Learning Technology Blog Aggregator

eFoundations blog—Both sides, now - are we builders or users of services in the cloud?

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all"
(Joni Mitchell – Both sides, now)

As an educational charity with a mission to "realise the benefits of ICT for learners and researchers", Eduserv must constantly ask itself how to make the best of its available resources for the benefit of the community.

What kinds of services should we be offering? What maximises our impact?

The answers lie in the expectations, needs and desires of the education community itself. But in an environment where the "cloud" offers us an increasing array of apparently very high quality, very low cost services, those answers are not necessarily easy to come by.

These issues affect not just Eduserv, but funding bodies, institutions and individuals in the community.

For those of you at ALT-C 2008, I'll be thinking about this stuff out loud in our sponsor's session - Wednesday, 11.00am in the Conference Auditorium 1. You are very welcome to come and help me shape my thoughts.

Fortnightly Mailing—Nicholas Carr: is Google God or Satan?

Nicholas Carr's The Omnigoogle is worth the 5 minutes it will take you to read in full. It concludes:

"God or Satan? When you control the economic chokepoint of a digital economy and have complements [that is, subsidiary services that do not cost you much to provide, and which complement your primary business] everywhere you look, it can be difficult to distinguish between when you're doing good (giving the people what they want) and when you're doing bad (squelching competition). Both Google and Microsoft have a history of explaining their expansion into new business areas by saying that they're just serving the interests of "the users." And there's usually a good deal of truth to that explanation - though it's rarely the whole truth.

Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or not."

Scott Wilson's Workblog—Beginning of the next memory S-curve?

How about an iPod that holds millions of songs. In fact, why not all of them? Want to replace that hard drive with a solid state one with 1000 times the capacity? Oh, and everything stays nice and stable when the power goes off, for far longer than today's flash memory. Like to guess how far away this is?

Technology development often exhibits an S-Curve pattern; first you get the slow buildup as it takes time to get an idea of the ground, then increasing growth, and finally a slowdown of diminishing returns. Then eventually you hit the start of the next "S" and you're soon back into exponential growth. Sometimes you're lucky enough to spot the next "S" starting, and I think recent developments are pointing to a new "S" in computer memory.

S-Curve diagram
(S-Curve diagram by Laird Close, University of Arizona)

The last few weeks saw three major announcements on the development of memory and solid-state storage.

First of all, IBM Research announced it was close to cracking 'Racetrack' nano-magnetic memory. This proof-of-concept technology would eventually replace flash memory and hard drives, with vastly greater capacity.

Next up, researchers from Daresbury and Glasgow have announced developments that could increase memory capacity even further, to "hundreds of thousands of times more capacity" using innovative nanotechnology (Nature Nanotechnology, 3, 289 - 233 (2008) ).

Finally, HP Labs have added the "memristor" to the basic building blocks of electronics. Memristors are resitstors that store information even after losing power, and do so for longer than conventional flash memory. Whats more, memristors are in principle far simpler and easier to make than flash memory, which could also accelerate the trend towards ubiquitous solid-state memory.

Now, whats our plan for when students start turning up with something the size of today's Google sat in their pocket?

Project Xiphos blog—Talis talks with Herbert van de Sompel about SFX, OAI, and Repositories

herbert-ata-rev.jpgIn our latest podcast I talk with Herbert van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. We discuss Herbert’s pivotal role in the development of SFX and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), before turning to a broader discussion of issues related to the use of repositories in preserving and providing access to scholarly literature and data.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Wednesday 3 September, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For other Talis podcasts in this Xiphos series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

OLDaily—XO Replacement Parts Available at Ilovemyxo

I think it's only a matter of time before we see people cobble together the most unusual inventions out of XO pieces. If they made the processor available as well, that would complete the set - you could make XO grids and all kinds of things! Christoph Derndorfer, One Laptop Per Child News, September 5, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Believe In...

The YouTube version of grade 5 student Dalton Sherman's speech, I Believe in Me, Do You? is up to 63,449 views. It won a standing ovation at the Dallas, Texas school district event where it was given. Sounds great. But I read that "Dallas ISD contacted his family in June with the invitation. They wrote the speech for him, and he practiced three times a week all summer long." As a commenter writes, "there is something deeply disingenuous about this stuff aside from the blatant ghost-writing." Right. And despite the suggestion that "there is not even the pretense here that the message came from a student" one wonders how many people - consciously or otherwise - attribute it as a statement of the student's views. Crass and callow. Sylvia Martinez, Generation YES Blog, September 5, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Open Standards and the JISC IE

"In retrospect many of the W3C standards which I had felt should form the basis of the JISC IE have clearly failed to have any significant impact in the market place - compare, for example, the success of Macromedia's Flash (SWF) format with the niche role that W3C's SMIL format has." Just so. But these standards didn't fail because they were open. They failed because, for various reasons, they didn't do what people wanted. Open standards are still better - but the lesson here is that standards are not necessarily better just because they're open. Brian Kelly, http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/open-standards-and-the-jisc-ie/, September 5, 2008 [Tags: ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Making the Election Video: Behind the Scenes

CommonCraft - which makes the "in plain English" videos - has released a site describing the making of their videos. it involves a lot of drawing and moving about of images. Via Sylvia Martinez, who notes that this is a "terrific post" because "it proves that no matter how experienced you are, creating a video is a process of trying things, seeing what works, and the intertwined nature of risk-taking, mistakes and creativity." Lee LeFever, CommonCraft, September 5, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—First Thoughts in On Spore

This is just the sort of thing that makes all my time disappear. "The game really makes you think about what you are doing and without realising it the decisions you make help shape your civilization - this becomes apparent when you look back on your history." I haven't seen it yet - probably just as well. Ewan McIntosh, edublogs, September 5, 2008 [Tags: ] [Link] [Comment]

Project Xiphos blog—BusinessWeek looks at learning technologies

My regular copy of BusinessWeek arrived this afternoon and, in amongst the usual content, I see that they’re going to be running features on ‘Back to School Tech’ (remember it’s American, so ’school’ means ‘university’) in next week’s issue.

Some of that content is already online, here, and includes various pieces on the use of consumer technology within the institution. Have a read, and join the conversation on the BusinessWeek site.

OLDaily—Document Startups in Chaos As Adobe's Flashpaper Discontinues

Adobe is discontinuing Flashpaper, which (as this article notes) has created chaos for a bunch of companies that rely on the technology. The only one spared? Scribd, which "switched to a custom solution based on Open Office and other nifty open source tools." There's a lesson in that. Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK, September 5, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Why OLPC Should Be a for-Profit Business

This post, authored by Mark Beckford (Managing Director for Strategic Business Development at Intel in China), argues that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project should have been set up as a for-profit enterprise. It would have benefited, he said, from a business mindset, a vibrant ecosystem, and competition. The problem is, the stuff that went into making OLPC possible would not have happened were it simply some private company - it wouldn't have had Kofi Anan's endorsement, it wouldn't have had Mary Lou Jepsen's screen, it wouldn't have had Walter Bender's Sugar, and it wouldn't have had the widespread notice and publicity. And, had it been a for-profit enterprise, it would have been bought out and quietly killed by Intel at the first sign of success (see the history of Firefly for a good example of this sort of thing). Mark Beckford, OLPC News, September 5, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

Overdue Ideas—Rights and Repositories: Reshaping the Cultural Perceptions of Copyright

The afternoon sessions for the event are more discussion based - I'm sitting in one being run for John Casey (EDINA) who spoke this morning.

His top 5 practical tips:

  • Factor IPR issues at the start of an activity - he said that if he was marking bids that left IPR to the last few weeks, they wouldn't get through. He also stressed the usefulness of consortium agreements - look at the JISC Model agreement
  • Effective information and records management procedures are needed - simple is best!
  • Always get contractors to sign - don't use contractors who won't sign, and don't assume that you get the rights because you are paying - you must get a license from the person doing the work
  • Take advice and improve your knowledge
  • Funding bodies - mandate and audit the correct use of licenses - money talks!

Top 5 Policy tips:

  • Need to be clear about where we want to go
  • Have to have individual academic integrity and institutional quality control in place
  • Workable solutions to IPR need the involvement of senior managers to provide top-down direction and leadership. Good approach to partner with other institutions - ideally ones that aren't competing with you geographically or sectorally
  • Institutional IPR policies should reflect the underlying business model and what is considered valuable
  • IPR issues act as a 'lightning conductor' in institutions - surfacing underlying issues of ownership, control, authority, power and status

John saying with teaching and learning material you don't need to stop tutors using their own materials - but you might want a right to use the material in perpetuity - need to be clear what you want and need to get out of agreements...

Overdue Ideas—Rights and Repositories: Licensing Content for PRIMO

This presentation by Katharine Ellis from the Institute of Musical Research. PRIMO is 'Practice as Research in Music Online' - http://primo.sas.ac.uk

The PRIMO project was to look at whether there were alternatives to asking musicians to describe their research in words if they could demonstrate it better - and how could their work be published free to the widest audience.

PRIMO now has a very small (6 items) peer-reviewed repository with full-length videos of music rehearsals, workshops and demonstrations. It is open-access with downloadable files licensed for non-commercial/research use. This allows citation using abstracts etc. - something that has traditionally been difficult - you haven't been able to include a 'sonic' abstract in your commentary or criticism.

However, they found that they were pushing at the boundaries of what was seen as acceptable in the academic community.

The challenges they face were:

  • IPR - what forms it took, who owned it etc.
  • Licensing
  • Research Councils UK directive for open access

Whose rights need to be protected? Performers, participants, funders, photographers, camera crews (potentially)

Decided to have a form which asked each headline researcher to say that all participants had said that the work could be regarded as their research for the lifetime of the work - essentially non-exclusive license to publish open access for non-commercial use (under Creative Commons). In the end, all comes down to trust. To engender trust, don't believe they can look at material created without these agreements in place - i.e. not looking at historical material.

Licensing Third-Party Rights in Music:

  • Be clear about what you as a broadcaster of online material can/must be responsible for
  • Be clear to researchers and users about where their own responsibility lies
  • In the interests of permanent access, do not accept responsibility for IP permissions that are time-limited
  • Be aware that a video of a presentation involing educational use exemptions ceases to benefit from those exemptions when it leaves the classroom
  • Use your metadata system to record the dates on which nested copyrights in a repository item will expire
  • Know your UK copyright timelines:
    • Original artisitic works (70 years after the death of the author, composer, photographer, artist)
    • Films (70 years after the death of the last of the following to die: principal director, author of screenplay, author of dialogue, or composer of music specially created for an used in the film)
    • Sound recording, remasterings and broadcasts (50 years after the date of the recording or remastering or broadcast)
    • Typographical arrangement of music (25 years from the date of the edition)
  • How many 3rd party IPR items are nested in a single video?
    • Musical text (composition and typography)
    • Film
    • Record musical performance
    • Images (e.g. CD Cover)
    • Stage music (other rights)
  • Can one license cover all these rights?

PRIMO pays for a limited online exploitation license - for a nominal annual fee, covering a certain number of downloads a year - it covers "Online broadcast to UK users (i.e. users in the UK at the time they are using the material), for limited downloading of performances involving complete musical works which are still in copyright"

This license doesn't cover:

  • Any rights antedating the presentation/performance which is to be posted
  • Any in-copyright stage music
  • Any in-copyright music to which new images have been added
  • Any recording rights or performing rights for in-copyright recorded/broadcast music
  • International usage (UK only!)
  • Any non-musical rights (images etc.)

The license is based on radio licensing - which assumes transmission in only a limited geographical territory.

PRIMO have taken the approach of getting the user to state whether they are in the UK before they have access - the user is responsible for acting legally here, not the 'publisher' - i.e. PRIMO in this case.

Overdue Ideas—Rights and Repositories: Overview of the legal landscape

Charles Oppenheim now presenting. He is going to concentrate on Copyright as he believes this is the main issue that academia is interested in (as opposed to trade marks, designs, patents etc.) (although I suspect  that these may become more important to us as I think there is a growing pressure to look at commercial opportunities growing from academic research)

Copyright protects the skill and labour expended by someone creating something new. Copyright is automatic (doesn't require registration of any kind). The owner has the rights to authorise or prevent third parties from copying (and certain other things) the work. There are various exceptions, such as library privilege, fair dealing etc.

Database rights protects collections of data or materials. In general as long as the collection and verification of the contents of the database involved significant resources, protection is given - arguable most repositories will enjoy both database rights and copyright.

Charles goes on to mention Performers Rights and Moral Rights.

Some major questions for repositories:

  • Who owns the rights in the materials that are being added? (The employer? the academic? students?)
  • Have those rights been licensed or assigned to the repository?
  • If not, can the repository hold the materials?

Copyright is much less to do with the law but more about 'risk management' and perception of risk - you don't need to be nervous, but you do need to be aware of the risks.

Also need to question whether moral rights have been infringed in any way and whether performers rights are involved?

For Orphan works, if it is low risk that anyone will anyone will complain, then why not make stuff available? If you feel it is higher risk, you need to judge the risks and make a decision.

Licenses you might use or encounter are:

  • Open Source s/w licenses
  • Creative Commons, Creative Archive, Science Commons
  • CLA or other RRO licenses

There are a number of forthcoming possible changes to the law:

Gowers Review

This was generally satisfied with current UK IP environment, although identified a number of areas where law was inappropriate or out of date.

There are expected to be a number of consultations to be carried out as a result - so far only one has been done, which is about possible changes to 'exceptions to copyright' and especially relevant are those relating to exceptions for educational use.

Gowers recommended an expansion to the exceptions to encompass 'distance' learning (even trivial distance), and that it should be media-independent - and to like exceptions to intent (i.e. for education) rather than medium.

Also recommended changes to use for research or private study - why restricted to literary, artistic, dramatic and musical works - why not all materials, and what would be the impact of doing this?

Gowers recommend extension of Library Privilege to bring more flexibility and more types of materials, and to expand to museums and galleries.

There were many more recommendations, and in theory we should see legislation to this later this year - but Charles believes we may see these bundled up with other changes coming out of EU proposals.

EU law

Changes to Sound Recording term from 50 years to 95 years. Gowers commissioned work that showed this was neither necessary or desirable. However, this has gone to EU with lobbying from major music companies, and they have drafted a directive (which may not become law) to this effect. If it is passed, it could have a significant impact on repositories collecting sound recordings (and there tends to be a high proportion of Orphan Works with sound recordings because of the number of people involved in the creation)

There is also currently a general review of copyright law by the EU, but at this stage only a discussion document, and it isn't clear what this will mean for UK law, but Charles believes that this discussion could hold up implementation of any of the legislation coming out of the Gowers Review - so we can expect UK law to remain as is for some time.

A final thing worthy of note is that there is a draft directive on public secotr information in place which, if it becomes law, it would mean all documents created and published by a University would have to be offered at minimal costs to any private sector organisation that wishes to commercially exploit it - which would include material held in publicly accessible repositories. It should be noted that there was a previous attempt to bring this in, but lobbying by HEIs managed to stop it.

Overdue Ideas—Rights and Repositories

Today I'm speaking at the JISC Rights and Repositories event - I'm here as part of the EThOSNet project - which is setting up a e-thesis service based at the BL (called EThOS) - see http://www.ethos.ac.uk for more details.

Starting with an introduction from John Casey from EDINA including a brief overview of OpenJorum, and then followed by Prof. Charles Oppenheim giving an overview of the legal landscape. After this, it's me - I'm a bit worried as some of the work on which we've based the approach that EThOS is taking towards rights was done by Charles Oppenheim, who is on hand to contradict me if I get anything wrong!

 

OK - starting with John (slightly frustratingly, I'm sat at the front as a speaker, and so I can't see the slides that are being shown)

John is talking from the 'teaching and learning' point of view, but sees the issues very much overlapping with research repositories.

John says we need to see IPR as an essential part of academic integrity and Institutional quality control. Noting that the media industry have very well established approach to IPR - even if not everyone agrees with them. We are in a the midst of change in academia in our approach to IPR. It isn't necessarily the legal stuff that is difficult but what John calls the 'underlying' issues - by which I think he means the cultural issues - norms of what is acceptable practice within a community.

John saying IPR is only a problem if you let it be a problem. John often sees people either putting their heads in the sand, or feeling that IPR is detail they can't be bothered with. John believes currently attitudes are related to the pre-digital era, and contain greatly exaggerated ideas of the value of content - John think that teaching content is often of little value cash wise, but of high utility.

By putting stuff online, 'we' (institutions etc.) are publishers - and this comes with rights and responsibilities. We are joining the 'publishing' world, which is already trying to come to terms with the challenges presented by digital production and distribution of material.

JORUM is a JISC sponsored national online repository, intended to hold learning resources for UK HE and FE. When JORUM was setup licenses for 'open' sharing (e.g. creative commons) were in their infancy. In the early days there was a high degree of risk aversion with regards to IPR in the sector, which resulted in a complicated license regime.

Now JORUM is moving in the direction of 'open access', and wants to foster the creation and re-use of learning material and ensure long term access. At the same time they want to reduce transaction costs, become a user-centred service to support sharing and reuse. JORUM wants to see more explicit acceptance and management of risks - there is a lot of nervousness around IPR, even though financially other issues in the sector cause a lot more problems (e.g. building project overruns, software project overruns etc.) - but perhaps nervousness is because the academic 'industry' is essentially and industry base around Intellectual Property.

JORUM will have three licenseing regimes going forward - all user-to-user:

  • JorumOpen - for free sharing under Creative Commons and similar licenses
  • Jorum Education UK - for sharing withing the UK HE and FE sectores
  • JorumPlus - more restricted content

The main obstacles around open content and IPR are philosophical, pedagogical, political and organisational - technical issues are comparatively minor. Legal matters are good for 'surfacing' soft cultural issues.

The current concentration on technical issues is a 'displacement activity' - we focus on DRM etc. to avoid the real problems - where no or lo-tech solutions are more realistic.

OLDaily—Bebo Is Forcibly Changing Usernames

I really hate it when sites mess around with user names. The way Second Life forces you to choose a last name. The way Google makes everybody a gmail.com email address (to Google, I am now stephen.downes.ca@gmail.com - how ridiculous!) - and this change by Bebo. Leave our user names alone! I don't go around changing Google's name to Gargle! or Bebo to Bobo. Or Second Life to Second Wife. My name is my identity; it is mine, and companies that mess around with it eventually see the last of me. Yes, even Google. Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins, Mashable, September 5, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—E-Learning On a Shoestring

This doesn't look like much at first glance but if you keep following the links you'll find a wealth of practical information. I really like the idea of e-learning advice that doesn't begin, buy an LMS. "You'll find guidance on low cost tools and technologies, as well as ideas and stories to help you get started." There's a menu bar across the mid-top of the page that aids navigation (it's a bit difficult to spot). It would be nice if it were licensed as open content, as the authors no doubt availed themselves of a lot of freely shared material in order to create this resource. Various Authors, Australian Flexible Learning Network, September 5, 2008 [Tags: , , , ] [Link] [Comment]

The Ed Techie—What I hope to learn from CCK08

I've signed up for George Siemens and Stephen Downes massive online open course "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" which starts next week. I have a kind of meta-interest in it (as I suspect a lot of participants do), in that I'm not just interested in what the course is about, but also in how it works. So, as much as I am interested in the content, I'd have signed up if it was 'Shakespearean Tragedies' or 'George and Stephen play the banjo'.

So here's what I hope to find out over the coming months:

  • To get a better appreciation of connectivism and particularly how people are applying it.
  • To see how people participate in an open course
  • To get a feel from George and Stephen as to how many people are doing the paid for version and whether this is a good business model (don't tell Stephen I said that)
  • To see whether the absence of formal creditation for myself significantly reduces motivation (ie will I drop out?)
  • How the distributed dialogue model works

It's great to see George and Stephen doing this. If we get some good research answers from it, who knows maybe it's a model for the OU in general?

OUseful Info—OU Library iGoogle Gadgets


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 just announced a couple of OU Library iGoogle gadgets too (though I think they have been around for some time…)…

…but whereas the Fact of the Day widget is pretty neat, err, erm, err…

Here’s the new books widget. The Library produces an RSS feed of new books for a whole host of different topic areas. So you can pick your topic and view the new book titles in a gadget on your Google personal page, right…?

Err - well, you can pick a topic area from the gadget…

…and when you click “Go” you’re taken to the Library web page listing the new books for that topic area in a new tab…

Hmmm…

[Lots of stuff deleted about broken code that gives more or less blank pages when you click through on "Art History" at least; HTTP POST rather than GET (I don't want to have to header trace to debug their crappy code) etc etc]

I have to admit I’m a little confused as to who would want to work this way… All the gadget does is give you lots of bookmarks to other pages. It’s not regularly (not ever) bringing any content to me that I can consume within my Google personal page environment… (That said, it’s probably typical of the sort of widget I developed when I first started thinking about such things…and before lots of AJAX toolkits were around…)

This could be so, so much better… For a start, much simpler, and probably more relevant…

For example, given a feed URL, you can construct another URL that will add the feed to your iGoogle page.

Given a URL like this:
http://voyager.open.ac.uk/rss/compscience.xml
just do this:
http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://voyager.open.ac.uk/rss/compscience.xml
which takes you to a page like this:

where you can get a widget like this:

Personally, I’d do something about the feed title…

It’s not too hard to write a branded widget that will display the feed contents, or maybe a more elaborate one that will pull in book covers.

For example, here’s an old old old old example of an alternative display - a carousel (described here, in a post from two years ago: Displaying New Library Books):

Admittedly, you’re faced with the issue of how to make the URLs known to the user. But you could generate a URL from a form on th Library gadget page, and assign it to an “add to Google” image button easily enough.

And the other widget - the Library catalogue search…?

Let’s just say that in the same way as the ‘new books’ widget is really just a list of links hidden in a drop down box, so the catalogue search tool is actually just a redirecting search box. Run a query and you’re sent to the Voyager catalogue search results page, rather than having the results pulled back to you in the gadget on the Google personal page.

(I know, a lot of search widgets are like that (I’ve done more than a few myself in years gone by), but things have moved on and I think I’d really expect the results to be pulled back into the widget nowadays…)

PS okay, I’m being harsh, it’s been a long crappy day, I maybe shouldn’t post this… maybe the widgets will get loads of installs, and loads of traffic going to the Library site… I wonder if they’re checking the web stats to see, maybe because they found out how to add Google Analytics tracking to a Google gadget? And I wonder what success/failure metrics they’re using?

PPS okay, okay - I apologise for the above post, Library folks. The widgets are a good effort - keep up the good work. I’ll be interested to see how you iterate the design of these widgets over the next few weeks, and what new wonders you have in store for us all… :-) Have a think about how users might actually use these widgets, and have a look at whether it may be appropriate to pull content back into the widget using an AJAX call, rather than sending the user away from their personal page to a Library web page. If you can find any users, ask them what they think, and how they’re using the widget. Use web stats/analytics to confirm (or deny) what they’re saying (users lie… ;-). And keep trying stuff out… my machine is littered with dead code and my Google personal page covered in broken and unusable widgets that I’ve built myself. Evolution requires failure…and continual reinvention ;-)

Fortnightly Mailing—A quick review of Google Chrome. Guest Contribution by Dick Moore.

Minor revisions 5/9/2008

First glances are promising: the integrated search and address bar works well as do the visual representation of most common visited sites, and bookmarks as thumbnails.

When Chrome encounters a poorly written website (or one that it is unable to cope with) then it is the tab that crashes and not the browser, though in testing I have not been able to cause a crash (a good sign in itself). Chrome’s privacy mode, called "incognito" will be of benefit to anyone wishing to browse on a shared computer: it ensures that no history or cookies are kept locally. (Internet Explorer 8 also has this feature called "inPrivate Browsing".)

Chrome’s interface is quite stark but its ability to go full screen and minimal would suggest that its intended use is as a means to access web based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail.

In a very rough test, Chrome was significantly faster than both Internet Explorer 7 and an "un-tuned" installation of Firefox.

Chrome is Open Source, which will surely mean that, as with Firefox, a wide range of plug-ins get developed.

Download and installation were very quick and easy, with bookmarks and tabs picked up from Firefox. As yet there are no Mac or Linux versions, but these will surely come.

Privacy considerations

For the more paranoid, the combined search and address bar suggests that every address we type will be recorded by Google, thereby enabling Google to collect even more data on which sites users visit, and thus Google better to target advertising at individual users. The privacy options give you some control over the "pass-back" of usage information to Google ; and the fact that Chrome is Open Source should allow the more technically capable to confirm that these privacy options work.

Overall, if you interested in a lightweight web browser, Chrome is well worth a look; and it is bound to get better. I will be comparing Chrome with Firefox over the next few months. For the moment I am not planning to take Firefox, with its invaluable range of plug-ins, off my PCs.

You can download chrome at google chrome download. Meanwhile there are lots of YouTube demos sprouting up. Personally I quite liked the comic strip that Google uses to describe the engineering thinking behind Chrome. This is at Read about the Technology

Dick Moore is Director of Technology at Ufi learndirect

OLDaily—Top Ten Online Psychology Experiments

So if you take a psychology test and put it on the web and make it a game, is it still research? Via JT Cobb. I should note that I'm a big fan of Casual Fridays at Cognitive Daily and often take part in these light-hearted trials. Sandra Kiume, PsychCentral, September 4, 2008 [Tags: ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Quick Introduction to Connectivism Course

George Siemens has created a short video introduction to our online Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course. Also, our MOOC will be the subject of a Fringe Alt discussion (see here and here). George Siemens, elearnspace, September 4, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Chrome Is a Desktop Web Application Platform

I think this is exactly what Google has in mind: "It comes dressed as a web browser but is actually a Desktop Web Application platform. It facilitates the creation of Web Applications that are desktop like in functionality." See also Tony Hirst. And Seb Schmoller runs a quick review of Google Chrome as a guest Contribution from Dick Moore. Ben Emson, Weblog, September 4, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

The Ed Techie—Tender is the right

I wanted to hit the ground running in my stint as SocialLearn director, but we have come across a minor hiccup. For services over £139,893 we are obliged by EU regulations to go to a public procurement process. We will be doing much of the technical development externally and if at some point we exceed the EU limit without having abided by their regulations, it could get messy and we'd end up in court. So in the interests of openness, and keeping my job, we'd best go through the process.

We're putting together the tender now, which has to be posted for 30 days, then we have to select the winner, so I'm estimating a 2 month delay on some aspects of the project.

I'm divided as to my opinion on the process. I understand why the legislation is there (to stop public bodies getting someone's cousin to fulfill a multi-million pound contract), but it does feel like a very EU type solution (I doubt the US has a similar procedure), why can't we get on with determining who we think is appropriate? But then again, I've already found the process useful in clearly defining the scope of the project, and it may put me in contact with developers I wouldn't have found otherwise. I'll let you know how it goes and reflect upon my experience of it here for the benefit of those who find procurement processes and EU regulations unbearably thrilling.

OLDaily—When Corrupting the Youth Is Good

From time to time people raise the question of ethics - what ought to guide our posts? What ought to guide our teaching? And it has seemed to me over time that the principles of ethics and the principles of reason converge - that what is ethical is to write and teach in accord with the principles of good reason (sometimes called 'critical thinking', though I need to talk about this separately some time). Because the only way youth can be 'corrupted' (in any meaningful sense of the term) is when they read uncritically, and when teaching contravenes the ethic and spirit of critical enquiry. Clay Burell, Beyond School, September 4, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Third Life - Auricle: the Next Generation

As Brian Kelly warns, "We should be aware of the dangers of associating services with departmental names and specific technologies. This has been well documented, including Tim Berners-Lee's article on Cool URIs Don't Change! - although this is clearly easy to say, but more difficult to implement in practice." That's why I use downes.ca and resist the efforts of companies like Google (or employers like NRC) to make me use corporate domains. Anyhow, as Derek Morrison writes here, Auricle is alive and well in its third (and, one hopes, final) incarnation. Derek Morrison, Auricle, September 4, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

Open Education News—Open Education: Getting Outside of the Echo Chamber


One of the challenges of an open education movement is expanding the conversation outside of the open education echo chamber. A recent article entitled Understanding the Ins and Outs of Open Content Licensing within Digital Directions, an online publication for K-12 educators and administrators, highlights the practical challenges faced by educators as they attempt to understand and incorporate openly licensed content into their classrooms. As noted by Jim Klein, director of information services and technology for Saugus Union school system near Los Angeles, California:

Licensing costs are one of the largest ongoing expenses in K-12. As budgets tighten and technology demands increase, educators are beginning to understand the benefits and embrace the opportunities found in open technologies … The biggest challenge for educators is their own education—understanding the need for appropriate licensing and the impact of the choices they make when selecting a license.

The article highlights the learning curve facing students, educators, and administrators, such as knowing how to chose the “right” license, how to mix content of difference license types, and how to tag and store content for effective and efficient aggregation. For most people, these are all very foreign concepts and procedures. Addressing these practical day-to-day obstacles will be key to expanding open education outside of the echo chamber.

OLDaily—HP's Virtualization Honcho John Bennett: Rethinking Virtualization

Virtualization is something that will occupy more and more attention in the future. Why? "We see a large number of customers spending less than 30 percent of their IT budget on business priorities, and growth initiatives, and 70 percent or more on management and maintenance. With virtualization and with these broader transformational initiative, you can really flip the ratio around." Dana Gardner, E-Commerce Times, September 4, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Stephen Downes: Redes de Aprendizaje

Diego Leal has very graciously translated my paper Learning Networks (The Buntine Oration) into Spanish. I gave the talk in 2004, but is remains relevant today. Translation by Diego Leal, .Edu.Co.Blog, September 4, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—iLeonardo

Giorgio Bertini writes, "iLeonardo is a Social Utility for connecting to people and their collections of relevant information on the web. People use iLeonardo to build digital notebooks of anything from the Internet. In return the utility displays similar notebooks that other people have created and made public." The idea has a lot of potential, however, right now it has been overwhelmed by someone doing 'voter information' for the U.S. election. Also, the forms to send feedback or request an account pop under the demo video, rendering them unusable. The idea is worth keeping an eye on, though. Various Authors, Website, September 4, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Edmodo

Ines Pinto writes, Edmodo is a "microblogging platform just launched, specially designed for teachers and students, dailly life school management, creation of students or teachers groups in the same school or between teachers or students from different schools in different countries." It makes you log on before you get a glimpse (bleah). And I don't like the choice between 'guys' and 'ladies'. The tool itself is a bit like a structured instant messaging tool. Interesting, possibly worthwhile. Nicely coded. Various Authors, Website, September 4, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OUseful Info—The Obligatory Google Chrome Post - Sort Of…


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 book and a viewing of the launch announcement.

Why Chrome? And how might it play out? (I’m not suggesting things were planned this way…) Here’s where you get to see how dazed and confused I am, and how very wrong I can be about stuff ;-)

First up - Chrome is for mobile devices, right? It may not have been designed for that purpose, but the tab view looks pretty odd to me, going against O/S UI style guides for pretty much everything. Each tab in its own process makes sense for mobile devices, where multiple parallel applications may be running at any time, but only one is in view. Rumbling’s around the web suggest Chrome for Android is on its way in a future Android release…

Secondly, Google Chrome draws heavily on Google Gears. Google Gears provides the browser with it’s own database, so the browser can store lots of state locally. (Does Gears also provide a lite, local webserver?) Google Gears lets you use web apps offline, and store lots of state without making a call on the host computer’s o/s…

So I’m guessing that Chrome would work well as a virtual appliance…? That is, it’s something that can be popped into a Jumpbox appliance, for example, and run…. anywhere…like from a live CD or bootable USB key (a “live USB”)? That is, run it as a “live virtual appliance”. So you don’t need a host operating system, just a boot manager? Or if all your apps are in the cloud, you just need a machine that runs Chrome (maybe with Flash and Silverlight plugins too).

Chrome lets you create standalone “desktop web apps” in the form of “single application browsers” - a preloaded tab that “runs” Gmail or Google docs, for example, (or equally, I guess, Zoho web applications), just as if they were any other desktop application. The browser becomes a container for applications. If you can run the browser, you can run the app. If you can run the browser in a virtual appliance (or on a mobile device - UI issues aside), you can run the app…

Chrome makes use of open source components - the layout engine, Javascript engine, Gears and so on. Open source presumably makes anti-trust claims harder to put together if the browser starts to take market share; if other browser developers use the code, it legitimises it, as well as increasing the developer community.

On the usability side, the major thing that jumped out at me was that there’s a single search’n'address “omnibox” within each tab. Compare that to current browsers, where the address bar and search box are separate and above the line of selectable tabs.

It’s worth noting here that many people don’t really understand the address bar and the browser search box - they just get to Google any way they can and type stuff into the Google search box: keywords, URLs, brandnames, cut’n'pasted natural language text, anything and everything…

What the omnibox appears to do is to provide a blend of Google Suggest, browser history suggest/URL autocompletion, (and maybe ultimately Google personal browsing history?) and automagically acquired site specific opensearch helpers within a single user entry text box. (I love psychic/ESP searchboxes… I even experimented with using one on searchfeedr, I think?) I guess it also makes migration of the browser easier to a mobile device - each tab satisfies most of the common UI requirements of a single window browser?

A couple of other things that struck me while pondering the above:
- what’s with the URL for the comicbook? http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ What else can we expect to appear on http://www.google.com/googlebooks/?
- has Google taken an interest in any of the virtual appliance players - Parallels, VMware, Jumpbox etc etc?

Open Education News—OER- Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education


Charles Bailey notes in his blog, DigitalKoans, the publication of a report entitled “Open Educational Resources- Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education” by JISC CETIS. The report is authored by Li Yuan, Sheila MacNeil, and Willber Kraan.

The Introduction of the report reads

Higher education institutions around the world have been using the Internet and other digital technologies to develop and distribute teaching and learning for decades. Recently, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained increased attention for their potential and promise to obviate demographic, economic, and geographic educational boundaries and to promote life-long learning and personalised learning. The rapid growth of OER provides new opportunities for teaching and learning, at the same time, they challenge established views about teaching and learning practices in higher education.

This briefing paper provides the background to the current development of and future trends around OER aimed at adding to our understanding, stimulating ongoing debate among the JISC community and developing a research agenda. The briefing is structured in three sections: Discussion on the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources; A review of current OER initiatives: their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges; and Discussion on trends emerging in Open Educational Resources, with respect to future research and activities.

OLDaily—Google Chrome Now Live

Google's Chrome browser is now available. You can download it for free and install it on your Windows machine (Linux and Apple users won't even see the download link). Here's the Wikipedia page on Chrome. The open source project behind Chrome is called Chromium, and you can download the source for various systems and mess around with it. Here's the developer documentation.

I've had a lot of people comment here on Chrome. Don't forget that you can subscribe to my comment threads and read every comment people post here (after I've expunged the distasteful ones). If you would prefer, you can now also subscribe to comments by email - go to your Options Page (you may have to login first) and then click on the Manage Newsletter Subscriptions to subscribe. Brian Rakowski, Official Google Blog, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , , , , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Google Chrome: Initial Reports Round-Up

Good round-up of initial reactions to Chrome (I offer perspectives from the Ed Techish crowd below). "It is a lightweight, fast, and pretty stable browser, although perhaps not as smashingly great as Google had hoped." Thord Daniel Hedengren, The Blog Herald, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—7 Really Awesome Things About Google Chrome

I'll grant, Chrome is really fast. But you still end up waiting when the server at the other end grinds on... as it does, say, at Facebook. It's also easy to switch - I picked it up and started using it right away; I wasn't all confused the way I was (and still am) when I tried to use the latest Internet Explorer. Stan Schroeder, Mashable, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Oooohh...Chrome Is Shiny....So?

Mark Oehlert comments on the way Chrome was announced. "I think it becomes pretty apparent that we hunger for visual explanations. ..and since we're on this topic, you should all go to VizThink - that's a gimme. So the question then is why do we continue to bias text over images?" (p.s. Mark please get rid of those SnapShots previews - they bog down the page load and make it a paid to view... just sayin'...) Mark Oehlert, e-Clippings, September 3, 2008 [Tags: ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—A Bug in Google Chrome

Pretty picky... but... "Google Chrome wrongly displays alternate styles as if active, thus "breaking" websites that use them." Well, ok, but that's for browser-specific code,m isn't it? But "To compete with Microsoft, the new browser must offer what other browsers do not." Well, is this so? Will we see Chrome-only features? Jeffrey Zeldman, Weblog, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—The Story Behind Google Chrome

Video from Google explaining why they developed Chrome. The Official Google Channel, YouTube, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Screencast Tour Of Google Chrome

Screencast outlining major features of Google Chrome. Because screenshots are not enough, and people who have Apple and Linux want to be able to see too. You can also view a big version of the screencast. Via econtent. DemoGirl, Weblog, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—First Impressions of Google Chrome

Interesting comment: "The future for Chrome is difficult to predict. Some have said it is a potential Windows killer, and if you look at the comments for any of the coverage on Google Chrome there will be people saying that it is unlikely that Internet Explorer users will switch, as one comment stated: 'It's Firefox that will suffer, not IE. Many IE users wouldn't know how to change browser, nor why they might want to'." Liam Green-Hughes, Weblog, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—The Triwizard Tournament of Browsers

Post that compares how asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) runs in Chrome. Though I should point out that AJAX works very differently depending on the operating system that is used as well - AJAX in Firefox on Windows works better than AJAX in Firefox on Ubuntu. Tamas Biro, Sense/Net Portal Engine Devblog, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Google, Chrome, and Copyright Email This Entry

One of many posts to complain about Chrome's end user license agreement (EULA): "Google has applied the same EULA that it uses for Gmail to everything you put into the Chrome browser. What, you never read the gmail EULA? You do realize it gives Google copyrights in your email, right? Yeah, it does." He has a very good point - even more so when one considers that Chrome is being released as open source and shouldn't have any encumbrances on it at all! Alan Wexelblat, Copyfight, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , , , ] [Link] [Comment]

OLDaily—Where Is the Aldus Pagemaker for the Cloud?

I remember Aldus Pagemaker. It really did revolutionize publishing. It came out just as I was in my graphic design period (I was doing a lot of posters and things for people), so I learned a lot about it. Now Steve Borsch is right - there is no PageMaker for Chrome. Yet. But one of the things I tried to do yesterday (it didn't work) was to drag a tab right into a Blogger input field. You see, what should happen is that the entire tab - with all its functionality - should embed into my page. Now this I think will be enabled by Chrome, eventually. This will be a game-changer. Steve Borsch, Connecting the Dots, September 3, 2008 [Tags: , , , , ] [Link] [Comment]

Open Education News—Court Rules Wikipedia Not Authoritative


The Inquirer featured a story about a US Appeals Court deciding against using Wikipedia entries to substantiate rulings to deport an immigrant seeking asylum in America.

The appeals court reversed a ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals that said it wasn’t an error for DHS to cite Wikipedia in its decision to deport Lamilem Badasa, an Ethiopian woman who was seeking asylum in the US, claiming her laissez-passer travel permit didn’t prove her identity.

The government used a Wikipedia entry to convince an immigration judge that the document was just a one-way travel document based on information provided solely by the applicant.

In overturning the Board’s decision, the appellate court noted that, because anyone can edit Wikipedia, there was no assurance that the information the government found there was accurate. The court said that looking up information on Wikipedia might have misled and tainted the government officials’ decision in the case.

eFoundations blog—Proposed XML format for DC description sets

DCMI announced yesterday the availability for public comment of the document Expressing Dublin Core description sets using XML (DC-DS-XML). (Disclaimer: Andy and I are co-authors of the document!) This document, a DCMI Proposed Recommendation, describes an XML format called "DC-DS-XML" which supports the serialization of a "description set", the information structure defined by the DCMI Abstract Model. A note providing some further information on the background to the development of the specification, and its relationship to other specifications, was also published.

It's important to note that, in the terms of the document Interoperability levels for Dublin Core metadata which I mentioned a while ago, the DC-DS-XML format is intended to support what that document calls "level 3 interoperability", based on the creation/exchange of records structured as DC description sets. The DC-DS-XML format explicitly addresses a fairly minimal set of requirements, and does not seek to address the additional requirements of "level 4" in that document; in particular it does not concern itself with the implementation of the sorts of structural constraints which might be expressed in a Description Set Profile.

Also, the aim is not to promote DC-DS-XML as "the one and only" XML format for Dublin Core metadata - or even "the one and only" DCMI-owned XML format for Dublin Core metadata. The DCMI Architecture Forum continues to gather requirements for other formats, particularly requirements arising from the use of Description Set Profiles - i.e. from "level 4" in the Interoperability Levels document. The relationship between the checking of the structural constraints specified by a DSP and validation using XML schema technologies of various hues will be a factor to consider here. This is likely to be one of the topics for discussion at the f2f meeting of the DCMI Architecture Forum, to be held on Thursday 25 September at the DC-2008 conference in Berlin in a couple of weeks.

The DC-DS-XML format is based on a "TRiX-like" approach, by which I mean that it makes the structure of the description set explicit in the syntax in a similar fashion to the way the TRiX XML format makes explicit the structure of the RDF graph. Just as TRiX uses XML element names and XML attribute names corresponding to the names of the components of the RDF graph (<graph>, <triple>, <typedLiteral datatype="..."> etc), so DC-DS-XML uses XML element names and XML attribute names corresponding to the names of the components of the description set (<descriptionSet>, <description>, <statement>, <valueString sesURI="..."> etc). In DC-DS-XML, the various URIs in the description set model are represented as XML attribute values, and literals are represented as XML element content.

A GRDDL Namespace Transformation is provided, in the form of an XSLT stylesheet, following the mapping from a description set to an RDF graph described by the DCMI Recommendation Expressing DC metadata using RDF. This means that any instance of the DC-DS-XML format can be translated into an RDF/XML document, and a GRDDL-aware application can automatically extract an RDF graph corresponding to the description set encoded in a DC-DS-XML instance.

A W3C XML Schema for the DC-DS-XML format is provided. A (rather more drafty!) RELAX NG schema is also available.

Comments on the new document are welcome, and should be sent to the DC-Architecture Jiscmail mailing list.

Weblogg-ed—Back to School

So, I’m tired. In the last 21 days I’ve traveled about 8,000 miles, near as I can figure, and given 11 presentations, four of them on “opening days” in front of a total of about 3,000 teachers in about a half dozen states and provinces. It’s a fun time when people are rested and ready to get back to school and for the most part engaged in thinking about teaching, learning and schooling. And it’s a good time to get a temperature check as to what’s changing, if anything, in classrooms and in schools. In a few words, my impression continues to be: not much.

That’s not to say that there aren’t more silos or islands or whatever metaphor works of teachers and classrooms with teachers who are letting students do real work for real purposes and real audiences. There are, and in general, it’s feeling like more and more teachers are taking seriously the idea that we need to start some wide-ranging reflection and conversation about just what it is we’re doing with our students. (How far those conversations ever get is another story, however.) I’m sure there will be those that read this blog and others who will disagree, who will trumpet serious efforts and rethinking things either on a personal or system wide level. And that’s all good, but not surprising. They’re reading and participating already. On some level, they get it.

But, I’ll say it again, what these condensed travels remind me is just how small the scope of all of this talk continues to be. The vast majority of those who I’ve been in rooms with the last three weeks have little idea of what is happening in the world and have given nary a thought to what this means for teaching and learning. How do I know that? By the “omg” comments that I hear as they are filing out. By the “Ugh…we’ve got a lot of work to do” responses. By the teacher/mother of a teenager who asked me what Facebook was. By the consistently less than 10% of people in the room who own a MySpace or a Facebook site. Not that the Read/Write Web conversation is the only one that matters in the context of changing schools, mind you. But it is the one that consumes my time, obviously.

Recently, after one of my presentations, the superintendent of the district and I were standing shoulder to shoulder as his teachers were filing out of the room. He’d given an extremely thought provoking introduction, articulating his desire that they enter into a district wide conversation about change, that they all had a stake and a voice in that conversation if they wanted it. But at the end of my talk, the few questions went pretty much right to the “yeah, buts” and the reasons why these ideas would be difficult to make work. “The problem,” the superintendent said to me, “is that they don’t think they have a voice. They’ve been conditioned to wait for us to lead, to tell them what they can or can’t do. Somehow, we need to change that.”

For most educators, “back to school” means “back to teaching.” And that can be good work, but it remains obvious to me that very few see it as “back to learning.” For themselves, that is, along with their students. I’m not seeing much change since I wrote this two years ago.

I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.

I still feel that way, for the most part. Things may have moved a tic or two on the scale, but until we do that en masse, not much is going to change.

(Photo “Knives Out” by Charlyn W.)

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Fortnightly Mailing—Nicholas Carr on Google's new browser Chrome + my three halfpenny worth

Nicholas "The Big Switch" Carr is quick with a brief calm first reaction to Google's release of a test version of its Open Source browser. My three halfpennyworth is that we should expect Chrome to work well with Google Aps (Documents, Spreadsheets, Google Mail, Sites etc), where Google thinks there is substantial not-generated-by-advertising revenue to be had from organisations (and ISPs) outsourcing to Google their email (and, in the case of organisations) the software for writing, and the storage for, their internal content; and with Google Gears.

OUseful Info—Managing Time in Yahoo Pipes


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

The Date Builder block is being applied to a particular field (cdate) in every feed item, and assigning the results to the y:published tag. But what exactly is it outputting? A special datetime object, that’s what:

The Date Builder module is actually quite flexible in what it accepts - in the above pipe, cdate contains values like “21 August 2008″, but it can do much more than that…

For example, take the case of the THES search pipe, also described in the previous post. The pipe constructs a query that searches the Times Higher from the current date back to the start of the year. Heres what the query looks like in the original search form:

And here’s what the URL it generates looks like:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/search_results.asp?
refresh=0&keyword=%22open+university%22&searchtype=kyphase&sections=0&categories=0
&dateissuefilter=datefilter&issue=0
&sday=1&smth=1&syr=2008&eday=4&emth=9&eyr=2008

sday is “start date”, emth is “end month”, and so on…

Posting the URL into the Pipe URL builder separates out the different arguments nicely:

You’ll notice I’ve hardcoded the sday and smth to the January 1st, but the other date elements are wired in from a datetime object that has been set to the current date:

Terms like “now” also work…

Taken together, the two date/time related blocks allow you to manipulate time constructs quite easily within the Yahoo pipe :-)

Footnotes