It’s awesome that people are talking about, and referencing, and critiquing EduGlu. Keep the conversations going! I do need to clarify a couple of things about it, though…
EduGlu is not mine. It wasn’t my idea. It isn’t my project. The concept is a logical/natural extension of lots of otherinterestingprojects in the area (and may be better implemented directly in any one of those, rather than building something new). This incarnation of the concept(s) grew out of a series of great discussions over a few days in Vancouver, by dozens of other folks (educators, geeks, researchers, academics, administrators…) and each discussion wound up converging toward this EduGlu idea, and away from the school-as-blog-host model.
It is currently just a thought exercise to frame discussions, and to help figure out what the requirements and issues are. The EduForge.org site for the project was set up explicitly to make it not “mine” but “ours” - anyone is free to contribute in any way they are willing and/or able. That includes toying around with the thought exercise.
EduGlu isn’t simply an aggregator. I think that’s part of what it has to do, but it’s the less interesting part. It’s really a way of thinking about the aggregation. Of running queries against the aggregated data to create custom, on-the-fly views of the data. It’s not simply about storing a bunch of RSS and providing an interface to view it. It’s about organizing that information in a meaningful way, in the context of an existing academic setting. Feeds will belong to individuals, who are associated with institutions, classes and cohorts (to start with, anarchy can reign later). Being able to set up “smart folders” or saved queries or whatnot will help individuals begin to make sense of all of this aggregated stuff.
In the initial stages of thinking about this, it’s important to not focus on implementation. I’m tempted to say “hey! I could do this in [insert platform here] pretty quickly!” - but then I begin by being constrained by the capabilities/limitations/metaphors of [insert platform here]. Once the concepts of this beast have been fleshed out by connecting a bunch of neurons, then it’s safe to start thinking about implementation.
I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I stumbled across Deepest Sender while poking through the Firefox extensons database. It’s a XUL app, so should run nice and fast. At first blush, it looks like a pretty handy way to quickly post stuff. It took maybe 10 seconds to configure to point at my WordPress blog here.
The editing interface only appears to let you select one category, though, but nicely handles keyboard input to select a category quickly.
I’ve been waffling back and forth between Safari and Firefox over the last few months. The flexibility of Firefox keeps drawing me close, like a moth to a flame, only to be burned because it doesn’t “feel” right. Safari does. I’ve been slowly adding Themes and Extensions to make Firefox start to look/behave better, and it’s close. Darned close.
The thing that might push it over the threshold for me was the addition of the All-in-One Mouse Gestures extension, which combines a bunch of stuff (including Mouse Gestures) into one nice package. In Safari (and every other Cocoa app on my system) I’ve been using CocoaGestures to add powerful mouse gestures to tasks like tab switching, closing tabs, etc… But on Firefox, I had to keep reverting to the keyboard (or moving the mouse to select a tab - much more efficient to just flick the mouse and have that motion translated…) Heck, I haven’t even found a keyboard combo to switch tabs in Firefox yet…
To prevent myself from backing away from this, I’ve gone ahead and requested a new project on Eduforge.org to host the mythical EduGlu application development.
I’ve got no idea what this thing might be - not even what language it will be written in - but I’m sticking a flag into the sand to say I’ll help build this sucker.
It’s going to have to be a spare time / after hours project for me, since I’m already way booked at work. If it turns into anything, I’ll try to address any issues that come up there. That’d be a good problem to have, though.
I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.
I thought I’d dodged this bullet. No such luck. This is a particularly insideous one, in that it is 2x exponential. I guess it’s my turn to be a good sport, so here goes…
Four jobs I’ve had
Fabric product packager? The guy that takes the big rolls of fabric and splits it down into the little rolls you see at the fabric stores. Summer job, first year of university.
Housekeeper, Heritage Park. Explains a lot, no?
Midway Operator, Heritage Park. Yes, I was an old-fashioned carnie.
Programmer at a defunct company that Shall Not Be Named.
Four movies I can (and do) watch over and over
Die Hard
LoTR (all three volumes)
Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. KHAAAANNNN!!!! KHAAAANNNNN!!!! ah, Superchannel…
Adventures in Babysitting. Elizabeth Shue is hot…
Four places I’ve lived
Calgary.
The south end of Calgary.
The southwest end of Calgary.
The northwest end of Calgary.
Four TV shows I love
Battlestar Galactica. Best. Sci Fi. Evar. (the new one, not the old campy one)
Lost (airdrop me onto any tropical island, please)
House (I identify with the cantankerous bastard)
Gray’s Anatomy (I know it’s a soap, but it works for some reason)
Four places I’ve vacationed
St. Thomas, USVI (got married there)
Georgetown, Grand Cayman Islands
Vegas. Yeah, I know. But we don’t gamble.
Hawaii. 2 weeks in Honolulu
Four of my favorite dishes
the big green one from Italy
that big salsa bowl. wait. is this asking about the dish, or the contents? Ok, the salsa, then. Or quacamole.
Pretty much anything Janice makes. If forced to decide? Perhaps the lasagna. mmmmm….
The chicken with mole sauce at Salt and Pepper. yum.
Four sites I visit daily
The Goog
Sitemeter (I’m a stat whore. sue me)
/.
Versiontracker
Four places I would rather be right now
St. Thomas, USVI
Georgetown, Grand Caymans
San Francisco
Vancouver
Four books (or series) I love
Asimov’s Robot series
Starship Troopers (awesome book, horrible movie - I read it in the ’90s, looong before it got movified)
Tolkein’s stuff (pick any)
Anything Arthur C. Clark. Again, grew up with it.
Four video games I can (and do or did) play over and over
Pitfall
Omega Force
Marathon
Quake 3:Arena
Four bloggers I am tagging I was going to let this one die on the vine, but now I’m kind of curious…
Brian had written about überbrü a while back, and I was intrigued by the idea - an open recipe for a brew, for sale only in local micrew bars (or at home).
Yet another good conversation, lubricated by a surprisingly good beer.
The best way to describe what hanging out with the Lamb/McPhees, Alan, Scott, Jason, and a long list of new friends is this. In a brief conversation with Patti this morning, I was telling her that I am rethinking everything I’m doing as a result of the amazing conversations I was part of since Thursday (including, but absolutely not limited to Northern Voice).
She replied simply “I’ve seen you smile more this morning than I had in weeks.”
In my neverending quest for The One True Blog Management App, I downloaded the latest beta of Qumana. It’s pretty cool. Cross platform now (well, MacOSX and Windows). It’s got its own ad manager system, which I won’t be using, but that’s how they’ll be trying to pay the bills.
The WYSYWYG editor is pretty decent. Haven’t tried to break it yet, though. Let’s see how it handles preformatted code:
public void Main() {
System.out.println("Trying out Qumana");
}
Hmm… didn’t handle that well… They all seem to bork on that.
Over the last few days, I’ve been privileged to be a part of some extremely interesting and engaging discussions about the nature of “blogging” in education. The Social Software Salon and Edublogger Hootenany sessions were incredible, unstructured, free-flowing, and unbelievably interesting. Essentially, there were no “presenters” and no “moderators” - both were completely open and lively discussions that I was lucky to be present for.
There were several recurring themes that emerged from these sessions, stated from multiple perspectives by several people with different backgrounds. Here’s my Coles™ Notes™ version of these sessions. It’s not unabridged, and if I’m missing (or misrepresenting) anything, I’m going to Trust In Blog that I’ll be corrected. I’m sure I’m forgetting large tracts of the conversations - they were recorded, and will be available as podcasts as soon as Jason and Brian have had time to edit and publish the audio. In the meantime, the wiki pages (linked above) for both sessions provide some background (thanks to Brian for setting those up).
I’m sitting in Canada’s biggest blogging conference, grooving out by hanging out with my blogroll. But the network’s acting up, and I can’t seem to check all of my RSS feeds, nor can I access services like email back at the U of C. I can see many sites, but UCalgary appears to have dropped off the net (from here, at least). I can post to my blog and Flickr, though.
Had a good flight over the Rocks this am. Too damned early, but them’s the breaks. Took a psycho cab ride from YVR to UBC - cabbie using GPS mapping to find the centre of campus. Went for a quick walk to the lookout point over the rose garden (holy crap is UBC a gorgeous campus…) then headed up to Buchanan C Penthouse to meet up with Brian and Alan for the morning Pachyderm demo session.