Kate O'Hara :: Blog

These are excellent.  This is getting very, very close to what an ePortfolio should be and that's not something I can honestly say about any other piece of supposed ePortfolio software I've seen (and I saw quite a few at BETT this year).

Very well done to the brains behind it! 

Now all we have to do is convince the entire world before it's too late...

I'm very excited.  Today Scran's installation of Elgg, called Scribble, went live. 

We've had it running inside the office for a while and during that time we've been populating it with content and it's now looking great.  It went live on Friday afternoon and I put links up on the main site this morning and we've had a good few users log in already. 

The community is open for read access to everyone.  Initially, only Scran users will be able to log in (using their Scran Stuff user name and password), but if it's working well and our users agree, we'll consider making it fully public later.  If you're reading this and you're interested in joining the community you can drop me a line: we'll be manually setting up accounts for a few interested parties.  My profile is at http://scribble.scran.ac.uk/kateo and you'll find my contact details there.

See Scribble at scribble.scran.ac.uk. 

I'd like to appeal for opinions from anyone who might happen to read this post.

The e-portfolio is perplexing me.  They are clearly the next (current?) big thing, but I'm confused about what an e-portfolio is actually supposed to be. 

At BETT this year I thought I'd take a look at what people were selling in the way of tools to create e-portfolios as this is often a good guide to how people will go about making them (madness - how mystified educators interpret policy decisions tends to be based on how salespeople interpreted them first).

It seems that there are a couple of broad angles on the thing:

• Is it an online identity or presence and a central hub for your personal learning network?
  
• Or an online record of achievement?

I'm concerned.  One of those seems to be a means to improve learning.  The other looks like an administrative tool. 

Which one is it?  Which one should it be?  I'd really appreciate anyone else's opinions or comments.

The new Elgg version is looking good.  I'm impressed with all sorts of things about it and I'm not even churlish about my old themes not working any more.  However, I have a motivation problem.

I'm excited about making a new theme.  Last time I personalised an existing one.  That was fun.  This time I'm really intrigued by the idea of building a completely new one from scratch.  My creative juices are fizzing over the rim just thinking about it.  But it's a big job, and I can't quite work up the momentum to get going on it.  I haven't been able to bring myself to start. 

What I need here is a teacher.  The task is exciting - no motivation problem there - but it's too big.  I need a teacher to break it down into manageable chunks.  I need someone to please.  I need learning objectives, smart targets, scaffolding, whatever you want to call it. 

This is an example of one of many reasons why all the exciting, flashy, high-colour cartoon interactives you can make will never replace the classroom teacher in educating our children.  Motivation to do and learn does not just come from the nature of the task itself.

As for me, I think I'm going to have to pull my finger out (as we say in Scotland) and do the job myself. 

I want one.  I'm not ashamed.  It's so cool.  Now, what can I sell to raise funds?

It's brilliant to see the number of posts in languages other than English appearing on Elgg.net these days. 

I often get frustrated when I can't understand or translate something.  It makes me feel I should be better at more languages and wonder how much more often I'd find myself frustrated if English didn't happen to be my first language.

I found this site displaying some interesting statistics about languages of internet users.  The figures are interesting. 

According to this site, English is the most commonly spoken language on the internet: 29.9% of users speak it.  Chinese, at 14%, and Spanish, at 8%, are second and third.

Internet penetration is the ratio between the sum of internet users speaking a language and the estimated total world number of speakers.  67.1% of all Japanese speakers use the internet.  Users speaking English account for 28.6% of all speakers of the language.  With Chinese the proportion is only 11.3% of all speakers.

The number of Chinese speakers using the internet has grown 374.6% in the past six years.  The number of Arabic speakers has grown by 930.2%.  The number of English speakers grew 138.5%.

I wonder if I'll experience being a speaker of a minority language within my lifetime?

I discovered this problem with floating when there is a short blog post.  It occurs in my personalised theme and also the Connections theme on which mine is based.

Added "clear: both;" to "entry", "post" and "info" classes to fix it.

I use a personalised version of the "Connections" theme and today I discovered that choosing to view users' icons breaks the "Community memberships" and "Friends" sidebars.

After some wrangling I think I've found the route of the problem.  All the sidebars are list items in the the "sidebar" div except "Community memberships".  This makes it difficult to style it in the same way as the others (and it doesn't make sense from a semantics point of view).

Also, each of the divs contains an H2 heading and then some sort of content.  The type of content varies from one to another: some divs in the Profile one, lists in "Recent Activity" and "Owned Communities", a table in "Your Friends", a form in "Search", etc.  This makes for a lot of repetition in the stylesheet to account for each type of content (or, not being an expert, I'm lacking some useful CSS shorthand?).  

I think having the content of each list item in some sort of container would make it easier to apply uniform overall styling to the sidebars.

In the meantime, I apologise for my broken "Community Memberships" sidebar. 

09/01/07 - Fixed now.  The "Community Memberships" box is now and item in "sidebar" list with id "community_membership".

25/01/07 - Now academic, since the latest upgrade has eaten all me themes!  Boo.  Ach well, good excuse to spend time making a new one.

I'd like it if the "View your activity" tool could show by default activity since I last logged in (or since I last checked perhaps).  

The current default time-frame is the last 24 hours.  I tend to log in less than once every 24 hours; I'm sure there are lots of users who log in more than once every 24 hours.  

It's now possible to blog any one of Scran's 340,000 images to Elgg using our new "Share" tools.

This image is "Oat straw rope or 'Gloi simmens'", number 000-000-590-867-C. It's a ball of handmade oat straw rope from Shetland, c. 1910. Click the image to see more at www.scran.ac.uk.

We hope to introduce blogging to other platforms in the future too.