The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
O’Reilly Radar > Gutenkarte: Geo annotation of Gutenberg texts – This is a great application. This sort of thing that Web 2.0 should be about: pulling together available and emerging technologies and resources to create new and meaningful applications.
technorati tags:gutenkarte
Blogged with Flock
TechCrunch » Blog Archive » eBay and Kaboodle To Launch MyCollectibles – Denise may like this. It will give her a place to showcase her collection of model horses and link that to her vibrant ebay operation. Pretty cool.
technorati tags:ebay, kaboodle, collectibles
Blogged with Flock
Today’s mash-ups remind me of those Time magazine collages: all cutting and pasting, signifying nothing.
WSJ.com – Portals- Why Getting the User To Create Web Content Isn’t Always Progress
Good piece. Puts the current mash-up craze into perspective. You could think of it this way: we all have access to cheap paper and pencils, that doesn’t make us writers or reporters or aritsts. I do write a mean shopping list. Just because the tools exist does not mean that everyone is a blogger or writer or reporter or artist. Now the lowere threshold for planet wide distribution that the net provides does mean that we may have a better chance of finding a blogger or writer or reporter or artist whose work we enjoy, but it doesn’t create that talent just provides an outlet.
The question of banning laptops in class: it’s academic, silly – Great piece. The author sees the problem: unfettered net access in the classroom. All of the dust up about laptops in the classroom has the distraction of net access at its core. After rushing to throw wifi into every nook and crany for no real reason, America’s institutions of higher education are looking to curtail that access. Faculty are definitely pushing back about student wireless access in the classroom, epsecially since there are no killer apps that require such access.
technorati tags: wireless, clasrooms, higher_education
How to compete with FeedBurner – Scripting News – Dave’s take on how to eat Feedburner’s lunch. As usual, a good read.
technorati tags: Dave_Winer, feedburner
O’Reilly Radar > Database War Stories #2: bloglines and memeorandum – In the second part of a series, we learn that bloglines and memeorandum rely on flat files, not database systems, to manage the vast amounts of data they are accumulating. This is pretty interesting and points out somethng that can be easily over looked: use the tools that are right for the job. If you are designing a system, do it with an open mind and look for the most efficient tools to accomplish your goals. Don’t shoe horn a project into a specific set of tools just becuase its the flavor of the month or what you know best.
technorati tags: bloglines, memeorandum
Textbender is a distributed system of collaborative writing, with a basis in genetic theory. As a distributed system, it differs from the typical centralized approach (e.g. of a Wiki) where writers push contributions to a single, central copy of the text. By contrast, textbender has no central copy; instead, each writer has a separate copy of the text, and selectively pulls contributions from other writers. As a consequence, there are multiple variations of the text. Collectively, the text has spatial diversity.
freshmeat.net: Project details for textbender
This is crazy:) From a quick look Textbender seems to have a lot of the authoring features that I’m looking to build into eLangdell. Basically it lets you take an existing document, slice, dice splice, and create your own version. Further you can include pieces of other documents in the repository. I’ll need to run the code to see how it works.
technorati tags: textbender, elangdell
This morning Jennifer M. Granholm, the governor of Michigan, signed a bill that will require all high-school students in the state to take at least one course online before they can graduate. This is apparently the first such requirement in the nation.
The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Michigan Requires Online Attendance
The thinking behind this is that students are likely to see online education and traing in college and the workforce so this prepare them for that eventuality. This is a reasonable assumption as the use of online educational resources spreads. What I wonder about is law schools. In the nearly 4 years since the ABA added standards for distance education (approved August 2002) very few schools have added DE courses to their cirriculum. Why doesn’t every ABA accredited law have at least one course offered using DE? I can think of any reason beyond some sort of academic inertia. Certainly every law school, especially every CALI member school, has the tools available to put one 2 or 3 credit, upper level course online and offer it to their own students. Of course it may be that all this is happening in a space I don’t see.
mynoteIT is an extremely powerful utility for any student at any grade level. You can store all your school information in one place, and access it anywhere in the world instantly.
Uses PHP, some AJAXy stuff thrown in. Very straight forward, clean feature set. Student and class centered. Groups are created using school/class/teacher/time boundaries. Includes basic calendaring. Editing is done in a basic box using FCKeditor (my personal fav, BTW) with an AJAX wrapper. There is some stuff to glean from this:)
RSS4Lib: RSS Book Publishing Timeline – This reminded me that you could use RSS to handle the time release of complex material like a casebook, or course material generally. Profeessor would create the feed and add material to it based on the syllabus. Students would subscribe to the feed and receive the material in their aggregator on a day determined by the professor. Thie needs to be an eLangdell feature. Prof creates online syllabus, adds course material to the syllabus, cases ,statutes, etc. for reading. Dates are selected to release the material via RSS feed. Students get an aggregator and subscribe to the feed. The aggregator grabs the materials on the selected date and makes it available to the student. No need to visit a website, follow a blog or anything. Coolness.
technorati tags: elangdell