SOAPed Up and Ready

Posted on May 23, 2003 by Brian

I previously posted on this metadata repository built by Ming Chen, for a project at UBC’s Faculty of Applied Science led by Jim Sibley. The new look and feel I mentioned has been implemented for App Sci’s LO management needs.

If you want to try the SOAP inter-repository communication layer, go to the search or advanced search pages. Then, instead of searching “this repository” select “LOM Dummy SOAP Service” (I suggest you search for “bad little boy”).

Doing so will query the original implementation.

Kudos to all involved. The aforementioned Mr. Sibley has also set me up with a UseModWiki page, which will hopefully be in some sort of viewable form soon. I’m just beginning to get a sense of what wikis can do.

Posted in Objects | Comments Off on SOAPed Up and Ready

LO Development Workshop @ UBC

Posted on May 20, 2003 by Brian

One reason why this space was so quiet last week was that I was hunkered down in a near-frenzy preparing for May 15th’s full-day LO development workshop. It was sponsored by MAPLE, and held at UBC’s Distance Education and Technology unit for a diverse group of DET’s faculty, instructional designers, programmers, administrators — with a few guests from elsewhere on campus.

It was the first time I’ve led an event on reusable media on this scale, and I’m grateful to have collaborated with a couple of DET’s talented course developers, Jeff Miller and Karen Belfer, when putting it together. I’m grateful for the kick-ass catering too.

Best of all was the group of participants, who were outstanding. They maintained a remarkable energy level, balanced a healthy skepticism with a respectful open-mindedness… and the afternoon strategy sessions produced some useful recommendations. I’m working on assembling their efforts into a relatively concise summative document.

Lessons learned: people who work in online learning may have minimal familiarity with specialized concepts around learning objects, metadata and consortia, but they do have a very firm understanding of the media they work with, and the issues that are relevant to them. In future iterations I will be more vigilant in minimizing the jargon and building on the existing expertise in the room. It seems to me that very little of the terminology tossed about in the learning object universe demands its own vocabularly, creating its own significant barriers to adoption.

[I’m storing up negative energy for a corker of a rant on this subject, which I hope to unleash later this week, assuming things degenerate as badly as I expect.]

On a related note, I resolve to keep the presentation segments much shorter in future events. Though I gave only a total of one hour or so of actual presentation, maybe half of that was necessary. And that itself could be carved up into five minute chunks, and deployed only if needed in the course of a more engaging, activity-based framework.

The master PowerPoint file is here (1MB). We also prepared this set of associated links (please excuse the longer list of omissions). You are welcome to use this material if you think it’s of use to you… and of course your feedback is more than appreciated.

Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for letting me use his presentation for a section dealing with tools and systems.

Posted in Administrivia, Objects | Tagged | 1 Comment

RSS Feeds via Javascript

Posted on May 8, 2003 by Brian

Most of the substance of these tips are bouncing around elsewhere, but now Alan, with some help from D’Arcy, wrap up the key elements of rendering RSS feeds into any web presentation (page, weblog, course) in a nice tidy package:

It makes use of a PHP script (demo version running on our server) that parses the XML feed, and returns a JavaScript set of write commands that insert the information into your page. All you need to do is to insert a simple JavaScript line of code in the part of your page where you want the feed. The only other thing to tidy it up is to link or insert a style sheet to format the output.

Posted in XML/RSS | Comments Off on RSS Feeds via Javascript

The Eater of Meaning

Posted on May 7, 2003 by Brian

Fun with The Eater of Meaning. My weblog title and blurb spit back out as:

Objected Leaks
Reuniting meddler, webs, andrews lotus of fuzziness stunts nearby…

I like what it does to the weblogs on my blogroll. If you are about to start an Ed Tech weblog, and are struggling for the perfect handle, you could do worse than some of these:


96
authentic
beSetting
carpentEr
cogitated
D’Archive Norse
Dave Davidson
divorced interconnecting markings
Ed Technician Devotee
OnBafgTibc
eduCate
electronically
electrolysis
Freedman to Tingling
Ppgiib
inequalities
Stetson Johnstown
Leash Circles Bloodied
Lawless Lessening
Liberalizes Technicians
Marble’s VGoided
nettle.narcissus envied
OLDness
ongoing
Per Translator
petroleum
sebastian
sebastian’s operating resort
Staphylococcus Up 4
serif insidiousness technical
Tends Reassessments Why
Usenet andean Abutment of ET
woo s lottery
Raymond Qi

Via woodrow s lothario

Posted in Webloggia | Comments Off on The Eater of Meaning

A free access, online, peer-reviewed, instructional technology journal??

Posted on May 5, 2003 by Brian

I assume that most people who read this weblog also read David Wiley’s autounfocus — and do so before checking out my own untidy little corner of the web. But in the interests of spreading the word on a promising announcement, I’ll quote from his latest posting

…given all our interests in reusability and syndication, why not crossbreed a peer-reviewed journal, blog, and a news aggregator? A peer-reviewed blog / aggregation service. Think something like:

* a clear statement of the topic(s) of interest to the publication / discourse-facilitation service

* all content would begin its life online somewhere else – a blog, personal website, etc. trackback facilities make blogs preferable.

* a k5 -esque story submission queue with editorial comments (also via trackback from other blogs) and a peer-review (voting) mechanism. articles could be submitted via trackback pings at publication time by their authors, or through a form-based approach by non-authors, as long as the content is cc-licensed (for more of a blog feel — “hey, here’s a great paper I found on LOs, repositories, and trackback! it should be published and talked about in the peer-reviewed blog!”) editorial comments given via trackback (when available) would let authors whose work is unknowlingly submitted know their work is being considered and how it could be improved.

* archived and permalink-ed papers, articles, etc. with trackback enabled, allowing readers to follow an ongoing dialogue from one article to the next

* trackback-enabled threaded comments which will allow readers to enter the discourse at any point and follow it forward and backward across comments and articles

* a clear path for moving high-quality discussions out of the comments world into the publication world, purposefully blurring the line between publication and discourse

* cc-licensing of all content, including comments

* subscribe-able / searchable RSS feeds of new articles, comments, etc.

Other than applauding the notion, I don’t have a whole lot of value-add to contribute here. (“Bad! Bad Weblogger! Cyber-parasite!!”) Though this might be an opportune time to note a couple of weblogs I’ve recently stumbled across that are poking around in the domain of open-access scholarly publications:

FOS News: “News from the free online scholarship movement” via open-education.org

and -=( In Between )=- , run by Henk Ellerman, project leader for the Erasmus Electronic Publishing Initiative’s EUR Repository.

And since I am giving all appearances of discoursing on this topic after all, I’ll note that based here at UBC is another vibrant open access scholarly publishing initiative, the Public Knowledge Project. Given our own interests in open content here at the Learning Object Supercentre of Love, I can’t help but wonder if the accordances between “open educators” and “open access scholars” (forgive the homely terminology) couldn’t be more usefully exploited.

Perhaps these alliances already exist, but from my own ill-informed vantage it appears to be yet another instance of related movements struggling in isolation toward a common goal.

BTW, I’ve recently approached the PKP, and they seem open to some form of collaboration. But other than a loose agreement that our systems should be able to query one another, I’m not even sure what to propose. (Your thoughts are welcome.)

Posted in Webloggia, XML/RSS | Tagged , | Comments Off on A free access, online, peer-reviewed, instructional technology journal??

Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration

Posted on May 5, 2003 by Brian

This article from the journal Language and Learning Technology looks at blogs and wikis specifically from the perspective of language learning, though its key points are fairly universal. The abstract:

Language professionals have embraced the world of collaborative opportunities the Internet has introduced. Many tools — e-mail, discussion forums, chat — are by now familiar to many language teachers. Recent innovations — blogs, wikis and RSS feeds — may be less familiar but offer powerful opportunities for online collaboration for both language professionals and learners. The underlying technology of the new tools is XML (“extensible markup language”) which separates content from formatting, encourages use of meta-data, and enables machine processing of Internet documents. The latter is key in the ability to link automatically disparate documents of interest to individuals or groups. The new collaborative opportunities this enables have led some to consider the growing importance of XML as the signal of the arrival of the second-generation Web.

By Bob Godwin-Jones.

Via carvingCode, via [alterego]

Posted in Webloggia | 3 Comments

Hey look! It’s a learning object repository!

Posted on May 1, 2003 by Brian

An interesting initiative here at UBC is a homegrown repository project that is nearing completion. While the functionality isn’t about to knock CAREO or DSpace off the Internet, it does have its points. It can sit on almost any box (it uses MySQL on the backend), and I find its metadata entry to be as simple and fast as anything else I’ve used. It could be a useful application for smaller projects — and the few people who have tried it out and reviewed the code have had mostly positive things to say about it.

It also has a functioning SOAP layer — though we’re not entirely sure what to point it at (David Davies has suggested we try connecting with him… I forwarded that on to the developer, and hopefully we can make something happen — thanks David!).

It still has a few bugs, and is currently getting a welcome reworking of the look and feel. So in a sense it’s not ready for prime time. But every time I have shared work with the community it’s brought a productive response, so I thought I would throw it out there. Feel free to try it out (forgive some of the dummy records still kicking around) and add a few resources (you need to register for that) if you like. Please refrain from uploading copyrighted material, pornography, hate literature, or anything to do with Celine Dion.

If you have comments or questions, you can direct general ones to me, and bug reports and techie queries to its developer Ming Chen (ming@apsc.ubc.ca). We will make the source code available as well, with the usual disclaimers, and your feedback on that is welcome.

Some places to go:

* Browse records
* Search and advanced search
* SOAP layer admin
* Source files

If you want documentation, drop me a line — I have a fairly substantive Word document I’d be happy to pass on. Obviously, our ability to support implementations is severely limited, but we will try to answer questions and assist you where possible.

Posted in Objects | 1 Comment

Hey look! It’s a learning object repository!

Posted on May 1, 2003 by Brian

An interesting initiative here at UBC is a homegrown repository project that is nearing completion. While the functionality isn’t about to knock CAREO or DSpace off the Internet, it does have its points. It can sit on almost any box (it uses MySQL on the backend), and I find its metadata entry to be as simple and fast as anything else I’ve used. It could be a useful application for smaller projects — and the few people who have tried it out and reviewed the code have had mostly positive things to say about it.

It also has a functioning SOAP layer — though we’re not entirely sure what to point it at (David Davies has suggested we try connecting with him… I forwarded that on to the developer, and hopefully we can make something happen — thanks David!).

It still has a few bugs, and is currently getting a welcome reworking of the look and feel. So in a sense it’s not ready for prime time. But every time I have shared work with the community it’s brought a productive response, so I thought I would throw it out there. Feel free to try it out (forgive some of the dummy records still kicking around) and add a few resources (you need to register for that) if you like. Please refrain from uploading copyrighted material, pornography, hate literature, or anything to do with Celine Dion.

If you have comments or questions, you can direct general ones to me, and bug reports and techie queries to its developer Ming Chen (ming@apsc.ubc.ca). We will make the source code available as well, with the usual disclaimers, and your feedback on that is welcome.

Some places to go:

* Browse records
* Search and advanced search
* SOAP layer admin
* Source files

If you want documentation, drop me a line — I have a fairly substantive Word document I’d be happy to pass on. Obviously, our ability to support implementations is severely limited, but we will try to answer questions and assist you where possible.

Posted in Objects | 1 Comment

Learning Object Bard of the Blogosphere

Posted on April 29, 2003 by Brian

Some may say that reading your own referral logs reveals passive egomania lurking in the dark heart of the weblogger. But had I never checked the list of referrers to this site I would never have discovered openobjects: constructing learning objects from their unfinished parts.

Openobjects is where a mysterious weblogger (no bio, no contact info) going by the handle of “Azzato” meditates on the subject of learning objects. Not concerned with mundane topics such as standards, tools, or techniques, Azzato instead explores the ineffable intersections between learning objects, post-structural metaphysics, and the mapping of pedagogic space.

From April 21:

The knowledge becomes then in a geometric place that one is framed by relative social surroundings and it is potentially accessible to the action of any individual…

Followed up the next day (that would be April 22):

…the limits that define the educative space vanish. The society of the knowledge becomes a network of objects of learning available. The learning objects become systems containers of new objects. The structure is in the open, the objects are positioned in different levels and they show geometries that the relation among them describes.

I’d quote more, but that’s it. No other postings.

One of my quarrels with the term “learning objects” is that it’s a clunky, borderline ugly turn of phrase. Utterly devoid of poetry. Whenever I say those two words an unpleasant aftertaste lingers on in my mouth… Yet now I must concede that this term has inspired lyric metaphor from at least one human being. I would never have believed it possible.

Way to go Azzato, whoever you are.

Posted in Webloggia | 1 Comment

RSS: A case for unsyndication

Posted on April 25, 2003 by Brian

Zeldman has a new RSS 2.0 feed, but isn’t too thrilled about it, judging from a posting entitled unsyndicate:

We can readily see the benefits of an RSS feed for BBC News, and it also makes sense on sites where page layout is primarily a delivery system for writing, as cigarettes are a delivery system for nicotine.

But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words. RSS feeds may subtly discourage that impulse to seek, see, bookmark, and return.

… more design-oriented, visually striking sites such as K10k and Adactio now have RSS feeds, and we’re less certain of the benefits there. In the case of K10k, news feed links gain value and credibility from their visual context.

… RSS turns commercial and personal sites alike into text broadcasting channels that can be quickly scanned like radio frequencies. This is great in many ways, but it has a downside nobody seems to have noticed.

… RSS feeds seem to have commodified the personal web space, turning every scribbler into a pundit or “journalist,” and these are roles to which few personal site designers are fitted. Some sites can afford to be judged by their words alone. Many others can’t, or might prefer not to be. Syndication is here to stay and it has a lot going for it. But something is lost in the translation.

While the power of an RSS reader is undeniable, it does seem like an aesthetic component of the web interaction is effaced. And not just in terms of the visual experience. I find that when I explore the net via hyperlinks, a term like “surf” really does apply. There’s a flow and a direction… but it’s subject to impulse, and there’s a sense that I could go — or be taken — anywhere.

With my newsreader, I feel less like a wanderer and more like an infomation processor. Of course in this context, trying to educate myself within a rapidly changing and expanding field, that’s probably what’s required.

Posted in XML/RSS | 2 Comments