It’s troublesome to test a site behind a login for accessibility. Education.au have an ongoing project to build a Firefox extension that is able to perform accessibility tests. The demo looks very impressive and also looks like a tool that will be able to educate users on good accessibility design. Glad to see that the project was driven by the need to test content with Learning Management Systems.

Wow - 92 apps got made in this years (2007) Rails Rumble (formerly known as Rails Day). The quality, quantity, and functionality are all superior given that these apps were all created in a mere 48 hours!
My favs:

• Invent a Story
  Collaborative story writing - 1 sentence at a time
• This Vs That
  Dual threaded lists perfect for debating
• DuctTape
  Create and publish simple lists/databases
• Researchr
  Group together ideas for a research paper in a drag and drop manner

Rails Rumble goes a long way to showcase the power of Ruby and Rails. In coming weeks I’ll be writing a few tutorials on using Rails to create e-learning/social collaborative apps. Remember that someday soon Rails apps will just deploy on a Tomcat instance - hint hint - Blackboard.

A funny series of pics to describe an IT project.

Spring Batch just got released. Spring Batch is able to monitor multi-step batch applications and take care of resource management. Great for processing large amounts of data, which I am fortunate not to be doing anymore.

BTW:

• The Blackboard import/export feature would benefit greatly from Spring Batch.

Stats on LMS satisfaction in organisations of varying size from an elearning Guild survey. Moodle, the open source alternative, scored exceedingly well. Blackboard, as expected hits that average mark with ease. Does being open source and free lend itself to a better satisfaction rating? I don’t think so because there are still elements of cost of ownership and support.

… and this quote is quite accurate: “the people who have to work with the LMS day-to-day give a much lower satisfaction number than the managers and directors”

DHH responds to the “How do you keep up with new technology?” question. Good advice - learn on the job, learn because a project would benefit and if you can’t then it’s time to start looking for a new job.

Enjoyed watching Scott Lesley’s presentation on Augmenting content with client-side tools. I had not realised that so many Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts specifically designed to enhance open content were available. I am still exploring Scott’s bookmarks on the subject, but here are a few gems:

• Convert a Greasemonkey script into a FireFox extension
• It’s My Learning Environment and I Want It Back
  A users writes a script to add a widget to Moodle.
• OER Recommender
  Totally love this extension. It recommends other useful resources related to the page you are viewing. I found the page explaining the approach and mathematics very insightful. It certainly gave me a few ideas on how I could put some Machine Learning concepts to good use. A big AHA moment here for me…….
• CoScripter
  Record doing a task in FireFox and then share it.

Since I am going to purchase an iPod touch, thought I’d start looking into building apps for the iPhone. I love the Rails support.

Blackboard have released a special language pack for ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’. A nice way to showcase their language pack capabilities. ….. but will it break the scorm content? Thats the big question!

Just been reading the latest ASCILITE Campus Newsletter. I was pleasantly surprised to find yet another homegrown LMS, this one comes from Edith Cowan University and has been in development for 8 years. There is something so special about designing something to meet the specific needs of an institution, instead of taking a “one system meets all needs universally” approach. Check out the demo.