What university libraries should do, really...

I am catching up on quite a few weblogs through Bloglines. I see
several posts on the joy of using RSS and readers like Google Reader. But that is not what I want to address here.

I would really like to point you to an interesting post on the blog of Erik Duval. I am a regular reader of the blog by Erik Duval, of elearning standards fame. He is from Belgium, if you didn't know yet.

Erik is really right on the spot regarding his university library that recently has moved into a great new building. Which is completely irrelevant to him, because he nevers visits the library!

But what is relevant to him, is not delivered by the library: "Why don’t they [the library] inform me when someone is downloading my papers?
Referring to my papers? Why don’t they alert me to papers I will
probably want to know about?" Are you listing over there in the library?

AFK

This a short message. I am Away From Keyboard (AFK). Will be back in a few weeks. And this is also post # 100 in this weblog!

Netvibes as PLE (again!)

Sometime ago I wrote (I think) on this weblog something about Netvibes as the means of creating a Personal Learning Environment. Now, Michele Martin brings this theory into practice, and writes about Reorganizing My Personal Learning Environment . A great read! And a recommended weblog too, which I have added to my Bloglines right away.

Social software in organizations: so much to gain!

George Siemens points to a very interesting post on the weblog by Ross Dawson. I've seen Wilfred Rubens refer to this post by Ross also.
I particularly like the comment that Siemens makes: "Organizations (..) are generally too unaware of
themselves and their strengths and expertise. Social software can
greatly aid the "coming to know oneself" that most larger corporations
need...but too often, hierarchy and information secrecy reduce it's
effectiveness." Yes, indeed: so much information that doesn't flow, well it flows, but only to certain persons in certain meetings... I see what he means!

Every CEO should be blogging !

This is just alittle sidenote... Well, not really. This is about blogging within an organisation. Sun Microsystems is a great example. The recent restructuring of the company was announced through a weblog. See also this article in Dutch in Emerce - Business nieuws: Sun Microsystems reorganiseert via weblog CEO

"Technologiebedrijf Sun Microsystems neemt de organisatie van het bedrijf grondig op de schop. In een voor topbestuurders ongebruikelijke actie maakte de hoogste baas van het bedrijf, Jonathan Schwartz, het nieuws nagenoeg direct bekend via zijn weblog."

Collections on Flickr

Yesterday I was posting some pictures on Flickr, when I noticed a new feature. It is called Collections. This is the answer to a question that has been around for a looooong time, about nesting of sets, and subsets etc. So I created a Work-related Collection for you.

YouTube: the stage is yours

YouTube is getting (we all know that) a lot of attention these days. Recently a Dutch education institute joined YouTube, instead of creating their own videochannel or whatever. Check out this channel. A quote in Dtuch: "De CABK, ArtEZ academie voor beeldende kunsten, is eigenwijs zoals een kunstacademie behoort te zijn en denkt: if you can’t beat them, join them. Is het huidige internet exhibitionistisch, wij kunnen dat beter. Is het huidige internet smerig, wij zijn viezer Is het huidige internet een generatiekloof, wij zijn generatieklover..."

Met dank aan Margreet van den Berg.

Vista revisited

Jaaaaa, er begint iets te borrelen op de UT. Lees de ingezonden brief van Casper Hulshof in de UT Nieuws van 8 maart 2007: "Met enige verbazing en ergernis las ik het
korte interview met Sander Smit (UT-Nieuws, 22 februari) over Windows
Vista. (..) Terwijl de gemeente Enschede op
open-source software overstapt schenkt onze zogenaamd innovatieve
universiteit een miljoen of wat aan Microsoft, met als drogreden dat
medewerkers er behoefte aan zouden hebben."

xFruits: handy stuff!

Through Stephen Downes i noticed the word "xFruit". Clicking on it, i arrived at a great example of a Web 2.0 service. Didn't you always want to have a handy tool to convert your weblog in a readable PDF (including working links)? Or to create an email notification based on RSS?
Well, then it is the right time to start experimenting with xFruits. They offer these kind of services. I did this already. Neat features: you can create and share your creations with others, you can search for others (socalled xFruiters), you use tags to describe your xFruits. Social software avant la lettre!
This service is brought to us, free of charge, by a French company (as far as I can see on their website).

Who's is innovative

A very interesting post by Willem van Valkenburg (in Dutch) on the way a teacher made use of a wiki and Google docs.

Check out Docent te modern : "Het komt niet vaak voor dat de studenten klagen dat docenten te geavanceerde tools voor ze gebruiken. (..) zeker omdat het om informatica-studenten gaat, die bezig zijn met hun master."

Netvibes contender... as opensource download!

I just found a great Netvibes contender, which is called eyeOS. A quote from their websi: "Welcome to eyeOS.info, where you can create and use your own eyeOS Virtual Desktop. With eyeOS.info all your data is available where ever you have Internet access and a standards compliant browser."

This is really something here.! Let me explain. You can download the source for this virtual desktop and install it on your own server. And since it is opensource, you can tweak it to whatever you like.

There are some 7 communities in different countries already. There is one The Netherlands already. This really worth investigating. Which I will start to do right after this post....

What would Marja have heard here?

I just read the weblog by Marja Verstelle. She is present at the ELI 2007 annual meeting, as far as I understood. I wonder what she picked up at this presentation:

EDUCAUSE | ELI 2007 Annual Meeting | Father Google and Mother IM: Confessions of a Net Gen Learner

Ofcourse, if others want to fill in here, that's fine with me.

Repositories are so 2006! Or 2005...

D'Arcy Norman, from the University of Calgary (Canada), has a great weblog for everyone interested in elearning and such. There's is always something interesting on his weblog.

One of his last posts is about CAREO, a repository that was offline for 9 months. His post is pretty disappointing: "(..) I think it's a pretty impressive statement about Institutional Repositories that something that was once trumpeted as The Next Big Thing can be out of action for 9 months without many people even noticing. Relevance of top-down, centrally ordained institutional Repositories?"

D'Arcy goes on to say that he still puts his links in del.icio.us and his pictures on Flickr. He doesn't need a repository. Also read the comments on this posts, for some more valuable discussion about repositories and the likes.

More social software in education!

So, this must be the year 2007 then! This will be a great year. There are lot of predictions for this year pouring in through my Bloglines. One recurring prediction is that social software will finally get mainstream for and in education. I sure hope so!
A teacher in Seattle, Mark Ahlness, starts of his new year with a great illustration of the aforementioned prediction:
"My 8 and 9 year old third graders (..) are alright with web 2.0. Many of them take it for granted. A third of my classroom has blogged from home over Christmas Vacation. (..) These kids are comfortable in the medium. My job is simply to give it to them. My resolution for 2007 is to give them more. They will not waste the opportunity."

One laptop per child (OLPC) video

Ben Werdmuller (of Elgg fame) pointed me to a great video. It shows off the user interface of the the OLPC - One Laptop Per Child - project. It really looks great, and has some similarities with the Elgg user interface. Ben writes on The Internet is People: "This social networking UI for the One Laptop Per Child ($100 laptop) project is amazing". See for yourself what you think.

The video referenced by Ben has been made by "90 percent of everything", which is a blog about usability.

WikiKids

Just a quick note here. There is a great example of the use of a wiki in K12 education here in The Netherlands. It is called WikiKids (only in Dutch). They have taken the Mediawiki software and adapted it for use by kids. And now they are starting to create a online encyclopedia by and for kids. It is a great example of kids that work together with other kids, as well as with teachers.

Weblogs at Leiden University: are they succesfull?

After a few weeks of inactivity on this weblog (but not on my other weblogs! check Dutch Sakai, or Twente Open Source Standaarden), I thought I should revitalize it. And since this is the end of the year 2006, I sounded good to me to start with a little reflecting.

So I started with reading what I wrote about when I started this weblog (is that sentence correct?).

1. I wrote about TagCloud, back in July 2005. Well, TagCloud is sleeping right now. Very sad to see actually, that the initiators of a trend, cannot keep up. I hope they will be back.
2. I also wrote about clustering del.icio.us bookmarks. This service has also died.
3. Back then I also wrote about Elgg. They are still alive and kicking! Which is good. I really like Elgg.
4. And then something really interesting. I wrote about weblogs at Leiden University. At that time there were "(..) 8 staff and 5 students actively maintaining a weblog. There is one so-called 'onderwijsweblog' and 8 groupweblogs". And now, in December 2006, 17 months later? Well, check for yourself. I am counting 10 staff weblogs, (only) 8 students that maintain a weblog. And there are now 14 group weblogs. I would not call this a success! Do you? It might be that people use other platforms. Like Hyves, or MSN Spaces, or Blogger, or Wordpress. Well, actually I think that we would be finding lots more weblogs than on the 'official' platform.

For all my readers, I am wishing you Happy Holidays! See you in 2007!

Going to Atlanta!

atlantaoverview,
originally uploaded by wytze.

Next week I will be attending the 6th Sakai conference, which is being held in Atlanta, Georgia (USA). All details are on http://www.sakaiproject.org/conference. It will remain quiet on this weblog for a while, due to this visit (please expect me to be back around December 12, 2006)
For 'live' coverage of t he conference you should go to http://sakai-nl.blogspot.com

My blogprofile

blogprofile,
originally uploaded by wytze.

Lilia Efimova has a great weblog. She is working in The Netherlands, but she is "(..) Russian. So far I work in the Netherlands, but one day will go back. I like this "between two countries" dimension of my life: it gives richer perspective on everything I’m doing." Just take some time to fill in your own blogprofile at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/17.html. I found it rather straightforward. It is a great way to sort of evaluate your weblog and to give Lilia some input for her research.
Thankyou for Scott Wilson, for pointing to this.

Are there open educational resources (OER) at your institution?

David Wiley (from the US) has a very comprehensive website, including a weblog (ofcourse!) on open educational resources (or OER in short). His blog is called iterating toward openness. David compares the current situation of OER with a university website: "Can you imagine being asked to calculate the ROI of a university website? Can you imagine what your perception of a university that didn’t have a website would be? OER projects like OCWs have to rise to the status of “website” - they have to become absolutely core, I-can’t-imagine-a-university-without-one." So, in a few *10?* years time, we will not ask ourselves anymore why we need OER. We just offer them to the outside world! I really hope so.