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…
Read MoreJust 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.
Read MoreJust 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.
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 CAREO…
Read MoreAlan 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.
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. “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.
Read MoreDavid Wiley just posted a link to his “Educational Content Viewer” prototype. Some scary synchronicity here - I’ve been thinking about building a learning object playback utility that could be embedded in CAREO. Wonder how this prototype gets its data? If it’s 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. Didn’t see any claims of XQuery support though (the closest they come to mentioning support is in this white paper, which doesn’t come right out and say they support it, only that they should). Will have to dig deeper. It’s also a little pricey. It’s good that it’s java, and has lots of tools, but it’s 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. Here’s 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 doesn’t 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, etc… These contexts don’t even have to be embedded in the LO’s 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 etc… 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.
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