Whilst learning about Flash (AS3) I came across the ability to use Flash run time libraries.
This seems worth doing (if it works well) as it makes maintaining Flash products easier: only one set of libraries need to be bug fixed (or enhanced) and whole online suite of products is fixed in a jiffy. No need to worry about updating and re-distributing every product manually.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Social vs. Individual Learning
Should we resist the tempation to throw all of our eggs into the social learning basket?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
What's wrong with podcasts?
Hopefully the advantages of podcasts go without saying, but what about the disadvantages?
In particular, what are the disadvantages of long podcasts?
Well, if you're like me and your job / learning requires you to quickly scan and extract information from many many sources per day then you'll quickly find the limitation of podcasts:
In particular, what are the disadvantages of long podcasts?
Well, if you're like me and your job / learning requires you to quickly scan and extract information from many many sources per day then you'll quickly find the limitation of podcasts:
- They are a slow source of information dissemination, and in particular
- They are serial information sources
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Open Source, Linux, etc.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is worth reading. It shows how the power of an online developer community was harnessed to develop one of the world's most successful, open source, products: Linux. It also includes a case study that copies this approach to develop another open source product.
The article includes many useful points that could be applied to many online communities, including e-learning and social networking / learning.
Here's some key extracts:-
One point that comes out of this is that lots of users can work wonders and, at times, exceed your expectations. So perhaps the moral for e-learning might be to have a large social networking system that allows users across courses to interact with each other.
"keeping ... users constantly stimulated and rewarded - stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work."
"The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better." - This also matches up with the above point about recognition and reward.
"Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong."
"When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential codevelopers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future."
"To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people."
"where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere."
The article includes many useful points that could be applied to many online communities, including e-learning and social networking / learning.
Here's some key extracts:-
One point that comes out of this is that lots of users can work wonders and, at times, exceed your expectations. So perhaps the moral for e-learning might be to have a large social networking system that allows users across courses to interact with each other.
"keeping ... users constantly stimulated and rewarded - stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work."
"The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better." - This also matches up with the above point about recognition and reward.
"Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong."
"When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential codevelopers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future."
"To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people."
"where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere."
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Sys admin: Ubuntu/Windows Shared Folder
To get a folder in Ubuntu shared in Windows:
- Right click folder, click sharing
- Install required s/w if prompted (Samba)
- In the VirtualBox running Ubuntu change the network interface to the Bridged type
- Get server address using ifconfig
- In Windows go to the IP address of the Ubuntu server and select the shared folder (could also map this to a drive letter)
On-line / Off-line Collaboration Spectrum
Online collaboration, social networking and social learning are the current "in" topics. But we should recognise that out in the big wide world of demographics there are a range of skills and personal preferences.
Some people are very IT literate and others are very hesitant to use IT; with a lot somewhere in between the two extremes.
Some people prefer one-to-one face-to-face meetings, some prefer group meetings, and some are happy to do everything online. A lot prefer to have a mixture of these.
One rigid online social networking / learning / collaboration system might not address the full spectrum of skills and preferences.
Some people are very IT literate and others are very hesitant to use IT; with a lot somewhere in between the two extremes.
Some people prefer one-to-one face-to-face meetings, some prefer group meetings, and some are happy to do everything online. A lot prefer to have a mixture of these.
One rigid online social networking / learning / collaboration system might not address the full spectrum of skills and preferences.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Elgg: server admin: mod_rewrite
To fix the mod_rewrite problem:
- In /etc/apache2/apache2.conf add:
<Directory /var/www/*>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
- Make sure rewrite is enabled:
add a link to /etc/appache2/mods-available/rewrite.load in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Towards an Elgg Dev System on my Desktop
As part of the Elgg project there's a need to learn and experiment with an Elgg server. The approach selected was to develop a desktop environment:
- Sun's virtual machine: Virtual Box
- Ubuntu
- Elgg installation
- mod_rewrite not working? e.g. this post
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Masses of Unstructured Text
The web is great - loads of information on every topic. So what's the problem?
Masses of unstructured text!
Many "authors" just contribute solid paragraphs of text. Some put their entire submission in just one paragraph! No formatting; no white space!
Who wants to read everything?
Having to read entire articles on the chance of finding something useful is a daunting prospect. Why can't people make an effort to structure their work?
Helpful Structure:
It's nice to use structure, headings, bullet points, etc. Make it easy for the reader to find what they want, and to quickly understand what the article is about.
Masses of unstructured text!
Many "authors" just contribute solid paragraphs of text. Some put their entire submission in just one paragraph! No formatting; no white space!
Who wants to read everything?
Having to read entire articles on the chance of finding something useful is a daunting prospect. Why can't people make an effort to structure their work?
Helpful Structure:
It's nice to use structure, headings, bullet points, etc. Make it easy for the reader to find what they want, and to quickly understand what the article is about.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Video Lazy?
As the Internet bandwidth grows to support more and more video there is a growing trend to use this in education. There's little doubt that video can be very useful for some contexts and for demonstrating particular concepts.
But, is video becoming a lazy way for people to provide information?
Many videos are just of people talking; and the quality of the information provided depends on the quality of the talk, and the usefulness of its content. There may be a danger of thinking that because video is a new thing - on the Internet - that it is always useful.
Students, and lecturers, could reflect on the following question:
Have you ever been to a lecture that was useless? And, will an online video of that lecture make it any better?
But, is video becoming a lazy way for people to provide information?
Many videos are just of people talking; and the quality of the information provided depends on the quality of the talk, and the usefulness of its content. There may be a danger of thinking that because video is a new thing - on the Internet - that it is always useful.
Students, and lecturers, could reflect on the following question:
Have you ever been to a lecture that was useless? And, will an online video of that lecture make it any better?
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Broadband Infrastructure - UK
We all know that you have to build a house on solid foundations, similarly e-learning and online technologoes have to be built on quailty broadband networks. The article UK broadband 'not fit' for future shows that there are many countries better placed than the UK. The UK came 25th out of 66 countries.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Human Based Genetic Algorithm
HBGA has human interfaces for initialization, mutation, and recombinant crossover. As well, it may have interfaces for selective evaluation. In short, a HBGA outsources the operations of a typical genetic algorithm to humans.
Bad IT days
Do you ever get frustrated with IT?
Things I find annoying (today):
Things I find annoying (today):
- Software that doesn't work properly - bugs in fundamental parts of the system
- Poor - or no - documentation
Thursday, September 24, 2009
What's this a list of? What pedagogy?
List
Ok the title on the page gives it away, but if you didn't know would you have guessed that it's a list of the
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009
I'm a little surprised that the top thing is Twitter. Ok it's popular but what's its value in learning? That falls under the pedagogy topic of ...?
It's easy to understand that these tools have a key roll in information dissemination and communication, but are people taking their eyes off the ball as far as (e-) learning is concerned?
Where are the tools that have a specific focus on learning (only)?
Would it be useful to have a list rated by pedagogical criteria?
What tools exist just to facilitate learning?
Ok the title on the page gives it away, but if you didn't know would you have guessed that it's a list of the
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009
I'm a little surprised that the top thing is Twitter. Ok it's popular but what's its value in learning? That falls under the pedagogy topic of ...?
It's easy to understand that these tools have a key roll in information dissemination and communication, but are people taking their eyes off the ball as far as (e-) learning is concerned?
Where are the tools that have a specific focus on learning (only)?
Would it be useful to have a list rated by pedagogical criteria?
What tools exist just to facilitate learning?
Social Networking / Web 2.0 in a Corporate Environment: Best Practice
A very useful report on...
BT's adoption of Web 2.0
BT's adoption of Web 2.0
- Made sure all employees can access social media sites.
- Use of these tools was covered by existing policies already.
- Agreed that all tools that allowed user-generated content would be behind our single-sign-on application to prevent any anonymous publishing.
- The ethos we would engender was one of allowing BT people to say anything they want, in the knowledge that they would be held accountable for what they say.
- All this functionality through a single ‘portal’ was incredibly powerful and sent adoption rates through the roof.
- There will always be a degree of friction between the need for robust IT processes to safeguard customer and business data and to effectively manage IT spending in a global corporation like BT, with the need for technical agility and to support the concept of the perpetual beta in which you try out quickly and cheaply often competing technologies and let users iterate and adopt as they see fit – ultimately, letting the users write the business case for adopting a particular option.
- The impact has been significant in some areas, subtle in others and in some cases has had no impact at all.
- Communications is becoming a ‘conversation’ rather than a managed activity which requires a different type of engagement by those traditionally responsible for communications activity.
- More and more content is produced and owned collaboratively.
- With no clear ownership, who manages a piece of community-owned content through its lifecycle and ensures it is deleted or archived appropriately?
- With increasing amounts of unstructured user-generated content appearing in disparate channels on the intranet, the challenge for users in finding and extracting value from that content increases exponentially.
- To help users find and keep up to date with new content, we are using a combination of ‘tagging’, where publishers and users attach key words to content which are then searchable by others, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS), where content is published into appropriate feeds to which users can subscribe for updates via a feed reader client on their PC or via an RSS server. Without RSS, the value of social media content would be very limited indeed. However, this does require both publishers, whose target audience may never actually visit their site but read content in their feed readers, and users, who are used to viewing structured content on the sites upon which it is published, to behave in very different ways.
- Contrary to popular opinion, these channels are being used in a constructive and positive way. To date, BT people have responded responsibly.
- A key lesson is to focus on the value social media tools can deliver rather than the risks. There are risks, but the potential benefits are huge.
- Better to start small with simple and cheap tools with limited functionality.
- Let users dictate the direction and speed of adoption.
- Let users play with new tools as soon as possible, warts and all. We positioned all our social media tools are ‘beta’ applications when they were first released to set the right user expectations.
- Engage the policy makers as early as possible. Emphasise that these tools represent an evolution rather than a revolution in the use of the web.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
A Free University
Wow, that's an interesting concept: a university that does courses for free! (Well they are free at the moment during the pilot. They say they may introduce a small charge after the pilot; but all the materials will be free anyway.)
It's another example of openness and cooperation on the Internet. Volunteers facilitate the activities and peers work together.
The Peer 2 Peer University has some credible backers, and deserves a pat on the back for pioneering such an interesting concept.
Will it be the end of traditional universities? They say that's not their aim. I guess both can exist side by side: we have the web but we still have newspapers and books. And, students still need somewhere to go to party ;-)
It's another example of openness and cooperation on the Internet. Volunteers facilitate the activities and peers work together.
The Peer 2 Peer University has some credible backers, and deserves a pat on the back for pioneering such an interesting concept.
Will it be the end of traditional universities? They say that's not their aim. I guess both can exist side by side: we have the web but we still have newspapers and books. And, students still need somewhere to go to party ;-)
Friday, September 18, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)