6 septembre 2018

Search Engines: Weblog Search Engines
Short article that reviews major blog search engines. Though the author lists some major sites, such as DayPop, Blogdex and Feedster, some major indices are overlooked, including Blogstreet, Memufacture, PopDex, Bloglines and Technorati. Some minor indices listed in the article include Detold Blawg Search, Eatonweb PortalEatonweb Portal, and Globe of Blogs. SchoolBlogs is an important site for educational blogs, as are the Educational Bloggers Network and Edublog News. And of course I would be remiss if I left my own Edu-RSS off this list. More...

3 F's, They're Out: Edison Sees Shake-up
The problems continue at Edison Schools, the private company hired to manage public schools in Philadelphia and other American cities. It turns out that you can't just hire anybody off the street: you need quality teachers. More...

METS: An Overview & Tutorial
This is a very interesting specification. The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is intended to describe the structural properties of digital resources. Why is this necessary. More...

ERIC/AE
For those of you following the pending closure of many ERIC services in the U.S., more information is available today about the face of the new ERIC. More...

Who's Watching the Class? Webcams in Schools Raise Privacy Issue
Everyone else must live under video surveillance, argues this article, so why shouldn't school children? "It helps honest people be more honest," says district Superintendent Larry Drawdy. More...

Let's Tie the Digital Knot
This article is five years old but it is fundamentally right and well worth repeating in the context of the current debate about teachers' use of technology. In particular, as was commented to me yesterday, "most virtual classrooms and computer facilitated learning looks to education like the horseless carriage looked to the old buggies - cosmetically different." I agree. More...

The Digital Optimist
"A journalist by trade," George Lorenzo reports on trends he observed while conducting research for an article on e-learning. Most of what he reports is consistent with my own observations, and a few of his points are worth noting. More...

How I Would Implement Weblogs in Business
I think the key question is: would anybody be this honest in a business setting: "Using a Weblog, I could chronicle the daily activities, learnings, experiences and developments of the community. As the community grew and interest spread, the Weblog could have become the best single resource for understanding the internal workings of the community, why it works, what we'd learned, what the manager does, what the members think, etc." No, probably not. More...

Those Who Can't
I passed on this article when it came out last week, but it has since attracted a raft of commentary on the WWWEDU mailing list, so perhaps I have misjudged the mood (hey, it happens sometimes). The gist of the article is that "Teacher training is lagging the adoption of technology." The majority of posters on WWWEDU agree, citing examples where students take over the operation of projectors and other equipment. More...

Symbol Grounding and Extensible Aggregators
This is a difficult article (you can tell by the fact that even the title needs a little interpretation). But it gets at the heart of a debate that is gradually engaging the entire XML community. In a nutshell: how do you know what the names in XML tags mean? In traditional XML, they are defined in a fixed vocabularity (such as IEEE-LOM). In RDF, they are defined by various name-spaces, which may be mixed and matched. More...