http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000753.html

http://elgg.net/sleslie/weblog/

David Tosh just posted that you can now populate your ELGG blog from other blogging systems simply by subscribing to the RSS feed. If I've done it correctly this post should now show up on my ELGG site at the above URL as well.

Now this got me thinking - if ELGG can tie into the SIS and create groups based on course admissions, and if you could filter on tags (it recognizes 'technorati' style tags already) could this be a step towards the mythical eduglu? What would be missing? Just thinking out loud (with comments turned off, I know. They are returning soon, almost got the new blog built). - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000754.html

I love that both Rob Wall and D'Arcy referenced Gandalf descending into the mines in regards to Stephen's announcement that he is on hiatus. It brought to mind a Gandalf quote:

"You can only come to the morning through the shadows."

(Though my favourite Gandalf quote still remains "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom." I wonder if our Gandalf feels that way.)

See you on the other side Stephen. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000755.html

http://rollyo.com/sleslie/course_management_systems/

I knew I had to read Bryan Alexander's Educause article on Web 2.0 not so much because the ideas would be new but because I knew that inevitably Bryan would point to some little gem in the ever growing Web 2.0 landscape that I hadn't seen before.

One that was new to me that he pointed to was Rollyo - a site that lets you roll your own search index by providing up to 25 URLs you want indexed. I wanted to check it out, because ever since Atomz was bought out a year ago, I had been looking for a replacement free web-based service that would let me do this.

To try out Rollyo, I built the above index that searches the top 20 (IMO) Course Management System sites. So say for instance, you wanted to find out which of these systems supported the "eXe editor," or was working on a blog project, you could try searching across just those sites for those terms. It is definitely not infallible, but I have been intrigued by the use of constrained search engines as a way to either augment or replace certain types of directories, where what is being catalogued is well known and fixed (for instance, all of the post-secondary course catalogues in a certain jurisdiction). - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000756.html

http://webtools.allegheny.edu/gnosh/

So the other gem for me from Bryan's Educause article was the above Gnosh from Allegheny College. Actually, I'm not sure that it was this tool that excited so much as the idea it inspired.

One of the things that has always bugged me about broad tagclouds like the one on del.icio.us or flickr is that, well, they are really broad - there is nothing connecting all of the words appearing in the tagcloud other than that they were used by any user of one of these services, and the userbases on these services are totally heterogenous. So sure, I can see generally what the popular tags for all flickr or del.icio.us users are, but why should I care? What I do care about is what the tags used in my particular community are.

How many departments webpages or college portals provide search boxes to Google (or even their own sets of pages)? Lots, right? In both cases, the users using these search boxes have lots more in common than the entire set of users across flickr or del.icio.us, and in fact in cases like portals we typically can get real specific about group memberships and affinities. So if instead of passing their searches directly through to the search engines we first capture locally what the terms they were using, all of a sudden we can build tagclouds of search terms that are locally relevant to that community of users.

So as someone in the Faculty of Science taking this specific Biology course, I might come to my campus portal and beside my personalized search box see a tagcloud of terms that other people in the Faculty of Science had recently used (including my professors). Sort of like displaying the attention of my particular affinity group, and potentially opening up interesting terms I may not have thought to search on.

Probably not very 2.0'ish, and likely someone will scream 'oh the invasion of privacy' (though nobody is forcing you to use this search interface) but what I like about the idea is that it is imminently doable right now with almost no new tech - whether it be this gnosh piece or one of the other tag cloud pieces emerging out there, the only other piece would just be a small script that wrote the search term to a database table before passing it on to whatever search engine you were using (that could be configurable). Someone please tell me if this already all exists and I'm just being dense before I go off and spend the little time I have free to using my terrible development skills to hack this together, please....

(And as an afterthought - why can't I see all of the tags used by myself and people I list as friends in flickr - or can I? how about all of the tags used by members of the same group? Maybe this is something that is already being done through the API?) - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000757.html

http://www.lmsnews.com/modules/content/index.php?id=15

Although the majority of the site appears to be in German, they do have 4 reviews on the open source course management systems Claroline 1.7.0, Interact 2.0, LON-CAPA 2.0.2 and StudIP. They seem highly anecdotal, but also honest about the ease (or lack of) installing and administering some of these tools. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000759.html

http://molokai.ol.mala.bc.ca/moodle_doc/index.html

As the original home of WebCT, it is not perhaps a big surprise that it is the most widely adopted CMS in the province of BC, where I live and work. And while that doesn't look set to change anytime soon on a large scale, 6 institutions have done pioneering working to investigate the viability of Moodle as an alternative, and have made the resulting reports available for all to see. The project was funded by my employers, BCcampus, through an Online Porgram Development Fund grant.

There is lots here to read - in addition to the final report and project recommendations, the partners have produced extensive documentation on each of the 10 distinct objectives (including such useful materials as documentation to migrate WebCT 4.1 courses to Moodle). And all of it is appropriately delivered via a Moodle site!

I know at least one of these partners has since gone on to announce its official adoption of Moodle as its institution-wide CMS, and that one of them was already firmly a Moodle adopter. So whether you are looking for a way out of your current lock-in or looking to buttress your arguments as to why your Moodle pilot should grow, you'll find some useful evidence here. (If I am sounding slightly partisan here, I have just spent the last few months of my life struggling with getting content out of WebCT servers to interoperate with the rest of the world, and let's just say I am the worse for wear.) - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000760.html

http://elrond.cetis.ac.uk/projects/index.php

We don't really have a national-level funding body for higher ed in Canada - education is considered a provincial jurisdiction, and while there are a few bodies that have tried to help coordinate activites at a national level, in truth it is hard not to look on with envy at our commonwealth cousins in Australia and the U.K. and the seemingly comprehensive strategies for implementing eLearning frameworks that their national bodies have developed. (That said, the flip side of the argument, which I think is very valid, is that when there is no 'central' body, it hopefully forces your solutions to be more grassroots and come from the system itself, not be imposed upon them).

This page lists many of the JISC-funded ones in the UK. I have no idea if it is officially ok to link to this, but based on the principle of "if I can point to a public URL on the web, then it is bloggable" here it is. In addition to getting a sense for the breadth of projects currently being funded under the 'ELF' rubric, you can get a combined RSS feed for all the projects listed here. - SWL

Update: Apparently the more offial list of ELF projects, and one less likely to disappear, is available at http://www.elframework.org/projects/, though I couldn't see rolled up RSS feeds, which is one thing I liked about the 'experimental' page.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000761.html

http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/LMS2/

This looks to be almost a year old, but I can't remember seeing it before - Glenda Morgan refers us to this rubric for evaluating CMS that was developed by CSU Chico in selecting their "next generation LMS." This was pre-behemoth - I wonder how they feel now abouttheir choice of Vista 4? - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000762.html

http://www.postgenomic.com/

Scott Wilson's recent presentation on "SOA and web 2.0 things" is well worth it even for you grizzled remix veterans of the blogosphere, if only for the most succinct and helpful explanation of the e-Framework I've yet to read ("A collaborative effort by JISC, DEST, SURF, NZ MoE and others to make sense of web services in education").

But what really blew my mind was the link to the above service, Postgenomic. If I understand it correctly, in essence it is a service which provides a registry for, and then search across, academic blogs dedicated to life sciences topics. It does so in order to give users a view on what topics are being talked about in those communities, what sites are being linked to, and what academic articles are being reviewed. And the only effort required to participate, as far as I can tell, is the use of a small 'review' microformat (that's right, isn't it?) that helps the service identify which posts are 'reviews' of specific academic papers.

What this means is that researchers, academics and students in a variety of life science areas can follow which stories their community is finding important, what tags members of their community are using most, (this is a lot closer to what I was writing about last week, though not search based), and get feeds of papers reviewed in their community.

This isn't the mythical eduglu, and maybe this is something that a system like aggrssive could facilitate for other communities or maybe I'm confused and this is duplicating something already there in more general systems like technorati (though I think not). But hot damn was this exciting for me to see. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000763.html

http://www.downes.ca/hiatusfaq.htm

Just had to chuckle at this - given Stephen's readership I can easily understand the need for this, as his abrupt announcement likely triggered an avalanche of concerned emails, but I'm not sure that Gandalf issued an FAQ (this now being my new mantra, not "What would Sun Ra do?" but instead "What would Gandalf do?") Although if he had, it would likely be as cryptic as this one ;-) - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000764.html

http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/

2006/03/do_students_act.html

Glenda Morgan points to an article which questions the moniker of 'podcasts,' as apparently 80% of downloaded recordings never make it off the desktop and onto a mobile device (or worse, are never listened to at all).

I think 'personal publishing' is a great thing, whether it be blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, etc. What has really annoyed me, though, about podcasts as a phenomenom and as hype, especially in the context of podcasting 'lectures' or other 'knowledge transfers,' is that it replicates what is already not a very good model of how to distribute information/learning - the synchronous spoken lecture.

So sure, having a recording means you don't have to actually be in the classroom. But the assumption this rests on is that if you had been able to be in the classroom, that sitting there listening to someone drone on was actual a useful or effective or efficient way to learn anything. So you can fast forward the recording to find the good bits - have you ever tried to listen to something in that way? Unlike say video, where there are cues you can conceivably process at high speed that something has changed which might warrant checking in again (say a 'scene' change) most audio, and certainly most recordings of someone just talking monotonously, don't avail themselves easily to such high speed scanning.

I will get more excited about podcasting as voice recognition and search technologies, and automated voice transcription technologies improve - podcasts then become a rich source to mine with tools that can allow you to zone in on what you need without having to sit through lots of what you don't. And maybe the fact that we've attached them to RSS feeds will allow for rich and relevant recommendations to emerge as we are starting to see in the blogosphere (especially if they get SHORTER!). (It sure to hell ain't going to happen by asking people to write reams of metadata about their podcasts!) And maybe I'm just a grumpy old git (this is entirely possible) who needs to get an iPod and start commuting to work, or develop partial shared attention skills at my desk, to appreciate the value that podcasts can bring to my life. Maybe. Never say never, right? So maybe this isn't the only post on podcasts I will ever write. But it's the last one for now. I have to go back to what this post distracted me from. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000765.html

http://le.suny.edu/sln/sln_rpc_publicresponse.htm

In June of 2005 I pointed to SUNY's Recommendations on their Learning Network's Next Generation Strategy, which had been published on the web.

If you follow Michael Feldstein's blog e-Literate (and you should) you'll also have noted that in October of last year SUNY announced its plans to build an open source 'Learning Management Operating System (LMOS),' and as part of these plans issued a Request for Public Comment on this strategy.

SUNY has now made available the responses to this public request for comment. If you are a decision maker in a large post-secondary organization or system who is wrestling with the choices of what to do next around your course management system strategy, I strongly urge you to scour this site and soak up everything you find there. Rarely has there been a better 'state of the CMS union (and potential future)' picture gathered together in one place. I do wish a few of the other open source players' voices were represented here, but it is rare to find this amount of in-depth discussion and feedback collected in one place. The SUNY Learning Network folks are to be commended both for their courage in the path they are blazing and the openness with which they have shared this material for all of our benefits. - SWL