Monthly Archives: February 2005

Utilizing RSS enclosures

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File enclosures have been a part of RSS since version 2.0, but have only recently come to everyone’s attention with the emergence of podcasting. Most people now associate RSS attachments with MP3 files, but there’s no reason to restrict the attachments to audio files. For example, Fraser Speirs recently coined the term “appcasting” to refer to the practice of using RSS enclosures to deliver software updates or release notes for applications.

My favorite RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire, already supports enclosures of any type and automatically downloads them. I’ve been planning to include the free “Lite” version of NetNewsWire on the student laptops in our 1-to-1 project next year, and now I’m thinking that RSS enclosures would make it really easy for teachers to distribute files to their students. A teacher could post lecture notes, multimedia content, or any other kind of electronic document and let each student’s RSS reader take care of the rest. Similarly, school principals could use RSS to distribute newsletters or other materials to parents who are subscribed to a school’s news feed. RSS: it’s not just for text anymore.

Off to Dallas

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Blog posting is one of the things that gets put on hold when I’m sick. Luckily I’ve rejoined the world of the living just in time to get on a plane this afternoon to Dallas where I will be joining a small group for a tour of the Plano Independent School District tomorrow. The trip is sponsored by the WIN-WIN Strategies Foundation which contacted me following the Wall St. Journal article that came out about a month ago. I will be meeting some other educational technologists from around the country and talking with some of the folks in the Plano schools who are doing some really great work. I’ll post more when I know more.

Thinking about the semantic Web

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I saw a mention of mSpace on Slashdot today and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. My brain has been stewing for several weeks now trying to figure out a way that our Hopkins teachers could share the lesson plans that they’ve created with the rest of the staff. I’ve looked at some online curriculum mapping products that advertise their ability to drill all the way down to individual lesson plans. (More posts on that later.) And just yesterday I saw a demo of the Infinite Campus student information system that purports to support sharing (or at least storage) of teacher lesson plans. None of these products have me convinced yet.

mSpace seems like a totally different approach that is worth a look. I’ve already downloaded the 97-page technical report and will start reading that later, but the abstract gives me hope:

The mSpace interaction model describes a method of easily representing meaningful slices through these multidimensional spaces. This paper describes the design and creation of a system that implements the mSpace interaction model in a fashion that allows it to be applied across almost any set of RDF data with minimal reconfiguration. The system has no requirement for ontological support, but can make use of it if available. This allows the visualisation of existing non-semantic data with minimal cost, without sacrificing the ability to utilise the power that semantically-enabled data can provide.

I’m not going to lie and say that I understand all of this stuff. But I understand the problem I’m facing. I want teachers to be able to create lessons that might involve all sorts of media and make those available for searching for their colleagues who may want to search by subject, academic standard, or some other characteristic. Looks like I’ve got some light reading for tonight.

Minneapolis a top tech city?

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According to the current issue of Popular Science my fair city of Minneapolis is the nation’s “Top Tech City.”

What made Minneapolis our high-tech champ? It ranked first among U.S. cities in innovative transportation solutions, fourth in energy technology. The city fell above the 50th percentile in every category measured, a broad-based showing of tech savvy that set it apart from the competition. With everything averaged together, there is no city in America where a culture of high technology has a more pervasive presence.

I’m a little surprised. With the exception of our glitzy new light rail line, the public transportation system here is average at best. The examples cited in the article seem a bit trivial. Maybe I’m just too close to it to appreciate it.

Online surveys made easy

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I got back from Rochester tonight following a couple days of work with about 50 educators from southeast Minnesota. I had a great time and I’m looking forward to continued discussions with the groups as they pursue their technology integration and school improvement goals. My colleague Corey Lunn and I shared some resources that we’ve used in our own work, and I promised to post some links here. I’ll start with the online survey tools.

Online surveys are great tools for a broad range of applications. From a community-wide questionnaire about a proposed school board policy to a quick survey of the teaching staff by a principal, online surveys make it easy to collect and analyze data. I’m familiar with three different survey tools: Zoomerang, KeySurvey, and phpESP. Choosing the right tool for the job requires careful consideration of its intended uses, the technical skills of your IT staff, and your budget.

You can test the online survey waters easily by trying the free version of Zoomerang. It’s limited in the number of respondents and questions per survey and, most importantly, you can’t export the results for further analysis. You can see simple bar graphs and charts online though and that will probably do the job most of the time. You’ll have to step up to the paid version for serious surveying work.

KeySurvey is what we’re using in Hopkins this year. It’s not as cheap as Zoomerang, but it has nearly every bell and whistle. You can create very complex surveys with conditional branching. (In other words, the users may get different questions depending on how they answer other questions.) The analysis tools are very advanced. You can do cross-tabulations on the Web and export all of the data in CSV, direct to Excel, and even SPSS.

Finally, there’s phpESP. If you’ve got a Web server that can run PHP and MySQL, you’ve got all you need. It’s open source and free so there’s little reason not to give it a try. It’s got all the standard survey question types and can export the results in CSV format for easy importing into the analysis tool of your choice.

We use online surveys to collect data from students and parents during each content area’s curriculum review process. I’ve had good luck using the surveys for staff development evaluations too. Are you using an online survey tool? Leave a comment and tell me how you’re using it.

New mail and calendar project from Novell

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We don’t run Exchange in my district, and nothing we’ve seen makes our email admin eager to give it a try. We’re also a cross-platform district which makes finding an email and calendaring solution that works equally well for everyone quite a challenge. As of today, and thanks to the fine folks at Novell who’ve found religion in Linux, there’s another option to investigate. Hula is an open source and open standards-based calendar and mail server. From Novell employee Nat Friedman’s blog:

Our direction is distinct from other open source collaboration server projects in that we’re not trying to build every conceivable bit of functionality that someone might consider “collaboration” into the server. Instead, we are focused on building great calendar and mail functionality. The dominant collaboration solutions today (Exchange and Notes) are built on a pre-Internet design and are just no fun to use for real people who live on the web, who collaborate across organizational boundaries (or who don’t have organizational boundaries to worry about), who want light-weight tools and URLs for their meetings and their appointments on their cell phone and so on.

This sounds interesting.

We want to build a real web-based calendar: to make it trivially easy to publish a calendar, to invite anyone with an email address to an an appointment and process their RSVPs, to get to your calendar via HTML or RSS or with an instant messenger or with SMS.

Also interesting is the Hula team’s decision to use a wiki for their Web site. Will the site blow up from wiki spam or will the user community collaborate on the site in cool ways?

Working with ISTE in Rochester

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I’m in Rochester today and tomorrow working as a mentor with teams of technology leaders from school districts here in southeast Minnesota. According to the ISTE Institute Web site, I’m an “expert mentor” who will be helping the teams put the NETS to work in their schools. The participants will be planning action research projects that will be completed between now and July when we will all reconvene. It’s always fun to work with people who are passionate about teaching, learning, and technology.