29 November 2002

Useit.Com: Flash and Web-Based Applications. The Internet is changing. Although people have primarily used it to read email and Web pages, more functionality-oriented applications are now emerging, with the goal of providing new features that do more for users. [Tomalak's Realm] For anyone developing apps delivered over the Internet, very interesting reading - includes .NET or Zeepe (which I am tempted to give the subtitle 'WAFFLE' - Web Application Framework - Fast, Light, Efficient. In the light of the above article, perhaps the E should be Ephemeral). posted at: 4:19:37 PM   Yet another weblog link tracker. Here's my Technorati Link Cosmos. This one ranks your inbound blogs according to their own number of inbound blogs. I like the name. (Thanks, Ton!) [Seb's Open Research] I suppose its fun to play with this stuff for a while, but does one return? So much information stored there, but really, apparently so little that's useful done with it. posted at: 4:09:44 PM   Learning resources: the user's perspective. Joseph Hart has started an interesting new weblog on online learning resources. I've subscribed to his RSS feed. In the following post, Joseph puts the finger on an important unsolved problem: locating relevant resources. Sabbaticizing. [...] When I began this project I was focused on collecting repositories of online instructional resources and putting the collection together in a form that could readily be used by instructors at Eastern and other institutions, perhaps via a web site or portal. Now, after just a few weeks, I've found that there are innumerable online instructional repositories (depending upon how "instructional" and "repository" are defined)--far too many to simply provide a listing and expect that instructors will be able to effectively use the list. I've also found that there are many overlapping categories, concepts, interests and approaches: digital libraries, learning objects, metadata standards, open source software, instructional repositories, XML, etc. What seems most needed, at least for my purposes in assisting instructors to use online repositories, is a set of guidelines about locating, evaluating, acquiring, and fitting online resources into course planning and revisions/expansions of courses. At this point there are many more repositories available and under construction than there are guidelines for using collections of learning resources. Instructors don't have the time to search hundreds of repositories containing thousands of learning objects. The promise of interlinked repositories or master repositories is just that, a research promise that may not be fulfilled for many years. So, the question is, How can online instructional resources best be used now? I do not yet have a good answer to this question. [EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online] I'm concerned that many good resources are underused, not for lack of quality, but because they are for all practical purposes "unfindable". I suspect resource authors will each have to take up the responsibility of providing and maintaining part of a shared, overall map of what is out there, if they want their resources to be used. [Seb's Open Research] From my experience, maps etc are really not much help; its the amount of information that is just overwhelming. IMHO, what is needed is a system by which the quality floats to the top and the dross floats to the bottom. The question is how do you measure quality; Google uses page ranking which is a sort of peer review and it works reasonably well over the huge, dynamic and active web. Its unlikely such algorithms will work for (school) learning resources. As part of a EU research project, Bristol Uni (I think) were doing a project to implement a distributed search system which included user ranking - what's happended to this I dunno, probably died a death. Despite projects such as Cybrarian, the UK govt and broadband consortia seem to have largely ignored this problem - note quite tru, the UK govt approach is "Kite marking" and providing a single source via Curriculum Online, but this misses the vast quantity of high quality stuff there is out there. posted at: 4:00:18 PM

© Copyright 2003 Pete Cole. Last update: 30/03/2003; 02:19:53.