Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Concept SURF-Meerjarenplan 2007/10 Doorpakken!

One more thing in Dutch, is that OK with you? The SURF Foundation has published her proposed plan for the coming years 2007 until 2010. SURF :: Concept SURF-Meerjarenplan 2007/10: "Het werkterrein van SURF is in de loop der jaren sterk verbreed. Dit komt ten dele door de nog steeds groeiende impact van ICT in het dagelijks leven. Maar het gevestigde en gegroeide vertrouwen van de samenwerkingspartners en de overheid in SURF als organisatie speelt eveneens een grote rol. Dit gegeven noopt niet tot een tevreden achteroverleunen, maar tot kritische beschouwing van de implicaties van die verbreding voor de komende planperiode."
SURF strongly recommends that we should think about service oriented architectures and really should work towards realising this vision. In the coming months the member institutions of Surf are invited to give feedback on the proposed plans. We will see what happens.
Update: strange thing is, not a word in these plans on social software or Web 2.0 or whatever. Therefore, I will put my review of the plan on my other weblog.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Web 2.0 in the making

For today, I just wanna point you to two shiny new services, in the real Web 2.0 spirit, that I recently joined for testing purposes. They both can be joined for free. Ofcourse always read their privacy policies if you also want to join:
1. Rojo: "Rojo means 'RSS with mojo' and in this spirit our company is dedicated to providing the best feed reader around so that busy people can discover and read content as efficiently as possible." This seems like Bloglines on steroids... maybe it is too fancy for me, although I like tags a lot, that is on del.icio.us en Flickr.com. There a lot of features!
2. Spongecell: "The new Spongecell online calendar (Innovation Partners' patent pending) features revolutionary ease of use for social networks - individual and groups - to plan an online calendar."This is a very nice and clean online calender, that you can share with friends. It also publishes to RSS if you want. I've been using RSScalender.com for some time now; dunno yet which one will eventually will be my winner. There are more competitors here, by the way. Just check them out at eHub.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Marijk van der Wende: Onderwijsinstellingen moeten zelf eigenaar worden van elo

Marijk van der Wende: Onderwijsinstellingen moeten zelf eigenaar worden van elo: "Een ho-instelling heeft allerlei systemen. Naast de elo bijvoorbeeld voor administratie van verschillende zaken zoals cijfers. Eigenlijk zijn dat allemaal kant-en-klare pakketten, waarvan de interoperabiliteit laag is."
Yes, this reference is not in English. But this is an interview on our current state of affairs regarding our VLE's (of CMS for those Americans): low interoperability and duplicate features in different systems! Prof van der Wende advises the institutions to get in control again and to let go of those commercial vendors that are trying to rule (y)our business.
Prof van der Wende was the chairwoman that advised our Executive Board on the way to go forward. See http://www.utwente.nl/elo for the advisory report (only in Dutch, we might do a translation in English, if needed).

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Testing Writely

Ok, testing with Writely seems to work OK.
Have you tried it yet? Check Writely !

Ajax Office suites compared

Innerphaze » Blog Archive » Ajax Office Chart: "I thought it might be helpful to have a simple chart to summarize my Ajax Office review. " That's how Dan McCrea introduces a breed of Web 2.0 apps that sure might scare Microsoft... Well, maybe not.
But then again: if you don't want to spend your money on a license fee for Microsoft Office, then turn to these apps. Some of them are real competitors regarding features, and some of them have a very sleak interface (they should, they pretend to be Web 2.0!). But maybe more importantly: you can easily share documents, revisions, whatever through your webbrowser. All of the apps are basically free to use. Some might turn into services that will charge. Anyway: just try them out!
My next post I will try to do through Writely.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

All things RSS (the complete story)

Alright, you sort of know what RSS is and maybe you use a feedreader to keep up with all those blogs, that spit out RSS feeds at ya.
But do you know what else you can do with RSS? Well, I just found out that there is a service that can convert your email into RSS. Isn't that cool?
A very nice list of what else you can do with RSS, can be found on a weblog by Rich Ziade. The title of his article is Basement.org: Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One. He says: "I figured I'd list out all sorts of creative ways RSS can be used beyond news headlines and blogs."

Monday, January 23, 2006

Ning: create your own webapp

Ning | Home: Front Page: "Ning is the easiest way to create your own social web apps on the Internet today. And it's free!"
Is it really? I didn't try it out, yet... But maybe later.

Friday, January 20, 2006

BlinkList | Your personal start page and social bookmarking engine

Have I already mentioned here that i like Netvibes a lot? I mean a lot!!!
I just found one other, sort of competitor. It is called BlinkList: "'BlinkList is Social Bookmarking merged with People Powered Search and Expert Recommendations... all wrapped in an elegant interface'"

Monday, January 16, 2006

On blocking blogs... in Australia

Through the weblogs of some collegues on the other side of the world I keep current on issues regarding the fact that a lot of schools in Australasia are blocking all sorts of websites and weblogs. And we are not talking about China here, but about Australia!
I especially recommend Leigh Blackall and James Farmer if you are also interested in these issues. James recently started nonscholae.org: "nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.
We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools."
A big round of applause for James for starting this initiative!!

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Parkin's Lot: E-learning grows up

No, this is not one more nice piece on what e-learning 2.0 is. This is a very nice roundup by Godfrey Parkin about what really should make us change drastically the way we work. I just added his fine blog to my blogs on my Bloglines subscriptions. Check it out at http://www.bloglines.com/public/wytze

Parkin's Lot: E-learning grows up: "the life expectancy of any training course is rapidly shrinking at the same time as the costs of creating it may be growing. Informal social learning relies on rapidly crystallizing out of the distributed knowledge network just that which is needed by an individual to get the job done. Since the knowledge in the network is constantly updating itself, it is always relevant, always current, and always available."

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Wanabo is a Free Tagging Service

Great stuff, that came to me through the famous eHub by Emily Chang. It is called Wanabo. I didn't try it out yet, though. Something for the weekend.... :-)
A quote:Wanabo "Wanabo helps you build an effective and alternative window into your site using tagging ». Its the easiest way to bring the power of folksonomies and the 2.0 Web to your online presence."

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

RSSCalendar.com - almost perfect

Happy New Year to everyone that reads this (I don't know who is reading this....)
I just stumbled on a very neat webapp. It is RSSCalendar.com : "Sharing your calendar with family, friends, and co-workers has never been easier. When you create a calendar event, an RSS Calendar Channel (or Feed) is automatically generated."
Yeah right, i thought.... but it really works very nicely. Just see the sidebar on this blog. There is a possibility to export to Outlook, which is nice. But I want it the other way around: to import my Outlook calender items to this calender.... Or I am wanting something that no one else wants?