As an open source fan I had to share this video that so accurately conveys the everyday culture of Italy. ;)
Recently I attended a conference "Enabling the Age of Immersive Education".
The best presentation was by Daniel Laughlin Research Scientist, NASA Learning Technologies. He was able to use Learning Thoery to give a very clear presentation that reinforced commone sense, but helped to organize understanding of the topic. This is definitely a goal for me.
A definite highlight of the conference was the hallway conversation with a photographer, writer and oral historian from Roxbury. She helped me really understand what I'd like to see done with Immersive Environments. As Daniel from NASA explained, our beliefs are burnt into our synapses. If we want to challenge those beliefs, especialy about emotional issue like racism and identity we have to invoke emotions while we teach. Thus, to deeply understand history, in a way that allows us to change our current beliefs, we have to have empahty with the people and cultures we study. I think emersive technologies, in the hands of artists like this woman could have the potential to do this.
Tom Werner of Brandon Hall Research posted a blog featuring an example by Karl Kapp that featured learning about and setting up displays for a hardware store. We have a client in this business so I loved the example.
Positives
- It's a great example of how a 3D environment would provide a better learning experience
- Better detail on the drill
- More authenitc hands on experience learning about the features
- More authentic practice where the learners actually set up the display and have it checked!
However, I really doubt this would work for our client
I envy the web apps running off apache. They get an incredible speed boost thru compression just by enabling the mod_gzip module.
Websites on AOLServer 4.5 can use ns_zlib to serve compressed adp pages but I don't know yet if static files like images, cascading style sheets or javascript can automatically be served compressed.
We've been doing lots of front end development and the size of javascript and css files can take its toll on load times.
Just yesterday I came accross this thread from the AOLServer mailing list archives where the author shares a filter for AOLServer that he wrote to serve up gzipped content if it's available. You don't need ns_zlib to use this filter as you are expected to gzip your resources beforehand. The filter will essentially ...
Version control is a must for projects such as ours with a geographically diverse team of developers each working on any number of these projects at the same time.
Subversion, because of its similarities to CVS, has made it easy for us to reap the benefits of version control with minimal effort. However, there is a lot more to subversion than update and commit. There is also branching and merging, but unlike CVS the concept is easier in subversion, at least, in my experience.
So when does branching become necessary or useful? Branching allows you to create a copy of the portion of your project to another location in the repository. This allows one developer to work on features that may not be part of the main line of development without disrupting the work of other developers.
Whatever field you are in, good communication is one of the keys that make work easier. In search for better communication, one of our colleagues came across the Jing program and shared about it to the rest of the group. I was tasked to look into Jing and see what it can do for the company.
As I tried to learn how to use the Jing program, I read through a few of the comments and blogs written by some users who participated in the Jing Project by providing their feedbacks which in turn became useful to the design and development team of Jing. The comments and feedback paved the way to a newer and better version of Jing. My learning experience with Jing was quite okay, I must say. Some things I found advantageous and useful while others, just about average.
Accessible Google Charts [ajaxian.com]
(photo by Google Charts API)
It's interesting how different companies, competitors even, can come together for a good cause in the name of making it easier for more people to use the Web.
In this feature from the Ajaxian, a Web architect from Yahoo, Chris Heilman, makes Google Charts, a product from Google, more accessible to people who can't see the charts it generates.
By "people who can't see", I am referring to people who are either fully or partially (color) blind and who rely on special screen readers like JAWS to view Web pages.
XO (OLPC) can change the world. [www.groklaw.net]
"Mary Lou Jepsen: Where to start: Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructure expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off on solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is a one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or, perhaps, 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it's environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn't as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can't be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn't – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world."
Tell a Compelling Story With Your Next Presentation [www.sociablemedia.com]
Beyond Bullet Points is a Web site and book that helps you make more effective presentations. I just watched the first -five-minute screencast to help me get started using the story template you can download from the Web site.
Just going through the video and applying the ideas to my presentation, I was able to iterate quickly from a boring, traditional theme to a more interesting take on the same information. There's much more there but this is a great start.
XSS: Welcome to 2003 (or thereabouts) [ajaxian.com]
Ajaxian mentions SafeErb for Rails, an add-on to help secure that user input is safe. It does so by checking if you explicitly call a certain method to escape the user content.
OpenACS, the base for .LRN, has been doing this for awile now. We took a different approach. All content is escaped by default, and the programmer must decide when to let through unescaped content. Either way it's something all Web frameworks should support if they allow users to enter HTML.
Printing the Public Domain [www.publicdomainreprints.org]
(photo by Moodle Teaching Techniques by William Rice)
I love the preface to William Rice's book "Moodle Teaching Techniques".
Rice says,
"While most [software manuals] do a good job of telling you how to perform tasks, that is, what buttons to push and menus to choose, they often leave the two most important questions unanswered:
What effect will doing this have on your audience's experience?
When would you want to do this?"
We are getting very close to having an integrated Moodle+ELGG+LAMS product and I'm realizing that we will need to write exactly this type of manual and/or training. As Rice puts it, "we need to combine 'keystroke-and-click' directions with advice on how to make the best use of the solutions and what effects it will have on student's experiences."
As part of Solution Grove Blog's facelift, we added links to "share" the content to different social web communities. We already have the standard "Digg" and "del.icio.us" links in most of our client sites and we initially thought of putting this in our own blog. However, while browsing other blogs, I came across a niftier implementation. It's a free script provided by ShareThis. All you have to do is 1) register, 2) customize your "Share This" link using their "button builder", and 3) copy the code to your page or site template.
Intelligent Web App Email Handling [www.michaelnygard.com]
Should Email Errors Keep Customers From Buying? describes a robust way to handle email in Java. The main point is very clear - don't leave a web visitor waiting while the application server attempts to send an email to them.
I am surprised this is even an issue in 2007. I suppose not everyone has gotten the message (no pun intended!) that OpenACS has used a background thread to deliver email for years. It uses a simple queue that attempts to save the messages, batch them up, and send them to a local SMTP server regularly. Usually, it is done at least every 5 mins or so, but that depends on how much email you are sending out.
I can't imagine it's that hard to run a local SMTP server in this modern age. It doesn't seem necessary to rewrite a SMTP server within Java instead of just running something like Postfix on the same box. Postfix will then make sure the email gets delivered to the intended recipient.
Recently, there have been blog posts describing Agile programming methods and the essential role of collaboration between the customer and the developers. Check out Professional Responsibility by James Shore, author of the Art of Agile Development, and Business software is Messy and Ugly by Bob Martin.
A crucial point of collaboration is defining the schedule. The customer and developer work together to write stories to define what will be developed. The customer prioritizes the order stories that are developed. It is up to the developers to, then, implement the stories.
A few weeks ago, I posted how Solution Grove implemented Moodle to ELGG Single Sign-On. That was only the first phase. The client also needed it to seamlessly auto-create users on ELGG using credentials from the user's Moodle account. We searched for a solution for this and found his ELGG-WebCT integration solution from Aperto Elearning Solutions. Even though the other component was WebCT, it was still interesting to us as the concept is similar - the user is automatically created on the ELGG side. Solution Grove emailed Aperto and their contact person was kind enough to point to us the Aperto download server, where the code can be downloaded, and added a few tips in the email as well.
XoWiki prototypes [media.wu-wien.ac.at]
Gustaf has been adding new features, fixing bugs and updating xowiki at such a dizzying pace that it's hard to keep up with all the cool and nifty features.
One feature that I caught up with recently while working on a project is prototypes.
If you've been using xowiki for a while, I'm sure you're wondering how and why the en:index page keeps coming back even after you've deleted it. The answer is xowiki prototypes.
You can find the prototype for the index page along with some others in packages/xowiki/www/prototypes.
So how can prototypes be helpful to you. Let me count the ways ...
Cesar Brea pointed out Bill Ives' post, "Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet."
We've created corporate intranets (demo site showing off what we did for Cesar's company) and Facebook apps so we've thought about this. I think the key to what Serena has done is using Facebook as a front end but having the intranet itself on a private and secure system. Then, you have the best of both worlds. Facebook becomes the watercooler, an open place for employees and friends to interact, while corporate documents and work discussions take place on a private system with controlled access.
Happy New Year!!
If you are reading this on an RSS reader, then you might not have noticed our new look!
After you admire the attractive new graphics and layout, you may find yourself wondering why we have ads. If I were to give an advice to a small company, I would not recommend a corporate blog with ads as the ads will likely lead off your site to a competitor's.
So why don't we take our own advice? For us, our blog is more than a marketing tool, it's our playground to learn about all things on the web. Our space for hands on learning. Ads can be important to a web site and so we're experimenting with different ways to incorporate them.
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- thanks
- Using clickpass
- Should we put this on Solutiongrove.com, .net, .info??
- How about redirecting users to setup password for elgg
- Great job!
- Bandwidth (the human kind)
- ns_zlib on OpenACS
- Thanks Mark
- svnmerge.py saves you the pain
- Mosio, Yahoo Answers on Mobile ?