Month: September 2007

by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Google Calendar knows Gmail

I’m not a power user of any of the Google tools. I have accounts and I do use Docs & Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail, but I barely scratch the surface beyond the basics of these tools. So when I stumbled across this little feature today, it made me pause and reflect that I really need to investigate these tools for more of these productivity enhancements.

I received an email from a non-Gmail using friend inviting my family to a dinner at their house. In the body of the email was a time and date for the dinner. Since I use Google Calendar, I decided to create an Event from the email. This is the first time I have used this feature. So, I clicked on the more actions dropdown menu and choose Create Event.The event pop up opens up with the date and time already prepopulated within the event. Google Calendar has gone through the Gmail message and found a date and time in the body of the email and prepopulated the event based on that information. It even went so far as to make a decent guess as to what the title of the event might be and prepopulate that as well.

I know in programming terms it is really not hugely difficult to parse the email message and find dates and times, although in this case it was made a bit more difficult because it wasn’t a well formed date and time, but still it was a really nice productivity feature to stumble upon in the Google suite. And one that makes it much easier to schedule an event from an email in Google than it does in Outlook.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

A walled garden falls

The New York Times is opening up their website, ending a two year experiment in charging for online content.

Despite the fact that they had over 250,000 subscribers and their subscription revenue was over $10 million dollars, in the end The Times decided they could make much more with online advertising than with keeping the lock on the door. Which really says something about the state of online advertising these days.

It was also interesting to read this rather naive quote from Vivian L. Schiller, who is the senior vice president and general manager of the NYTimes.com site.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

Your kidding, right? The senior vice president of a major web property like The Times didn’t realize that search engines drive traffic? Doesn’t that strike you as odd that someone in such a position of authority at a major online property in the media publishing business failed to understand one of the most basic web marketing truisms that search engines drive traffic – lots and lots of traffic – to web sites? I’m missing something in her statement.

For academics and researchers the most exciting part of the announcement might be the fact that they are opening up their archives.

…The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Not sure why the material from 1923 to 1986 is still locked up, but nonetheless the thought of being able to freely access articles and data from The Times via their website should make research a little bit easier.

As a fun little search, I searched the term “internet” from 1981 on to see when the word first appeared in the NY Times and it looks like the date of the first mention of the internet is November 5th, 1988 in an article about a computer virus called “Author of Computer ‘Virus’ Is Son Of N.S.A. Expert on Data Security”. This is really early days as the virus is in quotes and doesn’t even have a name. They simply refer to it as ‘virus’. Fun. And note the number of computers in infected.

The program eventually affected as many as 6,000 computers, or 10 percent of the systems linked through an international group of computer communications networks, the Internet.

Less than 20 years ago there were only 60,000 computers on the internet. Crazy. Today there are probably 60,000 computers in my neighbourhood.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Desire2Learn

A simple Del.icio.us mashup for D2L using Yahoo Pipes and Feed2JS

Mash delicious, d2l, pipes, feed2js

One of the features I like about Desire2Learn is the ability to create custom widgets within the LMS. I’ve just finished creating a custom external resources widget for our faculty based on del.icio.us feeds of some of our course developers and it was a snap to incorporate it into D2L. Here’s how I did it.

The Scenario

In addition to myself, there are 2 other developers at my institution who, among other tasks, actively support faculty using D2L. We wanted to create a custom widget of external Desire2Learn resources for our faculty to give them access to resources other institutions have put together. Instead of creating a page of static links, we decided to use our del.icio.us accounts to create a dynamic reference library that would automatically grow and update as we added d2l related links to our delicious accounts.

One problem was that we all tagged resources slightly differently in del.icio.us, so we needed to standardize our tagging convention. We decided to use the general tag of “d2l” to designate a resource we wanted to share in the widget.

With that non technical piece out of the way, I began to work on merging the three feeds into one.

Mashing up del.icio.us feeds in Yahoo Pipes

PipesI decided to use Yahoo Pipes for no other reason other than I am familiar with it and wanted to get something put together quickly. Since we are all networked in del.icio.us, it was quite easy to go to my colleagues accounts, click on their “d2l” tag and grab an RSS feed of that tag.

Once I had the RSS for all three accounts, I was able to begin creating a new pipe.

The first step in creating a new pipe is to specify the source of the data. In this case, it is the 3 RSS feeds from delicious, so I dragged a Fetch Feed module into the pipes work area and enter the 3 RSS URI’s.

I noticed that we had all tagged some of the same resources, so I needed to do a bit of data cleaning. Enter the Unique Operator, which allowed me to filter out duplicate links that appeared in the mashup. Now I had a unique list of links.

The one other thing I noticed was that both of my colleagues had added and tagged our institutions local instance of Desire2Learn in their delicious accounts. Since the final product of this feed was going to be within a widget inside that instance, I decided to filter out the url to our institutions Desire2Learn instance using the Filter Operator.

I now have a mashup outputting a single RSS feed created from 3 source feeds. The next step is turning that RSS feed into a Javascript snippet that I can use in the D2L widget. A great future enhancement for the widgets in D2L would be the ability to import RSS feeds. Right now you are limited to HTML and Javascript, which is what we are going to use.

Feed2JS

There are tons of great tools that you can use to convert your RSS feed into Javascript. For this project I used Feed2JS.

I took the RSS feed from the Pipe output and plugged it into Feed2JS. Feed2JS gives you a number of options to tweak the behaviour of the feed. I truncate the feed at 15 and choose to open the links in a new window to avoid taking the faculty out of D2L when they click on a link. I click on “Generate Javascript” and voila, I have a nice chunk of Javascript ready for embedding into a D2L widget.

D2L widget

D2L Final WidgetThe final step in the process is to copy the Javascript code and create a custom widget in D2L.

In D2L I created a new widget in the “Manage Homepages” area. After giving the widget a title, I decided to share the widget with other faculty members who may want to use it for themselves in their own courses, so I choose the share option in the Admin tab.

Since I only want faculty to see this widget, i set the release conditions to teacher. Finally, in the custom code tab I paste the JavaScript code I generated at Feed2JS and save the widget.

Once I have created the widget, I can then go into our Faculty Community course and add the widget to the homepage of the course. Now, whenever faculty enter the community, they will see the widget with the most recent resources our work group has tagged in delicious.

Reading through this it seems like a bit of work to create the mashup. But in reality it took me much longer to write this article than to actually create the mashup. All in all from start to finish it took me less than 15 minutes to create what will hopefully be a valuable resource for our faculty.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Delicious gets a makeover (and drops the dots)

Del.icio.us, the social software I probably use the most, is undergoing a facelift and, for such a simple interface, it’s headache inducing to see how the team went about the redesign. 2.000 post it notes on a whiteboard. Yikes! I thought my whiteboard was a mess.

One enhancement is the addition of the the url delicious.com. You can still reach the site using the now famous del.icio.us url, but by adding the delicious.com domain name it should help ease url confusion for newcomers. On more than once occasion when I show off the software to people, I have had users adding a .com to the url and ending up at some default landing page.

I’m hoping the search engine is much faster, as has been reported. I’ve been frustrated, and somewhat baffled, by the slow speed of the search engine, considering that Delicious is owned by Yahoo, which should know a thing or tow about optimizing search engines.

The new design is still in beta, but you can get some details and screenshots on Webware.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

Facebook is not how life works

Following up on a post from a few days ago regarding whether or not students want us in their space, I just came across an interesting article from the Washington Post called An Unmanageable Circle of Friends.

Overall the article is critical of social networks and the seemingly shallow relationships between people that often form. While I agree that many of the relationships are shallow, I also happen to know that the opposite is true and some fairly deep relationships can occur.

It’s also true that social networks don’t build real connections. It’s the people behind the keyboard who are the architects of real connections. I think the technology itself is agnostic when it comes to the level of depth of the relationships it mediates. The users choose how deep or shallow they wish to wade into the social network pond.

The one point that was bang on for me, however, was the point raised by University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman. Wellman really hits the nail on the head with regards to Facebook, MySpace and other social networks.

The bigger problem with Facebook et al., says Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist and founder of INSNA, is that current sites “assume that everyone in your life is on one happy network.” On MySpace, your work colleagues are given the same info as your Halo buddies. That’s not how life works, and pretending it does dilutes the meaning of our more powerful connections.

Essentially, everyone in our network gets the same level of access to personal information, whereas in “real life” we have much more control over what types of information we want to share with the people around us. I don’t necessarily tell my work colleagues all the details of my personal life, although they all know much more about my kids than my banker does. But my banker knows much more about how much I owe on my mortgage than my colleagues. We build these little walled areas in our life and when areas collide it makes us feel uncomfortable. And this is where I believe the friction will occur with students as educators push more into their online social networks.

One other question raised by the article, and one that I’ll be asking more and more, is how many social connections can we have before they begin to lose meaning and effectiveness? I have never heard of Dunbar’s number before, but I’m certainly going to research it a bit more as I continue to look at the effectiveness of social networks as an educational tool.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

Another year begins

I took these photos looking west on Hillside/Lansdowne Road, which is one of the main arteries leading from downtown Victoria to the University of Victoria and Camosun College. The top was taken on Friday morning, the bottom this morning.

Traffic on Hillside Ave

I’m really glad I live close enough that I can walk to work.