The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
iWebCal: Choose Calendar
“iWebCal lets you view calendars from iCal (and other calendar tools) on the Web. Just upload your calendar file to the Internet somewhere and type its address in the box above. Read the quick start for more info, or see iWebCal in action with an example calendar from Apple’s calendar library.“
Cool. Also works with the WebDAV-enabled versions of the Mozilla calendar tools. So, you could setup a group calendar that would be be pretty functional and web-enabled.
freshmeat.net: Project details for TCExam
“TCExam is Web-based software for generating and managing online tests and exams. It simplifies the exam cycle, including generation, execution, evaluation, presentation, and archiving.“
Commercial package using PHP, MySQL to create and admin on line training.
Slashdot | Open Source Methods Useful Way Beyond Software
“Former head of policy at the British Prime Minister’s office, Geoff Mulgan, has co-authored a paper on uses of Open Source methods in arenas far beyond the normal Sourceforge universe. The paper is jointly written with Tom Steinberg, head of UK civic hacking fraternity mySociety and explores the use of open source methods to improve academic peer review, drafting of legislation and even media regulation.“
Interestingly enough, this is a position that CALI holds and it is reflected in this year’s conference theme.
CODEC – NYLS CODEC Wortkshop Update
We’ll be getting together with about 40 faculty and administrators at New York Law School on April 22. The agenda is here. I’ll certainly be willing to talk about some CODEC features and Classcaster.
Slashdot | Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
“Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren’t happy, saying that it’s unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers.“
The DOAJ listing for law journals is here. 10 American law schools list 14 titles. CLearly there is room for expansion here:)
freshmeat.net: Project details for Swishd Cluster System
“Swishd cluster system is an application that will allow swish- e to scale to multiple machines, thus allowing the number of indexes (or collections) to become almost limitless. By scaling out to multiple swishd nodes the index sizes can remain small as the number of documents increase. This it typically measured in millions of documents/files.“
BetaNews | Duke Modifies iPod Giveaway Program
“However, the faculty will be the deciding factor this year as to which students will receive the iPods.Reaction from students has been mixed, with many claiming the program was a waste of money, as most already owned Apple’s player. Students felt that more pressing issues, such as financial aid and campus security, should have been addressed first.“
More on this here and here. The original release from Duke is here, as is the Duke iPod homepage.
You got your Ajax in my Ruby
“Codified by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications“, Ajax stands for “Asynchronous Javascript XML.” Essentially what Ajax does is move much of the smarts involving user-interaction from the web server to your web browser. This takes the form of an Ajax engine (a piece of Javascript code) embedded into a web page, downloaded to your browser, and springing into action upon arrival. Acting as an interaction broker, the engine takes care of all the whizbang interactivity you see (form input and validation, dragging-and-dropping, showing-and-hiding, etc.) while dealing with the web server (and it’s back-end database) as needed. “
Well, this clears up a few things. Now it the questions is how does this help me? I did find this toolkit, Sajax, that includes a PHP backend.
BoleyBlogs! – New CALI Lessons
BoleyBlogs! blogs the new list of CALI Lessons that was emailed last week. This is a great way to get information about new lessons out to studetns and faculty. Besides including links to the Lessons, the post includes this link to the Boley Law Library’s excellent CALI page.
Now, if they would use the CALI WebAPI…