Jeff Longland

I previously posted (briefly) about my adventures attempting to provide podcasts from WebCT. The larger issue this drives at is generating RSS feeds of WebCT Content. Andrew Gruhn commented today that he’d like to get RSS feeds of WebCT content as well. I drafted a post about this in November and have been kinda sitting on it ever since. So here it is with a whole lotta late night revisions. I’m working on implementing this but it’s currently more of a hobby than anything so don’t expect anything immediately. Hopefully someone finds this useful, let me know if you come up with anything or have suggestions for improvements.
So what type of content could we get out of WebCT? In particular, out of WebCT Vista 3/4 or CE 6. The PowerLinks SDK provides a few webservices that might be useful:

• Mail - new messages, etc
• Calendar - upcoming entries?
• File Manager - RSS w/ enclosures, ie. podcasting
• GradeBook - maybe grades?

I’m a little hokey on the GradeBook idea, but the other three sound decent. There’s also a beta Discussion webservice that’s available through the Vista Developers Network and that would likely be one of the most useful RSS feeds out of WebCT.

1. Instructor creates the RSS tool like they would any other tool. The tool is essentially an authentication module that can integrate with other systems or return a string - ie, HTML.
2. Student clicks on the proxy tool. The tool generates an HTML page with information about using an RSS reader along with a URL for the feed, perhaps a servlet on another server. ex. http://host/VistaRSS/feed?id=30303039 Velocity would be good for generating the HTML.
3. The user adds the RSS feed in their favourite reader. For me, BlogBridge or Thunderbird.
4. The reader makes the request and the servlet handles communication with the WebCT webservices. For example, goto the specified learning context (30303039) and get a list of all files in the /podcasts/ directory. Substitute any of the other content I mentioned earlier.
5. Using the list of all files, generate the XML for the feed. I’ve been using with Rome in my experiment with podcasting. Though Velocity would also make a good candidate.
6. Return the XML to the user.

Ideally in step 4 it would be nice to wrap some authentication around this whole thing. Authentication seems to be supported in a handful of RSS readers and podcast clients, mainly for standard HTTP authentication. Potion Factory walks through the steps of setting up a password protected podcast. Bottom line is that some form of restriction should be available should the instructor wish to restrict access to students only.

Well, time to mosey along. I should be working more on implementing this rather than writing about it, but I felt compelled to post today since I’ve been meaning to do this. So here it is.

Yes yes, it has been several weeks since my last post. What about that inspired post about blogging more regularly? Well, term transition has begun so my attention is definitely elsewhere. Unfortunately this post will be nothing substantial either, but the folks at Educause (and particularly ELI) have been pumping out some amazing content over the last four months that will more than fill my void

• Diana Oblinger’s Pocket Edition Podcasts
  
• ELI 06 Spring Focus Session Podcasts
  
• Educause 2005 Conference Podcasts
• 7 Things You Should Know About…

So while I’m working away I have the above filling my ears, interspersed with the occasional track from the Live Music Archive. I may not have the time to attend all of these concerts or conferences, but I’m forever in debt to those who have made the content available so that I can ‘attend’ when time allows. Thank-you.

The hype surrounding podcasting continues to grow. I can’t go through a day without having a conversation with someone about some aspect of podcasting. One year ago that certainly wasn’t the case. While discussing podcasting today, someone remarked that there’s as much pedagogical value as the audio cassettes that were discarded in favour of ‘e-learning’ due to a lack of engagement. Throughout the day I’ve been pondering the remark and I have to disagree. One of the benefits of podcasting is the delivery vehicle - hence the ‘casting’ suffix. The ability to easily broadcast recently created content - I suspect that updating 200 sets of audio tape lectures is considerably more time consuming than uploading a file that will be automatically pushed out through an RSS feed. iPods and MP3 players are integrated into the lives of many students, delivering educational or edutainment content over the medium seems like an ideal way to enhance the student experience. There seems to be a lot of focus on podcasting for delivery of lectures - but little focus on the uses of iPods and MP3 players in student assignments or exercises - see Michelle Lamberson’s recent post about an audio tour of Stanley Park. See Gardner Campbell’s There’s Something in The Air for other great examples of how podcasting can integrate into the lives of both students and instructors.

So where the heck am I going with this proprietary hype topic? Well, everytime I write, speak, or hear the word podcasting - I can’t help but cringe. It’s a great word but knowing that everytime it’s used I’m furthering Apple’s corporate mission bothers me a bit. But not as much as the credit that’s given to Apple. This is not Apple’s success - RSS deserves all the credit!  It’s only through RSS that podcasting is possible, so let’s give a little more credit where credit is due eh?

I just had to use the obligatory Canadian ‘eh

I just heard through the grapevine that iTunesU will be coming to Canada in the very near future. Apparently the thumbs up has been given to iTunesU Canada. I’ve taken the obligatory stroll through Google and don’t see any announcements or details, but apparently it’s true.

True?  Or simply more blogosphere hype?

As I start this entry, I’m sitting on a train looking at the shores of Lake Ontario as I make my exit from Toronto. I don’t make it to Toronto often nor am I particularly drawn here. You can take Jeff out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. Or something to that effect. I’m headed home to a less urban locale.

So what brought me to the big smoke? A conference hosted by Apple and McGraw-Hill Ryerson on podcasting in higher education. I haven’t written much here about podcasting, but don’t take this as an indicator of my interest – in fact, I’m borderline fanatical about podcasting… this from someone who doesn’t own an iPod! As with most of my obsessions, I’m more excited about the technology that makes all of this possible. So here’s my big anti-climatic announcement: I’ve been experimenting with the ROME RSS utility and the WebCT PowerLinks SDK to add podcasting support to WebCT. It’s nothing pretty yet, but I’m confident it can work – albeit in a manner that may or may not be inline with how Apple would like to see podcasting in WebCT. At the moment, my concern is to simply generate the RSS feed and the means to retrieve the enclosures. I have both of these pieces working, but as I said – it’s not pretty, nor ready for release. From the instructor perspective, the podcast is uploaded to a ‘podcasts’ directory in the WebCT section – it is from this directory that the RSS feed is generated. One item with enclosure in the RSS feed for each audio file in the podcasts directory.

Getting back to the conference, I was pretty happy with the speaker line-up. In particular, it was a great opportunity to meet Brian Lamb who came in from UBC. On our way into the city, a few of my colleagues asked me if I was familiar with any of the speakers – so I gave them my two cents and a strong recommendation for Brian. At the end of the day, they came back to me and commented about his energetic / humorous / passionate performance. And? They want to learn more! Sadly, they were unaware of my interest in this area. I think this tells me that I should probably be putting more of myself into this blog and generally promoting emerging technology more. Brian made a similar suggestion to post more regularly. I admit that I need to knock it up a notch.

The other presenters that impressed me were Robert Lyons and Bob Burke from Carleton. Having years of experience recording and processing lectures for television delivery has given them an opportunity to implement vodcasting with minimal effort. Copyright issues were briefly touched upon during the Q & A and it appears that due to the current state of Canadian copyright laws, Carleton can only vodcast original content. As a few audience members commented, Bob’s vodcasts are probably just as popular as his in-class demos because of his sense of humour.

Above and beyond everything else that was discussed today, I was most impressed with the depth of knowledge and passion displayed by the aforementioned presenters. A great day for reflection on the way home.

Edit: If you want to know more about the event, here’s a blog that will fill in the detals.