and may save me seconds of precious time ;-)
Like I said, it was just a fun little programming task. See the new Furl Search Maker:
to create your own, another in the set including the Multi-Site Submission Tool Maker, and the MovableType Search Bookmarklet.
This one is just out of the hatch, and not widely tested beyond my own browser(s).
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1109036520;}i:9;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:72:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/comments.php";s:5:"title";s:63:"Keeping Tabs on Comments in Multiple Author Blogs (MovableType)";s:4:"link";s:72:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/comments.php";s:11:"description";s:2976:"With exceptions of newer systems (yes, Drupal fans, that is you), many blog software packages are designed from the perspective of single author weblogs, but with some digging you can expand their functionality for multi-author sites.
We've recently released the Low Threshold Applications (LTA) site, recast as a blog from a once manually edited HTML site. To make the index of LTAs by author work, we had to assign the blog entries to accounts for the people that wrote the content (we are doing all the blog posting from content written by others). One limitation of MovableType is I can give author credit to only one person, so posts with multiple authors needed some under the hood tinkering to add new database tables and use PHP/mySQl query to pull out entries by "co-authors".
This also means that comments posted to an entry go to the actual author (a good thing), but how do I, as a site owner monitor that traffic? (just in case the spam roaches sneak in-- I can feel their antennae and little feet scurrying outside the moat).
At first I thought about altering the MT comment scipts to add my address asa BCC header to all email (ugh, more email). I think they way to do this is to edit the /lib/MT/App/Comments.pm file, around lime 216, from:
my %head = ( To => $author->email,
From => $comment->email || $author->email,
Subject =>
'[' . $blog->name . '] ' .
$app->translate('New Comment Posted to \'[_1]\'',
$entry->title)
);
to
my %head = ( To => $author->email,
From => $comment->email || $author->email,
Subject =>
'[' . $blog->name . '] ' .
$app->translate('New Comment Posted to \'[_1]\'',
$entry->title),
BCC => 'mt-admin@somesite.edu'
);
but the thought of more email was not enticing. (BTW, I never tested the above code, just guessing).
A simpler approach was to create an RSS feed to the comments that could be subscribed to, in this case:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lta/comments.xml
it's really just a new archive, with some cut and paste / minor editing from the full blog RSS feed (see some details), but at least it offers a scan across a mutli-authored blog what is being said. And once created as a feed, it can be embedded into content page:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lta/comments.php
Sure MovableType may be showing some signs of age, but it is still an open enough tool set to tinker with, once you get beyond what comes with the box.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:8:"using mt";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-20T10:13:03-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:2976:"With exceptions of newer systems (yes, Drupal fans, that is you), many blog software packages are designed from the perspective of single author weblogs, but with some digging you can expand their functionality for multi-author sites.
We've recently released the Low Threshold Applications (LTA) site, recast as a blog from a once manually edited HTML site. To make the index of LTAs by author work, we had to assign the blog entries to accounts for the people that wrote the content (we are doing all the blog posting from content written by others). One limitation of MovableType is I can give author credit to only one person, so posts with multiple authors needed some under the hood tinkering to add new database tables and use PHP/mySQl query to pull out entries by "co-authors".
This also means that comments posted to an entry go to the actual author (a good thing), but how do I, as a site owner monitor that traffic? (just in case the spam roaches sneak in-- I can feel their antennae and little feet scurrying outside the moat).
At first I thought about altering the MT comment scipts to add my address asa BCC header to all email (ugh, more email). I think they way to do this is to edit the /lib/MT/App/Comments.pm file, around lime 216, from:
my %head = ( To => $author->email,
From => $comment->email || $author->email,
Subject =>
'[' . $blog->name . '] ' .
$app->translate('New Comment Posted to \'[_1]\'',
$entry->title)
);
to
my %head = ( To => $author->email,
From => $comment->email || $author->email,
Subject =>
'[' . $blog->name . '] ' .
$app->translate('New Comment Posted to \'[_1]\'',
$entry->title),
BCC => 'mt-admin@somesite.edu'
);
but the thought of more email was not enticing. (BTW, I never tested the above code, just guessing).
A simpler approach was to create an RSS feed to the comments that could be subscribed to, in this case:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lta/comments.xml
it's really just a new archive, with some cut and paste / minor editing from the full blog RSS feed (see some details), but at least it offers a scan across a mutli-authored blog what is being said. And once created as a feed, it can be embedded into content page:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lta/comments.php
Sure MovableType may be showing some signs of age, but it is still an open enough tool set to tinker with, once you get beyond what comes with the box.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1108919580;}i:10;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/facetious.php";s:5:"title";s:35:"Facets of del.icio.us = fac.etio.us";s:4:"link";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/facetious.php";s:11:"description";s:5838:"Interesting- fac.etio.us is a rip, mix, and refeed of del.icio.us. Found by way of
John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software ("navigation for the digital universe"), a maker of corporate tools that offer:
...intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the relevant documents, products, and web pages that you need to find.... Our customers have slashed the time wasted by traditional text-based search methods, dramatically improving the quality and timeliness of their decisions. Seamark integrates gracefully with your existing information infrastructure, providing the results you want, when you want them. Our facet-based navigation explores the content using intuitive categories and keywords that match the way you think about your business. Navigation is so intuitive that new users can achieve superior results without any formal training.
You likely do not see news of fac.etio.us on the Siderean news, but the fact that it is there beside the corporate brohure-ware says that this company is doing some semi public R&D.
But back to what might be cool. Apparently, fac.etio.us is applying some of the keyword associaton logic of "faceted" searching by re-casting the last 5 days worth of del.icio.us feeds. From Joho:
Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects it's classifying and then lets users sort them using the facets in any order. For example, appointments in your calendar might have facets for time, date, person, location, subject, and importance. You could then ask to sort first by person, then by location, and then by date, and a minute later walk through them by importance, then date, then subject, etc. In short, faceted classification systems let you construct trees with the roots and branches in whatever order suits you at that moment. And faceted systems never lead you down branches that have no fruit.So, Siderean is playing around with doing a faceted classification of about five days' worth of bookmarks at del.icio.us. In an email, this is what Bradley Allen, the founder and CTO, says:
Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets. Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets.
So when I peeked, the facetious look offers a flickr-like font-size proportional view of tags, delicious creator, sites mentioned, as well as the 3 feeds mentioned above, and date added:
So in some sense, I have at a top level, 5 different content type paths to begin drilling down to, but within each, I have many more choices (based on the tags, the size of the tag telling me that there are more sites (or it is more popular). This is a rich choice of navigation paths-- so my inner geek follows the PHP link, which presents a new facet of 98 tagged sites, the display based on listings that shows tags people have applied along side the PHP tag, the other 4 facets, and at the very bottom, the first 10 of the 98 (with links to see more):
And from there I find a nice site with tagging to my own set on 11 Cool Things You Can Do with PHP. In 3 clicks, I drilled down through 9700+ sites, to a more specific set of 98 things, down to one I found useful. The numbers of paths through the facets are near infinite, and have me thinking new ways on classification schemes- is these a layer of quasi structure on unstructured tagging?
But what do I know? I am no professional metadata maven. But this dog knows when something smells interesting.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:12:"small pieces";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-20T08:48:13-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:5838:"Interesting- fac.etio.us is a rip, mix, and refeed of del.icio.us. Found by way of
John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software ("navigation for the digital universe"), a maker of corporate tools that offer:
...intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the relevant documents, products, and web pages that you need to find.... Our customers have slashed the time wasted by traditional text-based search methods, dramatically improving the quality and timeliness of their decisions. Seamark integrates gracefully with your existing information infrastructure, providing the results you want, when you want them. Our facet-based navigation explores the content using intuitive categories and keywords that match the way you think about your business. Navigation is so intuitive that new users can achieve superior results without any formal training.
You likely do not see news of fac.etio.us on the Siderean news, but the fact that it is there beside the corporate brohure-ware says that this company is doing some semi public R&D.
But back to what might be cool. Apparently, fac.etio.us is applying some of the keyword associaton logic of "faceted" searching by re-casting the last 5 days worth of del.icio.us feeds. From Joho:
Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects it's classifying and then lets users sort them using the facets in any order. For example, appointments in your calendar might have facets for time, date, person, location, subject, and importance. You could then ask to sort first by person, then by location, and then by date, and a minute later walk through them by importance, then date, then subject, etc. In short, faceted classification systems let you construct trees with the roots and branches in whatever order suits you at that moment. And faceted systems never lead you down branches that have no fruit.So, Siderean is playing around with doing a faceted classification of about five days' worth of bookmarks at del.icio.us. In an email, this is what Bradley Allen, the founder and CTO, says:
Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets. Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets.
So when I peeked, the facetious look offers a flickr-like font-size proportional view of tags, delicious creator, sites mentioned, as well as the 3 feeds mentioned above, and date added:
So in some sense, I have at a top level, 5 different content type paths to begin drilling down to, but within each, I have many more choices (based on the tags, the size of the tag telling me that there are more sites (or it is more popular). This is a rich choice of navigation paths-- so my inner geek follows the PHP link, which presents a new facet of 98 tagged sites, the display based on listings that shows tags people have applied along side the PHP tag, the other 4 facets, and at the very bottom, the first 10 of the 98 (with links to see more):
And from there I find a nice site with tagging to my own set on 11 Cool Things You Can Do with PHP. In 3 clicks, I drilled down through 9700+ sites, to a more specific set of 98 things, down to one I found useful. The numbers of paths through the facets are near infinite, and have me thinking new ways on classification schemes- is these a layer of quasi structure on unstructured tagging?
But what do I know? I am no professional metadata maven. But this dog knows when something smells interesting.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1108914480;}i:11;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/linkrolll.php";s:5:"title";s:35:"Linkroll Added to the Marklet Maker";s:4:"link";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/linkrolll.php";s:11:"description";s:942:"A commenter suggested I add Linkroll to the bookmarklet marklet maker collection, and that was an easy one to roll into the tool, which puts it up to a choice of 8 different web site submission tools that can be addressed with a click on a bookmark link.
Linkroll is another "social bookmarks" site, though instead of tags there are categories, 6 of one versus half a dozen donuts of another. It looks like it has some finer filters possible to put on links, and ways to collapse collections to RSS. Interesting, but I find having 3 primary sites to post links to is more than enough work. Furl is still my main dumping ground.
But keep the other sites coming- I can add them as long as the site offers some sort of JavaScript bookmarklet code.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:4:"pile";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-20T01:14:34-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:942:"A commenter suggested I add Linkroll to the bookmarklet marklet maker collection, and that was an easy one to roll into the tool, which puts it up to a choice of 8 different web site submission tools that can be addressed with a click on a bookmark link.
Linkroll is another "social bookmarks" site, though instead of tags there are categories, 6 of one versus half a dozen donuts of another. It looks like it has some finer filters possible to put on links, and ways to collapse collections to RSS. Interesting, but I find having 3 primary sites to post links to is more than enough work. Furl is still my main dumping ground.
But keep the other sites coming- I can add them as long as the site offers some sort of JavaScript bookmarklet code.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1108887240;}i:12;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:75:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/annihilator.php";s:5:"title";s:31:"MLX Track Spam: The Annihilator";s:4:"link";s:75:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/20/annihilator.php";s:11:"description";s:1618:"It's been a while since the spam roaches attached the Trackbacks on the Maricopa Learning eXchange, but I guess they had some extra time after recess to splat their PPC (porn, pills, casino) links into the MLX Sharebacks. I am still resisting closing it down completely, but likely will, as no one really sends non-spam trackbacks.
It took about 75 seconds in phpMyAdmin to clean out the spambacks, but I decided as a fun task to build my own web tool to do it even easier. Presenting the Spam Trackback Annihilator:
All I need to do is to fill in the easy to guess typical spam words, and select to wipe out from the Source, URL, Title, or Body fields (or all at once to lower the big boot). In one click I can kill thousands or roachies. You will not find this URL on our server, as I can run it locally from my OSX desktop. Next, I will set up a cron job to clean out the poker jokers once a day. Y'all are now wasting your time, not mine.
I'm also toying with whipping up a similar tool for MovableType blogs. That too would be a snap to zap bad trackbacks.
It's been a while since the spam roaches attached the Trackbacks on the Maricopa Learning eXchange, but I guess they had some extra time after recess to splat their PPC (porn, pills, casino) links into the MLX Sharebacks. I am still resisting closing it down completely, but likely will, as no one really sends non-spam trackbacks.
It took about 75 seconds in phpMyAdmin to clean out the spambacks, but I decided as a fun task to build my own web tool to do it even easier. Presenting the Spam Trackback Annihilator:
All I need to do is to fill in the easy to guess typical spam words, and select to wipe out from the Source, URL, Title, or Body fields (or all at once to lower the big boot). In one click I can kill thousands or roachies. You will not find this URL on our server, as I can run it locally from my OSX desktop. Next, I will set up a cron job to clean out the poker jokers once a day. Y'all are now wasting your time, not mine.
I'm also toying with whipping up a similar tool for MovableType blogs. That too would be a snap to zap bad trackbacks.
I am soooooo envious:
Northern Voice Blog Conference
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:18:"wide world of blog";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-19T19:41:37-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:305:"I am soooooo envious:
Northern Voice Blog Conference
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1108867260;}i:14;a:7:{s:5:"about";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/19/podcaster.php";s:5:"title";s:38:"Podcaster Request: Feed With a Summary";s:4:"link";s:73:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/2005/02/19/podcaster.php";s:11:"description";s:1324:"I continue to put my pennies in a piggy bank towards a future iPod. Until then, in scanning more and more RSS feeds that contain references to the audio enclosures, I am bothered/irked/annoyed by the scant details available to the summary in an RSS Reader:
My Views on the Cheese Curdling ControversyToday's podcast on the big stink about cheese.
Download file (6.4MB mp3)
Now regular cheese enthusiasts might automatically listen to my daily cheese diatribes, but if I am casual visitor, trying to make a decision if I ought to subscribe, I would be looking for a perhaps three sentence summary in text form, to accompany the feed.
Not only that, if a visitor wishes to write their own blog entry referral to me, citing my eloquent argumentative style on this important issue, without a good summary for copy/paste posting, they have to try and make up a summary.
Podcasters, take note- you put a lot of time and effort into the recording, but you are not serving a wider feed audience without a decent text summary in the feeds.
";s:2:"dc";a:3:{s:7:"subject";s:3:"rss";s:7:"creator";s:4:"alan";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-19T09:53:22-07:00";}s:7:"summary";s:1324:"I continue to put my pennies in a piggy bank towards a future iPod. Until then, in scanning more and more RSS feeds that contain references to the audio enclosures, I am bothered/irked/annoyed by the scant details available to the summary in an RSS Reader:
My Views on the Cheese Curdling ControversyToday's podcast on the big stink about cheese.
Download file (6.4MB mp3)
Now regular cheese enthusiasts might automatically listen to my daily cheese diatribes, but if I am casual visitor, trying to make a decision if I ought to subscribe, I would be looking for a perhaps three sentence summary in text form, to accompany the feed.
Not only that, if a visitor wishes to write their own blog entry referral to me, citing my eloquent argumentative style on this important issue, without a good summary for copy/paste posting, they have to try and make up a summary.
Podcasters, take note- you put a lot of time and effort into the recording, but you are not serving a wider feed audience without a decent text summary in the feeds.
";s:14:"date_timestamp";i:1108831980;}}s:7:"channel";a:7:{s:5:"title";s:10:"cogdogblog";s:4:"link";s:40:"http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/";s:11:"description";s:81:"[cdb] alan's wacky weird web II: projects, ideas, & instructional technology";s:2:"dc";a:2:{s:8:"language";s:5:"en-us";s:4:"date";s:25:"2005-02-25T18:07:37-07:00";}s:5:"items";s:2:" ";s:9:"items_seq";s:15:" ";s:7:"tagline";s:81:"[cdb] alan's wacky weird web II: projects, ideas, & instructional technology";}s:9:"textinput";a:0:{}s:5:"image";a:0:{}s:9:"feed_type";s:3:"RSS";s:12:"feed_version";s:3:"1.0";s:8:"encoding";s:10:"ISO-8859-1";s:16:"_source_encoding";s:0:"";s:5:"ERROR";s:0:"";s:7:"WARNING";s:0:"";s:19:"_CONTENT_CONSTRUCTS";a:6:{i:0;s:7:"content";i:1;s:7:"summary";i:2;s:4:"info";i:3;s:5:"title";i:4;s:7:"tagline";i:5;s:9:"copyright";}s:16:"_KNOWN_ENCODINGS";a:3:{i:0;s:5:"UTF-8";i:1;s:8:"US-ASCII";i:2;s:10:"ISO-8859-1";}s:5:"stack";a:0:{}s:9:"inchannel";b:0;s:6:"initem";b:0;s:9:"incontent";b:0;s:11:"intextinput";b:0;s:7:"inimage";b:0;s:13:"current_field";s:0:"";s:17:"current_namespace";b:0;s:15:"source_encoding";s:10:"ISO-8859-1";s:13:"last_modified";s:31:"Sat, 26 Feb 2005 01:15:14 GMT ";s:4:"etag";s:23:""8d167-93f7-421fcda2" ";}