Friday, April 21, 2006

Wanna take notes online?

I found this great list of notetaking services on the weblog of Solution Watch aka Brian Benzinger. Fifty Ways to Take Notes » Solution Watch: "So I started thinking about all the services I’ve used for taking notes and thought it would be a good idea to share them with you and while I’m at it, to make a list of any others that I find."
Great resource! Thanks for sharing, Brian.

Monday, April 17, 2006

Willem Karssenberg: A Really Simple Service Bus

Just a quick reference to TrendMatcher tussen ICT en Onderwijs: A Really Simple Service Bus: "Verder klikken brengt je bij een formulier waarop je je e-mail adres kunt achterlaten. Dat schiet dus niet op! Even Googlen (ja, dat doe ik met een hoofdletter!) brengt je gelukkig wel verder, namelijk gewoon naar de rest van de site die achter dezelfde URL zit: http://www.rssbus.com/prebeta.aspx
Daar wordt toch wel een zeer veelbelovend concept uitgelegd! Wie noemt zich developer, heeft het weekend wat tijd over en wil eens wat stoeien met het programma dat ter download wordt aangeboden?"
A service bus is what we need, at least in the world where we talk Service Oriented Architecture. This is what the site itself says: "RSSBus is a Service Bus - but a Really Simple one, with RSS as the main interchange mechanism. No one can deny the tremendous success and popularity of RSS as a tool for information exchange. ESB is also about information exchange and if you carefully read the definition above and are familiar with RSS and World Wide Web concepts in general, you will see connection points between the concepts: RSS and ESB."

Sunday, April 16, 2006

30 Boxes or Google Calender?

Well, I dunno if this is really social software.... But Google Calender is software that makes use of all sorts of innovative software technologies, so for me that sort of qualifies. Really nice! I have just started to explore. Importing an *.ics file is a breeze. Adding public holidays is easy, they can be added with one (or two?) clicks. Adding an event is so easy. This works really good. I have made my calender public, so it should be searchable for everyone also. Let's see how that works... I have only put some public appearances and conferences in my Google Calender yet.
I haven't found the feature where i can publish my Google Calender to a specific URL, which can be done at 30 Boxes. Here's my calender on 30 Boxes. 30 Boxes also features a RSS feed, that is quite handy. Oh, talking about that: that's exactly what RSSCalender does, which was featured here before.
So, in conclusion: I haven't decided yet which one is the winner for me. I will let you know which online calender I prefer, when I am ready exploring.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Choose your feed reader!

I use Bloglines as my tool to keep uptodate on the news, but there are other webbased feedreaders. A complete overview and review can be found at TechCrunch » The State of Online Feed Readers: "A feed reader, the most common solution to consuming synidcated content, saves the user time by monitoring countless sites and sources and providing near real-time updates to one location."
Go read for yourself!

A day at the office

08.39: Arrival at the University of Twente. Bad news travels fast: we have no internet connection!
08.48: I am quite happy: all my documents are still available to me, since I have them synchronized to my local hard disk every time I log off.
09.02: I have cleaned all my temporary files and documents on my hard disk. That really feels good. Let’s do some more cleaning up!
09.04: The coffeemachine is still working...
09.18: Time to do some more thorough cleaning: AdAware and CCleaner do their job mostly unattended
09.31: I do some work on the agenda for an upcoming seminar that we will organize on the subject of Service Oriented Architecture and what this will mean for education. This will be on June 7, 2006….
09.39: I have wiped even more stuff from my local hard disk
09.43: Ok, no my desk needs some cleaning (well actually the drawers in my desk). I speak to some other colleagues who also finally find the time to clean up.
09.50. A colleague ask me to provide him with a Word-document that I had sent him via email yesterday. A USB stick is our means of transport for this.
09.58: Yes, it is working again (you are reading this, aren’t you)

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

del.icio.us/wytze/elearning20

I am a huge fan of del.icio.us! I just am.
So far I have collected quite a few links over there. It is just so easy to bookmark now, especially with the Firefox extension. The things that for me have to do with what elearning 2.0 is or should be, are also (ofcourse!) on my del.icio.us account. Just go to del.icio.us/wytze/elearning20 to find out what i have collected so far.
And start using del.icio.us.... It is really very handy.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Things that we need in an LMS

Elliott Masie has a great piece on things that a LMS should be able to do: Making Your LMS Dance. One nice sentence in this piece: "LMS, I want you to integrate into our social networking systems. Sometimes, the source of knowledge is not a class but a conversation with a colleague down the hall."
Thanking http://www.elearnspace.org/blog for the pointer.