Updated: 24/9/05; 10:34:34

David Davies' Radio Weblog

 Friday, May 31, 2002

Searchable RSS portal

I'm building a list of medicine and educational RSS news feeds. Medical education is one of my fields of interest. I have a modest list at present and I'm looking for more. If you know of any more would you let me know? The feeds that I have are searchable so a potentially large amount of RSS data can be filtered.

Click here to visit my searchable RSS feeds service.

If anyone is interested in this as a web service you can embed a list of news items filtered according to your own interests by pasting the following web service macro into your weblog:

<%["xmlrpc://147.188.64.44:5335/RPC2"].newsfeeds ("keyword")%>

where 'keyword' is whatever you are interested in e.g.

<%["xmlrpc://147.188.64.44:5335/RPC2"].newsfeeds ("learning")%>

will give you the following:

rdhyee News

  1. Lots of travel in September and October
    I'll be traveling at lot in September and October, speaking at a number of conferences:
    • NISO Metasearch and OpenURL workshop (September 19-21, 2005, Washington, DC)

      Integrating Metasearch with e-Learning

      Various strategies for integrating e-learning and metasearch systems will be described, drawing from the speaker's experiences of combining data and services from ExLibris' MetaLib X-Server, Sakai, the Firefox browser, and the Scholar's Box.

    • Open Education Conference: Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference (Sept 28-30, Logan, UT)

      Towards remixing any content from any source with any service: lowering the barrier to use of content in open education

      As the amount of open content continues to grow, the need for tools that allow users to interact with this content will also grow. The Scholar's Box is a one such tool that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. Using the Scholar’s Box as a primary example, the talk will outline the many possibilities and challenges that face designers of tools for remixing content with services.

    • LITA National Forum 2005 (October 1, 2005, San Jose, CA)

      Breaking Out of the Box: Creating Customized Metasearch Services Using an XML API (co-presented with Michael McKenna, Roy Tennant, and David Walker)

      In addition to its own standard interface, Metalib, one of the premiere federated search systems used by libraries today, provides an XML-based API known as the X-Server. Little known and rarely used, the X-Server nevertheless offers libraries the ability to create highly customized metasearch systems and portals, ultimately producing more usable and powerful research tools. This session will include a brief introduction to the X-Server and showcase implementations at the California Digital Library, the Interactive University Project at UC Berkeley, and Cal State San Marcos.

    • Small Tools, Big Ideas (a conference on the discipline-specific technologies reshaping the practice of teaching art and art history) (October 7, 2005, New York City)

      Scholar's Box

      The Scholar's Box is a tool being developed at UC Berkeley that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. It is designed to connect domains that are of particular importance to educational users: digital libraries, educational technology, social software tool, desktop content authoring. The fundamental conviction behind the Scholar's Box is that teachers, artists, and researchers -- as part of their creative process -- should have easy-to-use tools that let them remix any digital content from any source with any software service. This talk will demonstrate how the Scholar's Box can be used to support the teaching of art and art history by allowing scholars to create annotated and reusable sets of images drawn from diverse sources. The sources will range from brand name institutional repositories to personal image services such Flickr to the Web at large.

  2. an educause e-book on the "Net Generation"

    EDUCAUSE | Resources | Educating the Net Generation:

      The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised—one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up.

    I've thought myself as of being part of the "net generation" and so believe myself to know in my gut how "Net Gen students" are like. That attitude is probably folly on my part, so it would be useful at some point for me to read this online book as a corrective to my own understandings of the next generation of students.

CETIS: Standards in Education Technology

  1. New CETIS briefings available
    The ever-popular series of CETIS briefings on e-learning standards just received two new additions, two major updates, and some tweaking on others.
Posted 5:09:18 PM - comment []
 Friday, May 17, 2002

As many people know, I'm interested in sharing ideas for the use of Frontier, Manila and Radio in educational settings. Along with others I've got a number of tools that I use to extend Manila for teaching and learning purposes. I'd like to invite anyone who's interested to join the following web site and have a look at my question/test plugin for Manila.

http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/collaboration/

The plugin can be used to generate and administer multiple choice questions (MCQs). The system is also IMS QTI compliant, though for this first release I've concentrated on QTI Lite compliance. It's in the early stages though it appears to work. My job over the weekend is to write some documentation.

I'm looking for some beta testers so please feel free to try it out and let me know how you get on. Use the 'Discuss' link to join in the discussion.

Posted 4:35:09 PM - comment []
 Thursday, May 16, 2002

Hmm, what do you make of this? Paste the following into a weblog post:

<%["xmlrpc://medweb3.bham.ac.uk/RPC2"].mcq.service.get ("1")%>

Airflow through the lungs...
A. increases from the trachea to the alveoli as total surface area increases.
B. increases from the trachea to the alveoli as total surface area decreases
C. decreases from the trachea to the alveoli as total surface area increases
D. decreases from the trachea to the alveoli as total surface area decreases

Posted 12:46:56 AM - comment []
 Wednesday, May 15, 2002

Want to be able to email to categories in your blog?

Here's a small script to allow you to do so. Download it, open it from within Radio (it'll know where it wants to be installed) then try emailing your blog. Make sure that the first line of your email message matches one of your category names. This category name should be on a line on its own in your email message. For example:

My Friends
Hello to all my friends!

The category name as it appears in your email message is not case sensitive. Useful if you're a lazy typist like me.

Let me know if it works for you.

Posted 11:02:16 PM - comment []
 Monday, May 6, 2002

AssetManager tool bug fix: Thanks to Rod Kratochwill I've caught a bug in the AssetManager tool that resulted in some of Radio's template images being incorporated into your picture gallery. Please refresh the code for this tool (you should get v0.981) to fix this. Once you've got the new code re-create your picture gallery using the menu Tools -> AssetManager -> Refresh Picture Gallery.
Posted 12:31:31 AM - comment []