We’re working with our Faculty of Medicine to help them in their Curriculum Information System project. It’s a cool way for them to track their enormous and dynamic (i.e., changing) curriculum, as well as the resources that support it.
CAREO is being used as a content management component for the MedCIS project. Their portal is built in SunONE Portal, so it’s quite different technology. How to integrate?
The integration is primarily being done via the RSS feeds exposed by CAREO.
I took some time to clean up the Object Summary Page in CAREO. I was only addressing functionality. It should be a little more useful now, since I dropped the redundant “Summary” and “Details” section, and merged them into a single, real “Summary”.
I also added a “Discussions” tab, so you can easily see what’s being said about an object. It directly displays CAREO discussion posts, and has a link to display Trackbacks (posts from other websites such as weblogs).
There is some debate over the behaviour of the RSS element. Should it point to the metadata for the learning object? Should it point to a “more info” page in the host repository?
As an example, would you rather have the link for a a learning object point to this location, or this one?
My personal take on the issue is this. If I’m syndicating a list of learning objects, say for use in an online course or something equivalent, I would need the link to point to the resource itself - the thing that is used for learning - the metadata or “more info” page would be useless to me in that context. If someone can talk me out of that, I would be grateful.
Just added a full blogroll to the right sidebar of my weblog. It’s a massaged dump of my NetNewsWire subscriptions (all 102 of them). I may also add a link to an OPML export of the subscriptions, if anyone wants it.
Please don’t read any relevance into the order of subscribed items… I haven’t prioritized them or anything - they usually stay where they fall in the NNW subscriptions pane.
UPDATE: I posted the OPML file for the subscriptions here (also linked in the title of the Blogroll).
Trying out NetNewsWire Pro as a weblog managing app. I use NNWLite as my aggregator, but thought it would be cool to combine the tools. I currently use KungLog as my weblog manager (post editor, etc…)
If you can read this, then NNWPro has been able to publish an entry to my weblog…
One thing I just noticed: There’s no apparent place for TrackBack URLs… How do I trackback other weblog posts? Is that handled transparently by MovableType?
Rumour has it that BlackBoard6 speaks (or at least understands) RSS natively. I’ll be damned if I can find any documentation on it, though… Anyone stumbled across the “official” way to use RSS in BlackBoard? I’ve got the javascript widget filling the gap, but would rather harness the power of a native tool if it’s available…
Just added a widget that will let you subscribe to any Simple Search query in CAREO. On the Search Results page, there is a link to the RSS feed for that query. Copy. Paste. There is no step 3.
This will make it much easier to syndicate any search query for use elsewhere. Just run the search, and grab the link from the results page.
Just took some time to play around with the standalone trackback tool from Ben Trott. Works like a charm (once I upgraded my Perl installation).
Now, objects in CAREO have an associated URL for receiving trackback pings, as well as one for retrieving all trackbacks (if any) for that object.
Log into CAREO, and hit the button for any learning object. At the bottom of that screen will be a trackback URL, as well as a link to the existing trackback items.
Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and myself have been kicking around this idea for a few days now. I think it’s quite cool, and could be an amazing feature to add to a LOR.
Imagine this: “Person A” is searching a LOR and comes across a really cool LO that they want to use. They have some comments that they might be wanting to share with a community outside of the LOR. They publish these comments to their weblog (say a departmental or institutional or even personal LO-related weblog), and include a trackback to a URL provided by the LOR for that specific LO.
Surfing the blog world with Feedster, and have come across a few more XML database links:
Berkely XML DB by Sleepycat sounds interesting. Has no mention of XQuery, though, which is a big drawback for our needs… (here’s a development weblog for their xml database)
NeoCore XMS sounds great, but rather pricey (advanced XQuery, integrated XSLT, etc…)
Here’s a thread on Slashdot about Open Source XML Databases… The thread includes this link to a weblog about xml databases, but it seems rather dated (last post was Aug 2002).
This guy really gets it. Extremely refreshing to hear from someone else who sees through the hype, but stills sees the promise, in learning objects.
Online learning is different than traditional, conventional classroom-based learning. Not necessarily better or worse, but different, and we need to recognize that in order to do it properly. “You can’t just put a course online.” - Exactly. You can move teaching or instruction online, but it’s a different thing than just save-as-online-course.
button for any learning object. At the bottom of that screen will be a trackback URL, as well as a link to the existing trackback items.