Dynamic blogroll

I’m working on a way to have a dynamic blogroll to show all the current posts of other participants in the Oped Ed course. See the right side of this page for the current implementation of this using Feevy.

What do you think? Anyone know a better way to do this? I tried it with a shared Google Reader feed, but couldn’t quite get it the way I wanted to.

Stay tuned as I try other options and refine this.

Summer reading

Well, it’s almost the end of the summer. I can’t believe it went so fast, but I did read some great books. Here’s a quick list of the ones I’d recommend:

Wikinomics – This is a great book about the power of mass collaboration to change the world. This is the kind of book that really has the power to change a person’s life. Since reading it, I’ve become keenly interested in the open educational resources movement. I’ve started developing some copyleft licensed resources and plan to do more in the future.

Everything is Miscellaneous – An interesting read about how digital searching and tagging is changing things. This covered everything from why the Dewey Decimal system may not be relevant any more to how playlists could be a model for so many things. At first, reading this book made me think about how educational content could be indexed and organized in a myriad different ways to meet the needs of different teachers and learners. By the end of the book, I questioned the whole current paradigm of learning and what is considered knowledge.

Faster – A book about how society is speeding up more and more every day. This one made me want to move to somewhere on the wide -open prairie and take a five-year long hiatus (and maybe never come back).

Three Cups of Tea – This had nothing to do with 2.0 or even technology, but everything to do with education in the developing world, which is certainly related to open cotent. It is about education, world culture, and humanitarianism. Along with Wikinomics, this was the most important book I read this summer.

Sidenote: I read most of these books on my handheld….lots of hours on a plane this summer.

So what did you all read and like this summer?

File formats

I hope that as people are posting open content resources, they think about file formats and making the materials accessible to as many people, platforms, and devices as possible.

Wikimedia Commons has done a good job of this, using open file formats like OGG and HTML.

One concern I have is with PDF files. This has become a de facto standard for many publicatios on the web. However, it’s not a very “accessible” format. (Note: Creating these files as tagged files helps with accessibility issues, but most people don’t create their files that way, and many tools don’t even support that on the creation side.)

I’m also starting to see some of the open content portals using their own file formats (some proprietary; others open, but very specific to their particular hardware). I hope that everyone will give thought to posting files in a more open format as well so that everyone can use it.