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…
UPDATE: I just re-read this, and it sounded like I was trying to claim I invented this concept of learning objects modeled as molecular compounds. David Wiley was waaaay ahead of me, writing a pivotal paper in 1999 (that’s a whole ’nother millenium!) - I was merely attempting to snapshot my thinking along the same lines, especially in light of the recent “learning objects as words in sentences” stuff making the rounds… Whew.
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.)
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.
I disagree with dcannell’s “thing of the past” verdict, in that I strongly think that learning object repositories are valuable (I’ve built a couple, and am working on something new), but that their role must change drastically if their value is to be realized.
OmniWeb 5.1 Beta 1 is available - includes updated WebCore (YAY!), and a bunch of other stuff… Now the text shadows render properly in css, and gmail works, and a bunch of other stuff. Thank you Omnigroup!
Well, not exactly alive, but it’s working. It’s freaking working! I can now insert new records (creating new xml documents) and save them, run queries, edit records, and save those changes. Whew.
There is some final cleanup I want to do (finish migrating from DOM4J to JDOM, clean out all of the debugging spaghetti outputs, and comment the heck out of it), then I’ll package it up and drop it on Sourceforge.
Just came across a link to the new Snap search engine. Not sure if it’s doing anything drastically different under the covers, but they are trying some new stuff in the UI (which may be a bit densely packed, actually).
The biggest thing they are trying is a javascript live-updating results display panel. You do your search, then refine it in another field, with the filtered results displaying in almost real time. No visible roundtrip to the server (but there may/must be one in there somewhere…)
It just struck me that the shortcut I described to allow me to easily search del.icio.us and Flickr would have been darned near impossible if they’d used some form of complex nested taxonomies instead of employing bags-of-keywords.
The more I play with tools that use bags-of-keywords, the more I see the power of them. Sure, you lose some of the elegance on the metadata side of things (hard to define relationships and parent-child links with bags of keywords, easy with taxonomies), but do users really care (or understand) that stuff anyway? Just enter a few more keywords, and eventually you’ll have described it as richly as you would have with a Library of Congress classification, without having to memorize LoC…
