We’re working on a project with some folks at the CHR, and they are travelling to a conference to present their courses and talk about the process. Part of that presentation will be a live demo of the Moodle-powered site and some of the cool Breeze content we put together for them.
The hotel (which shall remain unnamed for now) sent them a sheet, asking what technical services they would like for their 1 hour presentation. Included in that sheet was this portion, listing the costs per service:
Others will write more profound and deeper posts describing what’s so freaking cool about MacOSX 10.5 Leopard. This post is just my initial gut reactions. Want more meat? Surf over to arstechnica.com.
I’ve played with seeds of 10.5 for what seems like years (but is really only a year?) through our Apple Developer Connection subscription. But all of my previous experience was in carefully isolated cleanroom installations, to prevent any bugs from nuking my production system. I’d never tried an upgrade install. I’d never run it for more than a day or two tops because bugs and instability sent me running back to 10.4. So, this is my first real time in Leopard, without an alternate or backup system running a previous version Just In Case™.
I just poked through Rory’s A Typology of Learning Object Repositories article, starting with the tables, and found a few errors relating to his description of CAREO. Here are the corrections (I don’t have Rory’s email handy, and there aren’t comments on the DSpace page for the article):
CAREO supports hosting content as well as linking to other servers. That was one of the primary goals of the project - to allow people to easily post content without having to know FTP. I don’t have the stats on this, but about half of the items in CAREO were uploaded to the CAREO server via the “add object” form.
For “maintaining” an object - CAREO lets the owner of the object edit the metadata, including replacing the media with an updated version.
CAREO does allow retrieval of metadata - there’s a “metadata” button on every object - which shows up once you are logged in.
CAREO requires an account to submit objects, but anyone can create an account.
The metadata schema used was IMS LOM (and later IEEE LOM).
But, it’s all a bit moot, as institutional and provincial support for the CAREO repository evaporated long ago, and the application itself is on its last legs. It’s no longer supported, is barely functioning at the moment, and will be decommissioned at the end of the month.
We use the Events module to manage workshops here in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and use the “Upcoming Events” block to display the next few workshops on our website. Works great, but the default text leaves a bit to be desired. By default, it shows the event title, and “(2 days)” - which indicates that the event begins in 2 days.
But, it could also mean that the event lasts for 2 days.
I had the chance to work on a presentation for the K12 Online 2007 conference. Alan, Brian and I started by thinking of doing an updated “Small Pieces” piece, and we wound up creating a 53 minute video presentation touching on 9 trends in successful online tools, and how they might be used effectively.
The trends are, in no real order:
embed
connect
socialize
collaborate
share
remix
filter
liberate
disrupt
Here’s the presentation, hosted in chunky Google Video transcoded format. There are links to higher (and lower) res versions on the K12 conference page for the presentation.
I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but haven’t taken the time to put it into words. Most recently, a post by Jennifer Jones nicely sums up why Twitter is important, and I think it goes even further than that.
Twitter is important because it makes many of the intangible human connections more readily available to people who are separated by distance. I often feel more closely integrated with the people on my Twitter stream than I do with people who work in my department. Why is that? I see those people every day. But - the people on Twitter are constantly reinforcing my connection with them, and vice versa, through the unceasing flow of status updates.
It’s still not officially released, and I’m still in the early stages of putting together a funding proposal to turn it into a supported service, but if you’re willing to live life on the edge and risk a little beta goodness, UCalgaryBlogs.ca is kinda on the air.
All you need is a valid @ucalgary.ca email address, and you’re off and running. You can create as many blogs as you like, and can select from a bajillion available themes.
When I upgraded to 2.3, I left my 500+ categories in place. I used categories as tags, so didn’t see the need to convert them over to the native tag format. I’ve thought about it some more, and just bit the bullet. All of my categories have been converted over to tags (I think), and now I’ll use categories and tags in slightly different ways.
Categories will be used to define the “type” of post - work, personal, fun, etc…
We’ve been using Moodle to build a bunch of courses for our local health region, and it’s been technically working pretty well. Some of the feedback we’ve received about the UI has been less than stellar. For geeks and techies, it’s not too bad, but non-technical students get lost easily. Much of the complexity can be managed, but I’ve been struggling with how to simplify the intra-course navigation system.
By default, Moodle gives a previous/JumpTo…/next widget at the top of the page while viewing course content.
Lots of great stuff. This set of faves covers the last couple of weeks or so. I wish Anne Archambault was publishing to Flickr, since she’s done some awesome work lately.
I’m not going to write up a summary or wrap-up of the conference. Others havedone that better, and faster, than I. But I do just want to throw some thoughts out there on my Open Ed experience.
First, it was an amazing conference. There aren’t many events that bring together such a vastly diverse group of people - from widely different technical, cultural, geographical and economic backgrounds. Many of the conferences I have been to have felt largely homogeneous. A strong feeling of “sameness” that, while comforting on one level, is diametrically opposed to the real value of these conferences. What a conference can add, above a similarly structured online event, is the serendipitous exposure to people, ideas, philosophies, strategies, and techniques that one wouldn’t ordinarily be associated with. A cosmopolitan conference adds so much more value than one that is simply bringing together like-minded individuals. The irony is, this small conference in rural Utah felt more cosmopolitan than some large conferences I’ve attended in major urban centres.
