EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
June 5, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
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on eduglu - part 1: background - D’Arcy Norman dot net
From D’Arcy Norman, something that fits in well with my LMS revisioning schema. Wonder how it relates to something like Profilactic?
tags: darcy, dnorman, eduglu, ple
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EduGlu is a concept that
came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 - almost exactly 2 years ago - as a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple - a person publishes a bunch of stuff, and all they need to do is pull it into a course-based resource. On the other hand, it’s really quite hard - how can software provide what appears to be a centralized service, based on the decentralized and distributed publishings of the members of a group or community, and honour the flexible and dynamic nature of the various groups and communities to which a person belongs?
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wpng-calendar from Google Code
Integrating Google Calendar into a WordPress blog
tags: google, calendar, g-cal, googlecal, wordpress, blog
March 30, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
Listen to your maps with Wild Sanctuary | Tech news blog - CNET News.com Annotated
tags: conservation, google-earth, nature, science
Users can explore various sounds, and see their placement and contextual information on the map. What’s interesting about these “soundscapes” is that they can show the difference in an area before and after environmental impact both with visual maps and sound as. Several examples were given show instances where a once lush diversity of animal noises became quiet, following climate change, human settlements, logging, etc.
How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci « Wandering Ink.
tags: curiosity, learning, teaching
eLearn: 10 Web 2.0 Things You Can Do…To Be a More Successful E-learning Professional Annotated
tags: downes, edtech, productivity
The following list was inspired by eLearn Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lisa Neal’s blog post “Ten Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be a More Successful e-learning Professional.” We’d like to offer the “Web 2.0 Edition” of Lisa’s list:
- Listen to a conference presentation. When you run across conference presentations while reading your RSS feeds (EDUCAUSE Connect is a prime source, as is OLDaily), save the conference site as a bookmark and revisit it to hear a presentation.
- Record a 10-minute presentation about something you are working on or learning about, either as audio (use Odeo) or video (use Ustream), and post it on your blog.
- Do a search on the title of your most recent post or on the title of the most recent thing you’ve read or thought about. Don’t just use Google search, use Google Blog Search and Google Image Search, Amazon, del.icio.us, Technorati, Slideshare, or Youtube. Scan the results and if you find something interesting, save it in del.icio.us to read later.
- Write a blog post or article describing something you’ve learned recently. It can be something you’ve read or culled from a meeting, conference notes (which you just capture on the fly using a text editor), or a link you’ve posted to del.icio.us. The trick here is to keep your writing activity to less than 10 minutes—make a point quickly and then click “submit.”
- Tidy your e-portfolio. For example, upload your slides to Slideshare and audio recordings to Odeo and embed the code in your presentation page. Or write a description and link to your latest publication. Or update your project list.
- Create a slide on Zoho. Just do one slide at a time; find an image using the Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr and a short bit of text from a source or yourself. Add this to your stick of prepared slides you use for your next talk or class.
- Find a blogger you currently read in your RSS reader and go to their website. Follow all the links to other blogs in their blogroll or feedroll, or which are referenced in their posts. Well, maybe not all the links, or it will take hours, not ten minutes.
- Write a comment on a blog post, article, or book written by an e-learning researcher or practitioner.
- Go to a website like Engadget, Metafilter, Digg, Mixx, Mashable, or Hotlinks and skip through the items. These sites produce much too much content to follow diligently, but are great for browsing and serendipitous discovery. If you find something interesting, write a short blog post about it or at least a comment.
- Catch up on one of your online games with a colleague—Scrabulous on Facebook or
Backgammon on Yahoo.
Or make a Lolcat. Or watch a Youtube video.
Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Wiki collaboration leads to happiness Annotated
tags: collaboration, fosspreso, wikinomics
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March 14, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
Allegheny LMS Blog
tags: lms, lms-project
March 8, 2007 at 10:28 am · Filed under TechTalk
As mentioned in my earlier post, I’ve outgrown my old theme and I found that it didn’t resolve properly in Internet Explorer. One would load the home page and the content would not seem to appear. In actuality, it was there but you had to scroll past the sidebar in order to view the content. Not a great thing considering the market share that IE still holds globally, though it is shrinking every day! Go Firefox, go Flock!
So I took the Fjords01 theme and tweaked the footer to include a get footer call as it wouldn’t work with Casey Bisson’s bsuite stats plugin out of the box. Since the Fjords01 theme supports widgets, I took the opportunity to see how they worked. I have to say that if I end up changing themes again, the use of widgets would save a ton of time in recoding the theme to accomodate my particular needs. For more info on Wordpress widgets, check their Codex.
So here is the rundown of the plugins I’m using:
- Akismet - Stock plugin for prevention of comment spam, works pretty well for the most part.
- bsuite - to collect stats over time such as total hits, recent comments, most read, incoming referrals
- Category Converter - To merge my blogroll and topic categories.
- del.icio.us widget - Serves up my del.icio.us feeds quite nicely
- Dofollow - Gets past that annoying nofollow property
- Feedburner Feed Replacement - Redirects native Wordpress feed URLs to your Feedburner URL
- Google Analyticator - Simplifies the process of embedding the Google tracking code
- Google Search widget - Allows your viewers to search your site using Google search rather than the default Wordpress search
- Optimal Title -
- podPress -
- Sidebar Widgets - Allows for the use of widgets in your sidebars, I particularly like the ability to add RSS feed and Text/Code blocks! Adding the Sidebar Widgets drops in the del.icio.us and Google Search widgets listed above.
- Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to get updates when new comments are posted to a specific entry.
Beyond the plug-ins, you’ll notice a number of features in my sidebars which I dropped in using a Text widget rather than hard coding into my theme. In my sidebars I have links to the following:
- Google Search widget
- Google Reader Shared Items feed - I use this to act as a tickler for me and for my readers to see what I think is important in the current state of the edublogosphere.
- Recent Comments widget - So that readers can see what others have written
- del.icio.us links widget - This points to my general account but you could point to a specific tag as well.
- EdVentures pbWiki link - This points to the pbWiki resource I’m using.
- myBlogLog Recent Readers script - A blog meets mySpace kind of visual community indicator.
- Google Search widget
- LinkedIn contact link
- Technorati script
- Feedburner script
- Talkr feed links - A neat service that turns your text to speech. A little mechanical but a far cry from the old days of text to speech converters.
- And then your standard Pages, Archives and Blogroll links
[tags]wordpress, blog, plugin, theme[/tags]
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February 24, 2007 at 8:50 pm · Filed under EdTech, TechTalk, Web 2.0
This post was written in and posted from Word 2007. The latest version of Word allows you to post to a number of popular blog engines with some limitations. I didn’t have any problem connecting to my blog, but I wish that the ability to upload files to my Flickr account was built in to the interface. I’ve attached a quick image to see if Word 2007 can post to the blog I host.
UPDATE: Worked pretty slick. Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for bringing this to my attention. For those who would like a tutorial, check this link.
[tags][/tags]
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February 17, 2007 at 4:30 pm · Filed under EdTech, Web 2.0
I was thumbing through my latest edition of FastCompany and what do I see in the sidebar but Wes Fryer’s blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, and David Warlick’s blog, 2¢ worth, listed with another blog by Joanne Jacobs as leading education blogs.
Here’s what FastCompany had to say about Wes:
The Skinny: Long, articulate posts on school reform, creativity, technology - and seemingly whatever else comes to mind. “Why do young children love show-and-tell so much? Why do teachers feel so pressured to sharply limit…show-and-tell time?”
And about David:
The Skinny: Warlick’s two cents, all on a broad range of school topics are actually pretty meaty. But his real passion is technology, and strategies for reaching kids in the Internet era. “How many leaders are we using when we teach them to be taught,” he writes, “instead of teaching them to teach?”
Congrats to Wes and David, and keep the great brain food coming!
[tags] davidwarlick, wesfryer, blog, edublog, fastcompany [/tags]
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February 10, 2007 at 11:51 am · Filed under Random Thoughts
February 8, 2007 at 12:16 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts, ce5560
There has been a meme floating about the blogosphere for the past couple of weeks about how bloggers blog - the whys and hows for their own practice. I’ve consolidated a few of these here (which will soon be duplicated in my Diigo and del.icio.us accounts so that I can re-use the content for my summer grad course. I apologize in advance for the duplications!)
Bill Ives - Guidelines for Writing Good Learning Blogs
Wes Fryer - Developing blog post topics
Vicki Davis - Becoming a Blogging Maestro: Composing Beautiful Blog Music
Brian Grenier - How Do You Write?
Miguel Guhlin - Blogging Yin and Yang
For more blogging goodness, do a Technorati search for the tag - howdoyouwrite
It is a small but growing meme, so contribute! I’m working on my post right now.
[tags]blog, blogging, howdoyouwrite [/tags]
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January 22, 2007 at 10:02 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts
Development Blog › WordPress 2.1 “Ella”
Chock full of yummy goodness, WordPress has released version 2.1 of their blogging engine. Here are some of the highlights that I’m looking forward to:
- Autosave - This is probably one of the best things offered considering how many drafts I’ve lost!
- Tabbed editor - WYSIWYG to Source and back with no pop-up windows
- Privacy option - Edubloggers take note, you and your class now have even more control over access to your content!
- Spell-check - ‘Nuff said
All rolled up in an AJAX burrito for on-the-fly edits!
There is a ton more but if you want to improve future versions, jump on the Idea Board.
[tags]wordpress, blog, blogging [/tags]
Blogged with Flock
January 17, 2007 at 9:45 am · Filed under TechTalk, Web 2.0
I gave up using my WordPress.com blog when I decided I needed a bit more control over my content and my design. I hadn’t looked at my account in more than 6 months. But a recent barrage of spam comments that slipped past Akismet had me log in to clean up the presence as it still redirects to my present virtual home. Wow, all I can say is that WordPress has done some incredible things that may make me rethink recommending the self-hosting option for folks who want to start their own blog but desire, like I did, more control over appearance and its domain name.
The Dashboard - what used to be a rather plain interface with a single option now has 6 sub-sections: Dashboard, Blog Stats, Feed Stats, Friend Surfer, My Comments and Tag Surfer. Now as you pore through you will notice that a lot of these are still in Beta but it is nice to see development occurring in WordPress nonetheless! I’ve included screenshots below of the new Dashboard features. All of these screenshots are available from my Flickr account in larger sizes so that you can see the detail but in the interest of keeping download sizes small, I’ve opted to simply place thumbnails inline.
Dashboard
Blog Stats
Feed Stat
s
Friend Surfer
My Comments
Tag Surfer
The next set of big changes comes in the Presentation tab. Where there used to be only the option to use the pre-loaded templates, there are now additional options: Extras, Custom Image Header, Sidebar Widgets and EditCSS.
Extras
(right now this just enables Snap Preview for your blog - which is a pretty cool tool for enabling a preview of the link destination in a small javascript window!)
Custom Image Header
Sidebar Widgets
EditCSS
Your Profile now allows for the inclusion of an image attached to your profile which serves as your avatar.
Options has a new feature,Domains and one that if it isn’t new bears reinforcing particularly for those educators who are concerned over having their class content shared with too broad an audience or for those using their blog for private collaboration. This feature is the Privacy filter.
Domains
Privacy
The last tab in the Wordpress menubar is entitled Upgrades. This is an interesting twist as it represents the first time I’ve seen Wordpress charging for add-on functionality. Via PayPal, one can purchase credits which will then allow them to purchase one of the five current upgrades: Custom CSS (which enables use of the Edit CSS function), Unlimited Private Users, and then a1GB, 5GB or 10GB Space Upgrade.
Upgrades
Gifts
Domains
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