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 ;-)
I just hacked together a quick and dirty RSS theme in CAREO. Doesn’t do a heck of a lot yet, but it’s been a real eye-opener on what else will be required in the theming engine.
Test feed is located here. It might be down, or broken, or whatever. It’s waaay pre-alpha, prototype code. I’m subscribed to it in NetNewsWire, and will track it over the next few days to see how it works.
I’ve been toying with the idea of implementing an RSS theme for CAREO, mostly as a way to prove that theming really does work, and that the interface really CAN be anything (including a machine-readable XML feed).
Might have to whip up an RSS theme that will expose an XML feed for stuff like Top Objects, Newest Objects, or perhaps a search query? They’d have to be run as the Guest user, since I’m not about to do authentication from URL parameters (something about security or some such thing…)
I’ve updated the theme for the SciQ Pre-Alpha theme. This version should handle stretching (vertically) much better. Granted, the search results pages won’t be too long anyway, but I have to accommodate any length of page since they’re being generated dynamically.
Currently, I’ve used placeholder “content” for all pages. I know, the default “Home” page won’t be Q-Live, but I had graphics for that. And yes, I know the Q-Live button doesn’t go anywhere (but you JUST SAID Q-Live had graphics! I know… I have to write a WebObjects component in the UCRepositoryCore framework that can handle “changeable” pages like in the Learning Commons Website. Should be done Monday or Tuesday of next week.)