SciQ just went live. It’s a K-12 theme for CAREO that is being used to push learning objects into the classroom in Alberta. Could be very cool, especially when teachers and students start using it in the trenches. This is a product of a whole bunch of educational stakeholders in the province, from content production to curriculum to technology.
It’s cool, from my perspective, since it’s a completely different look and feel for CAREO. A real test of the theming engine. Actually, SciQ was one of the major reasons that the theming engine is as flexible as it is now.
In a word: WOW! Those are some amazing photos. Powerful, beautiful, and completely amazing. Thanks to Ken for sharing his photos. Many of these would make great learning objects…
Not sure if I’ll leave it there, but it’s kinda cool to see external content. I actually intend to use the RSS-HTML utility that David graciously provided to demonstrate integration of Learning Objects and RSS into online learning - a WebCT or Blackboard course could include live external resources, without having to manually hunt for them. That’s a Good Thing.
I just ran a cool little utility called Comstats. It sniffs through my Mail.app mailboxes, and runs some stats on the contents. It generated this cool and somewhat scary graph of number of emails received per day, over the past 2 years:
It’s a little scary to extrapolate what appears to be something loosely resembling an exponential curve out another couple of years. Yikes.
Just tried both the Solaris and Linux versions of X-Hive, and MacOSX puked on the binary files for both (binary file not executable). Doh. Frederik at X-Hive suggested there might be MacOSX support by the end of the year. Guess I will have to wait until then.
In the meantime, we’ll have to scare up a Windows or Linux box to test on. Rob’s always got a RedHat box laying around, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Sure hope the Linux build of X-Hive likes RedHat…
OK… I’m feeling like a bit of an inept bonehead for not being able to figure this one out, and I’m hoping someone out there in blogland has done something similar…
I was hoping to create a simple HTML web page that included several RSS feeds, including several from CAREO. I was sure someone would have done something similar, but haven’t found anything that works. Reliably.
Is there anything I can use to embed live RSS feeds in an otherwise-static web page? I don’t want to be pre-processing anything, or cacheing XML or anything. I want a live display of a live RSS feed in a static HTML page. I don’t care if it’s a PHP or PERL or whatever-based CGI that does the heavy lifting, as long as it’s relatively portable (i.e., don’t have to recompile PERL on MacOSX like rss2html.pl seems to want to do). Oh, and it has to be able to run on my server. I don’t want to have a cross-the-pond round trip like what is required to use the feed processor at curry.com
Both claim to support multiple simultaneous xml schemas, XQuery, and lots of other goodness. Both claim to be relatively portable (although they don’t list MacOSX as a supported platform. ARGH! They both list Solaris and Linux, so maybe that’s close enough?) Both carefully hide what it costs to license their software.
Let’s pretend that a major foundation that is interested in the intersection of learning objects and online community had approached me about sponsoring a meeting of people with said interest, and I had funding to bring 12 or so people together for a multi-day summit this summer to discuss the state of the art and where we go from here. Which is all true.
Who should I invite? You can only nominate five people, and none of them can be you.
I’ve been implementing the browse objects interface for the SciQ project, and it struck me just how different it looks from the current browse utility in CAREO. They do basically the same thing - allow the user to use predefined vocabularies for searches based on standardized metadata elements - but the presentation difference is quite striking.
Compare the two, CAREO on the left, SciQ on the right:
Today, we’re going to install WO on a Solaris8 box, in preparation for deploying CAREO for the MedCIS project.
The fun part of this will be integration with SunONE Single Sign On to override authentication within CAREO. We’ll also be imposing several “classes” of users (Instructor, Student, Guest), and allow users to share documents with their own “class” as well as optionally with those in “lower” classes.
I’ll report back on how the install goes. Could be interesting, but we should be able to do the whole thing remotely.
Over the last week, I’ve been completely blown away by the level of interest people are showing in LORs, and CAREO specifically. Wow. Really.
It’s been odd, because for the past couple of years, it’s seemed like nobody knew or cared about learning objects, never mind learning object repositories, and now people all over the place are looking at CAREO to help them play around with LOs and LORs.
