e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: From the Editors

These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.

  • Creative Commons and Learning Objects

    I just added a Creative Commons license to e-Literate. While I have always been supportive of open content, I didn’t really get how immediately important it is for higher education until I started helping my significant other start searching for ESL teaching resources on the Maricopa Learning Exchange (MLX). For those who don’t know, MLX is a Learning Object Repository–a place where teachers can share content that they have created and/or discovered that is useful for teaching.

    One of the objects that we found was a small site that a professor had created which linked to a whole bunch of external resources. Great. The trouble is that Kathy (my significant other) is teaching a non-online class and, since it’s her first semester at the urban community college where she is about to start work, she doesn’t know what computer access is like for her students. So she has to print out the resources that she finds. Unfortunately, many of the great resources linked from the web site have no published copyright policy (although many of them have copyright notices). So in order to (ethically and legally) use the content, she has to email each web site owner and ask permission. Needless to say, this could turn out to be an arduous task.

    That’s why I have added the “Creative Commons License” badge on the sidebar, which links to a simple explanation of what rights I grant for content re-use. This will apply to all content on this site, including the longer articles that I intend to eventually write and include here.

  • Categories, Themes, and Memes

    After giving it a little more thought, I have decided to use the term “site themes” instead of categories. The latter implies (to me, at least) that each post will be put in one and only one category, which is not at all how I have organized the site. “Themes” seems a little more flexible and inclusive.

    I’d love to see a tool that supports a lower-level clustering of posts for capturing memes. For example, I write about the idea of blogging as parallel play here, here, and here. It would be nice if there were some easy way to cluster those posts for my readers.

    I envision a second screen in the post submission page flow that would do this job. After you submit a post, the blogging software would scan it for permalinks to previous posts within your blog as well as similar text strings in the title. If it finds any, it would ask you if you would like to tie the posts together in a meme or, if one or more of the other posts is already labeled as belonging to one or memes, give you the option of associating the new post with the existing meme. So, for example, if I wrote a post called “Parallel Play Grows Up, Part III” and clicked the “submit” button, my blog software would show me the previous parallel play posts and give me a check box to select if I want to add this one to the “Blogging as Parallel Play” meme. (Optionally, it could also allow me to link in trackbacks and comments.) Then I could generate a “meme” list in my sidebar. Users interested in reading the meme would be able to click on a link that shows only the meme-related posts in reverse-chronological order.

    If any EE hackers are out there reading this, my birthday is August 9th…

  • Categories Are Up; Arranging Ideas

    OK, the categories are in place; you can now see only the entries for a particular category by clicking on the appopriate title in the sidebar. Luckily, the RSS didn’t change the edit dates on the feed so nobody got a feed reader full of old posts just because I mucked around with the categories.

    I think that most of the category titles are relatively self-explanatory, with one exception. I was going to call my classic KMish category “finding stuff,” since that seems to be what most of my KM posts that are not about blogging or community-ish stuff tend to be about. However, in homage to Amy Gahran’s excellent post about putting KM in human terms (found courtesy of elearningpost), I have decided to name the category (you guessed it) “Arranging Ideas.” It’s a bit broader and deeper than “Finding Stuff,” if also a bit less obvious.

  • KM as Tracks in the Mud

    When I was a tourguide at Rutgers (part of my undergrad experience), I learned an interesting (though possibly apocryphal) story about how the sidewalks were planned on the Livingston College campus. Apparently, the university deliberately refrained from putting down any sidewalks for the first several years. (For those who don’t know Livingston College, there are no roads inside the campus; hence there are no obvious paths for sidewalks.) Instead, the planners waited to see where students wore tracks in the mud from their frequent comings and goings. They then laid sidewalk in a pattern that closely resembled those student-created paths.

    I often think of KM the same way. More often than not, the goal is not so much to figure out how people should or would use knowledge as it is how they do use it. Once we have figured out how people think then we can lay the sidewalk and save them the energy of slogging through the mud every time.

    Which brings me to the e-Literate web site. (more…)

  • RSS fixed

    Your RSS and Atom feeds should now include HTML-formatted text that shows you the first 75 words of each entry. (If anybody has an Atom feed reader out there and could confirm for me that the Atom feed is working properly, I’d be grateful.) Thanks to all my readers (both of you) for your patience and many, many thanks toJoe Lapp for the EE plug-in that makes this work.

  • Continuing RSS Trouble

    Again, apologies to those who are trying to read my unformatted RSS feed. There’s a problem with the way EE handles the templates and my PHP skills aren’t up to fixing it. Also try as I might, I cannot find any clean way of fudging a decent division through writing style that will serve equally well for the web and the feeds without significant of extra work on each post (which kinda puts a major damper on the blogging impulse). Luckily, X-Path developer/hero and EE user Joe Lapp is working on modifying a plug-in he wrote for EE to work with the RSS templates in the near future. This is the right fix, it will be a permanent fix, and it will be a retroactive fix, so I’m going to ask those very few people who may have subscribed to my RSS feed already to be patient a little while longer until I have the new plug-in to fix the problem. Go Joe!

  • HTML-in-RSS Challenges

    My apologies to those of you who have been getting my content by RSS feed; I’m aware that you have been receiving unformatted paragraphs smushed together in one long graph. This is a problem with Expression Engine’s RSS generation template. Basically, in order to use HTML in an RSS feed you have to specifically escape out to it. There’s some debate on whether this is a good idea, but most of the feeds to which I subscribe do it because they can put bullet points, URLs, etc., directly into their feeds. I like this because it means I can easily read the whole post without having to visit the web site itself; all of the info comes to me. Failing that, I like to have an elipse at the end of the last sentence of the feed entry to let me know that the the thought continues on the web page…