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.
Norm Friesen just returned from the IEEE LTSC quarterly meetings, and he posted a brief report here.
Some progress on intellectual property issues, but what sounds most interesting is the proposal (apparently adopted already) to reserve physical namespaces for the elements of a metadata XML binding, such that the URI actually points to an info page defining what the purpose/meaning/etc… of that element is. We won’t have to collectively scratch our heads and say “WTF is semantic density, anyways?”
We’re going to give it a shot. We need to test out CAREO running under SunONE single sign-on authentication. We don’t have a Solaris box, but we do have a RedHat box sitting here.
Should be fun. Found what appear to be useful instructions here. I’ll report back if they were useful or not.
UPDATE: Yup. Worked like a charm. I’ll post some notes in the comments for this entry.
Wow. I just cleaned up the old IMS-only metadata entry component in CAREO, and lo and behold, IT’S ALIVE! It actually does a pretty decent job.
Next, I’ll need to clean up the logic that determines who is allowed to edit an existing object, then I can re-activate the “Edit” link on the object listing component.
The “default” and “commons” themes will have the “Add Object” button now, and as soon as I can scare up the graphics for the other themes, they’ll be activated too. Cool.
Now that the SciQ theme is mostly roughed in, I’m shifting focus yet again. We’ve had a Very Important Client request a form-based method to create and edit learning objects within the repository. We have ALOHA, but they need it integrated into the web interface.
We actually had that function about a year ago, in the CAREO prototype, but eventually had to scrap it because it was hard-coded to a single metadata schema, and that schema got updated. That broke the editor.
The SciQ Project is ramping up right now. Just received final content and UI, so I’m busy working away on transforming it into a theme for CAREO. That’s going to put pretty much everything else on hold until it’s ready to go.
This will be an excellent test of the theming engine in CAREO, though, and a cool use of the technology to get actual students (and teachers) using Learning Objects in the classroom.
