One of the biggest questions I get from people who want to use wiki.ucalgary.ca is "How do I protect or lock a page?" I've had to respond with a gentle suggestion that the wiki is an open resource by design, but that doesn't go very far. There are valid reasons for locking down a wiki - ranging from sensitive information that shouldn't be In The Wild, to protecting privacy (K-12 collaborations can't have info about kids leaking onto the 'net for obvious reasons).
Cole's looking for information about Zope/Plone for possible use in an academic setting. I've dabbled with Plone, but that was something like 18 months ago, so my info is a bit stale.
Thought I'd fire off a question into the Lazyweb to help Cole gather info (because I'm curious, too).
Anyone have any experience with Zope/Plone? How does it compare with Drupal? Pros? Cons? Scalability? The service may need to scale to an institutional level, IIRC...
We're starting to do a lot of Drupal hosting for various projects around here. It looks like we'll be having about a dozen or so Drupal-powered sites running by summer.
I'd been planning on putting together a "Learning Commons Drupal Distro" that had all of the modules that we like, and themes, etc. so I could easily set up new sites without re-downloading each module repeatedly. I was even planning on writing an install script, which would copy stuff into a specified directory and prompt for easy configuration. Turns out I won't have to do that...
Merlin Mann (through his awesome 43Folders blog) just posted some tips to help decrease distractions via email. Glaringly obvious stuff. But, stuff that I wasn't really thinking about.
So I just did something radical. I quit both Mail and Blogbridge. I'll fire them up a couple/few times a day, but they don't need to be open all of the time, just begging me to pay attention to the new, urgent, and interesting stuff that might be waiting for me.
I took the time to link each image to the source via the Notes feature. What a pita that process was... :-)
Trying the free blog editing client app Bleezer - it's a cross-platform java app. A little rough around the edges, but has a pretty decent UI (but categories are provided in a popup, so you can select only one category for a post).
The editor is not WYSIWYG, but toggles to preview mode easily. It doesn't grok the convention of skipping p and br, so the preview is spaced oddly. The app provides an interface for direct FTP uploads of images etc. as well.
The Performancing extension for Firefox was just updated, and they added some great new stuff. It's now tied into del.icio.us, and adds a "Page Tools" view that looks up the current web page in Technorati (handy, but no handier than a bookmarklet).
Firefox is still not quite as nice as Safari, so I don't think I'll be using it full time (page scrolling performance in Firefox is terrible on my 'book, and text rendering isn't quite as nice as in Safari). Maybe I'll try it for a few days to see how it works out.
It's been a LONG time since I've played with Ecto. I used the previous incarnation (KungLog) before it changed to become Ecto, and lost touch with it since then. I've been using the browser-based WordPress posting interface almost exclusively, with occasional dabbles into the worlds of Firefox+Performancing and Flock.
Gotta say, I'm less impressed with Ecto's write-and-preview flow (and by default, it's not even a live preview, and the "automatic" preview isn't quite "live"). If an app is going to provide an interface like this, it really should go the extra mile and use a full-out WYSIWYG interface (with the option to revert to source editing mode). And the controls for entering/editing hyperlinks are, well, bizarre and non-intuitive. A mini-toolbar at the bottom of the editing window is pretty un-Maclike, and odd when considering all other controls are in an almost-conventional toolbar above the editing pane...
It was pointed out that I'd neglected to have a "presentations" page, so there was no easy way to grab stuff from any of the presentations that I've had the chance to be involved with.
I just added a new "Presentations" section, listing (I think) every presentation I've done since I started here at the Learning Commons. There may be a couple that I've missed, but at least the "big" ones are there. I'll keep it up to date as new ones come online.
The problems with the adoption and implementation of the previous versions of the LOM are apparently solved by the addition of more definitions of structured taxonomy-driven authoritative metadata systems.
I'm posting this to remind myself to not get sucked into this stuff. It's good that people are thinking about how to improve on the LOM, and even deprecating the term "learning object" (replaced by "resources") but for the love of all that is holy and good, please focus on the content, context, and pedagogy and not on the metadata.
This post is the 1,000th post I've made to my blog (not counting the ones that made up the early months of the blog, which have been lost forever). As I've been publishing more stuff to it, writing more, ranting more, it's interesting (and curious) to see the fluctuations in traffic to the blog. As of right now, there have been 168,031 actual human visitors since stats started being monitored (on 5/25/2003).