Tom Hoffman: Information Infrastructure

From Instructional Technology:

News Aggregators, Teaching and Scholarship.

News Aggregators and Teaching

There are a number of useful ways to incorporate news aggregators into teaching. There are lots of classes in English, Social Science, Communication Studies and Journalism departments that ask students to read newspapers and journals on and off the web and then write about both the content and the larger issues. News aggregators are a valuable research tool, and should be included in any discussion about how to use other online research tools like search engines and databases.

In the case of NewsIsFree in particular, news aggregators are especially good at providing fresh interesting, and timely content, in languages other than English. Students (or teachers) can use an aggregator to automatically fetch and display content that interests students, content that is current in the language they are studying. There are hundreds of sources in almost any language, ranging from periodicals to web blogs, that offer students an opportunity to read content written in a variety of styles. It's a great way to get students to read in a language that they are struggling with, and to expose them to the language as it's used by real people. Tie news reading/blog reading to blogging (using any number of blog tools) about what they've read, using the language they are studying, and you've got a fabulous combination, particularly since there's a very good chance that students will read each other's blogs, and comment on them.

I wish that academic scholarly journals used the web and RSS for publication so that scholars could subscribe to a feed. It's a much better way of keeping up to date than waiting for your university library to receive and expensive bound journal, catalog it, and then make it available for circulation. So far I've not found any humanities journals that have a "news" page with a subscribable feed.
[Instructional Technology]

This article in adtmag (lost track of where I found the link) has a good overview of open source application servers from a business point of view:

Striking a balance
Organizations should look at not only striking a balance between open-source and commercial products, but also between low- and high-end servers, according to research firm Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn. This way, they will get better value for their money. Rather than standardize on a single-platform application server architecture, Gartner recommends using a low-end server for less-demanding, user-facing applications and a high-end application server for transaction-heavy applications.

Gartner reports that many companies have been paying big bucks for products that have more capacity than they actually need, which the firm chalks up to a lack of architectural planning and 'the blind adoption of vendor-promoted technology.' Gartner divides application servers into two groups: low-end, which support servlets and JSPs, but typically not EJBs; and high-end, which typically support EJBs and Java messaging, and handle large transaction volumes.

This high-end/low-end distinction was what I was trying to sort out in Chicago a few months ago, trying to establish that we aren't trying to do big transaction volumes at a district leve, but more "user-facing" stuff.

And it turns out that these guys [entity-X] have built a commerical learning management system on Zope. Doesn't look like they are educators though. The web site is generally uninformative (always a good sign...) One more thing to track down eventually.

I have, by the way, deployed our final evaluation system, and it is in use by the teachers. Thanks to the wonders of object orientation, I just added a comment attribute to the "standard" class, so anal teachers can comment on each score if they see fit, in addition to attaching comments to projects and units. This was suggested by Frank. I've been weighing requests to also allow teachers to just comment on a student's performance in a class as a whole, but Jennifer is so strenuously against it that I'm holding off.

I just undertook my first exercise in error handling, as well. Two teachers were getting errors when they were inadvertantly trying to make duplicate evaluations instead of editing the existing one. So I added a little <dtml-try><dtml-except> code to automatically compensate for that and redirect to the proper form instead of throwing up a Zope error.

I have one outstanding bug. Sometimes when teachers try to delete a standard from their template it produces a cryptic list instead of the name of the standard on the confirm page and then an error if you try to execute. I haven't tried to figure that one out yet. It works most of the time and is not very critical.

I had an idea in the shower this morning for integrating Radio into my Zope system at school. You can add a RSS feed from another Radio site to your Radio aggregator by clicking on the little coffee cup icon, which is actually a link like this (if you're setting up your feed from jepstone.net):

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url=http://www.jepstone.net/radio/rss.xml

This sends you to your local subscription page with the http address already entered in the field for the url variable. Simple enough. I want to allow teachers to automatically generate categories for classes or projects. This would allow the Radio input interface to be used to enter assignments and other news relevant to a specific course or unit (one sub-question is whether or not assignments should be strongly typed, compared to other news about a course--I think not, because you don't necessarily want to do extra work just to de-contextualize assignment information).

For example, once teachers have filled out the form to create a class object, the view method on the object could include a link to a url that looked like this:

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/editCategory?displayName=CreativeWriting

Except that it doesn't work. It doesn't put CreativeWriting into the displayName field (that seems to be the name of the relevant field, from looking at the page source). The advantage of this is that it starts to make Radio the single interface where teachers can add lots of different kinds of content, just by choosing the relevant categories. Ultimately, you should also be able to use XML-RPC to send these posts directly into the ZODB, to keep them associated with the course objects.

Had an interesting conversation with Diana Joseph about interface design metaphors while in San Antonio last week. One question was whether or not Radio is more like a hammer or a Swiss army knife. To me, "Radio" is a hammer, a simple tool with which I can hit a variety of nails in many contexts. Diana's first impression was that it was complicated with lots of little add-ons. To a degree, this is just a matter of familiarity. She was put off by the ZWiki site I had pointed her too, as well. The site she saw was just a quick demo I threw up, and what she saw was analgous to the interface of a blank piece of paper, which is mind-bogglingly powerful, but also strangely un-userfriendly in its blank form.

In relation to training teachers to actually use software, Diana was taking the point that it has to be clear exactly what problem a given piece of software is trying to solve. And certainly, fundamentally, people need to perceive that a given tool is going to actually solve a problem for them. However, in the long run, you can't really have a separate tool for every task. It doesn't scale. So you need flexible tools, but you need to start with a compelling story to launch the process.

So Do Librarians!.

Teachers Wanna Hold a Handheld

"Texas Instruments also hopes to expand its image beyond that of a graphing calculator for science and math classes to that of a handheld that can be used in other subject areas.

Many schools already use the devices and could download new applications onto them for use in other classes.
'We're not focused on doing PDAs for business,' said Tom Ferrio, vice president of education for TI. 'This is specifically designed for students.'
The company introduced a new, durable keyboard that is built to withstand the hazards of a backpack. It's packaged with a word processing software application so that students can take notes. Other new applications include customizable flashcards and multiple choice questions....

In the fall, TI will introduce a product called the TI Navigator, a wireless hub for teachers that can collect student work stored on the individual TI-83s, then move them to the teacher's computer to be evaluated." [Wired News]

What I don't think we're working enough on is the support from the school and public library for kids using these handhelds. Ebooks are the most obvious applicatiobn, but few implementations are even integrating them. Then there's wireless access to remote databases, bibliographies on-the-go, "ask-a-librarian" text-based chatting, integrating due dates into the calendar (yes, I know Innovative is working on this), and other mechanisms the library could support.

Maybe we can convince TI to help us develop some library apps for PDAs.

[The Shifted Librarian]

This is almost really useful for school, except we have our yahoogroup password protected, so I won't work. Still, it is good to know. Plus we're going to be running our list locally soon, so I'll have to think about how rss with that might work. Perhaps it is ok to make the subject line public but not the messages themselves.

I don't seem to be able to get it to work, anyhow. I seem to get blank documents. Is that because there have been no posts recently?

OK, it works now, but I still can't see the XML in IE.

Yahoo groups in your news aggregator.

Somehow I had totally missed this feature of Yahoo Groups. In the case that somebody else might have missed it too, if you submit:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Group_name/messages?rss=1

to your aggregator, you will get all posts submitted to that group in your favourite news reader.

Just subscribed to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/messages?rss=1 and it works perfectly. Getting rid of more mail! [from Paolo]

If you feel like trying to get a ZIS, running on your Mac, here's the first step:

Installing Tomcat on Mac OS X. The Tomcat server is ideal for deploying Web applications and Web services. It's also a snap to install on Mac OS X. Here's how. [O'Reilly Network Articles]

Quiet revolution: Librarians teach and preach Open Source software at convention. - By Ben Ostrowsky - Fresh from a victory against Internet filtering, many librarians are celebrating and demonstrating Free Software that can automate a public library for under $1,000, organize information into Web portals, and manipulate data in arcane formats. [NewsForge Reports]

From the article:

The host of Friday's hands-on tutorial, Emory University Library's Martin Halbert, says he encourages his staff to look first for Open Source software because "it's philosophically aligned with the values of academia." And it doesn't merely save the library money; it brings in more money. Grant funding to develop metaScholar, a toolkit for describing scholarly information, was contingent upon sharing the results. Halbert said the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation insisted that "if you want one of these grants, you'd better do Open Source."

That kind of foundation leverage is going to be what propels open source software into schools and other public facilities. Hopefully, we can be a part of that process.