02.28.02
Posted in Blogging, Software at 10:21 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Dave Winer uses analogy to distinguish Frontier, the environment (framework?) Manilla runs on, from Radio. He writes:
Frontier is our mainframe. It’s centralized. It includes Manila, a deep and powerful browser-based content management system. Where Radio is designed for individuals, Frontier is designed for communities and organizations, workgroups—groups of people.
I think that’s key. But it also seems to me that an organization running Frontier/Manilla might still want to license Radio for its end users.
I’m still struggling to grasp Radio. It’s so enormously powerful, with so much potential that I find it slippery.
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02.27.02
Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 1:33 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “More and more institutions are encouraging—or even requiring—students to create “electronic portfolios” that highlight their academic work and help them reflect on their campus experiences.” The article goes on to say “This month, Indiana University - Perdue University at Indianapolis and the University of California at Los Angeles formed a consortium to develop e-portfolio software”—at 10,000.00 an institution.
As much as I’ve encouraged, even evangelized, the creation of digital portfolios for graduate students, I think the consortium idea, and the price, is a bit daft. Frankly, I’d use some of the excellent blog tools that are already out there.Although BloggerPro doesn’t seem to have a license option, either Manilla or Moveable Type look possible to me as portfolio creation,management and hosting solutions. A school would create a couple of portfolio templates, make them available, add some custom locally written documentation and tutorials, encourage the interested students and faculty to learn the ten basic tags of HTML, and there you are!
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Posted in Blogging at 10:32 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Andrew Sullivan, has, I think, hit upon one of the key virtues of the blog as a tool for journalism; he writes in his “Blogger Manifesto” that “Peer-to-peer journalism, I realized, had a huge advantage over old-style journalism. It could marshall the knowledge and resources of thousands, rather than the certitudes of the few.”
Blogging-as-journalism then shares the advantages of open source software—you have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bug finders, fixers, and coders working because they want to. And I think this “open source” effect is one of the potential side effects of using blogs for instruction. You are helping students find a voice, a personal commitment to their words and thoughts, and you are teaching them to think about audience, one of the central requirements of good writing. These are all Good Things.
Since I started really thinking about blogs—and deliberately reading and researching them—I’ve slowly realized that one could argue that my central Celtic Studies Resources site is a blog, a blog with categories, and stories.
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02.23.02
Posted in HTML/XML/CSS at 9:54 am by Lisa Spangenberg
I’ve looked at articles recommending Cascading Style Sheets before, but I’ve always been frustrated by the browser incompatibilities and bugs. For the last month or so I’ve been following css discussions more closely, and I’m going to try using css again. I still don’t quite understand why people hate tables—I find them to be very useful—but the ability to use a style sheet for my sixty-something pages does appeal to me. So I’m taking a closer look.
I’ve found some good resources—this series of Apple tutorials, for one, and WebMonkey’s Style Sheet Guide then there’s Dave Raggett’s guide—and his useful “ccs readiness” checker HTML Tidy (I’m using Terry Teague’s BBTidy BBEdit plug in port). I’ve also found WDG’s Quick Tutorial and the New York Public Library Style Guide helpful, not to mention all the resources at the CSS Pointers Group.
Next of course is xml.
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02.22.02
Posted in Software, HTML/XML/CSS at 2:27 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
I’m old fashioned in a lot of ways. I use a text editor, BBEdit 6.5, to be precise, for my HTML (and for javascript and perl). There’s a version of BBedit, BBedit Lite, that’s free, and supports OS 9.x and OS X, and I started with it. My friend Nicholas Urfé swears by TexEdit Plus accompanied by Dean Allen’s Scripted Writing for the Web AppleScripts (yes, Apple Script is Mac only–including Mac OS X). I have them both on my list of things to look at.
But if I weren’t one of the fortunate users of the blessed Celtic computer, I’d use Arachnophilia by Paul Lutus for html under Windows. He’s announced that he’s rewriting Arachnophilia in Java2, to make it platform neutral because it “is immoral to write programs that only run on Windows.” That’s right—he’s asking users to boycott Microsoft. The new version of Arachnophilia is still CareWare.
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02.20.02
Posted in Blogging, Software at 11:57 am by Lisa Spangenberg
Interesting article at Byte by John Udall on Userland’s Radio 8.0.5. He does a better job of differentiating Radio from Blogger and other tools than anything else I’ve seen. I’m thus far unimpressed with user support at Userland; I’ve found places where the documentation, such as it is, is just wrong, as well as numerous instances where Windows information has been left intact in the Mac version of the software; that’s pretty unprofessional. And they don’t respond to user help requests, even though I’m registered and sent very specific information.
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02.16.02
Posted in Blogging, Software at 12:07 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
There’s an interesting Perl .cgi package called Movable Type; you can download the source for free, though they do ask for a donation. The FAQs, including server specs and even a template letter to send to your ISP to find out if you can run .cgis, are here.
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Posted in Macintosh, Conferences, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 10:32 am by Lisa Spangenberg
QuickTime clearly has marvelous potential for instruction–and lots of us are using it. Apple, with its long time interest in education, targeted educators with some specific sessions. The first one I went to was typical of such things—it was presented by an Apple employee with a background in education and instructional technology, with a hot demo. It wasn’t his fault that the technology wasn’t behaving, but it was his fault that the use of technology in his examples, and his own reasons for presenting the sites were not pedagogically effective or clear. Essentially, the technology was driving the instruction (though I think sites like RaceRocks.com have a lot of potential, the presenter left us to figure out the benefits of streaming).
It’s About the Content, OK?
Too often I see educators, administrators, and developers presenting the technology as the reason for instruction. The proposition usually goes something like this:
“We have this really great [camera, server, application&mdash:fill in the technology to suit]—what can we do with it?”
Putting the technology first, before the instruction and the student, makes me crazy. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the content, it’s about finding ways to encourage learning by using technology as one of many tools.
There were several amazing presentations at QuickTime Live that, while not specifically targeting education, were right on the money about how and why to teach with technology—because it’s often more effective, it adds qualities that couldn’t be achieved with other methods, and it makes learning fun. David Gratton, of Totally Hip Software, makers of the altogether wonderful Live Stage Pro, was a perfect example of the right way to teach with technology.
Live Stage Pro–QuickTime Interactivity for The Rest of Us
David showed specific examples of useful techniques–like combining an interactive QuickTime movie with XML to swap data with a server–and immediately tied his examples to specific educational goals–like evaluating student responses. A lot of the session’s effectiveness had to do with David—he knows his stuff, and is personally enthusiastic—but it also had a lot to do with Live Stage Pro and Totally Hip’s ethos. Totally Hip saw an unfilled need–developers and ordinary end users (educators) needed a way to access the enormous power and potential of QuickTime without having to drop everything to learn C. So they created Live Stage Pro, which really is freakin’ awesome, and then created one of the best educational discount programs I’ve ever seen.
I’ll try to locate some of the sites David showed, and get permission to link them, and I will be posting my notes next week One of them, TODD, a movie database that swapped XML, is here. One of the enormously high potential areas David talked about, and QuickTime offers, is getting away from the browser, since a QuickTime file is sort of like a bento box for data–lots of tracks, lots of different kinds of data in those tracks (including XML, also supported by AppleScript), and all of it, including server communication, in a single file, even a tiny ref movie, small enough to attach in an email, as David pointed out.
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02.13.02
Posted in Macintosh, Conferences, Copyright at 1:51 pm by Lisa Spangenberg
You can see the keynote in streaming QuickTime for yourself, but I’ll cover the basics. First of all, Apple previewed QuickTime 6 with MPEG 4. That’s the good news. The bad news is that because of some truly idiotic licensing proposals from the MPEG-LA corporation, Apple won’t be releasing QuickTime 6 yet. I’ll get back to the licensing issue in a bit, but I want to mention two other really neat pieces of news.
There’s a new, and still free, version of the Apple QuickTime Streaming Server 4.0. This is a solid open-source, standards-based streaming server, that now has MPEG-4 and MP3 streaming capabilities. Since the server only serves, and doesn’t encode, the new QuickTime Streaming Server 4 does not require a MPEG-4 license and is therefore immediately available. Even I’ve been able to set up a QuickTime Streaming Server, and I’m a medievalist, not a sys admin. The browser-based admin interface is definitely better now, and you can set things up so your users can create “play lists.” What’s that you say, you don’t own a Mac? Then check out the Darwin Streaming Server, the open source version, with builds for Linux, Solaris and Windows NT/2000.
Last, but far from least, Apple announced the free QuickTime Broadcast Server for live video streaming. This has enormous potential–but, since it’s dependant on the MPEG 4 encoding standard, licensing issues are delaying it as well. What’s cool about this, is that not only is it free, it’s Apple elegant, Mac simple. You need QuickTime 6, Mac OS X (v10.1 and later), and streaming server technology–Mac OS X Server, QuickTime Streaming Server or compatible servers.
Here’s, roughly, how it works. You get a Firewire capable digital video camera, and film your class, or event–live. You connect your camera, via Firewire, to a Mac running OS X 10.1 or later, and the free Broadcast server software, and the free QuickTime Streaming software–users need the free QuickTime 6 software, once it’s released, to log on to your server. That’s the lowend version; you can scale it to suit–camera, to a Mac running the Broadcast server, to include a separate QuickTime Streaming server instead of running it and Broadcast on the same server, or several streaming servers. At the demo, Apple used an Airport wireless base station to connect the Broadcast Mac to the Streaming server.There’s a lot of untapped potential here for foreign language instruction–potential for doing more than ripping the CDs that came with the textbook.
The licensing issues have to be solved first. Apple is fine with paying royalties to MPEGLA for the codec, the part that lets content providers–like educators–compress video into MPGEG 4. MPEGLA wants .25 cents per decoder, and another .25 cents per encoder, per year, with a one million cap. That’s fine, by Apple, and they’re quite willing to pay that so users can use QuickTime Pro to encode and play MPEG 4 files.
The problem is that MPEGLA wants content providers, “publishers” or hosts–to pay content royalties of .02 cents an hour for a content host (that means anyone with MPEG 4 content on a web site, streaming server or other “hosting” system), and another .02 cents per hour for a content replicator. That’s absurd, really absurd. It’s a Microsoft licensing approach–a penny here and there, 24 hours a day, to generate millions without actually providing goods or services. And of course, for education, that cost would almost certainly end up having to be passed to students–so MPEG 4 would, quite possibly, not be used, despite its enormous potential for high quality content delivery. If you think this is as daft as I do, you can email a polite protest to licensing@mpegla.com.
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02.12.02
Posted in Blogging at 9:14 am by Lisa Spangenberg
There’s a John Dvorak article on blogs here; he misses the potential, I think, but read it anyway. And thanks to David-Carter Tod, here’s Weblog Ed a blog on web logs in education, from Will Richardson. And yesterday I found another free blog hosting site, one that’s primarily emphasizing community; Grok Soup.
I’m on vacation, sort of, attending Apple’s QuickTime Live conference. Lots of interesting stuff, with several sessions targeting QuickTime in higher ed.
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