Montag, Januar 30, 2006

Wikis can look beautiful

OK, did I say "ugly as any Wiki"? The folks at StikiPad have created a wiki which pleases the eyes and the (dev-)heart. And the markup seems to settle, too:
Textile is the clear winner.

Sonntag, Januar 29, 2006

Future of Tech Publishing?

An interesting experiment at Ajax Patterns - a wiki for the upcoming Ajax Patterns Book. Looks ugly as any Wiki, but more important: does it work participaytion wise? Full text is online. More info about the copyright and licenses used.

Freitag, Januar 27, 2006

iTunes University

It is a cool idea: faculty and students put bootlegs of lectures on Apple - Education - iTunes U, but with all the lackluster succes of digital and mobile lectures projects - is this a real good new service for students? Most of my lectures depend heavily on slides I am showing. Are students really listening to this? But perhaps some students really try to recapulate their lectures? It could be nice if one assign students to create a five minute podcast summary… . Yeah, I will try that next semester.

Mittwoch, Januar 25, 2006

Ubiquitous learning environments at last?

Combine location-based pictures and notes (another project here) together with structured blogging and You could get something I call *Ubiquitous learning environments* - have a look at my vision of this (Wolf, Karsten D. (2001): WWW-based Learning Communities: Moving from patchwork environments to ubiquitous learning infrastructures. In: Dijkstra, S. / Jonassen, D. & Sembill, D.: Multimedia Learning – Results and Perspectives. (Peter Lang) Frankfurt/M., New York.)

The good and the ugly of Ajax

A rather good approach to Ajax from a software architect's point of view:
Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours

Ben says: After all the work of WASP and others to promote clean markup, valid pages and graceful degradataion via css - it sucks that we're going back to tag soup days by throwing javascript tags into our html.
I am still not sure if Ajax-technology is ready for primetime deployment. Don

Simple and elegant


Very nice examples how to implement websoftware for organizing and collaborating: Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboard und Ta-da List from a cool company (37signals.com). Excellent reduction (no bloatware) and good web interfaces. I will try them out in my next seminar.

Dienstag, Januar 24, 2006

The Zen of Javagames

Independent game devs rock and Hell of Sand is a good example of the more exotic sides of the web. Streams of Sand, Water and Oil fall down and You can play with it by drawing barriers, plants, even use fire. This is probably the next thing to a Nintendo DS you can get on a PC/Mac.

Sonntag, Januar 22, 2006

Karsten's SuprGlu on SuprGlu

Putting all stuff together is much easier with Suprglu: here is Karsten's SuprGlu. This is fun!

More info about user interface design for Office 12

There IS good research at Microsoft. Check out Jensen Harris's An Office User Interface Blog, where he explains the new UI for Office 12! These guys are really spending lot of thoughts on their re-design, something I never suspected as a Word-User from version 4.0 on a Macintosh SE. Since then imho, nearly nothing has happened and usability is down. Let's see if this redesign is more iWordish.

Structured Blogging

Structured Blogging reminds me of using templates in Web-Applications. Don't make it to hard for users to reach their goal (see more info about Results-Oriented Design here and there). Free text structuring and layouting is hard and takes too much time! Restrain and give structure and the user can concentrate on content. At least in the E-learning area this makes a lot of sense!

When the learning goes underground, the underground goes learning!

I am currently writing an article about "Webservices for communities (of practice)". This article at Connectivism Blog discusses people in organizations go underground in their learning efforts. Informal Learning (german research paper is getting more and more important in the E-Learning landscape (the ever busy Jay Cross is putting it into a book).

Managing learning is much about supporting a culture of learning. Watch this space for more information about the publication.

The Edublog Awards 2005

This is a cool list as a starter for getting into the Blogosphere of Education: The Edublog Awards - The Edublog Awards 2005 Winners. Good reading and a lot of stuff to cover!

The ISI Multilingual Glossary of Statistical Terms

If You need to translate statistical terms into some other language, rejoice: the ISI Multilingual Glossary of Statistical Terms is great for all people doing empirical research.