I’m working on a new theme for CAREO that is defined completely via CSS. No tables, no image spacers, no HTML hacks. This will provide yet ANOTHER layer of theming for CAREO - at the CSS/presentation layer.
It’s going to mean risking breakage on older, crappy browsers (like Netscape 4.7 etc… - which is still the institutional standard on campus here), but it’s an OPTIONAL theme, which can be used only if desired. That’s kinda the whole point of theming - you don’t even have to know the other themes exist.
I just implemented a “Discuss” feature in CAREO, that will let you (or anyone else) discuss a learning object. Currently, it’s quite simple (by choice, after taking to heart some of Joel’s thoughts).
It allows threaded discussions, sorted by date, and anonymous posting (we’re going to be using it for K-12 stuff, so we can’t make tracking user info mandatory).
It’s a bit quirky at the moment (like when you save a post, it takes you back to the main menu. It shouldn’t do that. I know that. I’ll fix that ASAP - but it WORKS!).
Just scanned the Rendezvous neighborhood in Safari, and it looks like Tim Bray is in the building (welcome to Calgary, Tim!). Must be meeting with Netera - Antarcti.ca has been doing some UI prototype work for them.
Cool, but it looks like he doesn’t have any actual websites on Vikram. Oh, well…
I’m guessing conferences like WWDC2002 will be a wee bit of a stress test on Rendezvous… Thousands of developers, all with Airport and Rendezvous, plugging the LAN. Could be interesting.
Finally, someone who seems to understand that community is not the same as “online discussion board”.
Joel talks about a “third place” that is important to people (in addition to places 1 and 2: home and work) to relax, share, discuss, whatever.
He goes on to babble a bit about how that might relate to software (he is a programmer, after all), but there are a couple of interesting points in there (like how posting rules may actually be a Bad Thing - hadn’t quite thought of that wrt software).
I just came across this conference, mentioned on EdTechPost. It runs August 13-14, 2003 at the University of Calgary.
Randy is going to be keynoting this with Terry Anderson. Should be an interesting show!
Summary:
The focus of the conference is on the best practices in e-Learning in both education and training. The latest e-Learning technologies and practices will be used in this conference to make this event accessible to more people then a traditional face-to-face conference could be. Using the e-Learning technologies, we can also reduce the cost of running a conference such as this, as well as eliminate the costs that you would have to incur to travel to Calgary.
I’ve become addicted to NetNewsWire. The first step is admitting it’s a problem. I only realized that it had become an addiction, when I hit command+L in Safari to start going to a site, when it hit me.
I have already seen all of the updates on every single website that I care about. In NetNewsWire. In a couple of minutes.
There is no reason to surf aimlessly through the several dozen of websites that I used to view daily (or at least weekly). I have 81 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire, and they cover the entire range of sites that I regularly check.
I finally got around to updating the Featured Object in our themes in CAREO. The previous one had been there since October, and was waaay overdue to be changed.
The new Featured Object is the “Powers of 10” animation, done by Florida State University. VERY well done, and cool, too.
Oh, and through the power of hierarchically inherited themes, I only had to change 1 xml fragment, and all themes in our repository were automatically switched to the new Featured Object… Cool. We can override the default for any of the themes, if we want, but this works pretty well as is.
I just migrated a bunch of relevant posts from my personal weblog into this one. This is where they should have been put in the first place, except for the fact that this blog didn’t exist before February 2003…
Well, that was kind of cool… I just implemented xml feeds for search queries in CAREO. Took about half an hour.
You can subscribe to any term you would normally enter in the search field in CAREO. Not sure how/if it would handle multiple words or anything. I guess as long as they’re URL encoded it should work.
Just replace “MYSEARCHQUERY” with whatever you want to look for. The top 10 results, sorted by relevancy, are returned. Searching for some stuff will be slow (something like “image” will get a bajillion results, which must be sorted for the top 10…)
Very interesting article, which basically boils down to something like “Technical interoperability is not the same as semantic interoperability” and goes on to discuss some interesting issues involving the granularity of a learning object, and the impact that has on its value and reusability.
Just realized the RSS theme went from “Hey, that would be cool” to working prototype in under an hour and a half… And that was doing the vast majority of the theme fragment creation/conversion/entry manually to get around the namespace issue… Could have been about 15 minutes otherwise. Theming is cool ;-)
