It’s not possible, you say! It is possible, I retort. With services like Qik.com you can with a compatible handset broadcast video live from your handset. Your viewers can follow your broadcast at the Qik web site. Another alternative is FlixWagon. It seems both these services are closed for new users for now. I’ve registered with both though so let’s see what they look like.
I’ve uploaded the presentation I made at the EdTech retreat yesterday. It’s a QuickTime movie so it should play on pretty much any platform. It is available at http://nystedt.s3.amazonaws.com/rss.mov
First, a confession. I am a bit of a luddite as far as RSS feeds go. It’s not that they’re not useful, just that I really haven’t taken the time to get to grips with them yet. So, a major thank you is in order to Padraig for finding this site, which allows you to enter the url of the rss feed, and in return it will spit out a web part of the rss feed which you can then import onto your site. This is how I added the ‘EdTech Blog New Entries’ web part to the EdTech SharePoint site.
Recently I was looking for an animated loader icon/gif for an ajax application. I found these 2 very useful sites which have a good collection of icons free to download. Anyone who needs an animated loader icon will find them very handy.
This press release says “Empost launches new state-of-the-art website”. Go to www.empostuae.com and check the source. It’s all in frames! Then go to the actual site at http://195.229.217.93/Empost and check the source - it’s all tables. I’m no web design purist but it seems to me that those two things alone will disqualify this particular site from being “state-of-the-art”. What do you think?
One of the big challenges in encouraging SharePoint use at the College has been the question of moving documents from a shared drive (usually the ‘H:’ drive) to SharePoint document libraries. This is partly because document libraries are one of the most visible and powerful tools in SharePoint, and also one of the features which differentiates SP from a traditional website.
A particular problem has been the question of setting up folders in a SharePoint document library. Teams understandably want to know how to create a folder structure, and in what specific ways they can improve the (often chaotic) structure of their H: drive folders. Unfortunately, this isn’t something I’ve always been able to give much advice on other than limiting the folder levels. The answer depends on how you expect your users to navigate to a file. Unfortunately, any solution using folders assumes that the user will approach finding a file in the same way as the person who set up the folders (i.e. I’ll make ’skill’ the top level folder, so everyone goes there first, then ‘theme’ my second level folder and so on.) As we know, brains don’t work like that (but wouldn’t it be easier if they did?)
Unperturbed, I turned to Google for an answer. To my surprise, almost every guru I read came up with the same answer, which was to ditch folders in document libraries and use content types instead. A content type is a collection of ‘tags’ you can specify and add to an item. If that sounds like jargon, consider this. Think of your Windows Explorer interface. Have you ever though just how un-useful the default column titles are? File size, created on, etc. Yes, they might be useful in some circumstances, but think how cool it would be for a language teacher to replace them with things like ’skill’, ‘theme’, ‘grammatical function’, or ‘level of difficulty’. That’s exactly what a content type does for you.
With content types you’re liberated from having to drill down through folders in a pre-defined sequence. Want to find all the ‘reading’ exercises which practice the past simple tense? 2 clicks and you’re done. Finding the right materials for a specified lesson aim (which we all do don’t we?) becomes a doddle. It also solves the problem of where to put a file which fulfills more than one folder criteria. For example if my learning object allows my class to practice speaking and reading, do I put it in the speaking folder or the reading folder (or worse create two copies)?
So why doesn’t everyone use them? Well, firstly, they’re (gasp) new. Enough said. Secondly, you can’t use folders in a content type document library (well, you can, but in doing so you negate all its benefits). The result is that you end up with a long list of files which appear disorganised (until you filter your search) because they’re not in folders. Thirdly, people are just used to seeing and using folders, and tend to assume that not using folders is a sign of poor planning on the part of the designer.
What solutions are there? Like any change, it will take time. We need to promote use by showcasing exemplar sites, and create a critical mass of users who are comfortable with them and recognise the benefits. This will then carry over to other sites which those users have access to. Any other suggestions, on a postcard please….
eSchoolNews:
<blockquote>You could call it, simply, “Round One” for Blackboard Inc.
At least, that’s the term that people in the Kitchener, Ontario, offices of Desire2Learn Inc. (D2L) were using after a federal district-court jury in Texas hit their small Canadian company with a $3.1 million judgment for infringing the patent rights of Blackboard, a much larger American company that dominates the commercial market for course-management software.
D2L President and CEO John Baker told reporters he was shocked by the jury’s decision.
In a related matter, District Court Judge Ron Clark, who presided at the trial, ruled against a D2L claim that Blackboard’s patent could not be enforced because the company had withheld information from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which approved Blackboard’s patent application in January 2006.
“I think we’re all disappointed,” Diane Lank, a D2L lawyer, said on Monday, “but this is Round One. I don’t think that anyone looking at this thought the case would end at the jury level.”
The implication from D2L is that the fight is not over by a long shot. But from Blackboard’s perspective, the verdict vindicates its argument that the methodology of its software–allowing individual users to access multiple courses through a single log-in procedure–constitutes a unique invention whose patent its smaller competitor improperly violated.
Matthew H. Small, Blackboard’s chief counsel, said Monday that his company had proved its case before “a very sophisticated jury” whose members included well-educated people with experience in academic computing.
Lank said, however, that D2L was “quite likely” to appeal the verdict, which the jury reached on Feb.22 after several hours of deliberation at the end of a two-week trial.</blockquote>
From Techdirt:
Blackboard is a distance learning company that claims to hold patents on the concept of distance learning. It wasted little time in suing competitors even as a close examination of the patent showed that it wasn’t just obvious, but there was plenty of prior art on it. A formal challenge to the patent was launched, and the Patent Office agreed to review the patent over a year ago, but has yet to do much on that re-exam. However, while everyone waits for that, the lawsuit went forward, and a jury has decided that the patent is valid and the company Desire2Learn owes Blackboard $3 million (found via Troll Tracker). There will be an appeal of course, and maybe one of these days someone at the Patent Office will realize that it issued a patent on something rather obvious with a ton of prior art.
Sounds like a pretty worrying development, I think.
Okay, so this is not exactly ed-tech stuff, but watch the video all the way through so you can see how it finished, I think you’ll be amazed at what is possible today with some technology.
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