This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Valid RSS
I got a little worried after reading about the dangers of invalid RSS, sure enough the main feed on this blog is invalid. Well, between you and me I am really sick of using Blosxom for blogging anyway, and I may need to change a few things around here.
The good news is that linkwalla's RSS validates beautifully. There were some around encoding URLS, but that's all in the past.
del.icio.us wonkiness
cogdogblog on the wonkiness of del.icio.us. It's driving me crazy, too. Especially since I use the delicious API in linkwalla.
At the social computing session at Sakai Austin, there were many calls to just use del.icio.us and flickr and google rather than developing open source software we can run on our campuses. These problems with del.icio.us really highlight to me some of the risk in deciding to just rely on some companies free services for classroom education. Classes run on a tight schedule, and sudden shift in the availablity of a service can really throw things off.
Tags: delicious edtech sakaiaustin05
Linkwalla, Ajax edition
I have release Linkwalla 0.8.5. This version adds some Ajax to linkwalla, so you can browse through the archives on the linkwalla home page without ever leaving the homepage. Despite introducing the giant buzzword Ajax to linkwalla, it isn't a major change in functionality, it just makes the UI a little more fun and pleasing.
The more I do the bigger the list of things i'd like to gets.
My Linkwalla todo list
Major
- Create a Unique URL for each link entry (a permalink for your link + description)
- Add, edit and delete inline
- An installation script gives the XML files the right permission, prompts for linkwalla and delicious passwords, etc.
- Search for links
- Tagging
- Create a linkwalla website
Minor
- Have an error message appear if the XML file is not writeable. currently it's just that nothing happens.
- Create an if statement so that if there is no delicious username entered, the option for delicios links isn't there
- Make the layoout of the links less of a table and more like blog entries
- Search through files to prune unused CSS classes and IDs
Openness by department at MIT
This semester is the first semester when everyone who requested a Stellar class website had to choose whether to limit access to the students in their course, or let anyone at MIT or the world to look at the site.
I did a little look at the classes requested so far to see how many people are picking a closed access site vs. an open site. What's interesting is that numbers really vary based on the department. Here is a random sampling of departments:
| Department | Closed | Open |
|---|---|---|
| Chemical Engineering | 100% | 0% |
| Political Science | 89% | 11% |
| Urban Studies | 67% | 33% |
| Civil & Env. Eng. | 36% | 64% |
| Electrical Eng. & Computer Science | 35% | 65% |
| Brain & Cog. Science | 5% | 95% |
| Chemistry | 5% | 95% |
In general the classes that are in the minority camp (e.g. BCS classes that are closed or PoliSci classes that are open) are likely to be cross-listed courses. So it appears that either the role of departmental cultures or the role of influential administrators who set up course for many people skew a departments' bias. It's great to have this information on hand the next time a student group approaches us requesting more open access, because we can now tell them which departments to lobby.
Tags: Stellar MIT OpenAccess
Scary Maven message
I'm making changes to the Stellar Images JSP pages, and using Maven for the first time to install my changes on our dev server. While watching all of the maven messages scroll by this one caught my eye:
[INFO] Exploding webapp...
Yikes! That doesn't sound good. Sure enough I did explode the application, too. Instead of boom it sounded like HTTP Status 500.
Hampshire College OCW
I just learend about Hampshire College OCW. It's extremely cool that this is a student-led initiative, and i hope they can take it far.
I left a big picture comment on their weblog.
I'm glad to read your thought on how OCW interacts with a course management system. One of our priorities at MIT is improving the flow of course content from our internal course management system (a mashup of a homegrown system called Stellar and Sakai) to OCW. Another angle to consider in the long term is improving the flow in the other direction. How can an instructor teaching a course (say an intro to Victorian literature) take advantage of the materials that are in their local OCW? And what about that great Robert Louis Stevenson module in the Tufts OCW, how can they bring that in to their course?
Tags: Hampshire OCW Stellar Sakai edtech
New javascript goodness
In order to enable the use of more client-side scripting, and eventually some Ajax interactions, I added the Prototype javascript framework to Stellar. I used it to stream line a new validation trick in Stellar 1.7.1.
In Stellar 1.7 we changed the access denied page, so that if the person seeing the Access denied page is a member of the MIT communuity, they can send an email to the instructors asking to be added to the class list. This reduced the number of students calling the help desk to report they were unfairly excluded from a class. Unfortunately it increased the number of faculyty complaining about students asking for access to the class website. This was especially true for big classes, with lots of TAs and instructors, where the faculty delegate jobs like keeping track of the class list to their assistants.
We now allow instructors to indicate who in the class staff should receive access requests from the students. At least one person must be designated, more than one is also fine. We couldn't use a radio button, because that would allow selecting more than one, and by using check boxes we allowed people to emove everyone. So I wrote a java script that notices when the penultimate check box has been checked and disables the last check box, adding a little expanatory note. When more than one check box is checked, all of the check boxes are enabled and the note goes away.
Prototype.js made it much easiers, especially being able to collect all the check boxes with the same 'class' in an array. I'm looking forward to doing fancier things with it in the future, espcecially in Stellar images.
Tags: Stellar javascript prototype
Stellar statistics
Check out the new Stellar statistics page.
Some statistics are current (like number of uses, the % of undergraduate vs. graduate classes, etc) some will be updated once per semester (e.g. the mime types and numbers of documents per class). We will add in the statistics from Fall 2005 soon.