Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism
In the previous post – OU News Tracking – I briefly described how to get a Yahoo pipe to output a “pubDate” timestamp in the “correct” RSS standard format: Here’s the full expression (actually, a PHP strftime expression) for outputting the date in the required RFC 822 date-time format: %a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z … Continue reading “Managing Time in Yahoo Pipes”
A couple of days ago, Stuart pointed me to Quarkbase, a one stop shop for looking at various web stats, counts and rankings for a particular domain (here’s the open.ac.uk domain on quarkbase, for example; see also: the Silobreaker view of the OU), which reminded me that I hadn’t created a version of the media … Continue reading “OU News Tracking”
Some time ago now, I wrote a post about progressive enhancement of HTML web pages, including some examples of how HTML data tables could be enhanced to provide graphical views of the data contained in them. I’m not sure if anyone is actively maintaining progressive enhancement browser extensions (I haven’t checked) but here are a … Continue reading “HTML Tables and the Data Web”
In the previous post in this series, I showed how it’s possible to identify traffic referred from particular course pages in the OU VLE, by creating a user defined variable that captured the complete (nasty) VLE referrer URL. Now I’m not definitely sure about this, but I think that the Library provides URLs to the … Continue reading “Library Analytics (Part 7)”
Chatting with Stuart over a pint last week, he mentioned that the Open2 folks had started publishing a programme announcement feed on Twitter that lets you know when a TV programme the OU’s been involved with is about to be shown on one of the BBC channels: open2 programme announcements on Twitter. By subscribing to … Continue reading “What’s On Open2…”
For almost as long as I can remember (?! e.g. Search Powered Predictions), I’ve had the gut feeling that one of the most useful indicators about the courses our students want to study is their search behaviour, both in terms of searches that drive (potential) students to the OU courses and qualifications website from organic … Continue reading “Searching for Curriculum Development Course Insights”
Every four years, I get blown away by the dedication of people who have spent the previous four years focussed on their Olympic Challenge (I find it hard to focus for more than an hour or two on any one thing!) Anyway, I was intrigued to see this post on Google Maps Mania yesterday – … Continue reading “Olympic Medal Table Map”
It seems that Google opened up a supercharged variant of Google Trends over the last week or two: Google Insights for Search. One useful feature the new service offers over the original trends service is the ability to compare the relative volumes for the same search term over several different time periods: It’s also possible … Continue reading “Google Insights for Search (on Youtube too…)”
In Back from Behind Enemy Lines, Without Being Autodiscovered(?!), I described a simple service that displays the autodiscoverable RSS feeds from UK HEI homepages (it went down over the weekend as the screenscraping broke, but it’s back now and some of the ‘issues’ with some of the linkscraping has been fixed ;-) Over the weekend, … Continue reading “UK HEI “Page Not Found” Error Pages”
Home again after a few very enjoyable days away at IWMW2008 in Aberdeen, and I feel like I need a way of saying thank you to the web managers’ community for allowing an academic in…heh heh ;-) So I spent half an hour or so (no… really…;-) on the train back from the airport putting … Continue reading “Back from Behind Enemy Lines, Without Being Autodiscovered(?!)”
