the Design Experience Weblog Archive

From news aggregator to knowledge management

I know this subject has been done before, but I am just imagining how it might work in the context of the work I actually do. First off, I need a way to publish something from my email to RSS so that I can handle all items in the same way. I suppose I'd want to push most of the mailing list kind of traffic right straight into RSS, but there will always be regular email. Once everything is in the aggregator, we want a want to publish the items where they need to go, but not just out to another weblog. That is really the last thing I want to do. I think a main weblog should be mostly original content, with links to other related items. When I want to save a link, more like a bookmark, something I might need later, I'd want it to go to a automatic (or manually) categorized location that can be easily browsed or searched. I'd like a TODO list that also worked the same way. I guess the main theme is to recategorize the items, with or without comments, and republish those as RSS, so that an item I need to respond to will show up in my TODO list RSS feed until I handle it. By republishing as RSS, my categorized ideas to remember can be easily shared, either on the internet for a public web site, or privately for a company intranet. I don't think any of this is incredibly complex on the backend, but the UI to manage it would have to be more robust than the traditional RSS reader.

It occurs to me that this is similar to the way everything is an object in Outlook. Same idea, just everything is an RSS item instead. But that is an implementation detail. The key is that by sharing data with RSS, there are a greater variety of tools.

Obviously I can do the same thing with email filters, I wonder if there is much of a difference. I guess offering RSS feeds as a traditional mailing list would turn everything back around again, for people who don't want to use an RSS reader and want to keep everything in email.

09:11 PM, 30 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Discussion Quality in Online Courses

Jeremy Hiebert offers some ideas on how to create sucessful disussion forums for online courses. It definitely includes involvement by the instructor to paticipate and sometimes guide the discussions.

01:43 PM, 30 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

How do we enable structured writing in weblogs?

Jon Udell writes about well-formed writing. He is using HTML markup with defined CSS classes to structure his weblog entries. He uses a special CSS class for quotations that includes the source. Searching the HTML source of his weblog, he can find entries. This is an interesting idea, metadata embedded into the posts, instead of alongside it. You can get right to the content that is referred to instead of having to scan an entire article. Jon advocates for weblog tools to support this kind of writing. I wonder what such an interface would look like? I guess it would be similar to the rich text widgets currently offered, but include buttons for additional markup such as quotation etc. As always, the key is to make it worth the effort.

08:46 AM, 30 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Wikis, Grafitti, and Process, or Why Wiki's Can Work

Clay Shirky explains quite clearly why a wiki, used by a healthy community, can work. Reading this makes me want to finish up a wiki-type CMS for OpenACS, specifically to allow the OpenACS community to improve openacs.org.

10:10 AM, 27 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Nice resource for migration to Linux

http://www.linuxmigration.com/quickref/ is a great resource for migrating to Linux. Say goodbye to Microsoft Windows.

03:19 PM, 26 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Mozilla Coffee

RJ Tarpley's is offering Mozilla Coffee. Half of the profits are donated to the Mozilla Foundation. Very cool.

03:26 PM, 24 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Case Studies of dotLRN Platform

Case studies of dotLRN, a course management system built on OpenACS, are now online. Organizations included are Sloan School of Management at MIT, Heidelberg University, Berklee College of Music, and several others from around the world.

08:44 AM, 18 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Top ten tips for implementing e-learning

Top ten tips for implementing e-learning by Jane Knight is a good list of ideas to remember when thinking about e-learning. Number 3 "Communication and collaboration are the key" seems to be the part that dotLRN is focused on.

08:41 AM, 18 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Intranet Roadmap

Intranet Roadmap is a resource site for those building a corporate intranet web site. It includes steps one should take in deploying a intranet web site.

08:39 AM, 18 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Pitch Journal

David Wiley gives a short update on Pitch the online peer-reviewed journal he is working on. He mentions that they are disussing what programming language to use. OpenACS would be a great platform for such a project. From all the web application tools I have seen, OpenACS offers the richest possibility for user interactions. The learning curve isn't the easiest, but the potential is there. I know some others in the community are interested in online journals built on OpenACS. For now, check out the future Pitch Journal web site.

11:52 AM, 13 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (1)

Making RSS Readers Smarter

Can RSS Readers be made smarter? It would be great if my RSS reader would read the posts for me, and only show the most promising ones. That might be a little ways off, but one thing that might be doable in the short term is hiding reciprocal links. What I mean by that is hiding a link from one of my subscriptions to another of my subscriptions. I am subscribed to several e-learning weblogs, and they often link to each other. Not too much, there is good original content on each of them, but usually there are a few posts every day. The trick would be determining if a link to a post that alerady exists in my aggregator is just a link, or contains original content itself that I would also like to read. Maybe just noting the connections is a start.

06:46 AM, 13 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Why E-Learning

I think the focus on E-Learning is too much on the tools and not enough ont he learning. It seems that all the work is being done of the technology and the learning aspects are left out. < This post at elearnspace mentions Learning Circuits Blog as the best resource on technology and education. The Leraning Circuits Blog calls itself the "Online Magazine All About E-Learning. All I have seen of E-Learning is a technique to organize learning into packets and deliver them to people. From my experience the best learning doesn't come from pre-packaged knowledge. Finding something out for yourself is the best way to learn. I am worried that the compilation of "Learning Objects" is too much packaging of knowledge. I suppose if the learning objects allow for independent discovery there will be an advantage. All I can see points to a more structured use, which seems to defeat the advantages of networked information. The greatest benefit comes when one discovers the links between ideas for oneself.

Hmmm, this is pretty incoherent. I'll leave it and maybe I can work all this out soon :)

09:15 AM, 08 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Public Knowledge Project

The Public Knowledge Project of the University of British Columbia is offering tools for online research management. It looks like a great resource for improving public access to research. There are tools for indexing, journals, research, and even a conference organization tool.

08:56 AM, 08 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

"The way learning was, and the way learning will be"

Stephen Downes discusses Design, Standards and Reusability in e-learning. He presnts the problem of incompatibility of design of learning and reusability. The conclusion is quite interesting and really makes sense to me.

In my view, the difference between the two horns of the dilemma is the difference between writing a play and creating a game. It is the difference between telling people what to do and when to do it, and creating an environment where people decide for themselves what to do and when to do it. It is the difference between requiring a director and requiring a coach. It is the difference between giving a person directions to the Forum and giving them a map of the city and letting them choose their own route.

The title is also a quote from that article.

I have recently wondered about "learning objects" and if they are just a new form of knowledge packets to be acquired. Is there a difference? Are learning objects just the same old techniques spiffed up with technology or are they something new? I will have to learn more.

09:08 AM, 04 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Jon Udell on Zope for Content Management

Over at InfoWorld, Jon Udell writes about using Zope for content management. He makes note of the object oriented nature of Zope and the ease of extending it for various content management applications, but also mentions the incresing layers of abstraction. OpenACS has battled with the choice between more abstraction and simpler code since switching over to OpenACS 4. I think the key is knowing when to use the abstraction, but still having an understanding of the underlying structure when you need to go beyond what the API designers imagined.

10:02 AM, 03 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Is an Open Source Content Management System More Expensive?

Over at Column Two is a reference to a Meta Group report on Open Source content management. The report claims that Open Source CMS are lacking in the ability to integrate with existing systems. James Robertson at Column Two notes that most CMS have this deficiency, not just Open Source systems. So, as always, get all the facts before you buy. I agree that for most clients integration with existing systems in key for pretty much any software development, web-based, or not.

09:56 AM, 03 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (0)

Games for education?

I found a good question at the elearnspace weblog: Do people learn more when they are having fun playing games? The post refers to a Wired article about a project to develop games for use in schools and business for education. I think a more productive use of computers and games for learning is to build the games, rather than just play them. Of course I didn't come up with this idea by myself. Seymour Papert and Alan Kay have been thinking along these lines for years now. For effective learning you don't just need fun, but hard fun. Of course, this brings up a huge education versus learning issue that I am not quite prepared for just yet.

08:23 PM, 02 Aug 2003 by dave bauer Permalink | Comments (1)

Actions

Add entry
Draft entries

Notifications

You may request notification for the Design Experience Weblog.

the Design Experience Weblog Archive

Archive

the Design Experience Categories

Actions

Notifications

Syndication Feed

Recent Comments

August 2003
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31