Blogging

This is a terrific short video of Johnny Lee’s Nintendo Wii remote controller hacks. The head tracking VR display screen application is particularly amazing and could have some powerful uses in educational games. I know of groups that are using complex technologies to achieve the same effect as this elegantly simple approach. Be sure to check out Johnny’s projects web site.

Go find: wii hacks, head tracking vr

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Simple Wii hacks, powerful applications

I’ve just discovered Wordle, a web application that creates word clouds from any body of text. Word clouds, like tag clouds, are a collection of individual words whose text size reflects the frequency of occurrence in a given body of text. Wordle has some nice layout tools to help you create beautiful word clouds. It’s easy to make your own. Here’s a word map from my weblog’s RSS feed. It’s easy to see the emphasis of words in my recent blog posts.

In the past I’ve used a more formal version of this kind of approach in the battle against plagiarism. For my module’s assessment I get students to write a dissertation and occasionally one student tries to pass someone else’s work off as their own. There are a number of applications that compare text from one source against another to look for blatant copying, but another approach is to use textural analysis that compares the linguistic style and word count of one section of a piece of work with that of another section. If you suspect a student of incorporating someone else’s work you can use this approach to spot a change a style from one chapter to another. This is a useful approach when the plagiarised source cannot be identified.

Anyway, for fun I thought I’d use Wordle to compare the word maps from the recent blog posts of three leading learning technologists. It’s interesting to see the different word emphasis. Can you guess which map belongs to Josie Fraser, Scott Wilson and Stephen Downes?

Go find: copycatch, plagiarism detection, word clouds

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Word clouds with Wordle

I attended a couple of days of the IMS Summit on Interoperability Now and Next in Birmingham, UK last week. Sheila has written up some notes. I have to say I was disappointed by the learning design session. Five years after the learning design spec was finalised it’s still a complex business using the spec and current tools to define and implement a simple interaction. I keep feeling that IMS LD was a solution looking for a problem and haven’t yet seen anything that solves any problems I have in learning & teaching.

Anyhoo I gave a presentation on using lightweight RSS for syndicating learning resources. Old stuff but still new to some. Sorry there’s no commentary to go with the slides. If asked ’so what’ I’d ask you to look at slides 17-20 as these outline a simple approach that uses RSS as a manifest for delivering learning resources (an activities, in fact anything you can point a URL at). It’s lightweight (the ‘manifest’ lists title, description and URL to resources, not the resources themselves), has an implicit sequencing built in (simple linear), with metadata if required, and is in a format understood by many existing applications and content management systems.

Go find: ims global learning consortium, ims learning design, rss

IMS Summit on Interoperability Now and Next

This is interesting.

Firefly allows visitors to a web site to point and chat. Basically a Flash overlay movie with transparent background allows contemporaneous web site visitors to point at content on the site and instant chat with each other. Chat messages are currently anonymous but I expect that will change. Messages are also transient so unless you’re there to see them posted you won’t see them although a chat history is recorded.

Dave was one of the first users to demo in public but they’re now taking beta signups so you could add the app to your site too. What will you use it for?

Critics will ask ‘what’s the point?’. Sure, being able to comment on a web site so that subsequent visitors can share comments is not new, but there’s something kinda cool about being able to do this in real time. Of course if you have a high traffic site like Dave’s you’ll get several people online at once, but for my site and I suspect many others you may be chatting alone for a while

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Fireflies swarming around your web site

You know the thing that puzzles me about services like Twitter and Jaiku et al, sometimes referred to as microblogging applications, is that you have to use a central server or service to create and distribute your Tweets or microbloglets or whatever-you-call-thems only to have them converted to RSS and syndicated. Why not just use RSS in the first place? You could create a lightweight RSS client that outputs your status, one-liner pearls of wisdom, or anything else you wish to tell your ‘friends’ about. Bake it into weblog or email or news-feed clients and you’re away. The beauty of using RSS is that everyone’s stream is distributed rather than collected at a central point, or bottle-neck as it sometimes becomes.

The benefit of a single service access point I guess is that it makes it easier to find new sources or feeds, but there are so many ways of finding RSS feeds that a distributed rather than centralised approach would be no problem. So what value do services like Twitter add? I guess that until we get better RSS clients - that is RSS creators rather than RSS aggregators - then the likes of Twitter offer client applications. But if we started to get other kinds of clients based upon RSS then just imagine the possibilities. You could syndicate your status and other Twitter-like info, but also mobile data, email, calendars, and in an educational context learning activities, reading lists, portfolios, lots of stuff. Of course you can syndicate a lot of this now but only via dedicated clients apps like purpose-built calendering service, VLEs, etc. An RSS client agnostic to content based around the triumvirate of title, description and link (plus attachment of it makes sense to add a file) would be a very flexible tool indeed.

I had a similar thought 5 years ago and created a simple tool back then for Radio UserLand. The tool is still available though I doubt it works now, and I don’t have a copy of Radio to try it.

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RSS microblogging vs Twitter et al