Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism
Idling some thoughts about what to talk about in a session the OU Library* is running with some folks from Cambridge University Library services as part of an Arcadia Trust funded project there (blog), I started wondering about how info professionals in an organisation might provide invisible support to their patrons by joining in the … Continue reading “Joining the Flow – Invisible Library Tech Support”
… And so it came to pass that the campus was divided. The LMS had given way to the VLE and some little control was given over to the instructors that they might upload some of their own content to the VLE, yet woe betide any who tried to add their own embed codes or … Continue reading “WP_LE”
Just over a month ago, the OU web team released a “Fact of the Day” Google gadget that publishes an interesting fact from an OpenLearn course once a day, along with a link to the OpenLearn course that it came from. (By the by, compare the offical press release with Laura’s post…) The OU Library … Continue reading “OU Library iGoogle Gadgets”
Okay, so I’m a few days behind the rest of the web posting on this (though I tweeted it early;-), and I have to admit I still haven’t tried the Google Chrome browser out yet (it’s such a chore booting into Windows…), so here are some thoughts based on a reading of the the comic … Continue reading “The Obligatory Google Chrome Post – Sort Of…”
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”
