I just put together an updated installer for APOLLO's supporting frameworks and resources. PackageMaker on MacOSX makes it so brain-dead simple to create really powerful installers. Gotta love that. And, it's free (included with the Developer tools).

This version of the installer includes the Pachyderm PXFoundation and PXPublisher frameworks. (Less than subtle hint about project relationships in there somewhere... ;-) )

I just got out of a meeting where we were preparing for another meeting (ick) which will involve discussing various web sites (design, structure, content...). Initially, Gord was using a Thinkpad with IE (ick again), which was barfing on pages, and being a general PITA to present from.

So, I grabbed my VGA adapter, plugged in the TiBook, and created a new workspace in OmniWeb 5. I added all of the URLs we were talking about as tabs (complete with handy thumbnail previews), and then we just cycled through the tabs. It was the slickest website review session I've seen. Just create a new OmniWeb Workspace for the client, set it to save automatically, and BOOM, you've got a handy dandy "live website presentation tool". Very cool.

When I implemented an experimental Wiki integration with CAREO, I imagined it would be simplest to just tie a Wiki page to each URL, on demand. By extension, that model could have provided a Wiki page for every URL on the internet.

Wikalong does this for all pages in Firefox - promising to become a public, shared margin for the internet.

I've left (early) from the Pachyderm development session. King and Josh kept going, and we're going to be unbelievably close to a working Pachyderm Presentation Authoring application. The work is shifting to the user interface, so changes will become visible.

We took some photos today, to document the ad-hoc Extreme Programming setup we adopted, and some of the results.

First, we have the "before" picture. The original Pachyderm 1.0 database schema we inherited:

Joshua Archer has been in the Learning Commons this week (up from the CSU Center for Distributed Learning at Sonoma State University. We're working on the code that will drive Pachyderm 2.0, and it's been a pretty intense week so far.

I'm feeling a bit out of my league, with King and Josh running with this stuff, and me panting about half a lap behind, struggling to keep up. Just like junior high school gym class all over again ;-)

Distributed Categories sounds something like a cross between the "bag of keywords" approach I've mentioned, and the Shibboleth method of associating distributed content via a shared magic keyword (as used by Stephen Downes' EduRSS Merlot feed aggregator).

Michael Feldstein has collected a list of folks talking about this stuff.

Just a note to myself to buy Practical WebObjects (found out about the book here. From the book's page:

It also goes into Unit testing, Kerberos authentication and a bunch of other intermediate/advanced topics. It's about time there was a book that was more than a tour of WebObjects Builder...

I didn't change weblog software again - just tweaked the layout of the site. I'm using Michael Heilemann's Kubrick v1.2.5 template for Wordpress.

I've modified it a bit to pull header, footer, and sidebar into separate files to be included, and tweaked a couple of things, but it's basically a stock Kubrick 1.2.5 template. You may need to force a reload for all of the new bits to show up in your browser (but really, who uses a browser to read weblogs anymore? ;-) )

David Davies just posted an entry on learning objects that has a reasonable description of what a learning object is (to him). He's also got a nice, clear diagram showing the reusability paradox, and how assets, learning objects, and content packages fit along the spectra of organization and reusability.

I listened to Stephen Downes' ITI keynote (and here in AAC AudioBook format) on the commute (first half last night, second half this morning, thanks to the wonders of AudioBook ;-) )

It was quite a good presentation. Some of it might be considered common knowledge (open is good), but this particular audience may not have heard the message before (or, they may have needed the extra "open in elearning is good" ).

Excellent! Stephen Downes just released a recording of his keynote from David Wiley's latest ITI shindig at Utah State University. There's also a PowerPoint version, if you swing that way. Downloading the .mp3 now, so I can drop it onto my iPod for the commute...

UPDATE: I just converted Stephen's big honking .mp3 file into a handy AudioBook AAC format for use in iTunes or an iPod. It's about half the size of the .mp3, and supports bookmarking, in case you don't feel like sitting there for an hour... It also has an album cover....

I've been surfing some of the weblogs I subscribe to, poking through their blogrolls for gems I may have missed. I'm amazed at how some weblog designs are so overly complex that it can take me a minute or two of scanning a page just to find the "subscribe" link. One site I looked at had a grand total of 469 hyperlinks on the main page alone. Many were blogroll items, bookmark links etc. But they overwhelm the reader with so much superfluous data that it's difficult to find the simple single link you're looking for...