George Bauer at the Python Desktop Server Weblog graciously responds to my critique of the Desktop Server/Community Server model. First, I want to re-iterate that I think it’s great that someone is creating an open source clone of Radio Userland, and, from what I can tell, improving on it. PyDS claims better performance, and although I’ve never tried it, Radio Userland is a resource hog. More usefully, it appears they’ve done away with the ridiculous 1989-era Compuserve-style assigning of numeric IDs on the Community Server side. Finally, from George’s weblog, it appears they’ve implemented Trackback (which Userland has been struggling with.
However, I do have some feedback/comparisons to the advantages George lists.
Read more…
Weblogs
Squeaked myself onto the DC Metro Blog Map just in time. It was written up in the Washington Post yesterday in Leslie Walker’s Web Watch column. (see second half of the column; first half is about Ice-T’s downloadable new album).
Weblogs
You’ll find me at the Cleveland Park stop on the Red line of the D.C. Metro Blog Map. :-)
Weblogs
An article, titled Teaching in the Wireless Cloud [link via Smart Mobs], addresses the impact of mobile devices on the teaching & learning environment of a campus:
“The campus becomes a different place when a student can connect with a content expert anywhere in the world from the steps of a gym, or compare notes with a student on another continent from a classroom doorway. The full potentials of this format are still being explored – how will faculty and student behaviors change when they can carry most of their work around in digital, connected formats, and communicate as effectively from a quad bench as from an office? How much more attractive and supported will inter-campus collaborative learning become?”
Good questions.
Education
Howard Rheingold talks about a study that shows how recommendation systems — like Amazon’s “Customers who bought this book also bought…” or NetFlix’s “People who liked this movie also liked…” — can be shilled:
“Taken together, the experiments provide several tips for the designers of interfaces to recommender systems. Interfaces should allow users to concentrate on rating while ignoring predictions. Finer-grained rating scales are preferred over simple “thumbs up, thumbs down” scales, but are not essential to good predictions. Finally, because users are sensitive to manipulation and inaccurate predictions, to keep customers happy, no recommender system at all is better than a bad recommender system.”
Note to self: you’ve got some thoughts on recommendation systems. Don’t forget to post them soon…
Technology & Internet
The President of Michigan Technical University, Curtis Tompkins, sticks it to the RIAA in a letter responding to their lawsuit over file- (aka song-) sharing. The suit asks for damages against a Michigan Tech student at the rate of $150,000 per song, which, by some estimates, could equate to $97 billion dollars in damages.
Apparently, though, the RIAA didn’t follow their own notification procedures that they have asked universities to comply with. Kudos to Tompkins for calling them out.
Intellectual Property
Looks like other people are thinking about the limitations of weblogging via a “desktop server” as well.
Weblogs
I was following the link from SiT about the RSS Feed Reader/Aggregator Directory and stumbled across the Python Desktop Server, an open source alternative to Radio Userland.
It’s neat that someone is replicating Radio’s functionality in open source, but I still have never grokked the value of the desktop server — why do I want to have all that content on my local machine(s) and “upstreaming” it to a site. If I use multiple machines (which I do), it’s too limiting. I thought the point of web applications are to not tie me to a particular box at a particular desk. Unfortunately Python Desktop Server doesn’t seem to be solving that problem.
Movable Type is more than adequate for my weblogging desires (and the price can’t be beat). What I’d like to see: news aggregation functionality similar to Radio Userland or Python Desktop Server built into Movable Type. (As a plug-in?)
If you can provide that functionality on a desktop server, why can’t you provide it on a hosted server?!?
Weblogs
The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, and the Knight Foundation (”Knight” as in Knight-Ridder) announced they will launch an Poynter Online News University to train journalists online. [link via Online Learning Update]
The education will be delivered online, but I wonder if they will be training “online journalists”?
Education
Terrific article by David Davies on Learning Object Contextualization. [link via SiT.] The example is length, but the key points are summarized at the end. The most important of the conclusions: RLOs [reusable learning objects --g] must have a context to be meaningful and Learners will create their own contextual links to and between RLOs.
Davies gives an excellent example that could be used in a problem-based learning (PBL) exercise. However, given our current expectations and structures in education, a learner creating “their own contextual links to and between RLOs” is probably not the most likely scenario (although it may be more desirable). More likely, actual usage of RLOs will begin with the instructors.
Education