October 13, 2006 – 12:11 pm
The countdown to the 2006 Sydney Moodle Conference is almost complete with the first keynote kicking off at 9:15am tomorrow morning. Its been almost two years since we first started evaluating potential candidates for our much needed Collaborative Workspace and I must admit that I initially gave Moodle the thumbs down! It was suggested to me by others here who had a background in education and were hearing a steady stream of praise for this dark-horse open source LMS. It wasn’t until I delved deeper into the source that I started to realise the extent of how robust the architecture is.
So here we are two years later providing free online collaborative spaces for the Education and Training community with over 1000 registered groups. I’m constantly telling any of my teacher friends (seems to be a strong connection between teaching and surfing!) who will listen about the future of online learning and how Moodle can provide an affordable entry point for institutions looking to head in that direction. I especially looking forward to this weekend’s conference as it’s always an eye-opener to see how other institutions are implementing, integrating and extending Moodle. If you’re going, be sure to check out our keynote: edna Groups - Moodle on steroids. Maybe I’ll see you there…
September 25, 2006 – 10:58 pm
One of our busiest site’s interfaces is getting a serious accessibility and standards-compliance overhaul, something I’ve been looking forward to doing for a while. I’m in the midst of development and rapidly approaching the launch deadline, but working on the search interface got me thinking about the recent Accessible Google Search that came out of Google Labs with the promise of a better browsing experience for an often neglected group of online users:
Google Accessible Search is designed to help the visually challenged find the most relevant, useful and comprehensive information, as quickly as possible.
One of the most promising aspects of the new technology was the prospect of being rewarded by Google’s ranking engine for developing accessible websites, something we try to do wherever possible (the Government Education Portal is a good example). However, considering the relative simplicity of the search interface there was wide spread puzzlement about the decision of the developers to not make it XHTML 1.0 compliant. Undoubtedly the complexity of the system (both software and business processes) was no small hurdle, but at least the standardistas made their feelings known.
A little over two months later and the author of one of the articles was approached by Google and asked for input on the interface for the Google Search Appliance. The result is a great step in the right direction and the number of big players who recognise both the importance and benefits of web standards is growing rapidly. It also demonstrates the power of the blogosphere!
September 22, 2006 – 6:59 pm
Audio and notes from Ted Rheingold’s talk at the recent Carson Workshops summit: The Future of Webapps. I’ve been well aware of the buzz surrounding the summit and have been patiently waiting for podcasts to appear on the sites of the various speakers or their entourages. Ted’s talk was titled ‘The State, Future and Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities‘ and explained much of the theory behind his site Dogster (and Catster), a free online community for dogs (and cats) with opposable thumbs, or presumably their owners. I dig the the buzz-word ‘Passion-centric’, it must be an instant hit as far as they go!
“Passion-centric online communities are dedicated to a particular interest and allow users to become completely immersed in their own passion.”
I was particularily happy to hear him mention Deviantart, an online community I’ve been actively involved in for many years, watching it go from strength to strength with each rebuild of the underlying framework. One of the obvious reasons for the success of Deviantart is indeed the passion of its users and their overzealous interest in its development roadmap, which could be damaging if not for the depth of their knowledge and experience.
Many other successful social networks get a mention and we get an insight into the types of strategies Ted uses to keep his community happy and continuously expanding. A few of the less commercial methods could be applied to to our enthusiastic online education community here in Australia and provided me with a lot of food for thought. Well worth a listen and hopefully not the last podcast to emerge from the summit.
Update: All of the podcasts from the summit are available now.
September 12, 2006 – 10:32 pm
This Web 2.0 awareness test is a humourous take on the hype surrounding the proliferation of web 2.0 applications. Its also a slightly scary example of how easy it is to fetch information about a user with javascript.
Part disturbing, part humour, this is a built-overnight, fun “Web 2.0 Awareness Test” based on a combination of CSS and Javascript which allows a site to programmatically determine if a link has been visited before.
I scored a measly 2%! Ah but of course I would on my work laptop, I’ve got real work to do. Can’t be sitting around all day digg’ing… Even on my personal computer I only manage a measly 18%, but then I look at the list of sites the score is based on and I’m not seeing many familiar names.
While there are a growing number of browser-based web 2.0 applications that I use, I seem to leaning more towards the webified desktop applications that are providing a flexible layer between the user and the online services they use regularily. For example, the Flock browser brings together a number of online services including social bookmarking, online photo storage, news aggregation, blogging and more; services that ‘web 2.0 aware’ folk are using everyday (and in some case all day). Windows Live Writer has been mentioned by Geoff and is another desktop app I’ll be trying out in the coming weeks. Konfabulator gives me funkier way to keep track of my Jira issues, weather conditions and visits to my personal website.
None of this is particularily new. Tools like Serious Samurize have provided similar, but less web-centric services to the desktop. What is new is the growing number of web 2.0 applications that are giving savvy internet users (aka flaky weirdos) a way to make their online world truly portable, and the desktop applications allowing them to shape it to their needs.
Ebrahim Ezzy said (much more elequantly than I could):
As the Web becomes increasingly interconnected and applications continue to blur the distinction between the desktop and web, we should expect to see more applications that allow Web/desktop synchronization.
Cheers to that.
