e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • The Obligatory Folksonomy Post

    Commenting on a recent post, Beth Harris asks the question of how the tagging system in Flickr could be used for teaching purposes. (Beth, a fellow SUNY-ite working at FIT, is doing some cool stuff with her art history classes using Flickr.) After thinking about it for a bit, I’m afraid the answer I come up with is “Not much; at least, not in its current form.”

    Given the huge buzz about folksonomies now, (which I have previously called distributed categorization), this is a disappointing discovery.

    What gives?

    Here’s my own take it: (more…)

  • Lean Clients, Plump Clients, and Chubby Clients for Learning Management Systems

    As I mentioned in a previous post the SUNY Learning Network currently uses a home-grown learning management system built on top of Lotus Notes. And while there is a web interface to the system, many of the current users are quite attached to their fat client.

    This may sound quaintly outdated at the moment. However, I strongly suspect that we’ll see fat(ter) LMS clients in the near future. There are some wonderful affordances that come with a more robust client-side component to the system. Up until now, those affordances have come with the relatively steep price of having to develop, install and maintain fairly heavy-duty (and often cross-platform) client-side software. But that’s changing. These days, the browser and the operating system themselves are increasingly able to function as client-side platforms for richer functionality. Add to this the blossoming of web services and the small, simple client-side tools that they enable, and we have the potential for what I would call “lean clients,” “plump clients” and “chubby clients.” (more…)

  • Some SUNY Trivia

    Here are some interesting facts about my new employer:

    • The total number of students, 413,000, is pretty close to the total poplulation of the European country Luxembourg, making SUNY the largest state university system in the country.
    • That 413,000-person student body includes 40 percent of all New York State high school graduates and roughly 37 percent of the state’s entire higher education student population.
    • Despite the fact that New York has one of the highest costs of living in the Union, SUNY has the 13th cheapest cost of state university tuition, i.e., 37 out of 50 state universities are more expensive than SUNY.
    • The per-pupil cost of education exceeds in-state tuition, which means that the New York state taxpayers partially subsidize the education of every in-state student.
    • One of the reasons that it’s worthwhile for New York state taxpayers to subsidize SUNY education is because, for every state dollar received, SUNY generates $8 in total spending in NYS. For example, SUNY estimates that it had a $17.6 billion total economic impact in 2003.

    Pretty impressive, huh?

  • Don't Use Bloglines

    I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to post this, but it seems to be my only recourse at this point.

    Apparently, the Bloglines aggregator stopped updating my feed several months ago. I had no idea that this was happening; nor did my readers who subscribe through Bloglines. As far as they knew, I just wasn’t posting. Lucky for me, Amy Gahran decided to check my site after six weeks of silence and discovered that my site had indeed been updated. Once she alerted me of the problem, I emailed Bloglines immediately and got a “we’re looking into it” response within a couple of hours. A few days later, I checked the feed and thought it had been fixed. But I was mistaken; it still wasn’t updated. I have poked the Bloglines customer service email address a couple of more times over a period of several weeks, but they have never again responded to me; nor have they fixed the problem. A week ago, I sent them an email asking them to at least notify my Bloglines feed subscribers that the feed was down. Again, no response.

    Now, it’s bad enough that there has been a silent failure for several months that might never have been discovered. It’s worse that customer service is totally out to lunch. But worst of all is that I have no idea if e-Literate is the only broken feed. I suspect that it isn’t. For all we know, there could be silent failures happening all across the Bloglines service.

    I was seriously thinking about using Bloglines for my Windows machine, but I have concluded that I just can’t trust it. One broken feed from a site is bad enough. But I’d have no way of knowing if even dozens of my feeds were silently failing through their centralized system. Until they can provide substantially better assurances regarding quality and consistency of service, I’m afraid I’m going to have to recommend to people that they avoid using Bloglines.

  • And the winner is…

    …pretty much everyone.

    No, e-Literate did not win in either of the categories for which it was nominated in the 2004 Edublogger Awards. But it’s hard to feel bad about it, given the quality of the contestants and the number of great new blogs I discovered through this contest.

    Take, for example, the blog that won in the “Best Designed and Most Beautiful” category. Now, I might have had a shot if the category had been “Best Information Architecture and Design.” I dunno. But Blaugustine is simply the most beautiful weblog I’ve seen. It’s a work of art.

    And then there’s “Best Newcomer (2004).” Chasing the Dragon’s Tail is a delight. It’s thought-provoking, entertainingly written, and focused on an extremely important topic, i.e., the digital divide.

    If you haven’t made your way over to the awards site and checked out the various contestants, I urge you to do so. Kudos to Alex Halavais and James Farmer for respectively inspiring and bringing to fruition this valuable and rewarding exercise.

  • Sakai Updates

    Mike Kruckenberg has posted several updates from the Sakai Winter 2004 Conference:

    (more…)

  • The Intractable Problem of Informational Cascades

    Stephen Downes’ new column on e-Learn does a great job of showing that solving the informational cascade problem is more challenging than I had presented it to be in my own article on the topic. In fact, his own analysis reveals that the problem may be harder to solve than even he himself suggests. The problem, as is often the case, is largely due to those pesky externalities, i.e., reality stubbornly refuses to conform to an elegant theory (and alas, Stephen is even more of a sucker for an elegant theory than I am). (more…)