IT: Instructional Technology

If you go to this page you'll see that Apple now provides RSS feeds for iTunes, iPod, PR and product announcements, (including third party products) and Knowledge Base support articles). It's pretty cool. It's a good example of what a university could do. Think about departmental and campus cultural events calendars from a variety of databases published (with a fairly simple XML wrapper) as RSS feeds that anyone at all could subscribe to. Libraries could publish catalog data for new books, department policies could be easily efficiently published when databases and web sites are modiefied, class web site's with blogs and comments or disscussion boards could have opt-in rss feeds . . . all sorts of publishing possibilities.

Posted by Lisa L. Spangenberg at 10:14 PM | Permalink

From O'Reilly's MacDev: LaTeX: It's Not Just for Academia, Part 1 by Kevin O'Malley

LaTeX is not a word processor. It's a document preparation system that produces typeset-quality output. LaTeX has as much, if not more, utility as commercial word processors. It's rock solid, has a long history of use, a large user base, and best of all, it's free. Kevin O'Malley covers the versions of LaTeX available for Mac OS X.

I'm more than a little frustrated with following my school's dissertation format in MicrosoftWord, but what's even more frustrating is finding a word processor that supports the formatting specifications for a dissertation, including footnotes, and Unicode. In particular, support for the "runic" characters of Middle English, like the yogh. I'm going to be looking at LaTeX, in part because of the bibliographic support for BibDesk.

Posted by Lisa L. Spangenberg at 10:09 PM | Permalink

I blame David Chess, who made a passing reference to the Wiki Pedia in his Log. I've looked at Wikis before, of course, and even posted about them, but the Wiki Pedia is the first time I really got to participate. The part that I find most fascinating about Wikis is the way the community aspect works. The fact that any one can edit it pretty much anything in most wikis is intriguing. And I can see how they have enormous use in development, for internal "knowledge management," or sharing and accreting tribal knowledge. But I'd like to try using them for teaching too (there's a lot of potential for using a wiki for student writing projects), and for managing my own data. I'm very keen to try a wiki in terms of my own dissertation research, both for the dissertation proper, and as a way of keeping track of the extraneous and tangential branching that my research often leads to. I really want something set up locally on my Mac's hard drive, or possibly on my ISP/site host's server, but in the meantime I've been playing around with Seed Wiki. You can see what I've done so far (not much) here.

Posted by Lisa L. Spangenberg at 9:40 PM | Permalink