Monday, June 13, 2005

I N K S C A P E . Draw Freely. it was only a matter time [Edubloggers Links Feed] this is very nice -- BL 4:22:15 PM      Google It!.

e-Literate: Sakai distribution. The conference ended with a Q&A session with the Sakai board members. I asked how decisions about what’s included as the ‘core tools’ will be made. The response I got from one board member was “I’d like to see Sakai include six discussion boards By dnorman. [Edubloggers Links Feed] 4:19:14 PM      Google It!.

Digital TV Transmitter Using a VGA card [Slashdot:] 4:12:47 PM      Google It!.

Evaluation of the Practitioner Trial of LAMS: Final Report. The JISC evaluation of LAMS which seeks to answer the question, "Does the use of a learning design tool such as LAMS support effective practice in designing for learning?" Seb Schmoller summarizes: "According to the report, only 21 practitioners reported back to the evaluation team during the evaluation, and of these, 8 were not part of the original 40. Of the 21 respondents, only 13 had actually run (or attempted to run) a LAMS learning sequence." Oh, and the answer to the question? Schmoller's verdict: "maybe". 42 page PDF (which is about 2 pages for each person who actually ran the software). I have run LAMS myself (on my laptop) and while it works OK it seems to require a lot of overhead for what it does (which means you probably shouldn't run it on a laptop). As a student I would feel frustrated because it's always telling me I must do this and I must not do that - it's a real stickler for sequence. On the other hand, it took me in the range of 30 seconds to set up a complete interactive online lesson. By Liz Masterman and Stuart D. Lee, JISC, June, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 4:10:29 PM      Google It!.

Google Translator: The Universal Language. How close are we getting to usable automatic translation? Close enough that translation companies are getting worried." What does the Google Browser do when it encounters a Japanese page? It will show you an English version of it. You wouldn’t even notice it’s Japanese, except for text contained within graphics or Flash, and a little icon Google might show that indicates Auto-translation has been triggered. After a while, you might even forget about the Auto-translation. To you, the web would just be all-English. Your surfing behavior could drastically change because you’re now reading many Japanese sources, as well as the ones in all other languages." Finally - a way to understand Pokemon. Via Seb Schmoller. By Philipp Lenssen, Google Blogoscoped, May 22, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 3:55:42 PM      Google It!.

Creation of a Learning Landscape: Weblogging and Social Networking in the Context of E-portfolios. Talks about e-portfolios, but more importantly, quotes Helen Barret: "I made the public statement this week, that high stakes assessment and accountability are killing portfolios as a reflective tool to support deep learning. Those mandated portfolios have lost their heart and soul: not creating meaning, but jumping through hoops!" And Misja Hoebe, who makes a similar point. Some very nice diagrams emphasizing the personal uses of e-portfolios (which I hope will become more widespread soon, before the bean-counters kill the concept). By Dave Tosh, ERADC, June 12, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 3:33:48 PM      Google It!.

Fedora Core 4 Available [Slashdot:] the torrent drill -- BL 11:01:38 AM      Google It!.

Performance of OpenOffice.org and MS Office [Slashdot:] 9:33:59 AM      Google It!.

Jon Udell on Wikipedia's way of dealing with integrity issues. [Scripting News] 9:18:22 AM      Google It!.