new EdTech site at UCOP

UC launches interactive website for teaching, learning, and technology. "The University of California has launched a new web publication and information hub to spotlight innovations in educational technology and to foster communication and collaboration across the 10-campus UC system."

Thanks so much to Lawrence Lee (of Userland and Tomalak) for his outstanding help today with a problem I reported on the Radio discussion group concerning internalLinks. The problem is not completely resolved yet -- but as you can see, I can at least automatically generate an anchor for major headings. I'm still hoping to get automatically generated anchors for paragraphs (as found on Dave Winer's blog, for instance) to permit highly granular referencing. (I wrote about this topic on Nov 19.)

Multiple writing spaces for blogging

One problem that we've been running into recently in our burgeoning blogging community is that the (often very fine) lines between private and public (and semi-private). I think that there is a still a lot of work that needs to be done with Manila and Radio to make moving among various writing spaces easy to do. I have played with different methods -- and each has its pluses and minuses. In the ideal world, I'd like to write (and create other "content") with the tool best suited for the job and in the space that is most appropriate -- and be able to move this material to other spaces (transparently and without loss of fidelity although the format will definitely change). And with materials scattered over all (in my blog, in discussion groups, in my email, in Word documents, in LaTeX files, in Radio, in Ecco, in my calendars (I use at least three of them), I still want to be able search and gather over all these sources. I know that this is asking for a lot -- but who said that I'm not a picky and demanding user?

Let me list different approaches I've taken so far. For a long time, I just typed my blog entries directly into the web-browser (the whole "edit this page" concept) Lots of advantages: the response is immediate, you write directly where the text will be going, and browsers are easy to come by. I still get chills (or at least slight tingles) when I can make very last minute changes to my manila site just before presenting a site at a talk. Downsides? The browser window (being so small) is hardly the optimal writing environment (no spell-checking, for example). More importantly, the browser is not a place I want to be doing my first pass at writing that is sensitive or tough to formulate. Not enough mediation between me and the world.

I thought that I had found a reasonable solution when I started to write in Microsoft Word (with its tools and the ability to stick in hyperlinks in a WYSIWYG fashion -- a feature I like a lot) and then copied and pasted selections into the edit this page window. Advantages: The Word document became the "source" and the blog became a destination -- which was fine for me. (That means when it came to reviewing materials I had generated, I could just read through my Word documents.) Writing in Word also provides me a relatively safe place to work out my own thoughts before sending them out the world. Downsides? Word generates absolutely horrendous HTML, encrusted with extra font specifications that I had to scrape off my text. Doing so by hand got old quickly. I tried to compensate for that problem by writing in an HTML editor separate from my usual writing space. However, what then happened was that I had to copy and paste from the HTML editor to Manila and to my Word document (which I treat as a "source".) As I've written before, one way around this problem would be combine add some scripting to MS Word to strip out the crud and then post the entry to my Manila site via XML-RPC/SOAP.

That still leaves unsolved the problem of granularity -- of creating and naming chunks of materials. Dave Winer writes a lot about outliners and how outliners are a natural chunking device. I agree from lots of personal experience with outliners. Ecco, my favorite program, is a PIM and an outliner. Dave Winer would like us to use Radio -- and this is what I've started to do. There are definite advantages. What attracted me to Radio was the prospect of automated permanent links (possible in this environment because writing in an outline form gives Radio information about the structure of the text. Rules work and if I need something more sophisticated, I can program it. Ideally, I'd continue writing in Ecco -- because that's what I'm used to and that's where my data are -- but cutting and pasting from Ecco to Radio is not a bad compromise. Downsides: Radio has a ways to go before it becomes a comfortable writing environment. It has a lot of potential (one can program it to your hearts' content.)

More tomorrow: How to incorporate metadata? How to sift out the gold from the rest of the ore?

Nov Jan

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