David Davies' Weblog

Is the context of a post to a web site important? When you read something from the web how important is the source, other material on the same site, the look-and-feel of the site even? When reading items gathered by an RSS news aggregator much of this context is lost. True, other posts collected in the same RSS feed (most often from the same site) can provide congruity but it's not uncommon for RSS feeds from weblogs for example to contain incongruent posts. A post on the state of world politics in between posts on a favourite pop song or what someone had to eat the night before would not be out of place on many weblogs. Now add to this RSS feed snippets or extracts from other weblogs, again a common practice on many weblogs, and very quickly you have a mix of decontextualized data where the original source isn't always apparent.

An interesting example of RSS decontextualization is doing the rounds in some aggregators this week. On Wednesday 25th Feb Mark Schalofski of the HACT website posted a spoof article 'revealing' that the Orkut online community web service was in fact a data gathering exercise for a masters thesis. Orkut's registered users had been duped into unwittingly providing the site's creators with valuable data on the social habits of netizens. This is of course false although a disclaimer at the foot of the original HACT article proclaims "except in that it rings true in a scary way". Who knows, Schalofski may have accidentally exposed the secret truth behind the Orkut phenomena but for now that's not the point. The real point behind this is that already I've seen items in my RSS reader that have picked up on the HACT piece by reading other web sites, and by a kind of Internet Chinese whispers the HACT piece has transformed into truth. Without the context of the original piece, the meaning has changed or at least people's interpretation of it has. It'll be interesting to see how far this HACT meme about Orkut travels. In fact as an experiment in the transfer of information through social networks it'd be interesting to deliberately start spreading false information. Only the naive would refuse to believe that this doesn't happen all the time anyway. Indeed, why do you believe what you read?

Any Internet publishing technology is susceptible to misinterpretation due to decontextualization but as weblogs and RSS news aggregators become ever more popular these kinds of contextual mistakes are likely to increase. The veracity of certain weblogs will doubtless increase due to authoritative reporting until they transform into well-used sources of information. Just like the situation we have now with more traditional print media. The rest of use will be participant in an unedited free for all where anything written or read must be taken on trust, precisely the situation we have now.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The UKeU is being 'restructured'. After a fairly massive investment of cash (£62m) the UK's flagship higher education e-learning venture had enrolled a total of 900 students. Not surprisingly the UKeU has found stiff competition from conventional universities who are also offering their own e-learning courses. Well what did they expect?

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) is now intending to refocus on "the development of e-learning in universities and colleges".

UKeU reportedly spent £10 million on developing their learning environment.

I've been using Apple's Safari web browser since it first became publicly available. So how come only tonight I spotted the Activity window? How long has this feature been in Safari? It's incredibly useful. It lists all the components of a web page during and after a page is rendered. You can use the list of a page's objects to see where all the objects are stored (i.e on which web server – a feature useful when designing or debugging weblog templates for example) allowing you to troubleshoot slowly downloading objects. We've all seen web pages, particularly weblog pages, seemingly take ages to finish downloading, even after all the apparently visible objects have rendered. Well using Safari's Activity window you can see exactly what's going on. What's more, once a page has fully downloaded and rendered you can see that object's size (another useful feature when constructing bandwidth-conscious web pages) plus double-clicking on any object in the Activity window to open that object in its own window, or download it to disk. A very handy feature. Surprisingly Apple doesn't mention the Activity window on its own Safari web page. Anyway, now you know.

Given sufficient time (but let's be realistic - it ain't ever going to happen) I'd like to have commented on the following topics:

• Why Orkut Doesn't Work

Following interesting pieces on the Corante weblog and in Wired I would have liked to comment on the trend for social networking services, and why ultimately most will fail because they're networking the wrong people.

• More about iTagg

A follow up to my earlier piece about this new service involving mobile phone shortcuts, automated text response & data gathering and premium-rate text messaging.

• RELOAD

This learning object editor, content packager and SCORM player goes from strength to strength.

• The Internet as physician

A recent article in the British Medical Journal evaluates the efficacy of two Internet interventions for community-dwelling individuals with symptoms of depression. The results? Web sites that provided cognitive behaviour therapy were more effective than a control intervention in reducing symptoms of depression. Reason enough to keep on reading weblogs then.

• ePortfolios

An interesting community project on creating electronic learning portfolios by Chandler-Gilbert Community College. This site is interesting because the portfolios are reflective learning tools rather than the more common but less interesting performance achievement portfolios.

Hey, what do you know, Mark Forster's advice really does work. I feel my blogging blockage shifting.

I expect many of you have experienced blogger's block, so I'd welcome any suggestions for getting unblocked. Lately I've been collecting ideas for blog posts and have now reached a point where I don't know where to start. It's fair to say that I've spent more time thinking about blogging than writing. I guess this is fairly typical procrastination. Thankfully there are tricks for overcoming it but I'd particularly welcome the thoughts of fellow bloggers who've bounced back from the block.

The JISC is hoping to provide a learning materials repository service to all FE and HE institutions in the UK. As part of this the JORUM+ project has been funded to:

1. investigate the user requirements for the national repository service by December 2003
2. support a JISC research programme called Exchange for Learning (X4L) into re-use of learning materials until July 2005

The JORUM Scoping and Technical Appraisal Study has now been published and includes recommendations for how this national repository should work. The lengthy report makes interesting reading and while the recommendations are too numerous to mention here, there's good news for RSS fans: "Implementation of RSS to allow alerts to be sent to relevant applications such as the L&T Portal whenever metadata is changed, so that the record can be automatically harvested"

The report mentions Scott Leslie's RSS-enabled repositories web page and so mentions the RSS learning object syndication offered by yours truly. With a bit of luck and a little bit of vision RSS may figure in the JISC/JORUM repository.

The initial stages of the JORUM+ project used the IntraLibrary product from Intrallect and Xtensis from XOR eLearning Ltd. As far as I know it's not yet been announced which vendor(s) will be involved in the next phase of repository development.

Should a well implemented metadata system be transparent to the user? An obvious question perhaps but a valid one nonetheless and depending upon the context the answer might not be as obvious as you may think.

Metadata is all around us yet how aware are we of its existence? An example. Most of us use Google at some point to search for pages on the web. Google uses metadata, quite a bit of it in fact yet most is not obviously apparent to us, at least not as metadata per se. There's a web page's title, metadata of a kind though you might rightly argue that's part of the page's data rather than metadata. More obvious metadata for any given page might include the date the page was last modified (available via the web server's page cache), the language, mime type (not all objects on the web are HTML web pages; think pictures, video, PDFs, etc.) and a few other bits of information. A web page's URL is also metadata, and that's quite an important part of searching Google, not least because Google creates its own metadata about a web page used to compile its PageRank. All these metadata are used to construct your search results when you search Google. Thankfully you can be blissfully unaware of their existence and still get pretty authoritative results. However, awareness of Google metadata can help you perform more focused searches but generally most of us are happy with the results we get when using the familiar single, simple search box.

Then there's learning object metadata. How aware are we of that, and indeed my main question, how aware should we be? The current learning object metadata specification from the IEEE weighs in around 69 metadata fields, that is 69 boxes in which something could be entered to describe a learning object. Let me say at the outset that you don't have to enter anything into any of these fields, they're not mandatory. But of course if a metadata system is to be of any use you'd have to use at least some of these fields otherwise what's the point. And it's a given that some metadata is essential for resource discovery and reuse, and therefore standardization in what those metadata are is essential. However, depending upon what your learning object is, some IEEE LOM fields will be more useful than others at describing your object. Some groups are working hard at helping to create a consensus as to what are the core fields that a learning object could use to aid resource discovery and reuse.

There's clearly an overhead associated with creating metadata as any data that can't be automatically gleaned from the object itself or created by the system a la Google has to be added by someone. Consequently there must also be a trade-off between the utility of metadata vs the cost of adding metadata. At one extreme no metadata is probably not going to be very helpful (and actually quite difficult to achieve given the inherent metadata surrounding any object placed on the web - see above). At the other extreme a comprehensively completed IEEE LOM record is likely to be too costly for many objects. As a result of this trade-off one of the hot topics in e-learning is trying to identify where the balance is, recognising that it's probably going to be different depending upon the context.

So, back to the question. Should a well implemented metadata system be transparent to the user? And a supplementary question, how can we as learners use this metadata to enhance our learning experience beyond that which was possible before the creation of the IEEE LOM?

Are there any really effective implementations of metadata e.g. the IEEE LOM in learning management systems that are transparent to the user yet sufficiently useful to justify the effort that went into creating them? And the $64,000 question, are these implementations used, and if so how, by whom and to what effect?

Finally just about set up with my new host. I chose Startlogic because the reviews I read of their service highly recommended them. They have almost 100% up-time and offer 1Gb web space with 40Gb per month transfer for only $7.50 per month. Web hosting doesn't come much cheaper than that for the level of service offered. A bargain. Their service comes with a very neat virtual control panel making it a cinch to set your services up. And what an array of services, web, email, FTP, PHP, MySQL, PHPbbs, FormMail, e-commerce inc. a PayPal cart and built-in image galleries. Oh and they throw in Blogger too but I'm happy to stick with Radio Userland. The icing on the cake are the reports that Startlogic automatically generate. You can probably tell I'm very happy with my new host. I can highly recommend them.

I'm changing the hosting server for this weblog so there will probably be a few temporary outages and broken links during the move. My new address:

http://david.davies.name

This has got to be the most pointless article the BBC has published about the recent Mars missions and space exploration in general. Patrick Stewart, the actor that plays Captain Jean-Luc Picard in TV's Star Trek has allegedly said in an interview that he did not believe the human race was ready to begin thinking about beaming down on other planets. Well duh!

"I'm a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the whole business of space travel,"

"As I get older my unease at the time and the money that has to be spent on projects putting human beings back to the moon, and on to another planet, is so enormous," he said.

Do you suppose that they think he really is the captain of a space ship and therefore has an informed opinion on the value of space travel? He's an actor! This doesn't give him any particularly special insight into the value of space exploration for the human race. Unless... what, you mean, Star Trek isn't real?

Now if they'd have asked the actor who played Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, I'm sure he'd have a different opinion about the value of colonising other planets.

Give me a break!

iTAGG are opening their doors on the 9th Feb and will be accepting mobile domain name registrations. Ok, maybe not quite strictly domain names in the accepted sense but their new service aims to make it easier to contact people using mobile devices. The idea behind the company is as follows. let's say i register a mobile domain name with iTAGG, for example 'david'. You then send a text message to the iTAGG short access number quoting my domain name. By return the iTAGG server will automatically send you any text that I pre-configure using my account. For example, I could pre-configure my account to always return my contact details whenever you 'finger' me at iTAGG. Alternatively I might pre-configure instructions for meeting so whenever anyone sends my domain name 'david' to iTAGG they get my instructions.

Nice idea. Except, there are probably alternative methods of achieving the same result. It was no coincidence that I used the verb 'fingered' above. Back in the good old days of the Internet the Finger protocol essentially did the same thing. Is anyone still using Finger?

I'd also question why I'd need to register an iTAGG mobile domain name to get this kind of functionality. For a start this is a proprietary commercial service. Are iTAGG's mobile domain names likely to achieve proper domain name status? Well we'll see but don't count on it. Also, I already have a unique mobile domain name. I call it my mobile number. The nice thing about my mobile number is that there are already well-established mechanisms to ensure that my number is unique. Although iTAGG will guarantee you a unique 'domain name', rival companies (if they ever emerge) will be under no obligation to adopt an interoperable naming convention. Sure, iTAGG domain names are easier to remember than numbers, right? Maybe. Once all the cool and obvious names have been registered you'll be stuck with the Hotmail username scenario (yes, I'll probably end up being david-davies834. And not to mention that you'll also have to remember iTAGG's short access number to make the system work at all. So with iTAGG you'll have to remember both my domain name and the access number.

iTAGG have a nice idea and I'm sure many will use it. However, as smart phones get more popular then why not use that other unique identifier we all posses, an email address. Just send me an email and I'll give you my contact details or send you instructions for meeting up. That is of course if you can make your email stand out from amongst all those Mydoom messages.

Scott Leslie has updated his list of learning object repositories that offer RSS feeds of their items. Nice work Scott. I particularly liked the collapsible headlines (once I figured out they were there: click the minus sign in the box at the right of the headlines in blue).