NASA took a bunch of photographs from space and stitched them together to make a really cool and powerful global image, without borders or clouds.
Check it out <a href=“http://careo.ucalgary.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Repository.woa/wa/ViewObject?object=1358" data-"=”">here, in CAREO.
PS. This blog entry is the first one to actually ping an object in CAREOā¦
Read MoreAlan Levine, Brian Lamb and myself have been kicking around this idea for a few days now. I think itās quite cool, and could be an amazing feature to add to a LOR.
Imagine this: āPerson Aā 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.
Read MoreSurfing 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).
Read MoreNotes from the conference call today.
I published my thoughts on the paper here.
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. āYou canāt just put a course online.ā - Exactly. You can move teaching or instruction online, but itās a different thing than just save-as-online-course.
Read MoreDavid Wiley just posted a link to his āEducational Content Viewerā prototype. Some scary synchronicity here - Iāve been thinking about building a learning object playback utility that could be embedded in CAREO. Wonder how this prototype gets its data? If itās already reading from CGI somewhere, it should be pretty straightforward to get that working.
Read MoreHitSOFTWARE claims their jAllora product to be a relational-to-xml mapper (and vice versa). Geert Clememsen from Frontbase just sent a message saying it works with the FrontBase database server.
Sounds interesting. Didnāt see any claims of XQuery support though (the closest they come to mentioning support is in this white paper, which doesnāt come right out and say they support it, only that they should). Will have to dig deeper. Itās also a little pricey. Itās good that itās java, and has lots of tools, but itās bad that it requires a separate webservice provider to manage/interact with it (ala Tamino) - an integrated solution like XStreamDB would be nicer for our needs.
Read MoreIt appears as though the SciQ live broadcast event went off successfully. That’s cool. This is the first live, streaming event hosted through CAREO.
Just running stats on it now, but it looks like we had 190 simultaneous users, with about 1800 page views. Hopefully we’ll get some stats from Apple or Akamai about the number of video streams served.
I’m crunching the apache log from www.sciq.ca now to see who/what/where people were going. I’ll post more info later…
Read MoreFinally taking the time to go through this paper (described here) by David Wiley. Hereās a couple stream-of-consciousness thoughts while reading it:
2.1: Decontextualized Learning: David discusses the paradox of context vs. reusability. This is a huge issue, but he doesnāt mention that a learning object can have multiple, simultaneous contexts, of different granularities and sources. An object can simultaneously be contextualized as a biochemical reaction, as a nutritional process, a socioeconomic driver, etcā¦ These contexts donāt even have to be embedded in the LOās metadata - they can be externally derived, as well.
Read MoreI decided I should to a test installation of the ALOHA Server application, which CAREO uses as its metadata repository (CAREO is technically a client application of this server).
Grabbed the documentation, PHP files etcā¦ and had it running in less than an hour on my TiBook. If you have more experience with MySQL, you could probably get it done in less than 30 minutes.
Pointed ALOHA at it, and added the first learning object within about 5 minutes of turning the lights on. Cool.
Read MoreJust got an email invite to a conference call on Friday, with āMr. Learning Objectsā - David Wiley. Should be an interesting session. How on earth would anyone live with a reputation like that?
From the invitation:
Featuring David Wiley, āMr. Learning Objectsā himself. To get ready for the discussion, take a look at the reading entitled āLearning objects: Difficulties and Opportunitiesā that is posted on Davidās blog at http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/.
Mike just got back from Vancouver, and was talking about an XML database he saw there: Bluestream XStreamDB
They claim to support XQuery via JDBC somehow. Itās a java-based solution (i.e., portable - thatās a Good Thing). Iām downloading it now to see what it does. Looks VERY promising.
Details available here.
UPDATE: Wow! It worked right off the bat! First XML DB to do THAT for meā¦ And it comes with a whiz-bang management app, too! So far, much more impressed with XStreamDB than anything else Iāve triedā¦ Oh, and itās not just portable, itās EMBEDDABLE. We could conceivably embed the jars for XStreamDB INSIDE CAREO for the repository in a box. It doesnāt come easier than that!
Read MoreJust came across this handy MovableType plugin: MT-RSSFEED.
It can take any RSS feed (static file, or URL), and parse it for display within a MovableType weblog. Iāve changed over the RSS subscriptions to CAREO on the right sidebar to use this plugin, and it works pretty well.
There are lots more great MT plugins at the MT-Plugins Directory.
UPDATE: Iāve also put the āotherā way of subscribing to RSS feeds in a page here, since itās valuable in contexts outside of MovableType (like, say, Blackboard, or WebCT, or whateverā¦)
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