http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/13/job-postings-want-

Ahoy mateys, so that “moose fever” - turned into pneumonia for me! On top of which my entire family got sick too. But we’re finally over that now, so time to break the silence and set sail on the seas of end-user mashups.

As much as I felt some small discouragement with the NV mashups workshop because of certain technologies blowing up during the session and us not sticking with a more hands-on format, I have not given up on the dream of exploring mashups for non-programmers and have continued on, scratching a few of my personal itches.

Job Postings Want to be Free!

The first one, which I mentioned in that session, is around HR departments that don’t provide RSS feeds for their job postings. I’m sure some smart HR professional out there will clue me in to how this is intentional and keeps the riff-raff out, but from where I’m sitting I would love to be able to help people who are already interested in my organization to easily monitor new openings, especially in this tight job market with more jobs than potential employees.

But if you are in higher ed in B.C., my particular niche, you are out of luck unless you want a job at UBC, the only institution that so far seems to have grokked this. I’ve found ways, over the years, to get this information pushed to my email (the WatchThisPage service has been particularly useful in this regard,) but I mean, email, ick, that’s so 1994 (whoops, a real pirate would never have said ‘ick’). So my goal was to see if I could build an aggregated page of BC post-secondary job postings, one with an RSS feed too.

There’s basically 4 steps in the process:

1. Identify the Pages

This one’s easy - go to the various institution sites in the province, and locate their job postings pages. In this experiment I used the job postings pages from schools local to me, Royal Roads University, Camosun College, University of Victoria (and UBC’s because they were already RSS).

2. Scrape the pages

So the problem with all these pages - no RSS feeds. That’s where a service like Dapper comes in. Dapper offers a fairly simple way, though the use of a ‘virtual browser,’ to look at a web page and tell it which elements on the page you would like to scrape out as data. It then allows you to access this scrapped information as XML, HTML, RSS, CSV, JSON, as a Netvibes module or Google gadget, and more. An example is this dapp that scrapes the UVic jobs postings page.

3. Clean up the feeds

Now you’ll notice in the UVic job posting example, there is all sorts of cruft in the feed. Dapper is ultimately only as good as the page that it is scrapping. It does its best to identify logical groupings based on the page markup, and the more that XHTML has been used in a logical way the better it does, but HTML itself isn’t a logical markup language. Dapper does offer you the ability to tweak the scrapper with constraints, but this is one aspect of Dapper I find not to be overly intuitive.

So instead of trying to clean the feeds up in Dapper, I take the crufty feeds from Dapper into Yahoo Pipes, which offers a much easier way to clean up the feeds. In the case of the UVic feeds, it’s by creating a filter to allow only those items whose feed contains the text “Comp,” which turns out to be the common element in all of their postings. Here’s the pipe, which if you clone you can see the various feeds being cleaned up.

4. Aggregate all of the new feeds

This turns out to be simply once these other steps have been taken. There are lots of feed aggregation services out these, but since we already brought all of the feeds into Pipes to clean them up, it’s easy to just use the ‘union’ function there to join them into one master feed of job postings.

About the result, and why am I talking like a pirate?

So obviously the resulting feed above only contains 4 of the 26 institutions in BC. It’s really just rinse and repeat to get the rest and then some formatting cleanup, which I purposely didn’t do (and least not publicly, hehe).

My intent in documenting this exercise (and the next one) was not to provide a production-ready feed of all BC post-secondary job postings, handy as that might be. It was instead to

• illustrate how YOU can use tools like Dapper and Yahoo pipes to create feeds and aggregations for data on almost any webpage, (made seemingly even easier now with Dapper’s release of the DapperFox plugin)


• spur information providers on to doing it right the first time - there is NO reason (as we will see in the next example too) to ever provide another list, another calendar, another set of links, etc, in a way that by default traps the content in a single presentation, only ever editable by a single author. NO REASON, and lots of GOOD reasons not to. The separation of content and presentation should have already become one of the default criteria you use to select any technology. If the tools you are using don’t support RSS or some other means to do this, use one of the HUNDREDS of FREE ones that do. And at the very least, please adopt tools that produce proper XHTML - accessibility means providing access, and if you won’t do it to cater to web wonks like me, do it at least to serve people who have no other choice but to consume your page through a text reader or other assistive device. If you don’t, someday someone may make you.

And the pirate metaphors? Well certain, shall we say, ‘issues’ around intellectual property were pointed out to me during the NV mashups workshop, and I guess this is kind of my reply - if you aren’t going to provide the data for users in a way that enables them to use it how THEY want to, don’t be surprised when they go and do it themselves, arrgghhh.

So until our next swashbuckling adventure, I remain yours truly, Cabin Boy Nessman of the good ship Syndication.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/13/conference-listing

(Avast, me hearties, this is the last of the pirate postings. Just be glad they weren’t podcasts

So the other ‘mashups’ itch I’ve been wanting to scratch recently revolves around events listings, specifically a list of ed tech conferences that’s been around for a few years. Now before ye raise the topsails and give chase, hear me out - the landlubber who created and maintains this list every year is to be much praised, as I have done so in the past, as are the folks at CIDER for posting it as HTML.

But in this age of participatory media and user generated content, does it make any sense for lists like these to get created and maintained by one person, in a Word document?

Aye, you say, but it was probably the easiest tool at hand for what was a selfless act of giving back to the community. Right you are; but howseabout I shows ya how to take this page, database-enable it and allow others to add to new events to it in about 5 minutes with free, easy-to-use web-based tools. Come aboard all ye who’s coming aboard…

Scrape, Clean and then…

So, much the same as the first exercise, we’ll use Dapper to scrape the HTML page, and Pipes to clean up unwanted stuff. Already we have an RSS feed of ed tech conference events; problem is, it’s a list that may never get updated, so having it as RSS hasn’t helped much, except…

Dabble Away!

…except there’s this neat service called Dabble DB that allows you to create online databases very easily. They have set it up so that to create one from scratch you don’t fill in information about tables and fields, like you would normally with RDBMS software, but instead create a “category” which contains “entries,” and “views,” and through adding attributes while describing an actual “entry” you build the DB in context. Quite nifty.

Even better though - you can point Dabble DB at an RSS feed or webpage with a table in it, and it will create a database based on those. Which is what I did, pointed to the cleaned up feed of ed tech events, from which Dabble DB created this default view along with a Calendar view of the same data.

So what?

Which is all well and good except…how is this any better than what we had? Well, first off, you can easily create some other views of the data. Here’s a map of the distribution of these conferences around the world (note: that feature still a work in progress; it only gives you totals, doesn’t let you drill all the way down. But then it was only recently released.)

Even better, you can embed the views of this database on any webpage by copying and pasting a simple line of code, so here’s a page on edtechpost with the calendar view, links to the chronological view and the geographic distribution views. Big whoop, I know, except look down at the bottom of that first page, you’ll see a form to add new events to the database. That form was also copy and pasted from the Dabble DB site.

So, from static HTML page to database with multiple views, and the ability for other users to add new entries, in less time than it actually took me to type this post. Even better though might have been if the originator of the list had chosen DabbleDB (or one of the other web-based databases or online calendars on this list, itself done in DabbleDB - oy, my head hurts!) to begin with and opened it up to the community to populate and maintain. Right?

So same lessons as the last time - the goal here isn’t to produce a new production version of this, but to show you another example of how these new tools can empower you, and to encourage information providers to ‘do it right the first time.’ And with that, I remain yours truly, Cabin Boy Nessman of the good ship Syndication.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/15/30-boxed-mashup-mu

http://30boxes.com/boxed

30boxed is a handy little service - give it a feed (why, give it multiple feeds!), and it will place all the items on a calendar. Say, for instance, if you wanted a simple way to visually track all of your classes blog postings against a calendar… - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/16/we-interrup-this-b

http://www.letelizabethspeak.ca/

Apologies for the non-edtech topic, but this is the only soapbox I have, and this is an issue that matters to me.

I strongly urge any Canadian readers, regardless of political affiliation, to visit the URL above and sign the petition urging the major Canadian TV networks to include the leader of the federal Green Party in the next leaders debate.

While we don’t yet know the date of the next election, everyone knows its going to happen at some not-too-distant point, and at a time when the major political parties in Canada are making increasing political hay out of environmental issues (yet doing little to address them) it is unconscionable that the leader of the Green Party be excluded from future debates.

Call me retrograd, call me old school, call me a neanderthal, I don’t care; I have not given up on either the concept or the practice of a Canadian federal government, as frustrating and ineffective as it can be, nor do I believe there is currently any other forum for the 4 leaders to engage that receives as much attention as the national televised debates. So please, lend your name to a more inclusive debate. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/21/trailfire/

http://trailfire.com/

I am kind of surprised to not have seen this come through my aggregator yet as it’s the kind of thing I thought the connectivist and open education crowd would be quite excited about. Maybe I just missed it, or maybe that just shows how clued out I am. Anyways, when I stumbled on this app the other day it was quite exciting as it’s something I’ve been seeking for a while.

Trailfire is a Firefox extension which allows you to easily create ‘trails’ through the web. ‘Trails’ are in essence sequences of webpages which can be annotated and can be shared with others. For instance, here’s is a trail I just created showing some of the applications I’ve found for creating trails online (how recursive!). Here’s another example, a trail on ‘elearning’ by someone called Ideanoth, and here’s another someone built to take you through learning CSS.

Each node in a trail, called a mark (and really just equivalent to a unique URL) can also receive comments from other users, so you can start to build up a bit of a threaded discussion around the nodes in a trail, and in addition, you can set the trailfire extension to show you any other marks from other users that have been set against any webpage. So all of a sudden, you can start to see how a specific resource can show up in multiple frames of reference.

Have a look; I think you could find fault with the interface and parts of the implementation, but I know the idea of being able to model how I’ve learned something by laying down trails that can then serve as the basis both for discussion and as starting templates for others’ trails really appeals to me as a way to ‘teach’ on the open web. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/22/greader-help-throu

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nessman/430434707/

So a little more on Trailfire - I mentioned in the first post that you can set it to see ‘marks’ on any page that others have added to their own trails. I have that setting turned on, and got this pleasant surprise while in Google Reader this morning - someone had added a mark to this page with all of the Google Reader hotkeys in it, so now with a simple mouse over I get annotated help on this page. While I am not totally thrilled with where Trailfire places the tiny icons on the page indicating that a mark already exists (they sometimes obscure the content) the potential for adding in-context help to any web page or application, unfacilitated by the page owner themselves, seems quite useful, and certainly makes my learning the Google Reader hotkeys all that easier. - SWL

P.S. - Alan, thanks again for the Muntandina tracks from Magnatune; bringing a huge ray of sunshine to a grey Wet Coast day.

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/27/the-future-of-lear

http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/i-overview/

Via a post by Michael Roy at the Wesleyan Academic Commons site comes mention of this interesting project that I thought for sure would get a reaction in the edublogging crowd, both for the topic and for its format.

The topic - “How do institutions–social, civic, educational–transform in response to and in order to promote new kinds of learning in the information age?” Rather than take a straight-ahead run at more conventional notions of ‘institutions’ I think they helpfully start by modifying the usual definition towards asking the question “What would it mean to start with a definition that emphasized social networks and the processes of creating those networks?”

The format - apparently a new Wordpress blogging plugin (code name Comment Press) which allows commenters to add feedback on a paragraph by paragraph-basis in a form that resembles a conversational thread. Well worth the read. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/30/the-end-of-an-era-

http://www.rheostatics.ca/#final

About 2 weeks ago I was driving along with the radio tuned to CBC, listening to an awesome cover of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere. Now that tune has always been a favourite Canadian classic, and from the voice singing the harmonies, even before the announcer came back on, I knew right away it was the Rheostatics, one of my all time favourite Canadian acts (as it turned out, accompanying another old time favourite, The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir). I had it cranked all the way up, and as the song ended the announcer came on to say we’d be hearing lots more Rheostatics leading up to their final concert, March 30, at Massey Hall.

I was gutshot, almost drove off the road. I mean, it’s not necessarily a surprise when I thought about it, they are all a couple of years older than me, all have families now, and have been making music and touring for over 20 years now. But it broke my heart - they were a young band with a cult album when I first started to go see them at shows in London, Ontario during my undergrad days, and I’ve probably seen them 8 times over the years. Each show was magic; the Rheostatics are one of those bands that, while they might not have the hugest fan base, have an extremely dedicated one, and live shows were like a communion. I will really miss them.

For your listening pleasure, if you’ve never heard them, a few excerpts of some of my favourite Rheos’ tunes

• Christopher


• Record Body Count


• Legal Age Life at Variety Store