Fortnightly Mailing

SpeedyFeed - getting RSS feeds into one place

SpeedyFeed (via Jay Cross) seems to provide an easy way to get a set of RSS feeds into one place. There is no limit to the number, but as you can see from this example - which contains some of the RSS feeds I keep an eye on - plus my own, any more than 6 and you have to scroll down to see all of them. If someone more fluent than I am knows how to grab the relevant bits of the source code from the SpeedyFeed page, and edit it so that it can be dropped into a web page of choice, I would like to hear from them.

The war (sic) over software patents in the European Union

No Lobbyists As Such is 400 page electronic book by Florian Mueller, founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign, published in June 2006, telling the story of how the EU software patent directive was defeated:       

"Relive the ups and downs, the moments of joy, the setbacks, and the intensity of one of the most bitterly contested fights in EU history. Understand the background to the dramatic turns of events in the process. Get a look behind the scenes of political decision-making and lobbying. Meet the key opponents and proponents of software patents. Read about the motivations they had, the methods they employed, and the arguments they exchanged."

Automatic metadata collection. Humans not obsolete. For the foreseeable future.

Via Scott Leslie's EdTechpost, I found this 60 page report by Kenny Baird (the Jorum Metadata and Technical Support Officer) and the Jorum Team [1.5 MB PDF], published in July 2006. The report consists of:

• an analysis of what Jorum (a learning and teaching materials repository - see footnote) is currently doing;
• an initial assessment of what JORUM could do;
• an overview of some other systems, services and products which claim automated metadata generation as either a direct or indirect output of their aims (this section forms about one third of the whole report).

This extract from the Executive Summary give you the flavour:

".... the increased application of systems and process to automate metadata will not result – in the foreseeable future at least – in the obsolescence of the human in the metadata creation process. Whereas a computer can read, say, an IMS Manifest file and record all references of technical formats much faster than a human, a skilled cataloguer is able to make judgements on the practical application of the described resource within a learning environment in ways a computer cannot. Therefore, much of the metadata which can be automatically generated relates to its technical properties, repository users will typically need more subjective metadata to enable them to asses their retrieval results. The ideal situation is the two approaches to metadata creation working in tandem, with as much automated as possible to allow cataloguers to spend greater time on creation of metadata that cannot reasonably be expected to be automated. Concise, accurate recordings of technical properties and other elements which are consistent and overly mundane to warrant repetition on creation (such as vCard details), allied with human catalogued entries will provide the discovery user with both an overview of a resources' properties and limitations, and also allow the user to make a quick judgement on the relevance of the retrieved resource for a particular educational/learning context."

Whilst writing this I looked back at Cory Doctorow's acidly written 2001 Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, and chanced on this 2005 summary by Google of the way metadata is used in web pages (part of a longer, but still brief, December 2005 analysis by Google of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata). This seemed to show much human error there is in metadata creation (across the web as a whole, as against in content curated by information professionals).

Footnote. Jorum is a JISC-funded collaborative venture in UK Higher and Further Education to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing, and standing as a national statement of the importance of creating interoperable, sustainable materials.

Talk by Steven Weber - author of "The Success of Open Source"

Updated 18 May 2012

I reviewed Steven Weber's "The Success of Open Source" in Fortnightly Mailing Number 60 in December 2005. I also included an interesting extract from the final chapter of the book summarising what Weber thinks are the circumstances in which an open source process is likely to be effective (not just in software production). [You may also be interested in this a "proper" review of the book in LRB by Lawrence Lessig - added 18 May 2012.]

Here is .mov file with a witty talk by Weber - whose voice is disconcertingly similar to Woody Allen's - to students on Stanford University's Literacy of Cooperation course, in Winter 2005. The talk is wide-ranging, with, towards the end, an interesting excursion concerning the political economy of drug development in the pharmaceutical industry, and the parallels between drug development and software development, with an interesting emphasis on patents. If the talk encourages you to read the book, it will have done its job. Order book from Amazon.

Whilst re-listening to the talk I came across a complete set of 9 edited videos of the Literacy of Cooperation lectures [18 May 2012 - link now dead], on Howard Reingold's SmartMobs web site.

Croquet - an open source platform for creating collaborative multi-user online applications

Thanks to Boria Sax and the Sloan Consortium discussion list for this link to the Croquet web site:

"Croquet is a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using Croquet, software developers can create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations. This open source release of the software developers kit makes it possible for experienced software developers to work with Croquet. It is the first complete release of the Croquet technology and marks a significant event for those interested in developing powerful collaborative applications."

Croquet FAQ page.

Educause flyer about using online mapping services to create curriculum materials

I posted something in July about how to geotag a photo or image and link it to Google Earth. 7 Things You Should Know About Mapping Mashups, is a 2 page guide from Educause. Here is the abstract:

"Mapping mashups use online mapping services, such as those offered by Google or Yahoo, to display customized, clickable markers showing points of interest and related information. In the classroom, they can place lessons in a rich geographical context and increase interactivity. They can be useful for spatial display of research data or for enhancing information on campus Web sites."

The guide struck me as too thin for comfort on practical examples and "how to" guides. What it really needs is an additional section of links of the form "to find out about this, go here, about that, go there". Suggestions?

Mobile Learning - from Leonard Low of Canberra Institute of Technology

Leonard Low has a well organised and well written blog about mobile learning. From which I learnt that 30 million mobile phone users in Japan have mobile phones that can read QR codes, which are the equivalent of bar-codes but designed so that a mobile phone with a camera can capture the data from them.

Leonard points to this piece by Ewan McIntosh describing QR codes in use in Japan in an educational context.

Social computing - a guide (the Blackboard "prior art" wikipedia page is a practical example)

The claimed benefits, especially for wikis, are that collaborative projects are accelerated, emails are hugely reduced, innovation happens through serendipitous connections, unnecessary barriers are broken down and the risks posed by leaving staff are reduced because their contributions remain.

This level-headed analysis from the 21/7/2006 Register in David Tebbut's IT manager's guide to social computing summarises the business uses of "social computing", and is the kind of thing to  show people who are turned off by terms like "Web 2.0".  It has an interesting set of links at the bottom of the second page.

Here is a practical - indeed stunning - example of how a wiki can aid knowledge management and creation - admittedly in circumstances in which a large number of people are exercised, and want to "do something":

Perceptive review of Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" by David Jennings

David Jennings has posted a long and typically perceptive review of  Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail". It starts:

It's a measure of a term achieving zeitgeist status when people apply it liberally, even in circumstances where it doesn't really fit — as with the managers who sought to label their initiatives as Total Quality Management or Business Process Re-engineering in the nineties, even if they only half-grasped the original intention behind these terms. In the 21 months since Chris Anderson published his article on the Long Tail in Wired, this new term has come close to achieving similar status.

Link to the full review.

Report from Sheffield "Spotlight on Moodle" event with Martin Dougiamas (Moodle Lead Developer) and Jason Cole (Product Development Manager at the Open University)

Martin Dougiamas and Jason Cole (who is responsible for the OU's Moodle implementation) spoke in Sheffield on 27/7/2006.

The event was organised by South Yorkshire's e-Learning and Open Source Special Interest Groups, and sponsored by:

• Ufi/learndirect;
• the South Yorkshire branch of the British Computer Society (BCS);
• the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), South Yorkshire Branch;
• Tribal Technology.

The continuation post contains an unpolished precis of Martin's and Jason's talks, and a very brief summary of responses to 2 of the questions that were raised subsequently.  Slides for Martin and Jason's presentations will be available soon are available as a 4MB ZIP file, and I will link to them from this post. Responsibility for the whole of this piece rests with me, and I will gladly correct any errors that are pointed out to me.