Every now and then, I remember about the great search application called Kartoo. It’s a flash UI on top of a bunch of search engines, and does some really interesting things with the aggregated search results. The coolest (and most visible) thing is the “concept map” view of search results - and this display doubles as an on-the-fly social network diagram.
For example, I just did a quick ego search (don’t laugh - you do it too. fess up!) for “darcynorman.net” to see what kind of diagram came up. I was surprised by how on the mark it is. The diagram is a good starting point (although far from comprehensive) for getting an idea about what interesting bits I published (since only those will be linked to by others), and you get a rough idea of my immediate social network. The display is paged, which is unfortunate and counterintuitive (since you can zoom and pan the diagram, and pagination only makes sense for text lists…). Here’s a screenshot of the second “page” of results mapped out:
I spent about 2 minutes playing with Moodle today, in response to a question from Gord about how to add resources to a course. He started adding a resource yesterday, but wasn’t sure how to finish the process (it was a website link, and he wasn’t sure which fields were mandatory and which were optional). So I log in with the temporarily-shared administrative account, navigate to the course, and open the “add resource” panel.
If Apple has decided to replace “Power-” with “Mac-”, and add “- Pro”, ala “MacBook Pro”, does that mean we’re going to see a “MacMac Pro” as the new Intel-powered desktop?
Here’s hoping the new naming scheme isn’t taken too literally… :-)
I’ve been watching way too much of The Incredibles since Christmas (finally got a DVD player, and Evan’s a huge Pixar fan already), and all I can picture when I think about the mythical MacMac Pro is this.
I’ve been given the opportunity to reflect some more on the nature of portfolios, and on the differences between “portfolios” and “dossiers”. I last wrote about ePortfolios vs. dossiers last month. This morning I got to see a presentation on a Very Important Project that is building a “Teaching Dossier” system as part of its offerings. I’m not going to name the project, because the exact implementation is irrelevant - it’s the concept of the dossier that is off the mark.
In my continued activities as the designated CMS Twiddler for the Learning Commons, I’m putting together a site for a client that will serve as both a “traditional” website (but they can edit through a browser), and a “community” site, with blogs, forums, resource databases and the like. I was playing with both Drupal 4.6.x and the betas of 4.7 (now up to beta 3), and I’ve found a combination of modules that will let us do pretty much exactly what we had planned on.
Since updating this blog to WP 2.0, the WP-Cache plugin has stopped working as it had been (i.e., it’s not doing anything anymore), and the performance of either WordPress or MySQL has been incredibly sucktacular. It can take over 30 seconds to generate a page. Requests are occasionally timing out. This just ain’t right.
I thought it might be a GoDaddy issue - they’ve had database performance issues in the past. But they assure me that everything is running fine. One of the downsides of using a hosting service is that I kinda have to take them at their word.
Moodle. It’s fun to say, and fun to play around with. I’ve spent a good part of the day playing with Moodle to set it up for use on a project. Well, that’s a lie. I spent maybe 10 minutes to set it up, and the rest of the time messing around with modules, themes, courses, lessons and activities to see what it can do.
In my early experimentation, it seems like an amazing and flexible LMS. Looks like it will be able to do everything we need for this project, and I’d be surprised if it couldn’t be tasked as the campus LMS as well. Lots of institutional and political reasons why that won’t happen any time soon, but the software feels pretty close to ready. I know Athabasca is running their campus on Moodle (and ELGG), and I’m wondering what they’re finding about large-scale deployment of Moodle…
David Wiley just wrote an excellent post about the “death” of learning objects. He’s right on the mark, emphasizing the learning part of the buzzword, while us geeks who were attempting to implement some of the early LO-based software got so woefully distracted by the object and reuse angles. He’s also much more articlate than I am, so give his article a read, then come back here. I’ll wait. Go ahead.
We were wandering around a mall this afternoon, and while Janice was looking in some foo-foo shop, Evan and I ducked into Black’s Photography. The camera dude sees us enter the store, and asks if I have any questions. I ask about the XT, what bundles they have, specials, etc…
Then, he pulls out the little key, and pulls an XT down from the display. “Here, try it out…” he says, knowingly.
I just did a quick Google for OmniOutliner todo-list templates, to see what ideas others have come up with to help manage the flow of tasks and demands, and found Kinkless Getting Things Done - a set of templates and scripts for OmniOutliner to help categorize and prioritize stuff that needs doing.
Very impressive stuff - it helps you define context (where/when something needs to be done) and then sets up a set of views on your projects and actions to help you get through them efficiently (or, in my case, without getting distracted by shiny tangents. OOH! A tangent! I should follow that! Wait…)
Well, I guess I’m committed to Dvorak now. Prompted by some tips from Ryan Poling, I just rearranged the key caps on my Powerbook’s keyboard. In the office, I use an external USB keyboard that has already been fixed to support the Dvorak layout. But, this afternoon on the bus ride home, I cracked the ‘book open to hack on my Rails bookmark manager - and realized that although the key caps were still QWERTY, I was starting to think in Dvorak. Light at the end of the rainbow…
After I wrote some thoughts about what I’m looking for in an RSS reader, I realized that the only application that comes close to what I was describing is BlogBridge. It has prioritization of feeds and items via “Starz”, and ties into social services (both a custom network for sharing keywords and ratings, and a direct connection to my del.ico.us account).
It’s got some room for improvement - my biggest beefs are resource hogging and the seeming inability of java apps to open URLs in a browser without bringing it to the front. But they aren’t fatal flaws - only annoying.