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This is the place to publish the support (or the lack thereof) for the “Decentralists” in terms of maximizing effectiveness through the use of small, organized, and distributed resources.
In this presentation, we have created three groups who will use a collection of “small” discrete, loosely joined technologies, to argue positions of Centralized, Decentralized, and Mixed implementations of instructional technologies. Participants include those present at our session June 15 as well as other edubloggers who can join us in blogs, wiki, and chat space. Follow the coverage via the EDU_RSS feed.
The nature of a decentralized system can lead to fragmentation - many different types of tools, each with its own pecularities. This can lead to a steep learning curve for users of the decentralized system.
Decentralized systems are generally more reliable than single, monolithic Centralized systems. If one part of a Decentralized system becomes unavailable for some reason, the rest of the system is able to function without it.
Stephen Downes just posted 2 links that might be useful.
Latest issue of JIME. Topic is “The Educational Semantic Web”. This is important because it may form a common way of describing resources in a more distributed way. APOLLO will need to tie into these concepts when they become available.
An article called “Improving Metadata Quality: Augmentation and Recombination” that talks about metadata as a collection of statements about a resource, and the possibility of managing metadata at the statement level. Sound familiar? APOLLO basically does this now.
A bunch of us here in the Learning Commons were poised above our keyboards at precisely noon today - when the available Saddledome seats were released to ticketmaster.ca
Well, the rabid Flames fans basically brought the Ticketmaster server to its knees - search results were displaying an estimate of 15 minutes to find anything, and all tickets were sold out before search results were displayed.
I’m guessing all seats, for both games #3 and #4, were sold out in under 10 minutes. To those lucky enough to sneak through the Ticketmaster screen.
This weblog started out a couple of years ago (first post retained from that era was July 2002 ) as a personal project, run under a beta of Blosxom, and published to my .Mac account. Most of the “early” posts from this era have been dropped, but I kept the ones relating to the projects I was/am working on.
Since then, it evolved to be hosted as a MovableType weblog, and ran on that software for over a year. It was switched back to Blosxom 2.0 in May 2004, and switched once more in September 2004 - this time to Wordpress (which is running the weblog now).
I was trying to figure out why Alan’s Feed2JS tool wasn’t displaying dates for my weblog feed. Alan pointed out that it was an RSS 0.91 feed, so it didn’t have dates. Duh.
After an email to the Blosxom group, and some googling, I’ve got an RSS 1.0 feed available. Turns out I needed an additional plugin to give the minimal Blosxom script some extra brains, and then some flavour files to tell it how to render the feed.
I’ve just installed Alan Levine’s handy Feed2JS tool, which takes any RSS feed and spits out a couple of lines of HTML/Javascript for embedding it on any web page. Very handy stuff.
UPDATE: (2004/08/04) I have noticed that the Feed2js deployed on commons is being pretty heavily abused. It’s being used by German dating sites, and many many other questionable (and certainly non-academic) uses. The number of requests on our server for the single feed2js.php file is an order of magnitude greater than the next-most-requested file. I’m temporarily disabling Feed2js for a while.
Almost plain english, and provides a nice at-a-glance table of key features and restrictions of the various licenses. They compare the 10 most popular licenses, as used by projects on SourceForge.net