… should not exist …

Lessons learn’t from scaling web applications - a comprehensive list of slideshows.

Nope — it’s both: http://blogs.pcworld.com/tipsandtweaks/archives/feature.jpg

It seems that iParadigm(Turnitin) has filed a patent suit against Blackboard. Read on at http://www.mfeldstein.com

EduCampOnline - a great idea for an online conference. I’ve just signed up to present on “Ruby on Rails for the Educational Technologist“. I hope to cover rapid prototyping techniques with the various Rails plugins.

Programming Collective Intelligence is my “must have” book for 2007. I’ve been looking for a book that was able to explain machine learning, data mining and the related mathematics. I think I’ve found it! This book seems to cover just about everything including:

• Recommendations (Collaborative and Item based filtering)
• Supervised and Unsupervised Learning
• Clustering
• Searching and Ranking
• Decision Trees
• Kernel Methods and Support Vector Machines (SVM)
• Genetic Programming

I hope I finally understand the maths behind SVMs. I’m off to order the book. I’ll post a review soon…..

I really really want to read some of the papers from AIED 2007, but sadly none are available on the website. I can’t think of any valid reason not to allow downloads in the year 2000, let alone 2007. AIED 2003 had the proceedings online. It just makes no sense.

USQ are doing some interesting things in the Virtual World space with AliveX3D. AliveX3D includes a Scene Editor that allows both students and lecturers to collaborate on models. With an objective to “apply the open source and Web 2.0 ethos to future e-Learning applications”, I don’t think the project can go wrong. A rich set of examples are available, these include:

• Hybrid 2D and 3D content in course content
• Multi-user Real-Time Collaboration
• Navigating 3D via 2D Hyperlinks embedded in content
• Educational games (Safety and Maths games)

I discovered AliveX3D via a paper published in the Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education: A WEB 2.0/WEB3D HYBRID PLATFORM FOR ENGAGING STUDENTS IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Its just nice to see an Australian Uni spending money to research and develop e-learning applications!!! I hope the project receives Carrick funding.

I’ve been meaning to post about ReMix 07 - a version of Mix brought to Melbourne, Australia. Essentially I changed jobs so most of the last 2 months was spent either handing over stuff, taking a break or getting inducted into a new work environment. ReMix was the conference I really wanted to attend. I felt it was time that I re-acquinted myself with Microsoft technologies and decide for myself if Silverlight warranted my attension. I learn’t a lot at ReMix, but almost two months after the event, 5 key points remain:

• SilverLight 1.0 means video. Full screen video, high quality video, overlays on video, triggers from video playback, custom video players and even video painted on other media with a brush……. Just take a look at the Top Banana video editing Silverlight example. Cross-browser video too! I am really happy that Windows Media (um Silverlight video) now plays on a Mac.
• Expression Blend rules. I love the way I can do data binding in Expression Blend. Latest release outputs to Silverlight. I’ve been looking at the output produced by the drawing tools to help learn XAML.
• Expression Web won’t be my best friend. Not just yet, anyway. It does a good job of replacing Frontpage, but not quite up to the task of matching Dreamweaver.
• I must make time for Popfly. Popfly is Microsoft’s answer for Machups, Gadgets and even Web Page creation. It looks simple, but is powerful at the same time. The Popfly interface needs a bit of UI input. Nick Hodge did a great Popfly presentation.
• Steve Marx got me interested in ASP.NET Futures. Steve built a functioning video site in under an hour. I was very impressed.

I’ve always thought Pivot Tables in Excel were useful! Sadly never got to use one for a real project. I’m slowly getting re-acquinted with Visio - as I’ll need to use it alot in my new role. I was quite surprised to discover that Visio 2007 is now much more than a flowcharting application. Visio 2007 has some cool data visualization tools. The PivotDiagram uses data from an Excel Pivot table and helps visualize complex relationships. Visio makes it easy to link data to any diagram - a feature called Data Graphics. The example that caught my attension, was a Network diagram where all the server data was read in from a spreadsheet. This is a great idea, if their are many Servers at your workplace, with server name and function changes happening ever so often. I’ll keep sharing my experiences with Visio.