Josh and I (and sometimes King) have been utilizing a pair-programming-at-a-distance method of collaboration (not quite like spooky action at a distance, but sometimes it feels pretty close...)

Our magic sweet spot combo of tools includes 2 computers at each end of the pipe, one with VNC (a server at one end, a client at the other), and the other computer acting as "support", with iChatAV acting as our communications bridge, and various browsers and utilities handy on the non-shared screen. We leave an iChat video connection open, so we can communicate without having to stop editing source code to enter chat mode. This rocks nicely.

Not sure how I missed this, but I just came across the EDUCAUSE | Blogs site-within-a-site while surfing Feedster to get the latest stuff from the Educause 2004 conference.

I had no idea that Cyprien Lomas was blogging - met him at the NMC2004 Summer Conference at 2004, and I'll definitely be following his blog...

The Educause Blog site looks to be pretty much what a department would need to use in order to officially adopt blogging as part of their website - a collection of bloggers and categories, with the ability to view individual bloggers or categories, or collections of any combination thereof. Very nice. They don't say what software they're using, so I don't know if it's WP, MT, or if they rolled their own...

I completely forgot about the 2 Amigos at Educause! It was originally a "3 Amigos Production", but that's a long story. Alan and Brian made the trek to Denver, and it sounded like fun of course!

The presentation wiki is available as well. Links to other stuff are available via Alan's description of the presentation.

This Rip, mix & feed style of dealing with resources (content, learning objects, whatever) is very cool. Using small pieces loosely joined...

I just nuked the Google Adsense stuff from this weblog. I had added it to see how it did with analyzing the content of various pages (along the lines of the bags-of-keywords and content-indexing memes with respect to learning objects and metadata).

The experiment was actually quite interesting and informative. Conclusions:

• It is definitely possible to effectively match content (ads) with other content (weblog posts) based on the bits within that content (and not on keywords or taxonomies applied to the outside of said content).
• The matches between content and ads are often extremely accurate, but lag by a couple of days as Google updates indexes and caches. New posts tend to have a quasi-generic ad for a day or so, and then a "real" ad kicks in
• Readers of this weblog (perhaps/not weblogs in general?) are rather task-oriented folks. They don't get distracted by ads - they are apparently here to read stuff, and don't tend to click on ads
• As a result of the previous point, Adsense isn't a viable revenue source. It wasn't intended to be - I would have donated any revenue to the Breast Cancer Foundation - but over the past several months, Adsense tracked a grand total of less than $10US. They don't pay until you hit $100US, so I would have to keep ads running for almost 2 years to see a dime from Adsense. The Adsense EULA prevents me from publishing specific details on success rates (CPM, etc..) but they were substantially less than stellar. ;-)

By the way, the conclusion of this experiment was triggered by the IT Conversations: The Future of Online Advertising (at Gnomedex 4.0) session. They got talking about "monetizing content from weblogs" and adding ads to rss feeds. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn't continue with Adsense. The talk was quite interesting (with folks from Google, Amazon, etc... talking about what they do and where they are going), but a wee bit scary.

Scott Leslie just pointed me to a Erik Duval's weblog which points to a couple of presentations from the Dublin Core 2004 Conference in Shanghai.

I'd missed these links when Erik first posted them (the "DC2004" title didn't grab me - doh!) but man, are they great presentations (well, the .ppt files are great anyway - I can only assume the presentations were better!)

They are basically talking about the changing role of metadata - how the html entry form is dead/useless for this. How multiple simultaneous metadata descriptions of resources are encouraged. Using multiple metadata schemas (LOM, MPEG, DC, whatever), as part of an active workflow rather than an ordained-from-above authoritative approach. About learning from cool new tools like Flickr, del.icio.us, gmail, etc...

After a meeting we had on Tuesday, where I demoed Alan's Ocotillo "control panel", I decided I needed to reinstall feed2js on our server so we could do something similar for a project.

Last time I installed it, I made it freely available for anyone, and it wound up running news feeds for a German dating service, and a gun club, and several other questionable (and definitely non-academic, and certainly non-UofC) uses. These users were hammering our server, using resources that are needed for "official" purposes.

Great. The National Post has an article suggesting the iTMS will open in Canada on November 28th (I'd link to them for posterity, but someone needs to hit the National Post with a cluestick - their website is useless to me if I have to be a paid subscriber of their dead-tree version to read stuff on it).

I'm so totally hooked on ITConversations, and I'm a little nervous about what will happen to my credit rating if it becomes easy for me to get quality audiobooks for the iPod...

Josh, King and I are continuing work on the Pachyderm Authoring Application. We just got a distance collaboration setup going that works really well. We use VNC to share a computer (my TiBook), iChatAV for an open audio channel, and Breeze Live for a shared whiteboard. This is working almost as well as when Josh flew up to Calgary for a week. I think we'll be able to get much more done this way. And it's more fun, too...

Alan Levine just created a real, bonafide learning object using Flickr.

Alan's description of the resource, and the process, and the learning object itself.

I'll preface this by saying this is an off-the-top-of-my-head post. I've been thinking about this off and on for some time now, but thought I should dump a snapshot into the online brain for safe keeping.

I'm re-posting this here to force me to deal with it more productively. Jon Udell totally nailed what's wrong with deeply structured taxonomies, and the different bags-of-keywords approach successfully employed by Flickr and del.icio.us.

What needs to be done is to show how the bags-of-keywords approach could be employed in such a way as to allow the librarians of the world to relax (i.e., can it provide an efficient way of navigating a large-scale repository or repositories, or is it effectively limited to small scale - personal or workgroup level repositories? Gut says it could scale, but there isn't enough data to get the library geeks to chill.)

Finally taking the time to read James Farmer's article on incsub: Communication Dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments.

Did a quick skim, and he's referencing the book "E-Learning in the 21st Century: A framework for research and practice" that was put together by Randy Garrison and Terry Anderson. Randy is the Director of The Learning Commons, while Terry is up at Athabasca University, and was involved with the development of CAREO.