Customize Your Home Page

In the past if you wanted to customize the home page in your browser you had only one choice - build your own own website and set your default home page in that browser to that website.

The advent of RSS feeds though has led to services providing customized home pages. One is iGoogle (so far no lawsuit from Apple on that name), another is Netvibes. To set up your own customized home page in Netvibes go first to www.netvibes.com. You should see this:

The first thing you will need to do is register -- do that by clicking on "sign in" in the upper right hand corner of the page.

Next you want to customize the content by adding feeds to websites you are interested in. to do that click in "add content" in the upper left hand corner of the page. A new navigation pane will open on the left hand side of the page:

























Click on "add a feed". That will open this window:













I happened to know what blog I would like to read regularly, so I typed www.cafehayek.com into the link box.

Netvibes looks to see if that blog has an rss feed. If it does you get something like th following box.



















It doesn't really matter which feed type you choose. Some blogs only offer one, some like this one offer lots of formats. All of them work in Netvibes. As soon as you click on one feed Netvibes adds a content module to your home page:



















The module lists the most recent posts in this blog. If you click on one you have a choice of views. The default view loads quickly:


Or this one -- prettier, but slower to load:





There are all sorts of widgets (little programs that do something for you). To access the most common click on the add content button again and then look under the widget tab (see left).

For example you can add a widget that shows you the weather forecast for your zip code:


























If you have a lot of blogs you enjoy reading you can organize them in pages or tabs. I have a page for general things and a page for education blogs:


The only thing left to do is go to your browsers option menu and set www.netvibes.com as your new home page. Now the news and commentary you are interested will be fed directly to you every day.

Lisa

Late Work Policies

Tis the season to talk to students who are unhappy with their grades and faculty who are unhappy with their students. Late work of course causes the vast majority of the student/faculty conflicts I mediate each semester. Today while surfing I saw this policy on a course David Wiley teaches:

Late Work Policy

If your work is ever late, I may or may not accept the work and may or may not penalize the work, depending completely on my possibly grumpy, biased, or elated mood. If this does not seem fair to you, then do not be late with your work.

I like it because it reflects my own -- I let students turn in work as late as they want (although before the end of the semester), but I noted that I truly hate to get a mass of grading the last week of class and will probably be extremely grumpy at the sight of it. They should reflect that grumpiness to be reflected on their grade.

My high school daughter has a math class this semester which allows late work up to a point -- 5 days. She hasn't managed to turn in all of her assignments because she does tend to let them pile up for the entire 5 days, however she is learning a valuable lesson her other teachers are skipping - she is trying to figure out how to manage her own schedule -- school, work, social, etc. I appreciate the math teacher for giving her this flexibility and of course the rope with which to hang herself. :^)

Lisa

OER

Today I listened to a conference presentation given by David Wiley:

http://opencontent.org/presentations/bcnet07/

A long time ago when I first started thinking about learning object repositories I used David Wiley's definition of learning objects. I was very enthusiastic about the whole concept of repositories. CCCOnline folks spent a lot of time researching software and looking at how to build repositories. Unfortunately that whole process has stalled over the years.

Why?

Because it's too complex. Today we have a repository of sorts, but we only have one or two people who can actually put objects into the repository and no one appears to be able to get them out again.

H'mmmm

In the Wiley presentation he talks about meta-tags versus folksonomies -- the tagging of the last few posts in this blog.

Certainly the idea of tagging does help solve the complexity issue of repositories. For example, for this post I wanted a picture of David Wiley. I went to Flickr and searched for one. And for what it's worth there are many to choose from. Tagging and an LOR in action. :^) The one above was taken by D'Arcy Norman and can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/1451331578/ .

Reuse versus Adaptation

I think I am building up to an anti-copyright rant again. Learning Objects aren't overly usable unless they are obviously open. This is also something noted in the presentation above. Whenever I get some cool object that requires a contract to use I drop it like a hot potato. Getting a contract signed in my educational system is a lot like praying for rain. It might take months and I really have no control over the process.

Step two is that I have to be able to adapt the object. To use the presentation analogy -- I typically don't want to just string a bunch of objects together and call them a class, I want to change them first. This is of course much more complex than that - there are some technical skills involved, but at the least I want to know that I can change the object. :^)

Lisa